Bring Back the Old Lectionary

I wholeheartedly support Bp. Martins's Resolution B009 which would restore the option to use the 1979 BCP lectionary instead of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). And I agree with every one of the reasons he gives for the change, plus I would add these:

• Use of the RCL is incompatible with the use of the BCP psalter. The RCL psalm selections are notoriously prone to skipping lines and other practices which make it difficult to read the psalm directly out of the BCP. By contrast, the canny observer may notice that there are breaks in the BCP text where the psalm selections begin and end, helping to nudge the reader into reading the correct verses. Service sheets have their uses but there is also something to be said for getting the laity to actually crack the prayer book and read it.
• Commonality is not what it was once cracked up to be. The Roman church has demonstrated, with their new mass translation, that they have ceased to care about a common liturgy. Yes, other churches are using the RCL, but I'm not sure that getting the more liberal elements of a bunch of Protestant denominations together to work out the details is such a good idea. We need to stick more to our own identity.

The RCL probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but its many quirks show that it was insufficiently reviewed. And at this time I would prefer to hew more closely to our own prayer book. Therefore I support the availability of the old lectionary, and furthermore would advocate returning to its use if it is once again authorized.

Communing the Unbaptized from the Outside In

Derek Olsen notes another run of posts in "The Daily Episcopalian" in support of communing the unbaptized, which he describes as coming "from our self-proclaimed liturgically-conservative non-theist, one from the site’s village atheist, then one that I can only kindly characterize as theologically confused." Well, yeah, and that's why I dropped "go start your own church" responses on the first two and threw up my hands on the third. What I wanted to note, however, was this response:

Besides that: this is itself, in fact, a completely “in-group” issue and only of interest to people already involved in the church. That, to me, is what’s fascinating about the thesis in that piece, in fact – that it seem to see this in exactly the reverse way.

People who aren’t Christian aren’t really interested in participating in Christian religious rituals; I personally had no interest in even stepping foot in a church for most of my life. And I think that most people believe – quite reasonably – that religious rituals are about faith, and that taking part in them has some meaning. Particularly when priests say things, and people respond; that’s serious stuff.

And this, to me, is exactly what’s wrong with CWOB; people probably think that we’re in our right minds and won’t involve them in something that might compromise what they may or may not believe. But of course, we’re not; we’re using the “full-initiates’” version of the rite on people who don’t know anything about what’s going – the version that assumes understanding and assent.

And to this, I can only say, Yes, exactly so! The supposed appeal of communion to outsiders seems to me to only work on the utterly clueless but easily informed "I'll just follow what everyone else is doing" crowd, who can be educated with a sentence, or on those syncretes who are so muzzy-headed as to be immune to our persuasion and whose participation is necessarily a profanation. The message I'm taking away from all of this is that a lot of the push for this is coming from people who are also effectively outsiders on the inside, who are nominal members but who have abandoned the historic faith. And that's why I want them to go found their own churches, rather than wrecking mine.

Anglicans ARE Doctrinal (but not overly so)

Bryan Owen has called attention to a trope about Episcopalians that I seemed to have missed hearing outright, in this case stated flatly by John Westerhoff in A People Called Episcopalians:

Orthodoxy for us is right worship and not right belief.

Well, hogwash. At least, back in 1976 it was hogwash, and as I am going to insist in some sort of continuity of nature, I'm going to stick by that.

But let's start from the reality that we have four big liturgical submissions to general convention this year, plus changes to remove baptism and confirmation is requirements, plus SCLM's desire to "revise" the hymnal even though it's quite clear that the laity (and especially the young) don't want it changed. Add to that Enriching Our Worship (the prayer book that is not our prayer book) and the common experience these days of going to an Episcopal church service on a Sunday morning and hearing all manner of alterations to the liturgical text, and one ought to conclude that if it is "right worship" that characterizes our orthodoxy, a lot of the people in control cannot agree that the church's designated worship is right. I will return to that thought, but for now, let us just say that "right worship" is not a unifying principle, as it stands.

Let us continue to that worship. Westerhoff claims, on the page following the above declaration, that "if anyone wishes to know what Anglicans believe about issues of faith and life, he or she needs to turn to The Book of Common Prayer and engage in the process of interpreting this document." Let me be blunt: this isn't true in the ECUSA of the present. In the first place, there is all the deviation and change I just mentioned, which testifies to degree to which the 1979 BCP does not reflect current worship. But beyond that, if one follows the various discussions it becomes clear that there are various principles floating around which the prayer book which does not state, and which are the true dogmas determining the trajectory of the church. Thus I would not look to worship nor to liturgical texts to find our beliefs; as a rule I would look first to the social and political organs to which our membership belongs.

But let us look at the actual texts on the presumption that they do have some normative content. Well, as anyone who has every read through the Eucharistic liturgies knows, the following rubric is to be found in both Rite I and in Rite II:

On Sundays and other Major Feasts there follows, all standing

And what follows begins, "We believe". It is, of course, the recitation of the Nicene Creed, so following Westerhoff's principle it could be concluded that Episcopalians are supposed to believe all those doctrinal statements made in the creed. Thus saying that our orthodoxy does not include Right Belief is untrue, even if one only relies upon what the liturgy has us do. And really, if one looks to the gospels the statement is preposterous. What did Jesus teach about worship which only mouthed the words without believing them?

Historically, Anglicans have always held to some doctrines, not that it is possible to avoid doing so anyway. What was distinctive about our approach was our refusal to make every issue a matter of doctrine. The classic example is our approach to Eucharistic theology, in that we have always insisted that it is sacramental and not merely symbolic; but we did not insist on a particular theory beyond the insistence on real presence, unlike the Roman official theory of transsubstantiation. This "not right belief" theory is a plain abuse, and it is used to justify a lot of plainly abusive behavior. C.S. Lewis, who is about as inarguably Anglican as they come, caricatured the modernist Anglican cleric perfectly in The Great Divorce, but his apostate bishop is found in large numbers in the American church, mentally crossing their fingers throughout the liturgy. Bishop Shannon says that we should not persecute "those who are seeking to engage imaginatively with modernity", but perhaps he forgets that Fundamentalism itself came to existence out of that very engagement. Or perhaps he means that "engagement" signifies bowing down to the Spirit of the Age and accepting the precepts of the secular, modernist world uncritically. I insist that this engagement must include pushing back against the dogmas of modernism where they conflict with our core beliefs. So for instance, when someone doubts the doctrine of the Virgin Birth (which we've got there in the Creed, so according to our worship, one is obligated to believe it), proper engagement consists of challenging that doubt, not accepting it uncritically.

I do not think that Bishop Douglas is entirely correct when he says that "the Episcopal Church is not a church that readily thinks in terms of 'doctrine.'" It would be more accurate to say that there is a large segment of its membership, and especially of its clerisy, who readily subjugate theological thinking to secular doctrines. They do not like the notion of theological doctrine, for various reasons, but there are many points which they treat as inarguable, and insofar as these things go in a largely powerless organization, they persecute and marginalize dissenters. Saying that we don't do doctrine is really no more than a tactic in that marginalization, a justification for driving from office those who want to maintain the integrity of the institution. We DO do doctrine; what we don't do is approach its justification with any kind of intellectual integrity. Reasoning about what we do is governed by prejudices and emotions, not by deduction from scripture or our tradition. What we need to do is repent of this, and return to taking seriously the doctrinal statements we make every Sunday morning.

Next Sacramental Target: Confirmation

Derek Olsen has called my attention to several resolutions to get rid of confirmation as a requirement for ordination and other church offices. As Christopher Arnold comments, this is part of a "an across-the-board devaluing of our rites of commitment." It fits right into the push to commune the unbaptized as a blurring of the pattern of church membership. Personally, I think that someone who cannot bring themselves to be confirmed or formally received into this church has too many reservations to be trusted as one of her officers or ministers.

Now everyone who has been paying attention in ECUSA knows that confirmation has been caught in a bit of a sacramental bind resulting from the emphasis on baptismal membership in the 1979 BCP. Marion Hatchett's Commentary on the American Prayer Book says nothing on the rite other than to refer the reader back to the section on baptism, in which confirmation is hardly addressed. The addition of chrismation to the baptismal rite also confused matters because that Eastern element is typically held to be the equivalent of western confirmation. That said, there are traditional understandings which those of us who are old enough remember, and rather than simply dismiss them, it seems to me that there is something to be said for trying to synthesize them in light of the baptismal emphasis of the 1979 book.

I personally was confirmed into the church as a teenager, having been baptized as an infant into the Presbyterian church and made a communicant there some years prior. My connections to that church faded, and in any case I was sent to an Episcopal high school in which I was given a pretty good theological and sacramental education. Indeed, when I skipped forward a grade, the only course I was not permitted to skip was fifth form (junior) sacred studies! I came to understand that I needed to become a member of this church, and having approached one of the chaplains, it was arranged that I would be one of the confirmands in the spring. My understanding of this, for myself, combined the change-of-membership and bar mitzvah aspects, for it was in that act of conversion that I took full responsibility for my faith.

And I don't see this as problematic, thirty-five years on. When Olsen says, "baptism is full initiation into the Body of Christ; Confirmation is full initiation into the Episcopal Church," I might not use exactly the same words, but the sense is sound. And that is also why I think the rite is best reserved to the bishop: connecting us into this church is, within our polity, expressed as connection to her bishops. And indeed it's ironic that, for all the growing vagueness about membership and its rights, the one thing the progressives do tend to get dogmatic about in church structure is that hierarchy.

Overall, this reinforces my support for a do-nothing general convention. Here we have yet another big theological revision, hidden within a procedural change at that, which cannot be properly discussed--and particularly so given all the other weightier topics on the floor. This is perhaps the biggest challenge to the church as an organization: we have to find a way to deal with these issues which isn't so patently dysfunctional. And personally, I think that way is to accept our traditions and stick by them.

Well, I Thought I Was Done

There seems to be no end of things to comment about in the CWOB/communing the unbaptized exchanges. For instance, over on the Episcopal Cafe we have Jeffrey Shy asking rhetorically, Is it Communion Without or Communion Before Baptism?. Well, since the focus really is on us, that's why I prefer to refer to "communing the unbaptized". Nobody should be taking communion before they are baptized, and people who are preparing to be baptized surely can understand, if they are taught, the need to wait. The movement is surely more about countenancing "communion for people who have no intention of being baptized", and at that point the matter becomes less their lack of receptiveness and more the proponents' lack of respect for the sacrament. But then, here we have a policy suggestion from an admitted "non-theist", so really the question ought to be, "what is it with the institutions of the church that we hand them over to people who cannot even get to the end of the first line of any of the creeds without crossing their fingers?"

This is how incoherent liberal theology can get. It was one thing twenty years ago when one was likely to be buried in a lot of supposedly post-theological Tillichian or whatever jargon; it didn't mean anything substantive when pressed, but at least the semblance of intellectual persuasion was maintained. Now, the best they can come up with is the largely aesthetic standard of "radical hospitality", and while I have expressed my opinion on that before, and before that, I'm not the only one who sees the vacuity of the phrase. Over at Sublunary Sublime the author asks, "what exactly about this message is supposed to be radical?" and goes on to say:

It’s not difficult to see that the CWOB movement is straining toward relevancy, and is increasingly taking its cues from the advertising industry. So, by breaking with the status quo, in this case, 2,000 years of ecclesial tradition or the “canonically-driven,” they think they are doing something progressive; and in so doing, they are only giving the people what they want. But what if the message of the status quo is to break away from the status quo? What if the message of the status quo is collapsing difference, mixing all forms of life into one homologous consumer package? If they really wanted to be radical, wouldn’t the message be: you can’t purchase spirituality on the cheap?

But, no, "radical" isn't speaking to the culture, except to say, "see how we aren't like those other (stodgy, mean-spirited, parental) Christians". Well, yeah, except that to the spiritual-but-not-religious upper-middle hipster/sub/urban inquirer which seems to be our preferred clientele, this translates to assurance that we don't expect anything from them. It's not a challenging message; it's certainly anything but a call for them to rise out of their religious indifference or dilettancy. "You can believe in therapeutic moral deism, be a pagan or a satanist or an atheist, or not believe in anything at all, and still commune with us": that's our stirring rejoinder to the call of the world.

An actually radical message these days would sound more like, "abandon your false gods and philosophies, repent of your sins, believe and be baptized, and then join with us in communion with your savior." That is theology of the prayer book, and the theology of the church from the days of the apostles. Gritting our teeth and sticking with the tradition of the church as we received it: that is what is now radical. Instead we have what Bryan Owen accurately describes as "an assault on the church":

The current assaults on the orthodox understanding of Baptism take direct aim at what it means to be united with Christ in his death and resurrection, to be reborn into God's family the Church, to receive forgiveness of our sins and new life in the Holy Spirit. And by extension, an assault on the Church's understanding of the inward and spiritual grace received in Baptism is an assault on the Church itself. Such assaults entail a revision of the biblical narrative of Creation-Fall-Redemption that excises the Fall from the story. They jettison the understanding of sacraments as sure and certain means by which we receive the grace needed to heal our profound brokenness. And in the process, the very meaning of the term "Church" gets redefined. No longer is the Church "the mystical body" of Christ and a "wonderful and sacred mystery" that elicits our awe-filled, humble obedience and transcends our capacity to comprehend and control (BCP, pp. 339, 515). Instead, the Church becomes just another merely human institution that can be manipulated and tinkered with as we see fit. Lacking any transcendent dimension, the Church is just about us: our preferences, our agendas, and the wills to power that have the majority votes to satisfy those preferences and enact those agendas.

And such a church is not worth belonging to, except perhaps to gratify one's taste for choral singing and empty ceremonial in a spiritual space, though I note that as theological traditions lose their grip, so to do those of the liturgy, and one may be subjected to clown masses or liturgical pep rallies or Giant Liturgical Puppets of Doom.

Once, we held a very high view of the church and her sacraments. It is time to take back the church from those who have forsaken this. Otherwise, we will be left with naught but Gothic revival tombs of faith, sold off one by one to real estate developers or Muslims or indeed anyone except for those refugee Anglicans who bailed out in time. And if it takes a purge of the clerisy to get rid of the apostates and theological slackers: well, it's a radical idea in this church, but something must be done.

So It Comes to This

Alerted by Robert Hendrickson, I have put myself through reading Eastern Oregon's justification for communing the unbaptized (which ca be reached from this page). And, well, it's hard to respond to it, starting right from its abject failure to address the traditional defense of reserving communion to the baptized. Let us start with the first few sentences invoking the spirit of the 1979 BCP, which are of a kind with all those American Catholics appealing to the spirit of Vatican II to defend their various liturgical outrages. The truth, as Hendrickson points out, is that the 1979 book does not in any way contemplate Eastern Oregon's proposal, but instead goes the opposite direction. The 1979 theory is the traditional view with the sacramentality turned all the way up: we are a people made sacramentally through baptism, and fed sacramentally through the Eucharist. The celebrant says, "the gifts of God for the People of God", and it is plain in the baptismal rite that the water of baptism is how we are incorporated into that people.

And after that, it is a foregone conclusion that they are not going to step up to explaining away what Paul says on the subject. Instead, all I can make out of their rather vague and theologically buzz-phrased statement is that, while it's not just "a simple statement about hospitality", what makes it not "simple" is that somehow the isolation of Eastern Oregon means we do not need to go to the bother of baptizing people.

And about that, I may make two observations. A hundred or so years ago, the situation was hardly better. My wife is from Great Falls, and if Oregon presents transport and population density problems, Montana is in every way worse. And I have seen the tiny font that Bishop Tuttle used as he organized the church in the state and others in the west. It is a tiny cup, barely suitable for the immersion of baby mice, but I dare say multitudes were baptized from it. Surely it is no harder for a priest to get around the diocese today.

But more to the point, baptism is not in any way limited by the supply of priests! If it be so important to get visitors up to the table, then perhaps the altar guild could provide the ushers with a cup of water and cards with the baptismal formula on them, so that the unwashed (as it were) could come to the table, made new in Christ and ready to feast. But in any case a parish or mission need not wait for the priest to make his circuit for baptisms that cannot wait.

At least, I think this addresses their argument. The whole thing is only two pages long, and at that is padded with the filler of modern theological jargon, so that they say they are "intentional" and "empowering" and so forth, when it is not clear that they could articulate their intention or where power is to be had, much less what constitutes hospitality. Tony Clavier sets forth a succinct statement on baptism, and I can understand it and defend it, and I read Eastern Oregon's statement, and it is incoherent. The message I get from it is that if one sprinkles in the right theological magic words, then one's practices are justified, even if those words in what is not so much a thread of argument as a ball of word fluff.

So this is what passes for the theology that would overturn one of the Church's oldest rules. I think the resolution will be defeated, because while we are perhaps woefully ill-educated, there are probably enough priests left who remember at least this small part of their seminary educations. But the vote will be far closer than it ought be, because, it appears, this sorry excuse for a rationale has pwoer over far too many in this church.

The Rebellious Generation in Charge

Over at Driving Like Jehu we have the suggestion that the urge towards communing the unbaptized arises out of an instant gratification culture. I don't think this is the case. Discussion shows a lack of people who aren't baptized banging at the door; in general they take the requirement of membership before participation as reasonable. No, the impetus here comes especially from the clerisy, who object to the notion of even the barest semblance of turning anyone away.

It's pitifully easy to unpack this, especially when I hear the magic phrase "prophetic voice". Our boomer-dominated hierarchy is still living in the late 1960s and still protesting against the Establishment, refusing to accept that, within the church, they are the establishment now. And, well, they tend to have maturity issues, one might say, about authority. So they are willing to use it against people who rebel against them, but they are reluctant to act like parents.

This reluctance means that discipline ends up being for enemies, not friends; it is reduced to a political tactic. As a church we find it very hard these days to teach personal purity; we indulge ourselves, and we indulge the rest of the world too. You are unlikely to hear a sermon against fornication in an Episcopal parish, and the notion that one ought to observe particular rules goes equally unstated. Every case is exceptional, and we grant ourselves limitless leeway. Meanwhile there will be a list of political resolutions at General Convention whose form and content will be drearily familiar to anyone who ever rubbed up against the college protest subculture.

Thus it is hard for our clerics to tell anyone No. That people should be baptized, that they should be in love and charity with their neighbors, that they should be confessed of their sins (witness the growing practice of omitting the confession of sin for large portions of the year) ceases to be requisite for participation in communion, because that wouldn't be inclusive, which is another way of saying, We Can't Say No. And we go on from there to edit out "the Jesus of Revelation" in favor of a mythical nonjudgemental "Jesus of the gospels" as though there were not plenty of parables in which Jesus preaches the peril of being judged.

And the solution is simple: it's time to grow up, time to admit that our desires are not to be catered to and that are sins are a problem, time to step up to defending the church as our predecessors expected us to.

Communing the Unbaptized: One Last Observation

Jared Cramer joins the army of those objecting to communing the unbaptized, and in large part I endorse what he says about the bad arguments in favor of the heretical practice. But there's one thing to be added. We're talking here about one of the oldest canons of the church--not our church, THE church-- which they wish to overturn. It isn't as though there is no great weight of theology behind this, because, of course, there is. Any of us who have rebuked the innovation can explain what is wrong with it in a couple of sentences. But somehow, all of this is utterly irrelevant, and the proponents of the error can make an end run around fifteen hundred years of Christian theology. Or to put it more technically, this is the worst kind of progressivist restorationism, the liberal equivalent to the Jehovah's Witnesses. And there is no way of doing theology that is more in conflict with Anglican principles.

Do Nothing, the Musical

Robert Hendrickson has alerted us to the publication of the hymnal revision survey results. And as he notes, one of the results that jumps out right away is that among the laity, almost 50% of those under 30 actively oppose revision. But this needs to be seen in context of a general lay resistance to revision, and the lack of active support for same. Looking at the age group populations again (Table 4 in the report), no age group shows more that 28% support for revision; the lowest expression of opposition is among the 40 year olds, of who "only" 44% are against revision.

I don't feel the need to go over the lay statistics in detail, except to note that the only groups where there is something approaching balance between opposition and support is in the black and native American subgroups. Most other lay results are unsurprising, though there is a strong positive correlation between parish size and opposition that one might not have expected. The clergy results, however, have some very surprising results. Working age clergy tend to favor revision, except for the under thirty set, who not only have some of the strongest opposition, but who are also the least neutral by far: 8% as compared with around 25% for most subgroups. There is a strong difference between the sexes here, with female clergy showing near 50% support (as opposed to the men, who lean towards opposition). Black and Latino clergy also show quite strong support for revision, the latter quite in contrast to the Latino laity.

The music directors patterns are odd: the biggest opposition is shown by those in their 30s, the most support by those in their 40s. They are more supportive of revision, but not to the degree of the clergy. Things get interesting again, however, in the usage statistics. Here there is a hidden problem in that the question was asked of the laity, who are probably unaware that there are almost always some hymns which organists prefer to play out of the 1940 hymnal, so usage of that is probably understated. Nevertheless the picture is clear that the 1982 hymnal remains the standard, with some supplemental use of LEVAS and WL&P (the "black" and "contemporary" books respectively). The survey of utility similarly comes out in favor of 1982; the survey analysis also notes that the clergy are much more negative about 1940 than the laity are.

I'm not sure how to interpret the stylistic results, because it's not entirely clear what the categories mean. Nonetheless, it is clear that most people want a "traditional" service, and most people get it too. One of the surprises here is the preference for sung psalms, which are also more common than I would have guessed. Again, the clergy come off as the most change-minded, and not surprisingly, they are the ones who like chant the most.

One quite surprising result is found in Table 50, where across the board there is a very strong preference expressed for singing as opposed to listening. Every group showed at least a 55% positive response. Another sign of our lack of "what's happening now" is the extremely strong preference for a physical hymnal in the form of a book.

And there's quite a bit more, of greater or lesser interest (for example, there is an extremely pressing need to come up with something for Province IX, where the existing Spanish language supplement is greatly disliked and is little used). However, after saying, "well, we need to think about changing anyway", the report admits the obvious: the support for revision among the laity simply isn't there. And it's also clear, as Hendrickson points out, that the conventional clerical view, that we need to change everything to get the young people into the church, is not borne out by the data.

Finally, I would personally observe that the liturgical output of the SCLM, as we see it in the blue book, does not give me a good feeling about how they would handle hymnal revision. On the contrary, it shows that they have tin ears, not to mention their propensity towards questionable theological novelties. It's best that we stick with what we have, and fortunately it looks as though, on this issue at least, the evidence is in favor of stability.

Do Nothing!

Permit me to be the next one to join the bandwagon behind Jason Ballard's cry for General Convention to do nothing. I can hardly do otherwise given how much of what Ballard says in support of this call to inaction. And besides, if you've been reading my comments on the various liturgical proposals being presented, you'll know that three of the four I categorically object to, and the fourth I have lots of issues with.

It's one thing for the national church to pass self-gratifying resolutions supporting this or that progressive political cause. These resolutions don't help the church, it seems to me, because the people who might join us for our politics are already members. They annoy a lot of the membership, either because of their contrary political commitments, or because there are a few of out there who don't have those sorts of commitments in the first place. But messing with the religion itself: that's terribly destructive. What needs to happen is that the people who have differences with fundamental tenets need to resolve them either by being instructed by the church, or by going elsewhere and cresting their own institutions. (And if they feel they have to take buildings with them, then let them.) The current practice of co-opting church institutions to teach against against it ought not to be tolerated.

And really, constant reconsideration of basic stuff needs to end. It creates a climate in which heresy becomes the norm and orthodoxy is at best tolerated as an aberration, and is in practice actively discouraged. It's too often the case that someone who exerts the first prerogative of orthodox tradition, objection to change, is told that any objection to change is to be dismissed, that change itself is virtuous. In every other context, this is nonsense: some change is good, and some change is bad, and the good should be embraced, and judgement should be based on the merits, not on simply some need for unspecified change. It's really all about power: priests and rectors have power to dictate arbitrary change, and laypeople can do naught but complain. And complaining laymen are dismissed as stick-in-the-muds or fuddy-duddies or fundamentalist troglodytes. In a functional church, social structures within the clerisy, and failing that church discipline serve to rein in untoward change. These plainly do not function in the Episcopal Church, and indeed, church structures are seen as ways to amplify the urge to arbitrary change. So it's best that these structures do nothing at all then that they keep at it.

So I echo the call: General Convention should pass a sane budget, not the one that has been proposed, ratify a few episcopal elections if necessary, and then should go home.

More Liturgical Fish in a Barrel: and I Brought a Shotgun

Bill Dilworth suggested I should make some comments on "Daily Prayer for All Seasons", another product of the SCLM to be put before General Convention this year. Well, heck, how could I resist? Never has so much that is bad in the outpourings of our liturgical overlords been distilled into such a concentrated essence.

For those of you who didn't make it all the way to page 352 of the Blue Book: this thing is is something of a combination of scriptural meditation and office, as if Forward Day by Day were folded directly into the "Daily Devotions" section of the BCP. Well, OK, on one level it's hard to object to this on principle, though I don't know that I would want something written once for the ages. And it's not really my cup of tea, at that; I'm more of a "grind through the office lectionary" kind of guy. That said, however, everything I complained about in "Liturgical Materials Honoring God in Creation" is just as bad here, and there's more to boot.

Let's start with the second entry, for prime in the Advent season. It begins with a versicle and response ostensibly repeating Isaiah 40:5:

God’s bright glory will shine,
and everyone will see it.

OK, right from the top: this isn't what the verse says. The correct NRSV text is this: "Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken." The italicized portion has been omitted entirely, and the leftist problem word "LORD", which those who stayed awake long enough in the higher quality sort of Sunday school will recognize as a placeholder for God's name, has been dropped. OK, so where did this come from? Shouldn't this come from the RSV, as the BCP directs? Well, perhaps the NCC's campaign to suppress the RSV is likely to prevent us from reprinting it, At any rate, however, the text admits that this comes from The Message, Eugene Peterson's extremely free paraphrase; and he can be quoted saying that he is uncomfortable with its use as a liturgical text. Peterson and I do not see eye to eye on a whole raft of issues, but at the very least I think the bible words that we repeat should be the actual words of a genuine translation!

I cannot similarly criticize the translation of the hymn, for it is new to the 1982 hymnal, and with the cost of the hymnal companion the source doesn't come readily to hand. And at least when we get to the scripture reading, the true NRSV text is used. (A question to the SCLM, by the way: does the NCC know what you're up to? Are they going to license the NRSV for this?) The meditation sentence by one Sam Portaro is innocuous enough, at first glance. But then we get a highly egregious "affirmation", a word which in itself gives a discomforting note of psychobabble. What it is, in fact, is a substitute for the Apostle's Creed. This I have big problems with, just on principle: if we cannot say the creeds as the rest of the church says them, then we are in schism. But never fear, the urge for a precious moment finally bursts forth here:

We believe in God, Creator of all:
The two-legged, the four-legged,
the winged ones, and those that crawl upon the earth
and swim in the waters.

I am moved to flip back to "Honoring God in Creation" and cry out, "but what about the prokaryotes?" And what about heaven? Sorry, guys, but this is just glurge, and as I don't have a need for the stuff (and indeed would avoid it if I could), I wouldn't give up Christian unity for the opportunity to indulge in that vice.

And there's more of that in the prayers, but I would rather advance to terce, where we get a little womynist love in the form of a "hymn" from Julian of Norwich. Dame Julian is an official Cool Saint of the Modern Church^tm, so one cannot get away with complaining about some fairly out-there imagery. But the surprise in this service is hidden in the scripture reading, which curiously claims to skip over a verse in Isaiah 11. Really, one has to be immediately suspicious when a passage of a mere four verses has to omit one of them, but looking up the missing verse shows that half of it does in fact appear in the printed reading. What is omitted is the following sentence: "His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD." And I have to assume that the sentence was omitted because someone on the SCLM found it theologically offensive. Well, it's time for them to get over that, a read scripture as it is given to us rather than editing out the bits they don't like.

But as far as that editing goes, they top themselves in sext, where they have the gall to redact the Virgin Mary's words in the name of feminist correctness. Now, I have to suspect that of those people who actually do the hours, 93.42% of them have a Pavlovian reaction to the word "magnificat", and start off saying or singing "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior." The other 6.58% are the hardheads who memorized Rite II, and it is they who will be tripped up the worst in this exercise, because while the first line is the same, the second is not. Recall the scriptural context: Mary is speaking to Elizabeth, and therefore she refers to God in the third person from beginning to end. And since, therefore, five of the eight verses begin with the word "he", our liturgical overlords have recast this as a hymn addressed to God, so that all those offensive pronouns can be replaced by "you". And heaven forbid we should speak of a promise made to Mary's fathers. So we have yet another case where we can't say what scripture says.

And so, on it goes. I skip ahead to sext for Epiphany, where Christopher Wordsworth's text must be altered, that God may not in man be manifest. At the prayers for none we have one of those modalist things. The "confession" supplied for vespers is a mealy-mouthed thing against which words of the actual BCP stand in stark relief. As far as Lent is concerned, it appears that the only sin of which we might be convicted is inadequate social justice; personal purity and piety make no appearance. Things get a little better in holy week, if only because, perhaps, they dare not erase the cross. But I don't feel the need to go beyond there; it is bad enough thus far.

I do not think that anyone will actually use this for daily prayer. The people who do that will use the daily devotional rites we already have in the BCP, or the hours from some Anglo-Catholic rites, because they will want to work through the office lectionary. If approved, I think this would see use perhaps on seasonal retreats. And I do not think that the unwary should thus be lured into using works which tamper with scripture so, and never mind the abominable taste in the writing. Why in the heck can't we use the texts everyone else uses? Why can't we say the Magnificat and the Creed as others do? Why can't we confess our sins as sins? Look, the problem with the offices as we have them isn't anything in them; it's that we have a culture of not doing them, due to time or whatever. Making them more elaborate isn't going to get people to do them, and using them as yet another conduit for SCLM's wimpy theology is dishonest. If SCLM has time to waste on this stuff, then we can do without them. Everything they touch turns not to lead, but to arsenic. It's time to disband them and live with what we have for another thirty years or so.

Interlude on the Titanic

The new liberal trope for fixing the Episcopal Church is, it appears, some sort of reorganization, especially directed at General Convention. Now, on one level I will be the first to complain: anyone who recollects the course of conventions over the past decade or so can see that they have not covered themselves in administrative glory. But I would also think that the problem here is far less in the actual organization, and almost entirely what they are being asked to do. And you can work this out by looking at what the two extreme parties think about the structural problems. The problem progressives see is that current structures get in the way of the changes they want to make; the traditionalists see that the current structures enable those changes, because the progressives take advantage of the inability of the houses to consider the issues intelligently in order to advance the progressive program through outrage escalation.

As it happens, the traditionalists are more in the right here. Well, the progressives are correct in observing that the current structures slow them down, but that's because that's the intent of the canons. And they need not only to be slowed down, but stopped, which is extremely difficult the way the polity functions now. Kendal Harmon made a long address concerning our polity problems, and I would agree with most of what he says. The organs which are supposed to keep discipline in the church don't work, because they are to a large extent used to drive out traditionalists who resist the innovations; but the innovators are not disciplined for stepping outside the canons, and indeed tend to be lauded after the fact (see under "Philadelphia, 1974"). GC has to deal with facts on the ground delivered by disobedient priests and bishops and dioceses, which are then backed up by resolutions proposing huge theological changes.

These resolutions are a big part of the problem. It is impossible for GC to function when it has to deal with a major theological issue every meeting; and this year, we have a whole raft of them: Eastern Oregon's proposal to legitimize communing the unbaptized, the approval of same-sex unions, and all the deviancies hidden in the SCLM's proposed liturgies. These have been talked about at great length, but I cannot imagine that there's going to be much effective talking going on at GC, because the venue is not conducive to intelligent contemplation by those whose minds are not already made up. People will line up at the mike, and the ritual statements will be made, and the press of other business (especially the budgetary disaster, which I can only hope will prevent some of these matters from coming up at all) will close off "debate". And there will be votes, by orders, and the votes will be closer than they ought to be, so that communing the unbaptized will likely fail, but with significant support; and some of SCLM's concoctions will get through (because too many people don't have time to consider them and their objectors seriously), and some will fail but again with far too much support; and same-sex unions will pass in part because of the concerted effort to drive away its detractors. And I will guess that every one of the issues which failed will be raised again in three years, and the progressive heretics will see gains because more traditionalists and even orthodox liberals will throw in the towel when defeat of innovations this time doesn't result in any discipline against those who continue to violate the canons and abuse liturgical texts.

And meanwhile, the elephant will sit in Research and Statistics, ignored. Susan Snook and Phil Snyder have, I think, some serious theological differences, but they agree on the one big thing: the progressives do not care that they are destroying the church at a rate of 3% a year. And it's conspicuously obvious that the thing that is destroying it is precisely that the progressives largely do not care about religion, or at least not the Christian religion as it was delivered to them. The purpose of the church, to them, is to put its (now enfeebled) powers behind endorsing the lifestyle dilettancy of the white upper middle class. So we engage in pointless (because with less than two million members whom the church surely cannot mobilize to the polls) political advocacy, and approve of our interesting sexual arrangements, and wink at our predilection towards spiritual adventurism (religion to us is like food: the serving platter for our Epicurean and cosmopolitan indulgences), and fulminate harmlessly at the economic 1% (when we are largely to be found in the 5% or so). And it is all so very much the lotion for our back-patting and the hot springs for the spa of our self-regard. That anyone else might look to us for RELIGION doesn't seem to matter, so it's hardly surprising that people don't bother to join us when they can get all of this for free. Well, free of church services, and our friends in the SCLM seem so determined to make what happens on Sunday morning a heel of self-righteous correctness bound together with abominable prose that its no wonder people are sticking their fingers in their ears.

And the running of all this disfunction: well, it gets a pass in the proposed budget, which Snooks computes as allocating 44% of the national church budget to administration, including running a $1.25M deficit. Mission and education together constitute less than 2.5% of the budget! And let us not forget, a large chunk of that 44% is dedicated to shameful lawsuits against the schismatics, ostensibly in the name of fiduciary responsibility, as though there was anything responsible about the way this budget was produced. If nothing else, her proposal to take a big bite out of the admin budget makes all the sense in the world; but we need to keep going from there. If there must be Eucharists at GC, then instead of the usual self-celebratory circuses, let them put on sackcloth, and recite the litany, repent, and return to their true business: the increase of true religion in the world.

The Vogonic Mass

"The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex, in the destruction of the planet Earth." From The Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Perhaps she worked on the Standing Committee for Liturgy and Music of the Episcopal Church.

For all the complaints about Holy Women, Holy Men, the blue book for General Convention is out, and we see even more of the fruits of SCLM's labors, set before the church for ratification. And as I try to force myself to read through it, a competition mounts in my head between my repugnance at the language, my anger at the dubious theology, and my annoyance that we have to waste our time over this at all. I mean, it's bad enough that we have to suffer through a kalendar revision to commemorate a bunch of non-Christians, badly, when most of the parishes which bother with so complete a list are never ever going to to use this, and when the message is that you don't need to be a Christian to be a Christian. It's bad enough that we have to even consider communing the unbaptized (though this heresy, at least, cannot be laid at the door to SCLM's meeting rooms). No, besides the ill-conceived rite for same-sex blessings, we are given two more dumps of liturgical stuff. First, we have "Liturgical Materials Honor God in Creation and Various Rites and Prayers for Animals", which, besides setting forth a rite for the St. Francis Day blessings, has a slew of other material: litanies, prayers, and a Rogation procession. The latter has prayers various stations along the way, including the local landfill or transfer station if it be on the route. As seems to be the case for all material issuing forth from their word processors, the notion that one could use so conventional a form as "through Jesus Christ our Lord" seems to have been utterly abandoned, so that indeed it seems that they must spend a great deal of time devising alternative titles and honorifics. There are, inevitably, lapses into modalism, as well as travels further afield. For instance, we have this paganism-flavored litany:

On your earth, as it changes, Creator, have mercy.

On the soil, that it may be built up and be fruitful, Creator, have mercy.

On the minerals below the earth that nourish life, Creator, have mercy.

On your volcanoes and lava flows, Creator, have mercy.

...and on it goes, on and on, and there is a another after that. In the Hitchhiker's Guide it is said that "the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council, survived [an Azgothan poetry reading] by gnawing one of his own legs off." I might do the same if forced to stand through this, or at least cast aside a candy bar wrapper in protest of this pollution of my ears.

After that, we have a loooong series of meditations disguised as an annual cycle of daily prayer. And again, there is the same preciousness, the same aversion to the old scripturally-based forms, and the same venturing out into questionable theological territory. Don't the Forward Movement people take care of this for us? Why does SCLM have to write such drivel? Why can't they write anything baldly orthodox?

And why do they have to write anything at all? Look, almost none of this is going to get used, even by the many parishes that have St. Francis Day services. Perhaps some of it will be used on Earth Day observances (I forget whether HWHM adds the latter to our Kalendar). And none of it should be used, as offensive as it is to both theology and the art of writing English. But really, I have to think that it doesn't matter that any of it gets used: the point is to make a lot of people feel good about having directed SCLM to write it in the first place, and for the writers to think well of themselves for their progressive liturgical politics. Meanwhile, the church declines, three percent a year, and I cannot conceive of how these rites and prayers will have the slightest effect in reversing the decline. And after that in the pipes, we have hymnal revision coming up, and I expect that they will make a hash of that as well, as though we really need to put parishes through the expense of buying yet another set of expensive books to put in the pews.

It's time for SCLM to take a vacation. A long vacation. Say, a decade or two, or the forty years prescribed for the Israelites in the wilderness. Nothing they are doing is going to get more people in the pews, and indeed they seem to be largely trying to drive away anyone with, well, orthodox views on how prayers and rites should be conducted. And if they want to do something for the environment, well, cutting out the three hundred and thirteen pages they take up in the blue book, multiplied by the number of delegates and bishops, would be an excellent starting gesture.

Budget Bracket

I never knew how ECUSA's budget priorities were worked out, but thanks to the guys at Stand Firm, now I know.

From the Curate's Desk: "On Many and More Controversies"

Robert Hendrickson addresses the "justice" connection between communing the unbaptized and various other issues presented to the church in my lifetime. And I think he is right in saying that this is not really a justice issue; it is not unjust to say that some people are in the church, and some are not. That said, there is a definite progression to the thinking about the issues in question. Let's start with racism. Here the justice issue was as far to the fore as possible: it quickly became impossible to say that a black man was, simply by virtue of race, incapable of acting in every way as a white man could, and particularly so within the church. But they knew that already, Absalom Jones having been ordained over a century earlier. And note that there was never any question of blacks or any other race being outside the church; it was a question of office, not membership. Then we moved on to women. And here we started to hit the first real resistance, because it could not be said that in every way women and men could be substituted for each other. However the position that prevailed (and which I accept) was that in the matter of the ordained ministry, they could so serve for each other. And again, women were always a part of the church; office, and therefore power, were at the center of the dispute.

Next, we turned to homosexuality, and the character of the discussion was transformed again: for now, it was not only the office of presbyter which was at stake, but the church's approval for the sexual relations between homosexuals. The church could not, after all, seriously disapprove of blacks being black, or women being women; and it could not disapprove of women doing what women by nature do (e.g., getting pregnant and producing babies). But with sexuality there was always the tension between what people are (or at least see themselves to be), and how people act it out. If the bishop of Massachusetts, who is a monastic and thus celibate, identified himself as homosexual, well, it was difficult to object to him failing to act it out. And here scripture also began to interfere in a more complex way. If it was possible to turn against Paul's injunction against women speaking in church by invoking his own words, it was also easy to turn against the passage in Leviticus and Paul's words against male homosexuality. The words of Genesis, however, require a lot more exegesis to get past. And increasingly, people were uninterested in exegesis. But beyond that, there was a spirit of theological adventurism dating at least back into the 1950s, but which was greatly amplified in the late 1960s. The theological discussion of homosexuality was swept together with a parallel line of theological deviancy arising out of the academy, so that one gained points automatically by casting an orthodox position in a political light. This is how "inclusion" got to be such a problem word. As various people have noted, it started out as a code word for a parish in which homosexuals were socially accepted. But inclusion inevitably got coupled to access to power, and access to power inevitably led to using power against the uninclusive enemy. Inclusion meant exclusion, because the troglodytes had to be excluded from power in order that inclusion of homosexuals might prevail. At this juncture, inclusion in the larger sense and justice couldn't really live together.

Where it really fell apart, though was in that adventurism. There was a notorious incident, some years back, in which the Office of Women's Ministry was caught hosting a pagan ritual on its website; and furthermore, it was discovered that the authors of the rite were in fact Episcopal priests by day, and pagan ministers by moonlight, as it were. Some time later, the same office promulgated, "for study", a Eucharistic rite which among its various oddities incorporated the catchphrases of neopagan ceremony. Meanwhile, we had Jack Spong, who, far from defending the faith, used his bishopric in the end to attack it. All of this stuff was at the urging of, to be blunt about it, the church's enemies. So while we got (in the Righter trial) the notion that we do have a core theology, in practice, it does not as yet contain anything. Which is to say, there's no significant penalty to contradicting it, if one takes the prayer book as a guide to its contents. Therefore communing the unbaptized is conscionable because it's a discipline problem, and in lots of dioceses, there's no discipline. We were incredibly lucky that the dual Muslim/Episcopal priest was canonically resident in Rhode Island, or the contradiction might never have been resolved. The theology of salvation has dissipated into a universalism under which we might as well commune everyone, because everyone will be brought to Christ in the end; and never mind that everything we have written down, from the BCP to the last chapters of the Revelation, is vehement in its contradiction to this notion. Justice brought us to inclusion, but inclusion brought us to the lack of nerve to turn those we really have no use for Christianity, and therefore cannot truly be included anyway.

Somewhere along the line, we have to grit out teeth and start doing some real theology; and I'm afraid that means not only committing the church (that is, our organization) to particular positions, but also relieving clergy who refuse to sign up for it of their positions. And especially bishops.

Bathing and Sainthood

Derek Olsen has a new post (primarily in reference to his Living Church article) which makes a connection I missed. There has been a great deal of complaint about Holy Women, Holy Men the replacement for Lesser Feasts and Fasts and particularly over the observance of days for non-Christians. Or as AKMA says in the comments, "here you have identified the simplest problem with the book: despite its title, it shows little attention to whether the figures commemorated therein are, in fact, particularly holy."

I also have to agree with with John-Julian's remarks: the parishes that would be most interested in celebrating the whole round of proposed feasts are also those which would have the most problem with the proposed observations. But I think it has a very good chance of being passed, because the theological problems don't have traction in a church where giving communion to the unbaptized is being seriously considered. Increasingly it seems that the church is directed by men and women for whom the religious functions of the church are unimportant; what matters is the church as a platform for carrying out a social program.

Of course, this will eventually destroy us. People don't need to go to church to feel good about their environmentalism (John Muir) or their patronage of the arts (Bach, Durer) or their resistance to racism or sexism or anti-homosexuality (here I stopped keeping track); even the heathen do as much. Maybe it's too bloody obvious to be said, but the only way we are going to continue to have an Episcopal Church is to convey to potential members a reason to become Episcopalians! Instead, the additions to the calendar and communing the unbaptized send the message that there's no need to join the church; we give up having any sort of sacramental or communal reason for being. Eventually people catch on, and they don't join us.

I would tend to agree with Tobias Haller that communing the unbaptized will fail to be approved. But I would be willing to be that the number of episcopal and clerical votes for it will be greater than zero, perhaps greater than ten. Maybe as much as a quarter will vote for it. And even if it go down to defeat, I would assume that the practice will continue; discipline, after all, is only to keep the traditionalists in line when the object to innovations, but innovators are empowered to break the rules. In 2015, it will come up again. And unless things change, the number of people who take their religion (as opposed to their politics) seriously will decline. Who knows? By 2018 they might succeed in passing it. But at 3% loss a year, by 2018 the church will have lost another 20% of its membership.

815 Bleak House

Via Episcopal Café we have this highly cogent analysis of the proposed budget by the Rev. Susan B. Snook of Nativity, Phoenix. Public reaction to the proposed budget has often been negative due to the elimination of any funds for churchwide christian formation. Snook makes a run at an overall budget that is less plainly suicidal, and while I have not looked over her proposal at any length, at least she hasn't come up with something that is as automatically dismissible.

Far more to the fore, however, is how she associates 815's approach to this with the legendary probate case of "Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce" of Bleak House infamy. Snook points out how the case ends: not with resolution, but with an inability to continue because the estate in question has been exhausted in litigation costs. But that's quite consistent with the relentless prosecution of cases against schismatic parishes over the properties, is it not? The liberal clerisy's obsession with its right to the inheritance of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Unites States of America (to give the full, now never-used name of the body) really is right out of the book. And spending the inheritance away, they have: banking on our now-vanished prestige and authority, looking at properties and endowments as "fiduciary responsibilities", expecting theological loyalty when they have betrayed their responsibility to their own tradition.

And it's destroying the institution. The hardcore conservatives are largely gone, having been deliberately unhorsed when they couldn't be pried off the reins. Other people are trickling away, and there is now a large clump in the middle, whose unity transcends political alignment, dismayed at the continuing push for heterodox positions. But the administration doesn't seem to be concerned about that; indeed, the presiding bishop herself seems to incapable of maintaining at least a front of orthodox belief, if her Easter message is any indication. No, it all seems to be about keeping their hands on the power and the money, while both dribble away with the losses in membership and attendance. Eventually the legacies will be gone, the buildings all sold to developers and other churches or religions, unless they repent. Our institutions can grow, and our inheritance maintained and increased; but only if we return to the religion we also inherited, and work towards that faith's transmission to the next generation.

Oolon, Call Your Office

Bryan Owen has put himself through the torment of reading the drivel coming out of another Jesus Seminar event. I personally can't bring myself to do it any more; the smugness and the intellectual bankruptcy of it all got to me years ago. But then Douglas Adams did the heavy lifting in the ridicule department years ago:

Now [the babelfish] is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing".
"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys. But this did not stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme for his best selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up for God.

Robert Munday's characterization of it as "an intellectual Ponzi scheme" is more or less on the mark as well. In that regard it's a testament to the gullibility of journalists who write about it as if it were something novel and challenging, when in fact it has been grinding along for over twenty-five years. I suppose there could be some point to this sort of critical study, but the conspicuous biases of this group and the manner in which it has sold the souls of its members to publicity make it mostly useful as an object example of what not to do. If this is the alternative to traditional faith, then it makes traditional faith easy to swallow.

Days of Anamnesis

It struck me first during the Old Testament reading. So many years before I had heard those words spoken, the account of the first Passover, and then during the epistle, and finally during the gospel, which I recall James Salango declaiming in his operatic preaching, forty years ago or more in my Presbyterian days: "and say ye well, for so I am!"

Of all the days in the church year, the days of the Triduum are the most concerned with the remembrance, not only of who we are, but of where we began. So we hear the same readings, year after year, or at least we did until the RCL got into the act and we are now doing a different psalm on Maundy Thursday and a different passion section on Friday. But the hymns are largely fixed too, though again 1982 has mucked with the harmony of "Ah, Holy Jesus" and we have a new hymn, set to the Third Mode Melody, whose words I am not too keen on. But "Pange Lingua" is still given 1940's accompaniment, and as ever we sing C. W. D.'s beautiful setting of "Were You There". And the lessons: after years of repetition (and helping to sing the passion on six occasions) I have nearly memorized them. The story of the Passover, the communion narrative, the footwashing and new commandment: I repeat the words in my mind, more or less. Having been raised on the RSV I still haven't gotten used to the NRSV text. But it is close enough.

And it will soon be sundown, and there will be fire. "Rejoice now; this is the night." I can sing the first section of the Exultet from memory. Then will come the lessons, not so many, this year, I would imagine, for fear that the service might offend for its length. If I were in an Orthodox church, even the sermon would be the same, and indeed for two years Barbara Seras read for us Chrysostom's incomparable sermon.

This is the season in which recall the reason for the church, which is not inclusion, but incorporation. Christ established his feast, and was killed for us, and rose as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, as the apostle says. And we are made part of his body, the church, through the baptism which he commanded us to take to all the world, and to recollect, to remember, to feed that body's members through the new paschal feast of his body and blood. Welcoming people is good, feeding people is good, but there are two great commandments, not one. We are first, to love God, and to love God, we must do as his son commanded. And to do that, we must worship him by and through recollection of our story as those baptized into his death and resurrection. This is why giving communion to the unbaptized is wrong, and even spiritually harmful: it is out of season. The Eucharist is not the sacrament of inclusion; it is the sacrament of the included. Those who partake, but are not baptized, are not really included; they remain outside the body. It is only baptism that incorporates.

And that is why it is important to repeat our story, year after year. We must remember that our savior's story is not just a myth, to symbolize or epitomize a salvation which he did not really enact. Possibly the second lowest point of the past few days was when I found myself reading the BCP rites largely to see where they would be deviated from. If I come to an Episcopal Church, and they do not do the liturgy in the book, then they do not recall for me the church into which I was confirmed, but some other construct of theological adventurism.

So I commend all of those who join with us, throughout the church, in reaffirming their baptismal vows. Let us say it together:

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and restoring life to those in the tomb!

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Amnesiac Church

Robert Hendrickson's thoughts on General Seminary's changes as the epitome of the loss of church identity struck a chord with me, as they did with many other people. Some years back I wrote of how my first parish was lost to me, but as with Fr. Hendrickson there is an earlier, a scholastic loss. Many, many people have seen the chapel in which I was made an Anglican, for it figured as a prominent set in a well-known movie. It looked then much as it did in my day, although far more brightly lit. Built in the extremely stylized Gothic of the midcentury, it lies buried at the heart of the main school building, dark and perhaps oppressively silent when not in use. Like many Anglican churches of the era it abounds in symbolism, most especially the wooden altarpiece which closes in stages, to be entirely shuttered on Good Friday.

In my day, it was arranged as a classic tripartite church, and between that and my old parish (before its remodelling), I came to understand how the 1979 BCP was tuned to such a space. And because I was interested in art I understood how that form echoed western church forms back into the dark ages. Oh, there were signs even back then of a certain weakness, but by and large Sunday services were conducted with high-and-wide panoply.

But it is all changed. I was a high school student in the mid-1970s, when there was still a certain hesitancy about that money stuff; the only significant building while I was there was the girls dorm, completed just before my arrival. Shortly after I left the 8th and 9th grade boys dorms were torn out and replaced by individual rooms, of which I heartily approved. Then the capital poured in, and now there is no building left untouched, and several altogether new besides. Ironically, the last I was there the only unchanged space were the upper grade student rooms, which seemed to have changed not since my day but for the light bulbs. And much of this I could appreciate too: the gyms, for instance, were quite problematic in the winter; the old boathouse was kept erect by cables. But the chapel.... It suffered improvement too. Anyone can guess what was done: the altar was pulled far forward, and the choir arranged around and behind it. The altarpiece was left, irrelevant, on the back wall. Architecturally this arrangement is less than satisfactory simply because the space overall, massive and immobile, is relentlessly longitudinal and resists being made to accommodate a centralized plan. But more to the point, it signals a change in the way the liturgy is viewed, and with that, a change to the way we look to God...

... because, in the new plan, we do not look to God at all. We look to ourselves, and turn away from transcendence. Communion itself is the most immanent of all rites, for what could be more immanent than holding Jesus' flesh in one's hand, and drinking his blood from the common cup? Jesus looks down upon the performance, over the shoulders of the sopranos, hoc est corpus, hocus-pocus, see how the miracle is performed once again, pay no attention to that Son of God over there, reigning from the cross.

But it isn't just there, and it isn't just the trendy vandalism of sacred space. I was confirmed along with the new prayer book, and my personal volume says "Proposed" in big letters on the title page, because it's a 1976 BCP. I've never in my entire life experienced a 1928 service, and I wasn't exposed to Rite I until I was over 25. Rite II was the service I grew up with in the church. And for years, I would go elsewhere, and Rite II it usually was, except for the occasional Rite I (and missal services a couple of times at Ascension & St. Agnes). And, for all the "mays" and "shoulds" in the prayer book, there was a way that nearly everyone did it. But now, I step into an Episcopal service with the full expectation that liberties will be taken. Commonly if there is a leaflet it will avoid referring to God as "he", which I ignore and say the right words (and if any man quibble with that, the words in the BCP are by definition the Right Words). But now I brace myself for other changes, so that this element or that may be omitted. Leaving out the confession is commonplace now and hardly to be remarked upon, but I've been at Sunday services where the creed or even the Lord's Prayer were not said. And there may be strange readings from non-Christian religious writings, or strange prayers of unsound theology and regrettable English. I have yet to hear the anaphora messed with, but that must be a matter of time and judicious screening of the parish website on my part. Furthermore, stories reach my ear of parishes in which, contrary to canons, homosexual marriage rites are performed sub rosa; communion is offered to pagans and the irreligious so often now, again in violation not only of mere canon but of the plain teaching of St. Paul, that if and when General Convention votes down Eastern Oregon's heretical proposal, one has to doubt that they can take the next step and apply any discipline at all to those who continue to flout the canons. But after all, even being an unbeliever isn't cause for defrocking; only finally losing patience and looking elsewhere for an orthodox bishop is cause for revocation of orders.

Traditionalists once liked to condemn the 1979 book as a diluted, pale version of the 1928. I never found this that convincing, and on some points the 1979 takes a more catholic and dogmatic line (such as in the inclusion of a catechism). But all that is far, far behind us, because however weakened it may be, the rites of 1979 have proven to be far too regressive to see continued use. It is stupid that I should have to be nostalgic for the 1985 and the new hymnal (which has its own egregious emasculations of many texts), but there it is: these days I feel I have to check ahead of time to make sure that I'll get a prayer book service with music from the hymnal.

And then there's the preaching, and the theology of Inclusion, which really means accepting all the sexual quirks of the upper middle class and saying all manner of self-serving pablum about overcoming racism and classism and sexism and a whole lot of other -isms. There are altogether too many Episcopal sermons and incidental writings that might as well start out with the following: "God (remember, you can't say 'Lord' anymore: imperialism, don't you know), I thank you that we are not like other people: traditionalists, patriots, corporate executives, or like this Republican over here." Liberal politics has become a parasite on the church, driving actual religion from the body. The only hard doctrine that matters is fealty to 815 (and to nowhere else: heaven help you if you suggest that Canterbury is owed some more final allegiance, much less the greater tradition of the church.

We can't go on like this, and if we keep trying to have a church that stands for nothing in its theological past, we will end up with no church at all. We pick saints who are not Christian, say prayers which omit the most basic claims taught from the beginning, and join the Body in communion to those who are more likely to follow Bacchus or even Moloch than Jesus. Our "leaders" hate our buildings, our words, our music, and even a lot of their own members. And there's no hope that the more orthodox liberals will act to rein this in, because they sold themselves to the high church Unitarians because they thought the latter would be needed as allies against the troglodytes, as though the Unitarian crowd would ever have done anything else. The worst of it all is that the old liberal notion of the church as a force for social good is completely bankrupt. Nobody takes our moral voice seriously, and nobody should. We are too obviously in hock to the mores of our class.

Is there hope? Well, perhaps, but only if priests who cannot get through the creed without crossing their fingers are defrocked, and bishops who cannot do so are deposed. The prayer book should be left alone for another thirty years, and priests who cannot resist tampering with it should be kept out of parish ministry. Preaching social justice needs to give some ground to preaching basic doctrine and personal virtue. We need to recover the old Anglican virtues of common sense, simple orthodoxy, and sensible solemnity (meaning, we do still need to remember how to laugh at ourselves). If we cannot do these, we will continue to fade away, and we will deserve to do so.

The Great (but late) Commission

When a blog post collects two hundred comments in the matter of a couple of days, it's hard to keep up, and I miss things. And mostly that's OK, because with that kind of outpouring there's bound to be a lot of repetitious exchanges which are largely skippable. Thus I missed this off-hand assertion when it went flying by in the big CWoB thread in the Episcopal Cafe:

I will note that 'The Great Commission' a poorly attested addition and arguably late addition to Matthew's Gospel[.]

I'm not a textual scholar, so I'm not equipped to refute this the hard/scholarly way. Fortunately, however, one of the nice things about having an internet is that there are always plenty of them lying around, ready for citation. And in this case, Derek Olsen, who is such a scholar, saw this passage first. And he doesn't think much of this assertion:

On the strength of the actual evidence, then, we’ve got to conclude that, contra the starting claim, the Great Commission in its familiar form is very well attested textually and there is only one hint read through a particular philosophical construct to the contrary.

Well, I'm not surprised to hear that. There are a very few big disputed passages, such as the Comma Johanneum, the Pericope of the Adultress, and the endings of Mark, and there are a host of shorter passages of some variation, including the doxology of the Lord's Prayer. One hears about the major ones right off if one looks at the subject at all, and in any case if one uses a modern bible the footnotes are going to tell you about the problems. In my RSV Common Bible, the last page of Matthew is utterly bare of textual notes, and the last such note in my NEB New Testament is back at the beginning of chapter 27.

But the whole form of the argument should tell you all you need to know anyway. "It's a late addition" is Protestant/Enlightenment- speak for "this passage is a problem, so I'm going to dismiss it by implying that there is an earlier, more authentic version that leaves it out." It's the Thomas Jefferson approach to theological argument, and the average layman is well-advised to dismiss such arguments out of hand.

I note Derek's comment towards the end about the pattern of trying to cast Trinitarian doctrine as late and therefore an innovation. Unitarianism has been an occupational hazard of Anglican clerics for a quarter millennium, but really in the interest of institutional knowledge, priests and deacons who are going to set aside the creed need to turn in their orders and go find some other job. Restorationism is the road to theological solipsism, and combining it with modern rationalism is the highway to the altar of the Spirit of the Age.

That Not Meddlesome Enough Archbishop

Reading and analyzing the same sex blessings proto-rite took away the time I would have needed to write the apparently obligatory postmortem of Rowan Williams's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. But really, on the level that most people felt moved to write those things, I didn't want to do so. Much of what was written was predictably partisan: the StandFirmites all attacked him for not stopping the advance of liberalism, the anti-Covenant crowd attacked him for being its chief advocate, and a small crowd of radicals attacked him for not pushing the homosexualist agenda. A bunch of moderates of various persuasions said laudatory things.

I find it very hard to participate in any of this, with one exception. Much of the commentary is based upon the juxtaposition of Williams's publicly expressed viewpoint on homosexuality, before his enthronement, and his failure to advance those positions once he became archbishop. This was widely attacked as either a lack of conviction, or a deceit; but I continue to hold it to be a noble expression of the largely forsaken principle that the president of a body is first responsible to it, and not to his own party within it.

As to how he managed that responsibility: I do not feel I am competent to express much of an opinion on this, and I think most of those who are expressing such opinions are as unqualified as I am to offer them. But the possibility of anyone succeeding as Cantuar, on any terms other than the most progressive radicalist, seems to me to be extremely small. Consider the last Lambeth conference, which was pretty much of a wash (and therefore, given the need for action, a failure). The disinvite of Robinson was, I think, entirely justified, but the program of talking everything to death in small groups was surely doomed to produce nothing of merit. At the same time, the global south conservatives, on the advice of their American advisors, sabotaged the conference anyway, thus granting a moral victory to the very people they oppose the most.

People keep saying that the communion needs a "strong leader". The American progressives are adamant that Cantuar is going to lead nothing, as far as they are concerned, and GAFCON is a institutionalization of the same position from the other side. At this point, the communion cannot be led, and I'm rather doubtful that the Church of England can be led either. The only people who can win through "leadership" within the current structures, it seems to me, are the radical latitudinarians who can use the still lingering Anglican urge towards adiaphora and canonical mechanisms of the churches to drive off the traditionalists and conservative evangelicals and thus win the denominations over to their views by default. In other words, we can have the kind of destructive leadership epitomized by our presiding bishop and her compatriots at 815, or we can have ineffectuality. People are starting to say that nobody wants to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Well, I suspect that there are various radicals who would love the position, but I think most anyone else would be mad (or at least relentlessly driven by a sense of obligation) to take it. A strong conservative would face open rebellion.

Meanwhile, the institutions are becoming increasingly problematic. Matt Kennedy and I don't tend to agree on a lot, but his analysis of how the revisionists work does pick up one note: among the progressives there is a strong sense of church institutions as tools to be used to advance their positions. His conservative faction cannot do the same because the machinery won't push in that direction: the crucial people in the middle are not going to turn into theological authoritarians. At the same time simple disobedience is becoming a pervasive feature of church "administration", so that the most depressing aspect of the Communion Without Baptism push is the very large number of parishes that flagrantly disobey the existing canons. Same-sex blessings/marriages are widely permitted by bishops who also wink at many other big canonical violations. Many of these same bishops expect obedience from their conservatives which they do not demand from their liberals. Increasingly what passes for leadership is conservative rebellion and schism, or progressivist litigation. This church cannot be led in any positive sense, at least until the bishops start acting in some sort of concert and take their vows seriously as defenders of what they have received.

I have no idea whether things have progressed so badly in England. If one takes Jeffrey Johns as an exemplar there are surely those who wish it so.

Blessing for Study Only: The Conclusion

Let me start this summary post by saying that I have doubts that this rite will be approved as such. Its existence is something of an act of appeasement, but the only ones who are likely to satisfied by such a rite are "moderates" who are uncomfortable with homosexual marriages but who acknowledge that the church needs to do something towards homosexual families (for in the end, isn't that where is is all headed?). Those moderates are going to have trouble as more and more state governments find themselves conducting homosexual weddings; the pressure of social justice will trump theology, and the homosexual activists will put them on the spot and make their position politically untenable. The heteronormative side (and for all it's a faux-clinical sociologism, it's an accurate enough nutshell description that I'm going stick with it here) isn't going to find these blessings even slightly acceptable, and of course the homosexual activists want marriage, period, except for a small contingent who want to argue that there is something special about same-sex relationships that frees them from the commitments of marriage. This last group, I think, cannot prevail either; the argument about homosexuality that can win has to argue for exact equivalence.

And that's where we start running into trouble in this rite. There has been a running theme in these posts that this liturgy is trying to both be and not be a marriage. I see four different inputs, in fact:

• The baptismal rite, which has contributed mostly structure


• Enriching Our Worship, which is the source of a lot of dubiously orthodox variation in the common elements of the rite


• The marriage rite, which contributes the core elements and language


• Novel lessons and rewrites which attempt to make this not the marriage rite

I personally don't see the reason for taking on the baptismal rite structure, but though it is a very prominent change it has the least impact to the significance of the rite. The EoW revisionism is utterly unacceptable to me, but it's potentially an independent issue: the rite could be made to use orthodox language (though I suspect that the anti-dominical crowd is entirely subsumed within the supporters of same-unions/marriages, and that the two issues are locked together through common participation in a modernist theological worldview; but they could be addressed as separate issues.) It is the mixture of novel and marital material that presents the central issue.

The rite is obviously trying very hard to NOT be a marriage rite, and anything that can be explicitly linked to marriage is conspicuous in its exclusion. Conversely, for all the appeal to baptism, and for all that the rite is reordered like baptism, marriage is plainly the starting point. As I said at the beginning, nearly every element of the marriage rite appears. OK, so what is this rite actually doing? Well, that's a very good question. Our theology admits that marriages have a reality outside of what we do in church, as reflected in the considerable difference between the celebration of a marriage (which is to say, a wedding as something done in church) and the blessing of an existing civil marriage. I have to presume that, on some level, this same-sex blessing rite reflects the same connection to a civil unions, which is why there's that rubric allowing the bishop to change the wording of the pronouncement so as to reflect the laws of the state. So what's going with those unions? Well, from a legal POV they are supposed to force everyone to recognize the couple as a family; and I would assume that they are intended to have the social/moral effect of authorizing sexual relations (and by extension, prohibiting other relations).

Or to put it more baldly, they are weddings-in-everything-but-the-name. So here's Sarah Breuer's explanation of the blessing she had after she was married in Canada:

That was the clearest way we could think of to satisfy our bishop's direction that it be very clear that the service in our parish was NOT the performance of a marriage or blessing of a marriage contract.

But it's quite difficult, if same-sex couples may be blessed at all, to figure out what, if anything, ought to be radically different in the liturgy. One priest friend objected that the vows we used were too close to those of marriage. When I asked her what we should promise to do differently -- eliminate a commitment to fidelity? say we can call the whole thing off if the "richer/poorer" or "sickness/health" thing makes it difficult? -- she couldn't think of what to change.

Breuer took a different liturgical starting point, but in the end that question of what to promise differently hangs over the the matter, and in the end, the answer given seems to be, "we will always say 'covenant' instead of vows, and never say 'marry', 'husband', or 'wife'." And ontologically, well, she had a same-sex marriage: the government in Canada said so, and I don't think that blessing it as if it were something else changes that; nor do I think that she had any intention of reinterpreting her state of connubiality to fit what her bishop would or would not allow.

And that's where I expect this to be headed: I think this is going to be set aside in favor of approving same-sex marriages, and that therefore this material is going to be used to "update" the marital rite instead.

And right away, in the readings, a problem appears: most of the OT lessons are fighting against this. Three of the readings specifically establish the ancient understanding based on the complimentarity of the sexes. Well, if same-sex marriage is the same thing, then those readings don't really tell us anything about marriage, it appears. So what does? Well, that is a very good question. Back in the discussion of the readings I noted that the readings abandoned any material about marriage per se in favor of readings about the Christian life in general or (in the case of the OT readings) a couple of passages extremely problematic even in the context of homosexual relationships. Those latter surely do not inform heterosexual marriages, and if we have to exclude the most traditional passages as opposing homosexuality, then we have virtually nothing left except for one passage from the Song of Songs, which may be Solomon's, but which is devoted to romance, not the life of the household.

And that's the core of the theological difficulty. Back at the beginning, I referred to one position as the "heteronormative side", which is to say, those who hold to the ancient pattern of marriages between men and women as a norm, a moral rule. But beside the norm stands the normal. That, more than anything else is what drives everything about this issue: "treat us like normal people" is the homosexual cry. Well, OK: on some levels I don't think this is even vaguely arguable. The notion that two people need to have some sort of ceremony to put legal force behind the permission of one to visit the other in the hospital and otherwise see to their care is absurd on its face. But this has nothing to do with sex, and it has a great deal to do with the way hospitals are run. Invoking normality here is going to lead directly to the statistical normality of marriage as the union of a man and a woman into a household, a family, out of which children proceed. The fact that in general such marriages do not begin with children, and that they are expected to continue after said children are grown, or that the marriage may be infertile either through physical defect or age of the couple or contrivance: all of these are nonetheless edge conditions, through the edges be rather broad as these go. If homosexual marriages are "just like" the ordinary kind, they nonetheless fall into the edges as well, being infertile and uncommon. This doesn't imply that there is "really" something wrong with them, but rather that they don't have a claim to dictating the nature of the ordinary, male-and-female, child-bearing variety.

That's one of the two big risks here (the other being that the anti-dominionist heresies will gain entrance to the marriage rite). If you read what Wikipedia has to say about marriage, you will find that they (at the moment, at least) define it as "a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship." Well, no, not really: that would be adoption. Why is the definition so, well, wimpy? Because (as you can see from the thirteen pages of archived discussion) in an attempt to cover everything they've basically taken out any character, because there is always some edge case somewhere which contradicts any definite character the state of matrimony is commonly said to have. The temptation is going to be to cut down what we now say about normal marriage so as to fit homosexuality into the same pattern. Marriage may thus be pried free of scripture because too much of what scripture says states that the normal pattern is a man and a woman. Trying to find marriage simply in agape leads to its dilution into all interpersonal relationships. Where does one find the requirements for chastity, fidelity, and permanence, for instance? The challenge of theological justification for homosexual marriage is to find it in theology which does not disrupt the teaching we already have about marriage between men and women. This rite, and its justification, doesn't provide a road map for that.

No to Communion Without Baptism

My parents did not do bumper stickers. Ever. Except for one case: Around 1970, Marriott wanted to build a theme park a few miles from our house, a prospect which was widely loathed among our neighbors. Therefore they affixed a bumper sticker to the our station wagon reading "No to Marriott Proposal".

And I must similarly and relentlessly object to a proposal from Eastern Oregon to eliminate baptism as a requirement for communion. Atlanta, you may recall, tested the waters with a local proposal for "a year for theological and catechetical reflection, dialogue, discussion, conversation and listening among parishes of this diocese on 'Communion of the Unbaptized'", which was defeated there. Now it's going straight to GC, and intends to change of the C&C right away.

I've been over the intellectual climate of this before. As to the theology, it's hard to top Tobias Haller's succinct rejoinder:

The church is radically inclusive and baptism is the means by which people are included. Communion is the celebration of that inclusion, not its means.

It is supremely ironic that a church that spends so much energy (rightly) celebrating the baptismal covenant could then turn its back on its significance in what seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of these two sacraments, and their interrelationship.

To this I can only add that abandoning baptism as the standard of membership represents a failure of our religious nerve so profound as to tip the balance against our institutional continuance. What's the point of a church that by implication admits that being a part of it is of no real consequence?

Communion Without Baptism is anathema; this is not negotiable.