Shreds and Noise

You may or may not have heard the publicity noise over a supposed gospel fragment which may or may not suggest that Jesus had a wife. Well, the upshot is this:

• Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School announced that she had examined a papyrus fragment from a private collector, and had determined it to be genuine. The recto side of the papyrus was translated from the Coptic to read "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'..." at one point. The fragment, which she dubbed the "Gospel of Jesus’s Wife", was dated to the 4th century, and claimed to translate some lost 2nd century Greek version.
• Not surprisingly, the MSM jumped on this, and not at all surprisingly, Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times was first in line. Others followed, all with the usual breathless "will this change everyone's understand of early Christianity" pseudoquestion.
• Surprisingly, though, there was a major pushback the next day, which also appeared in the some mainstream publications. The most prominent story was this AP wire story, in which there seemed to be almost a line of other early text types queued up to cast doubt upon the text. It seems that the lack of provenance of the fragment is a problem in itself, but many of the scholars quoted were dubious about its authenticity.
• Also making a "day after" appearance was this NBC news blog post, which stepped up to deal with some of the historical and theological context familiar to those of us with at least a passing knowledge of the field.

It's clear that, if it be genuine, we're looking at a gnostic text: that it is in Coptic is a warning bell to begin with, and one of the phrases in the text parallels a portion of the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the best known gnostic text. And as such it fits the type pretty well: these texts say a lot of odd things about sexuality and Jesus, and it isn't clear that any of them are to be taken literally. These texts are all, as a rule, pretty late (typically 4th century), so their relationship to ante-Nicene patristic Christian is controversial. For a long time the picture of gnosticism we had was largely formed out of patristic condemnations; it wasn't until the Nag Hammadi discoveries in 1945 that we could really begin to pull together a solid picture of gnostic writings.

And this is the point at which the plot thickens, because Dr. King does not come into this with clean hands. She is part of a group who doubt gnosticism as a category, which is not entirely bad. Far more problematic is her willingness to sit as part of the Jesus Seminar, which is anathema to real scholarship as far as I am concerned. And there is a far more damning problem, beyond the doubts about the paleography. Here is Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica:

[T]his fragment is exactly, exactly, what the Zeitgeist of 2012 would want us to find in an ancient gospel. To my mind that weighs heavily against its authenticity. Of course I hope I'm wrong and that it is genuine, and that is certainly a possibility, but this is equivalent to winning big in the lottery and that should make us nervous. It is too perfect. As Larry Schiffman put it, "The most exciting things are the things most likely to be forged."

It is far too reminiscent of letter to Harry Potter's mother that he finds in the last book, which has been truncated at a point which allows a reading wildly divergent from the text read as a whole: how convenient that we get this tantalizing phrase, cut free (literally) from any context, which fits so nicely into the restorationist tropes of mainline liberalism with their vision of a purer faith captured by those, well, patriarchs and then enslaved by the Constantinian state.

If I were a betting man, I could put my money on this coming to nothing. Orthodox theologians are not going to be disturbed that the corpus of gnostic writings has gotten one text larger anyway, but I would lean towards counting it as a fake. What is more significant is the will to believe it, and possibly to create it. If you want a snarky read of this, you'll prefer Thomas McDonald's analysis, but I would also recommend this longer and more dispassionate take from Smithsonian magazine. But one should also consider, on one's own, the rush toward any text which stands outside the particularity of orthodox Christian faith. Where is the need to have faith in these scraps coming from?

What Does It Mean to Do Theology?

Like sands through the hourglass, nothing seems so relentless in the Episcopal Church as the continual effort at eroding any kind of notion of doctrine. Thus a discussion of catechesis at the Episcopal Café set off, as anyone might expect, a run of responses deriding the notion of a catechism as being a vehicle of "old-school" "authoritarian[ism]". Well, as usual this immediately abandons any real sense of Episcopal Church history, as everyone knows that we didn't even have a catechism until 1976. And that book actually says this concerning the catechism:

This catechism is primarily intended for use by parish priests, deacons, and lay catechists, to give an outline for instruction. It is a commentary on the creeds, but is not meant to be a complete statement of belief and practice; rather, it is a point of departure for the teacher, and it is cast in the traditional question and answer form for ease of reference.

The second use of this catechism is to provide a brief summary of the Church’s teaching for an inquiring stranger who picks up a Prayer Book.

It may also be used to form a simple service; since the matter is arranged under headings, it is suitable for selective use, and the leader may introduce prayers and hymns as needed.

I submit that there is nothing much authoritarian in this, other than the apparently now antique notion that the Church teaches anything whatsoever. A perusal of what our catechism actually says should reveal nothing that is controversial to those who have set aside the routines of modernist revisionism. Obviously people who value questioning more than answers are going to have a problem with such formulas, but someone who is going to question traditional answers has an obligation to know and understand those answers. A catechism is a pretty easy route to to that understanding, be it memorized or not.

Behind this emphasis on questioning, however, is a more or less utterly false picture of Christian history. Or at least, it stands as an utter rejection of Christianity as a historical religion. The trope is religion as a Journey, in which God has to be sought out; but that's not Christianity as the Church teaches it. Seeking takes us to baptism, and baptism (as the sacrament of incorporation) brings the crucial seeking to an end. Doctrine is part of the map giving direction to this, and one of the Church's roles is to keep this map whole, and to make sure it keeps getting passed on to the next generation.

By contrast, the modernist version seems to be that the church really doesn't know much about God, at least nothing worth listening to; in fact the message seems to be that one can basically assume that everything they say is wrong. A quote from one response: "'[R]evealed' truth [...] is nothing more than a prior consensus opinion of some particular group." This isn't a "healthy skepticism"; it's skepticism of a certain sort elevated to dogma. The modernist catechism, were one to be written, would say that the church is nothing more than a political body, that it has no historical teaching worth passing on, and that the purpose of theology is to mine the tales of scripture so as to best ratify the moral impulses of upper middle class liberals.

My reaction to this is to observe how Christian precepts inherited from the church are central to the moral dogmas of the liberal intelligentsia. It seems to me any reason they can give for rejecting church tradition goes on to provide a ground for rejecting liberal moral teaching; any compelling reason to think that Jesus is of any importance eventually relies on the authority of the church as a witness to the faith. And besides that, the picture they give of church history simply isn't true. It is possible to say the most utterly unsupported things about church history and scripture without the least shame, the product of a restorationism so extreme as to retreat back before any record we have, enabling what comes down to simply making up proto-Christianity as needed. But there are a lot of records, and it's pretty clear working from the materials we have that Nicene orthodoxy wasn't something made up at Constantine's behest.

That orthodoxy may not sit easily in some modern minds, but so what? Surely what is most congenial to the secular, irreligious, or "spiritual" world around us is what we should be most suspicious of. It is those precepts which we who hold ourselves worldly are most inclined to rationalize. And I should add at this point that the neo/paleo-con conservative political religion of a lot of American Protestants is as easily criticized on the same basis.

Moderns don't like Jesus as the Real divine revelation who acts in history to save us, because it's so, well, particular and exclusive. Well, so what? If that's the way things are, then it's up to us to learn to live with it.

I Talk to the Snakes, But They Don't Listen to Me

It's hard for me to get past the title of Elizabeth Kaeton's latest missive on the conflict over marriage. When she accuses her opponents of "listening to talking snakes", it's easy to get the message that serious response to their objections isn't on the program. It's also easy to get the message that grounding in scripture isn't a component of her theology. Or perhaps the temptation of a snappy and contemptuous comeback has overcome the recollection that it is God in those early chapters of Genesis who is providing the instruction.

And indeed, that's the rub, for if she isn't going to listen to God speaking in scripture, it might well be asked to whom she does listen. It's all well and good "to talk about the traditions of mutual love, fidelity, intimacy and mutuality that are at the heart and soul of Christian marriage," especially when that talk comes from scripture. That talk, in scripture, is found in the context of an explicit acceptance of all that stuff in the book with the talking snake. And back when I was discussing the lessons for the proposed same-sex blessing rite, I noted how all nearly all the lessons addressing marriage were dropped apparently because they all started from the "man+woman=godly intent" theology of Genesis, except for one passage of love poetry, a lot of general lessons about agape, and a couple of slash re-readings out of the OT.

So where is the instruction coming from? Well, without regard to the opinions of the DSM, it isn't coming from science. Permit me to turn my religion off for a second: the teaching of biology is that homosexuality among humans is a sexual aberration which fortunately hasn't been common enough to interfere with the continuation of the species, at least perhaps until recently. That's about what we can get from that, and it's obviously not a good basis for a moral mandate of any kind, for or against. No, it's pretty obvious that the starting point is in some respect taking the material in Genesis 2 and maybe adding a few extra verses after verse 25, and maybe filing the gender off Eve, and dropping verse 24. The argument is that homosexual relationships are just like heterosexual ones, but the latter continue to be informed by the same set of verses (except some of what Paul says), and therefore someone like Kaeton is listening to the talking snake just as much as anyone else in the church is.

The point here is not about listening to talking snakes, but about listening to other people. My interpretation of Kaeton's remarks is that anyone who explicitly goes to scripture as an authority in opposing her program is going to be dismissed out of hand. I also interpret them as expressing contempt for those people. So, really, there's no point in even talking about talking, because it's pretty clear that the only talking that's supposed to be heard is her talking. And you know, I'm not willing to sign up for that.

It's hard to find any discussion of "alternative sexuality" of any sort and not hear at least a whisper if not a droning mantra of "it's what feels natural to me, and it's not hurting anyone else." Why on earth should anyone take that seriously? It's nothing more than the voice of appetite. Meanwhile I look at ordinary, procreative heterosexual sex, and I see a lot of people who hurt each other, themselves, and especially the kids they bear because they cannot control their appetites. It seems to me that same-sex relationships shouldn't get a pass on these issues, so that I think we can step up to getting rid of the same-sex blessing rite simply because we cannot possibly justify having an opposite sex relationship blessing. Instead, it's easy enough to figure out that we countenance endorsement of marriages-which-aren't-marriages simply as a tactic toward insistence on the acceptability of homosexuality.

Kaeton thus comes across here as a classic "[w]e know better than you on this topic and we’re going to have a 'dialogue' until you see the error of your ways and agree with me at which point our dialogue will be done" liberal. Personally I have better things to do with my time.

Church and Chicken

As pretty much everyone in the country knows by now, the president of Chick-Fil-A had an interview with a Baptist organization in which he stated support for the "the biblical definition of the family unit" and made other statements essentially rejecting the notion of same-sex marriages. Apparently the LGBT rights lobby, with the help of those friendly to them in the media, decided to make a test case out of this, to the point of getting a few big city mayors to make rash statements about how they would try to keep CFA out of their cities. So someone (it might have been Mike Huckabee, but he certainly played a key role in organizing it) decided to respond with an Appreciation Day: basically an eat-in. Well, CFA was swamped, and media from all over reported on the crush of people, albeit often grudgingly. A LGBT "kiss-in" protest, by comparison, made little impact.

So what does it all mean for us in the church?

Matthew Paul Turner, I think somewhat inadvisedly, titled his analysis "5 Reasons Why the Church Failed Yesterday. I think perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about how the churches failed, given that different churches reacted in contradiction to each other. I do think that Turner is partly right in his third point: this was not about people, but about issues. But beyond that, it's also about the institutions which exemplify these issues, and here is where I think it is more profitable to focus. It is the done thing, from the liberal side, to throw around the word "hate" a lot, the better to identify the opposition with those who tied Matthew Shepard to a fence (and yes, it was only a day or so before I saw that connection made). It seems to me to be more about anger than hate, and I think the target isn't so much homosexuals as it is the liberal establishment that's pushing this cause. Which isn't to say that there weren't a lot of people in this who, put on the spot, would not have strong negative reaction to homosexuals as a class.

But the thing that really lit this off was how the MSM and the mayors jumped behind a boycott. That set off American antiestablishment reactions in a big way. The message that should be taken away from this is how intense the resentment is against being lectured over this issue, not about how much America hates homosexuals. The liberal establishment put their influence on the line, and failed spectacularly.

Obviously the Episcopal Church ended up on the losing side of this. Oh sure, we got to indulge in our feelings or righteous persecution, but we had no effect on the course of the event. The usual Episcopal liberal voices said the usual things about how hate-filled the sandwich eaters were, and maybe it's just me, be there was at least as much anger expressed there as in a thousand chicken sandwich lunches. Outside of our own little world, nobody cared. We got dismissed as just another bunch of liberals, subspecies a bunch of heretics who've pretty much forsaken the faith.

Ike, We Hardly Knew You

In one of the more egregious acts of questionable triumphalism concerning the recent General Convention, Becky Garrison writes:

Commentators at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times may decry the Episcopal Church as a place offering pet funerals but nothing for the faithful or failing to provide anything one cannot get from purely secular liberalism. These traditionalists appear to bemoan the loss of a 1950s-era church that promoted an Eisenhower-era civil religion replete with the cross draped in the American flag.

While they wax nostalgia over a past that largely existed only in TV Land, the Episcopal Church made history at its 77th triennial General Convention by passing two gender nondiscrimination resolutions.

She is, at least in one respect, talking through her hat: given that she is a bit over a year younger than I am, she has no memory of the fifties, because she wasn't even born yet. Eisenhower himself was in some respects a throwback to mid-1800s political faith: he holds the unique distinction of being the only president to be baptized while in office. But as for the past, I need not recall the fifties, but (to take a signal year) 1979. In that year there were plenty of signs of weakness, but one could generally be assured of stepping into an Episcopal Church and getting an orthodox service and a half-decent sermon. The crackpot radfems were about (Gyn/Ecology was first published the year before) but if you avoided recent EDS graduates or faculty, you were probably safe, and there were still plenty of priests left from the glory days of Sewanee.

Thirty years later, and surely nobody is particularly surprised by the transgender resolutions. It's the sort of stuff we do, as a matter of course, endorsing the mores of that sect of liberal academia who still go to church. The problem, as Garrison resolutely ignores, is that there is no theology behind that morality; instead, the theology is cut down so as not to tread on the mores of the upper middle class.

The sneering reference to TV Land is, of course, a slap at Ozzie and Harriet, as though few people were raised by their undivorced parents. Far more typical of fifties TV fare were slap-happy, childless comedies like I Love Lucy and Jackie Gleason's various shows, as well as all those westerns; the other archetypal "fifties" show, Leave It to Beaver, didn't start until '57 and ran well into the sixties, and Andy Griffith didn't start until 1960. In the irony department we have the fact that Hugh Beaumont was a licensed Methodist lay preacher, and that the real TV Land has been running Roseanne for the past four years.

But then, one could just as well make snide references to Rocky Horror religion, seeing as how GC has all but set us up for the Rev. Frank N. Furter. Way too often there is a kind of freak show quality to things Episcopal these days, where there seems to be a contempt for the ordinary and a love of what we in the medievalist community call "freaking the mundanes". Thus canonizing agnostics and inviting pagans to communion is good, because it annoys people who take baptism seriously. Weird, clumsy and questionable rewrites of the liturgy are good, because they annoy people for whom the long-memorized words of the rite recall the ancient traditions of the church. Chasing after academic leftist fads is good because it annoys the supposedly rightest establishment. Doubting the creed is good, because it annoys those who see the manifest hypocrisy of it. The Episcopal clerisy and its hangers-on are heavily contaminated with radical chic.

I do not need the fifties, which I too cannot remember. But I like to think it is still possible to set the sarcasm aside and simply do the prayer book rite straight up and mean it without irony. I like to think it is possible to do theology as a church instead of as a colony of secularized academia. And I like to think we can talk about the past without falsifying it. Her picture of what the reasserters want is, to put in bluntly, as false as can be, and furthermore it's very hard for me to believe that she could have any real awareness of them and honestly make the claims about their desires that she presents.

The Numbers Matter

One of the tropes heard in the discussion over the future of ECUSA is a certain dismissiveness of the steady-since-2000 declines in membership and attendance. Occasionally people cast doubt on the statistics-gathering, which I would hold to be unjustified. The membership numbers have certain problems which are well-known to those of us who study them; the attendance numbers are perhaps subject to a certain imprecision, but they are immune to the record-keeping issues which affect membership values. But beyond this, all the problems with church statistics tend to minimize decline. To the degree that the numbers are wrong, they are almost certainly inflated. There is no reason to disbelieve that the decline is real, and at any rate the closure and departure of parishes testifies to the trend well enough.

Given the reality of decline, the forces of tradition naturally want to attribute it to the church's deviancy. And again, on some level this is inarguable: one can match up much of the decline over the past few years to departures of dioceses and parishes over theological issues. This of course doesn't immediately imply that the issues should have been resolved the other way, nor does it imply that this is the sole source, or that sticking to traditional teachings on the issues at hand would have avoided declines.

On the other side there is a certain perverse pride in driving off the troglodytes, and a certain stiff upper lip about dealing with the losses. But that brings us to the point: the losses DO have to be dealt with. To take an example close to home: Back twenty-some years ago, around the time we married, our parish was nearly literally bursting at the seams. We would have to open the windows so that the people standing outside the building could see and hear the service. And this happened at Easter, and then when the bishop visited; but when we had people standing outside on an ordinary fall Sunday, we knew we would have to build. And while being stuck in a school lunchroom for nearly a year was pretty annoying, the idea that we were growing was energizing and helped carry us through. Twenty years later, we are in the throes of our third rector change, and attendance in 2010 was down to the point where we probably could fit into the old, unexpanded church, and my guess is that 2011 will prove to have been worse, and this year is looking worse still. There is a constant drumbeat about making budget, and anyone who watches can see that we have gone from spiritually prosperous to living under a constant level of strain.

It is easy enough to say that numbers are not of themselves a sign of spiritual health. But the church is a spiritual institution, and the numbers are surely a key measure of institutional health. They do not show that the institution is in some sort of healthy, controlled contraction: they show a church which is being forced to retrench at the mercy of demographics and as a reaction to its dogmatic changes. In context, the dismissal of the numbers' relevance isn't confidence; it's denial. Parishes (and now cathedrals, for two were closed and one was sold off in the past year) are forced to close, and few on the progressive side are willing to face up to the obvious truth that the institution cannot keep going like this.

Let Us Now Praise the Late Sixties

Today, in recollection of the uncanonicalirregular ordinations in Philadelphia back in 1974, we have been given a paean to their ilk by Louie Crew. It is praise afflicted with a certain nostalgia, not to mention some self-exaltation: Dr. Crew, as a founder of Integrity, surely must be numbered among those whom he praises.

And perhaps some did sit in jails; but nobody involved in those ordinations was at any risk of that. The worst that could have happened was that a bunch of women would continued to be numbered among the laity, and a few retired bishops might have had some ineffectual discipline directed at them. I eventually realized that what I was seeing was not a group of isolated rebels, but a more or less organized coup.

Dr. Crew's part in this was carried out during his rise through the academic establishment. In the same era, women's studies enjoyed the same elevation (the department was established at UMCP before my arrival there in 1977). The protest establishment still waxed nostalgic over "four dead in Ohio" (ignoring the two dead in Mississippi), but the inconvenient fact that these six constituted the entire scope of the carnage was giving way to the more prosaic reality that the next generation wasn't going to get to live as well or with such noble causes at hand. It was easy enough to see that the church was being taken over by liberals who intended to use the structures of the church to push their views on everyone else. Or in other words, they just wanted to supplant and become their supposed oppressors.

But beyond that, the attitude fostered (and which the conservatives unfortunately picked up from them) was that being a jerk for Jesus was not only perfectly OK, but that it was the way people should act: contemptuous, loose with the facts, power-hungry and, well, self-righteous. When I look back at 1974, I think about how much more civil and mutually respecting the church might be if they had waited for GC's approval. And a little remorse for the damage they did to church order would also be in line. But humility, it appears, has passed away.

Teaching the Church

No passage so symbolizes the impasse of the church today than the British prime minister David Cameron lecturing his own church on their sexual ethics. Of equal note is the context of the speech: a reception at 10 Downing Street for "the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-sexual community" (to quote the Church Times article on the event). OK, so here is where it is at: a man who is a churchman listens to pressure groups, and presumes to pressure the church on their behalf, as though the church has nothing to teach him on that matter.

But then, the church has ceased to speak with one voice on the matter. Anyone who guessed that the CT article is graced with a photograph of the event could also guess that said picture shows perennial episcopal aspirant Jeffrey John, who is transparent as glass about his desire to make whatever diocese he attains dominion over as a power base for dictating approval of people, well, like himself. Church teaching becomes thus something to be captured and made to serve his views. But then, what's the point? The PM has already shown that church teaching is held inferior to, well, whoever it is that taught him. Or maybe it is simply his own urges and calculations which rule him.

There has been a lot of going on about Ross Douthat's doubts on the prospects of liberal Christianity. A lot of the rejoinders don't seem to be able to get past the adolescent observation that the conservative denominations are also on the ropes. But really, considering Cameron's remarks, it's hardly surprising. The various churches are all having a hard time getting people to care, I think for somewhat different reasons. The Catholic Church's problems in the USA, for instance, are plainly derived in part from reaction to the high-profile sex scandals. But the secularists are also getting their wish: it is they who are setting society's agenda, and the churches are, by and large, simply buying into the programs given to them by worldly authorities.

This corrupts the conservatives and liberals differently, because they are in bondage to different secular authorities with different aims. The conservatives are controlled by business interests who are uninterested in theology, and this means that they are free to adhere to basic theological doctrines while at the same time their moral teaching is contaminated with neo- and paleo-con economic and social dogmas. The liberals, however, are enslaved by the academic and social bureaucratic establishment, and these people are notoriously adverse to Christian tradition. The irreligion of the academy produces a derivative irreligion in their ecclesiastical followers, so that the result is that, as Douthat says, "the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism."

There remain centrists, of various political views, who are not beholden to the outside, but they are conspicuously beleaguered. Their faith that scripture- and tradition-based theology is the starting point for moral reasoning and "lifestyle" (as though one works out how to live in the same manner as one works out how to get one's hair cut at the barber or salon) is dismissed as antique. If they represent the best foundation for a church going forward (for they do make an argument for religion above and before their moral teaching), they are also crippled by institutions which abuse their otherwise commendable loyalty. I have tended to have little use for the "emergent" movement, because too many of its proponents (Brian McLaren, I'm looking down the road at you) are object lessons in the corruption of hitherto conservative non-denom evangelicals by the same intellectual forces which ruined mainline theology. But as it stands, the only hope going forward is to break free of existing institutions, and indeed perhaps to see institutionality itself in different terms, because of the obsession with church power which so drives liberal Christianity.

That said, I'm not abandoning the Episcopal Church this week. But right now its claim to my loyalty is based very weakly on being able to find a sufficiently orthodox parish, and nothing else.

Rules Are For Other Dioceses

A letter has been set forth from the bishops of New York authorizing their clergy to conduct same-sex marriages beginning September first. OK, so what has changed to permit this? Nothing whatsoever, unless you want to count the change in New York state law which took effect over a year ago. General Convention didn't authorize use of the "provisional" blessings rite until Advent, and did nothing to change the church's theology on marriage at all.

But that's the pattern of progressive Christianity, isn't it? Rules are not for them; they're for the troglodytes who refuse to get with the program. Bishops Sisk and Dietsche aren't going to face any serious discipline for stepping way outside the canons; indeed, I suspect they will be lauded for their courage in doing so. If anyone bothers to bring this as far as a presentment,I predict that the matter will be placed outside domain of "core doctrine" and dismissed. But I don't see a presentment in the offing, really.

One wonders why we even bother with GC any more, except that I know the reason: we have to pass all those self-affirming resolutions about political issues over which we have no influence. So when a diocese authorizes communing the unbaptized (as opposed to merely ignoring the abuses rife in the church) it will be lauded by the "cool kid" progressives, but in spite of the recent rejection at GC, nobody will ever be disciplined for inviting pagans and atheists up to share in the Body and Blood.

Such is the state of order in this church.

General Convention Postmortem

It's all over but the application of the Secret Episcopal Procedural Decoder Ring to figure out exactly what didn't pass. And the results aren't pretty.

Hardly anything bad was actually entirely rejected. Holy Women, Holy Men got sent back for another round, but there's no reason to believe that the standing committee is going to straighten out and get rid of the questionable entries. Communion of the unbaptized at least was not authorized: Eastern Oregon's resolution did get tabled at the start, but North Carolina's study resolution was gradually mutated into a completely different statement that baptism before communion was "normative". At that, it took until the last possible moment for the bishops to get rid of a sentence essentially authorizing communion of the unbaptized through the trapdoor of "pastoral sensitivity"; it's not clear whether or not the deputies were able to readdress the final version. So the best that was perhaps achieved on this front was the status quo: that places where it is being permitted will continue to invite unbaptized people to the altar.

The big news-making issues, of course, were the transgender protections and the approval of same-sex blessings. The latter was pushed through by terming the rites "provisional" rather than "trial", in order to get around a supermajority provision in the church constitution. I see no reason to take the difference seriously: the words are, in context, essentially synonyms, and nobody can surely believe that the next GC will be able to say, "no, that was a bad idea; we'll stop doing these." Furthermore, the authorization to reword the rite according to local laws surely will be taken in some dioceses as grounds to use the rite to do same-sex marriages.

The transgender resolutions are something of an empty gesture in light of the two such clerics who spoke on the measure. One can do the math and consider the possibility that every transgendered person who has considered ordination is already in a collar; the impediments which supposedly already stood were surely naught beyond the need to move to a different diocese.

I lost track of the other liturgical junk. I think we still are stuck with pet funerals (though without assurances of our dogs joining use in heaven) and some of the other rubbish from SCLM, but mostly they stand as symbols of unorthodoxy rather than as present threats to what goes on in church.

The usual round of political posturings was enacted, an enormous time-waster considering that nobody cares what a church of less than 1% of the population thinks.

And finally, restructuring. The WSJ article that has attracted a lot of attention is nearly as wrong-headed as people accuse it of being, but there is a kernel of truth at the bottom of it all. It is hard to imagine that restructuring these days will not encompass means to continue to drive the traditionally orthodox out of power. What should have happened to the liturgical resolutions is that everything except same-sex blessings should have gone down in flames, and the blessing rite should have been brutally overhauled to remove all the anti-dominical heresies embedded within it. That none of this happened indicates that orthodox believers don't have much of a future in this church.

It Isn't STRUCTURAL Reform We Need

It's striking to look at the list of resolutions up at General Convention and see how many of them are ostensibly about "structural reform", and to contemplate what that reform seems to point toward. Now, I think there is a need for reform, but it's hardly the central problem besetting the Episcopal Church. No, as one can see from the rest of the resolutions, the two central agendae of the church are once again (a) making upper middle class liberals feel good about themselves, and (b) indulging in a taste for theological adventurism. And therefore the direction that "reform" is trying to take is to centralize power in an administration to tell the conservative dissenters to shut up and get with the program.

Consider all the fuss about transgenderism. In reality, this is vanishingly rare, especially among women: even the highest "I get to make up a number by assuming this is wildly underreported" values are only a couple of tenths of a percent, and more reality-based numbers give a few hundredths of a percent for men and and another order of magnitude less for women. Yet this is a big cause at GC, with special bathrooms which have been the cause of a few amusingly embarrassing mistakes on the part of the unwary. It's an ideal cause for us because it's nominally transgressive, pseudo-clinical, and cheap. Meanwhile my quite liberal daughter has gotten thoroughly annoyed at all the people in the cosplay forums she frequents who go on and on about how remarkably out-of-the-ordinary their sexuality is. One would think that people who pick a single person of the opposite gender, make a legal commitment to them, and get down to breeding are, well, a vanishing breed. And certainly the agenda of GC takes them for granted, ignoring the much more disruptive issues of divorce and unchastity. But to deal with those issues, they would have to take a very large part of their liberal membership to task, which isn't going to happen.

And consider the current path of the proposal to commune the unbaptized. This is really another "getting points for being ineffectually transgressive" project, at the cost of one of the most fundamental understandings of the church. And thank heaven, the original Eastern Oregon resolution has been set aside; yet in its place we have a resolution from North Carolina which, having been amended, is now proposing a committee to study the issue and make a report. If such a committee is formed, what's most likely to happen is one of two outcomes: either those in control will make sure there are enough heretics on the committee to guarantee a less than orthodox report; or when a less adequately packed committee delivers an insufficiently licentious report, it will be thanked and ignored, and the heretics on the issue will simply press the issue again and again until they've driven off enough orthodox to prevail.

And that's where structural reform is hitting the rocks. The obvious reform that is needed is to get the heretics out of control, and arrange church structures so they can be kept out of control. But where we are actually headed, it appears, is arranging things to entrench the heretics and increase their powers to suppress orthodox dissent. So right before GC we get a presentment against a group of bishops who had the audacity to file an amicus curae brief in some Ft. Worth case, objecting to 815's claims about church polity; and it turns out that this comes from the bishops of two of the rump dioceses. This kind of loyalty oath crap is the worst sort of hypocrisy in a church where every sort of praxis violation is routinely ignored (see under "communing the unbaptized" above: does anyone really think that is going away?). And of course the truth behind the truth is that these bishops were picked outside the normal process and seated by the central administration, so they are very much the agents of the centralization faction.

If these people get their structural reform, we are headed towards a tightly centralized church which enforces a paradoxical theology of deviance; which is to say, the one thing that won't be tolerated is any notion of orthodoxy. I won't be a part of such a church, but then, I don't think very many other people will want to be a part of it either.

No Man's Prayer Book Is Safe

...while General Convention is in session. At least, that's the risk offered by one resolution, as Bishop Martins sees it. The offender is A059, which fixes an oversight in the authorization for use of the Revised Common Lectionary. Now theoretically putting everyone on a different lectionary should have gone through the prayer book revision process, which requires an absolute minimum of two GCs to put a change through. The problem is that when they authorized the change to the new lectionary, they forgot about the lessons for the proper liturgies, so that Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week are still only authorized to use the 1979 readings. Well, OK, so they're proposing to spot fix this this GC. Well, as the Bishop observes, once this has been done for this, it's probably available to do for anything. So (to take his example) they could rewrite the marriage rite on the spot. And therefore the BCP could change pretty much every three years, instead of every forty years or so, as in the past. Also, being able to spot-"fix" the text makes attempting changes all that more inviting. And then it's a "Lord" here, a "Father" there, a "sin" in another place, and pretty soon those of us with some attachment to the 1979 book find ourselves stuck with the Enriching Our Worship tripe. We have all these people claiming that we are bound by worship, not doctrine; but of course there's a lot of doctrine in the BCP. And what better way to become even more unbound than we are in today's "what's a rubric" free-wheeling days than to simply change the book constantly. I'm with the bishop. What we don't need is yet another way to slip change into our worship.

On Hiding Out in a Pre-Modern Church

Andrew S. Damick, an Antiochian priest, has put up a typically convert Orthodox posting on who's not a Christian. Now, I don't know the whole story of his conversion, but his capsule biography describes him as an Evangelical missionary kid; it's unclear on his degree of religiosity prior to his college conversion, though I am led to surmise that it was pretty high.

In discussing this I need to refer back to an earlier post of his on his personal blog, in which he discusses Peter Leithhart's "Too Catholic to be Catholic" criticism of closed communion of the Catholic Church. Orthodoxy of course is even more closed. Perhaps the center of all of this is in these words from Leithart:

Here’s the question I would ask to any Protestant considering a move: What are you saying about your past Christian experience by moving to Rome or Constantinople? Are you willing to start going to a Eucharistic table where your Protestant friends are no longer welcome? How is that different from Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentiles? Are you willing to say that every faithful saint you have known is living a sub-Christian existence because they are not in churches that claim apostolic succession, no matter how fruitful their lives have been in faith, hope, and love? For myself, I would have to agree that my ordination is invalid, and that I have never presided over an actual Eucharist. To become Catholic, I would have to begin regarding my Protestant brothers as ambiguously situated “separated brothers,” rather than full brothers in the divine Brother, Jesus. To become Orthodox, I would likely have to go through the whole process of initiation again, as if I were never baptized. And what is that saying about all my Protestant brothers who have been “inadequately” baptized? Why should I distance myself from other Christians like that? I’m too catholic to do that.

In these discussions I find myself in the same position, minus the ordination. Damick responds:

As for how becoming Orthodox or Catholic reflects on converts’ former religious experience, Leithart seems not to be aware of something that is amply available in nearly any convert story out there. Most converts do not, in fact, see their previous religious experiences as wholly devoid of grace, as being defined by unmitigated darkness, but rather as having been in some sense a propaideia—a preparation for receiving the fullness of the Christian faith, a preparation for which they are usually quite grateful. I know very few who look on their former communions as Leithart fears they should. Of course they will look on where they’ve converted to as being better, else they wouldn’t convert. But Leithart would have someone whose convictions run that way stay where he is!

What I read in this is quite different. Yes, converts come up with these explanations for their past. The question is whether they are good explanations. The problem for someone who goes from being, say, a faithful Anglican to being a faithful Catholic is that a rationalization is practically demanded of him. The past has to be explained if it is to be talked about, and therefore there needs to be an explanation of the past that justifies the convert's former faithfulness. The other explanation, that the person was heretofore deluded by Satan into believing a false religion, is too dangerous to faith of any sort.

But if one's evangelical or Anglican or Lutheran churchgoing is a preparation for their Orthodoxy, then it would appear to follow that there is something providential in it. And this brings us back to the "who's a Christian" question, because in Damick's scheme the ersatz Christianity of the Protestants is only of merit if it leads on to Orthodoxy. But who can foretell such a thing? And I would note a subspecies of convert who is angry at his old church for its betrayals, and who indulges in the Cyprianite heresy in proclaiming that "there is no salvation outside the (that is, my present) Church." One can only get to this claim through a selective reading of the gospels, but be that as it may, often times these angry converts likewise take issue with their current church, and find some schism that rejects it, and so on through a serial Cyprianism of ever more questionable sects.

And it can work the other way. My sense of confirmation of where I am traces directly back the other weeks following Bishop Clark of the Episcopal Diocese of Delaware laying hands on me in my high school's chapel, and is so strong that I am not tempted by any church which rejects the reality of that confirmation. Why shouldn't the standards of that church prevail, rather than preferring my own taste for Eastern or Roman theology? If one is to believe in the reality of the Church, then why not be guided by the empirical reality that people of faith and grace are found without distinction to rite or hierarchy? I do not trust that the reasoning of theology is a good enough guide for this, or else the One True Theology would have won out centuries ago. Reason isn't unimportant, but it's also obviously inadequate to the task. One's intellectual taste in theology is nearly as questionable as one's taste in music or vestments.

Pre-modern churches are attractive if one is tired of fighting liturgy battles or listening to supposedly postmodern rationalized doubt. But that very attraction is a potential occasion for sin. My reaction to the theological problems of my denomination is to want to reform it, to bring it back to the virtues it had when I joined it, and to perfect those virtues. I cannot hide out in the Eastern or Roman churches because I am not willing to purchase human assurances of salvation at the cost of my integrity. And I think that converts between denominations should, as a rule, be silent about their old homes, because they are too prone to a kind of slander.

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.