The Next Problem Bishop

I held out hope in the whole Gene Robinson consecration debacle that perhaps at least the question could be confined to the Donatist question of his presumed sexual sins rather than having to confront idiosyncrasies of his theology. Well, now he is retired, and I have heard the news that he is now to have a column at The Daily Beast. And I have found out, via Bryan Owen and Peter Carrell, that Robinson's opening column makes some quite problematic statements:

God is infinite, and it comes as no surprise to me that there have developed, over time, many credible and faithful approaches to understanding God. In the end, no religion holds a lock on the reality of God. Each religion grasps only a part of the infinite God and offers insight into God’s reality, and we would do well to exercise a good measure of humility in claiming we know God’s will. Better to begin each pronouncement we make about God with “In my experience…” or “From my perspective…” or simply “For me….” At the end of the day, no matter how much we believe we know God’s will, we must acknowledge that each of us is only doing the best she/he can.

Well, Lewis said something similar, and yet utterly different. I don't accept this "blind scholars and the elephant" theory of religion and theology; to the degree that other religions may have something to say that is "valid" (i.e., accurate), that validation can only come from comparison with the Christian revelation. To try to assemble the "parts" of God each religion grasps is to construct an idol, the inevitable outcome of such syncretism. In Robinson's case he will, if unknowingly, make God in the image of upper middle class liberal American mores.

Likewise, his plea for subjectivism is against everything the New Testament teaches, and never mind the Torah. I say this over and over again: anamnesis is central to Christian theology and ecclesiology. The Mystery of Faith that we state on a Sunday is not three personal experiences or perspectives: it is three statements of the reality of Christ's salvific acts. We are not here to preach what we feel; we are here to remember what Jesus did, and to tell all the world about it.

But instead, we get the dreary, routine (and I will presume political) moralism which has been part and parcel of liberal Anglicanism for decades, buttressed with the platitudes of American religiosity. I sense that the retired bishop can do no more for his church than reassure a certain class of "seekers" (especially the "spiritual but not religious" set and the followers of moralistic therapeutic deism) that the faded religion of American Episcopalianism is no threat to their anemic faith.

But to stand up each Sunday and profess the tenets of the Creed: that would be a quite different matter. But at this point it seems safe to say that those tenets are not going to get play in the bishop's columns.

In Case You Didn't Know, Spong Has a New Book Out

So here I am on Facebook, and someone puts up a link to a RNS puff piece on Jack Spong, who, it is said in the title, "has no regrets." Well, I would suppose he wouldn't. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this piece is really a book tie-in, or that the long, long list of those who hold Spong anathema aren't given any significant voice.

And I suppose I shouldn't be the last surprised that the writer so soft-pedals Spong's legacy: a greatly diminished diocese, a record of heretical theologizing, and a tradition of divisive controversialism. The 2011 statistics are out, and it should surprise nobody that with the exception of Average Sunday Attendance the statistical trends of the last four years show no overall change from the consistent decline seen from the turn of this century, so that I am pretty safe in predicting that the 2012 numbers will leave membership below a hundred ninety thousand and ASA below six hundred twenty thousand, and this year's numbers will show declines from that. And as Spong continues to be invited into churches to push his idiosyncratic heresies, we continue to find bishops who cannot commit to the most basic tenets of the faith. Preaching has been so captured by the socio-political inclinations of the liberal upper middle class that I should to have been surprised to told that the gospel story of the healing of the ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19 for those who check up on that sort of thing) is somehow about the social action we should do, rather than being a type of the rejection of Jesus by the Jews.

But the point, after all, is not serious engagement with Spong's datedly-wrong theology (Tillich is, after all, so late-1950s), nor a balanced historical recollection (which would lay bare the breadth of disagreement with Spong's later ideas), but rather to present him as a noble, heroic dissident in order to make his books more salable to the godless ex-Catholic intelligentsia whom the booksellers see as the surviving market for this kind of work. As for myself, I have no interest at all in what Spong has to say at this late date; I only wish that the people at the Religious News Service (not to mention the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia), who are supposed to know better, would cease this hagiography.

Be a Bishop OF the Church, Not FOR the Church

Bishop Martins pegs the chief issue with the Presiding Bishop's sermon:

I'm going to cut right to what seems to me a rather larger and more fundamental issue, which is the duty of all Christians, but particularly those in ordained leadership, to operate from within the tradition, as an insider looking out, and not from a critical distance, as an outsider looking in. [....] As an insider looking out, as an apologist and cheerleader for the establishment, a bishop sits under the authority of the tradition, particularly the authority of sacred scripture. There are interpretive roads that are open to others--outsiders looking in--that are properly closed to bishops (and, by extension, to priests and others who preach and teach).

This is exactly right, and precisely delineates one of the two great besetting problems of the Episcopal hierarchy today. There are too many Anglican bishops out there who see their episcopal seat as a "bully throne", which they can use in the interest of whatever their theological or moral position may be, without regard to what the Church teaches. It is not entirely dishonest for them to say,"this is what the Church teaches, and this is what I teach," though it is the rankest hypocrisy to sponge off the diocesan dollar when doing so. But often enough even this nicety is given the go-by. The presiding bishop makes an exegetical howler which everyone from John the Divine to John Paul II would denounce in a heartbeat, and which indeed much of the present-day church was quick to disavow; and yet her sermon put it in the mouth of every Episcopalian.

As Bishop Martins says, bishops take vows to defend the teaching of the church. It is perhaps true that the presiding bishop didn't attack that teaching, though I find that reading of her words strained. And prophecy being what it is, and blowing where the Spirit pleases, the only spirit I heard was that of the Age. Her shaky bridge was constructed entirely out of the common tropes of modernist, semi-secularized textual skepticism of the sort where doubt of the text is supposed to increase faith. It was typical of the strain of modernist solipsism which brought forth all those bad sermons back around Easter and which felt that Jack Spong's nonsense was something that needed to be taught to laymen in Holy Week. There is none of the dialogue and caution which characterized the true Anglican line of theological inquiry.

Thus was the pastoral office abused. Look, whatever the virtue of inclusivity, we don't have anything to say to the much larger majority who are straight and whose vocation is to bear children and raise them. Our bishops and clergy have naught to say to the multitudes who without finger-crossing can say the creed (which I must point out is ritually led by the candidate at an episcopal consecration) except to tell them that there is something wrong with believing what their own church teaches in the liturgy. This is patently destructive. And if a prophet risks all for the truth, it is impossible for me not to see Lewis's "Episcopal ghost" in this, and to ask of these latter-day "prophetic voices", "What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came-popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?"

Will the Last Orthodox Bishop Please Turn Out the Lights

Having ranted about Virginia, now I find from Bryan Owen that the Bishop of Washington doesn't really seem to believe in the Creed either, at least not the part that says that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. How else am I supposed to interpret a flat statement that "we don’t know what happened to Jesus after his death, anymore than we can know what will happen to us"?

Some priest, in a "sherry and knives in the vicarage" moment, once told me that what the bishops were doing when laying on hands during a consecration was removing the candidate's spine. These days it seems more likely that they are removing any kind of commitment to orthodoxy. And for all the wimpiness of the 1979 ordinal, we find on the very first page of the consecration rite the candidate is given the charge to "guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church". The first part of that charge is given ritual embodiment two pages later, when the candidate is made to lead those assembled in the recitation of the Creed. So there is no way in heaven or on earth or in hell below that I can find it acceptable that a bishop issue statements that they do not really believe what they say every Sunday. Pike at least had the decency to quit, not that he hadn't effectively trashed the office by that point.

And I do not see the point in founding my life in an untruth. It is a popular defense of such views to claim that the scriptural tales somehow express Truths, but when I at least press against them, seeking meaning, the only substantial truth that I get is that these people don't want to be caught sharing the same theological space as fundamentalists and other political reprehensibles. An apophasis swallows the rest: they can never get to the point of saying that they actually believe anything real about the world. It recalls the "bizarre form of heresy" Florence King attributed to her grandmother: Christianity apparently reminds them of classless places like Lynchburg, Jerry Falwell's one time base of operations. The only solid truth I find is a kind of snobbery, one which has no appeal to me if only because I was raised by mainline Presbyterians instead of foot-washing Baptists or pre-Vat.-II nuns. It's one thing to admit the plainly obvious, that the scriptural accounts are not, whatever their testimony, perfect historical records. But I see no intellectual warrant for the presumption that we can go back and do a better job of presenting what happened to them than they did. The alternative to rejecting the roughly literal version of their accounts isn't some other scriptural truth: it's simply making up one's own religion and imputing it to them. And I find that absolutely uncompelling. The church's teaching may be faulty, but the historical connection backward renders it intrinsically more reliable than modernist restorationism.

I had hopes that Budde would represent some sort of relief from the confrontational tone of the past. But what good does it do when she reneges on her promise to defend the faith? It's impossible to mount a theological apologia of my church under these conditions; every snide remark from my conservative Catholic acquaintances about the vacuity of Anglican theology is vindicated every time one of our bishops publishes remarks such as these. We don't deserve to have a future if we keep going on like this.

What in the Hell Is Wrong With Virginia?

So, several weeks back we find an Episcopal parish in Virginia presenting the essentially apostate John Dominic Crossam in a lenten program. Now we find out that on Good Friday another parish in the diocese had John Shelby Spong preaching his heresies, which seem to have gotten worse than ever. What is the matter with Bishop Johnston, that he thinks there is anything at all OK about giving these guys lectern time, much less allowing them to preach?

There is no way in hell that a man who denounces the Nicene Creed has any business doing anything that bears the slightest resemblance to teaching in this church. Those of us with a little theological sophistication can tell that Crossan and Spong and their ilk are shovelling theological crap of their own excretion, but the average parishioner (and for that matter cleric) shouldn't be made to sort through this dung heap. The failure to defrock Spong needs to be rethought; unfortunately Crossan isn't one of ours that we can discipline him, but the failure of the lofty persons at 815 to denounce these presentations leads one to suspect that either they share the same inability to repeat the Creed and mean it, or that they are so absorbed in keeping their grip on church buildings that they've lost interest in what is said inside them, other than when it comes to a-heterosexual approval. It's hardly out of the question that both are true.

This is where the deeper rot in the church lies. I can see how we can disagree on sexual morality and on the ministerial authority on women, even to the extent of disagreeing with Paul's teaching. When we cannot step up to a commitment to the most basic statements of theological principle, to which we all state allegiance every Sunday, it sends the message that we are intellectual frauds. In a Catholic or Orthodox church, the priest who allowed this nonsense would be called on the carpet by the bishop and would stand a real risk of being inhibited and deprived of office. And they would be entirely right to do so. Our bishops should be doing likewise, lest we be reduced to The Dilettante Episcopal Church.