Summer Ends, But Not the Doldrums

Things have gotten slack in the Anglican blogging world, so that the best I can observe about actual events is that the Diocese of New York coadjutor slate is made up of what seems to be the standard set of candidates for a liberal diocese these days:

• one white guy shaved bald (bonus points for the goatee)
• one white woman with an upper-crusty big hairdo
• one black guy (also covering the foreign-born slot)
• one lesbian
• one guy who actually looks like a traditional bishop candidate and happens to be a bishop now

It's hard to get excited about it: everyone except the last makes the ritual obeisance to the Spirit of Inclusion, so I would guess that the bishop will remain bishop of where he is now instead of being enthroned in Harlem. I assume if they elect the lesbian that the Stand Firm people will be briefly distracted from the string of neo-con/Libertarian political posts and will make their ritual denunciations, and that the diocese will move on to uncanonically marrying homosexuals out in the open instead of behind church doors (if indeed they are bothering to be so circumspect now). I cannot imagine in any case that much will change, no matter who is elected: numbers in the diocese will continue to decline as before, in a smog of upper-middle self-congratulation.

Meanwhile the ordinariate is receiving a second ECUSA parish. It is simply pitiful to hear the goings-on about this from the traddy Roman side, as though the influx of a small number of Continuing parishes is going to have any effect in the great sea of American liturgical indifference. It is at least encouraging to see new churches and renovations which pay any attention to artistic merit, but the level of churchmanship still seems stuck at "wham/bam/thank you--" well, not "ma'am" but you get the idea. About the only thing I can hope for is that the infection of RC liturgical notions can be halted.

Speaking of which: so here it is Sunday morning, and guitar and hymnal services have been combined for the summer, and the organist can't be there this week. So we sing one of the listed hymns and the doxology, unaccompanied, and then nerve is lost on the final hymn and it gets replaced with a Cursillo thing which most people don't know. And you know what? The congregation sings far more enthusiastically on the unaccompanied hymns than it does on the guitar songs. Now this was trending to an older crowd, but I'm going to guess that if the kids aren't singing the hymns, they aren't singing the guitar songs either.

And thus ends a rather rambling blog post.

On the Other Hand

If I came upon a service in which the "creed" which Bryan Owen quotes here was recited, I'd get up and walk out. Conspicuously.

How Can Anyone Say "Credo"?

One should not be surprised to find over at the Episcopal Cafe this sort of routine liberal paean to unorthodoxy, I suppose. Personally I think that someone who is expressing these sentiments ought not to be a candidate for ordination.

Meanwhile (courtesy of Bryan Owen) we have a superb essay from Matt Gunter on the centrality of the creeds and their importance as a focus for Christian belief. I would like to elaborate on two points he raises, and then address one of my own.

First, in answer to the question, But, isn't one's faith about one's relationship with the living God and with God's children. Can’t we just say Love God and love your neighbor and leave it at that? , he writes in part:

It is inadequate to appeal to a simplistic pietism, whether in its more conservative or more liberal versions, that says "Don't bother me with doctrine, just give me Jesus". We have no access to Jesus other than the Gospels which are soaked in interpretation (doctrine) of who Jesus is and why it matters. And the creeds are the Christian guide to understanding God in light of Jesus.

To this I would add two things. The word "relationship" is (as this mathematician constantly finds himself pointing out) only the context of the issue; the need is of course to put oneself into right relationship with God. And if you take John 3:16 seriously, an important, perhaps crucial component of that relationship is beliecing the right thing about Jesus. A Christian needs to be able to answer the challenge "who do you say that I am?" correctly.

And where do we get the answers to that question? Well, the church remembers them. I seemingly cannot emphasize the centrality of anamnesis enough in this: the church is our conduit back the the historical truth of Jesus. The creed, besides its own content, stands as a synecdoche for the recollected truth of the Church. The all-too-obvious problem with a lot of the doubting is that it reflects listening to what the World says about Jesus. And not just the World, but a world which has turned away from Jesus and rejects Him, that is, the world of modernist, Enlightenment-driven skepticism. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to prefer a voice which has rejected Jesus over that which is specifically commissioned to recollect Him.

Second, he raises the question, "But isn’t the language of the Creed poetic, rich in metaphors?" I would like to rephrase his answer more forcefully. Some of it is metaphorical, but some of it is not. He says:

To say that all language about God acting in history, e.g., the virginal conception, the incarnation, and the bodily resurrection as historical, physical events, is metaphorical and only true in some spiritual sense is to try to be more spiritual than the God we know though Jesus has deigned to be.

I would put this more strongly. Those who first said the creed did not mean anything in the least bit metaphorical when they said that "Jesus[...] was crucified, died, and was buried." If a person says otherwise, they are not telling the truth. So if we say those same words, but mean them "poetically", we deny that Jesus was so executed; we essentially falsify them. So we move to the surrounding words. Nobody at Nicea held that the statements in Matthew and Luke concerning the Virgin Birth to be metaphorical in the sense that they accepted the assertion that Jesus was born through the normal biological processes in which some actual human male fathered him. Nobody then understood the phrase "rose from the dead" as implying that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels didn't relate an encounter that was physical in the only sense that matters. (Indeed, the passages in John seem specifically intended to argue against any such interpretation.)

Metaphor is not a "get out of meaning free" card in any case. The utility of figures of speech presupposes that some figure conveys the meaning adequately, and that others do not. But the intent, after all, belongs to the speaker. Gnosticism may have been fading by the 400s, but there is not any doubt that the bishops were intent on excluding gnostic readings of scripture. No bishop at Nicea, not even Arius, wanted to leave open the possibility that Jesus remained dead or that he had an ordinary, earthly, biological father. Saying the creed "metaphorically" so as to assert those things is an act of intellectual dishonesty: it proclaims a unity of belief which the creed's formulators absolutely rejected. Not only that, but the need for metaphor is entirely lacking. One does not need figures of speech to relate the heterodox theories about Jesus, so one might as well speak what one believes in a manner which does not invite the false interpretation that one accepts the orthodox interpretation.

Finally, my own point: there isn't anything unreasonable about the expectation that people who cannot say the words ought either to find another job (if they are clerics) or another church (if they are not), or they should allow themselves to be instructed by the church and fix the defects in their theology. All of this is very much about the church as an institution, and it seems inevitably to trace back to power, and thence to politics. In my own church the creeds are connected directly to sacramental participation (as the Apostle's Creed is prerequisite to baptism) and to sacramental order (as the Nicene Creed appears in the order for consecration of a bishop). They are what we, individually and corporately, believe. Liberals within the church have long looked to the institution as a source of moral authority to push moral causes; but regardless of the other reasons why that authority has been eroded, the fundamental hypocrisy of clerics standing up and saying, "we believe, but I do not believe," also weakens the church's authority. A reasonable person, a not especially sophisticated reasonable person can see that the emperor lacks clothing: such a cleric does not teach with the church's authority, but only with his own. One can readily progress to the inferred teaching that the church has no real authority in the first place.

Blue Pencilling the Creed

From a comment in the Lead:

Today, in a class that explores our faith and our ministries, I gave the class a copy of the Nicene Creed and a pencil. The directions for the exercise: draw a line through any part of this creed you do not believe. Not a single person failed to strike out about a third to half. One left only, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. The composition of the group: a retired professor of theology and church history, 2 clergy, 4 Episcopalians, 2 ELCA Lutherans, 1 Presbyterian. The simple fact is, that on any given Sunday, if you asked a congregation how many present believe the entire Nicene Creed as it is written, my best estimate is fewer than 25% would say so.

I really think that a deacon should not be encouraging people to strike out portions of the creed; or at least, if he do so, then he ought to be challenging them as to why they think they feel entitled to reject them. Well, since he's in another diocese and a deacon to boot, I don't suppose I have to worry about refusing communion with him.

Not a Prophet

I am not a prophet. I am sure that most of you already knew that, but I just wanted to get that straight from the start.

Harold Camping is not a prophet either. For those of you who may have forgotten him, or who have never heard of him, he was the radio preacher who predicted that the world would end on May 21st. He had also predicted the end would come in 1988, and in 1994, and now he has moved the date to October 21st. After three failures I think it is safe to say that he is not a prophet.

Hananiah, in our first lesson, was a false prophet. Some people claim that Harold Camping's stroke which he suffered about three weeks ago is akin to Hananiah's fate, but since I am not a prophet, I cannot offer an opinion on that. Jeremiah, in this long passage of which I have subjected you to as little as I thought would make sense, has put on himself a yoke at the command of the LORD, as a symbol of Nebuchadnezzar's subjugation of Judah, a yoke which will eventually be broken, but not yet. We do not know why Hananiah takes it upon himself to say otherwise, but his words, his acts do not prevail against the true word which comes of God.

Prophecy is repeating the word of God; false prophecy is daring to speak in the name of God, but putting your own words in His mouth. There is an appalling lot of the latter going about. Either that, or we've gotten extremely fortunate: when I was writing this I typed “prophetic voice” and “episcopal” into Google, and it told me it had found fifty-four thousand results. And just for fairness' sake, I put in “catholic” instead of “episcopal” and got two hundred and eight thousand. The new version of the church calendar that has gone into trial use seems to identify political activists as “prophetic voices”, or in the case of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, unabashedly designates them as “liberators and prophets”. Personally, I am skeptical. However worthy the cause, I am not convinced that all who uphold it do so as messengers of God.. Our allies are not all Balaam, driven by the LORD to speak His word and to lay blessings upon Israel.

No, I do not think we have entered a new age of prophecy; I think we have entered a new age of hubris. God seems to have an awful lot to say about politics, and especially about the economy and about taxes and regulation and public policy. It cannot all be true, and I am inclined to believe that little of it is true. “Render unto Caesar what is due Caesar,” Jesus said, referring to a denarius with Caesar's profile upon it, and yet he did not say whether that very denarius truly belonged to Caesar. If Jesus could be so cryptic, how plain-spoken are those who claim to follow him.

And last week you heard an anthem to the trinity; but what only we in the choir saw was that there was a second set of words, words which did not pray to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. They could not bring themselves to say “Father”, so they addressed their first prayer to the “Creator”, setting themselves against the ancient judgement that creation was the act not only of the Father, but was accomplished through the Son and the Spirit as well, Just as redemption comes from and through all three persons of the Godhead. But this refusal to say the words of scripture is also a kind of false prophecy, speaking our words rather than His.

Now, I do not number myself among those conservative Protestants who hold that there is no new prophecy. But I myself am not a prophet, nor even a dresser of sycamore trees (as Amos said of himself). I am a man, baptized, who sings in the choir and who has been allowed to speak a sermon. God does not dictate these words to me in the night. Perhaps they are spoken in accordance to His will, or perhaps not; that is why I pray as I do before I preach. I believe that I have been called to speak to you; I have believed so for some decades; but the words are mine. And I am given to assume that this is true of most preachers, and of political activists, and of all the rest who speak in the name of the Godhead or in the name of the truth which is His being.

And yet Jesus in today's gospel also speaks of prophets. He speaks of the grace which those who repeat his message pass on to those who heed them. Jesus says these words to the disciples, in preparation for sending them out to preach among the Jews; earlier in this chapter he gives them instructions, and then teaching and advice for their journey. In this passage we must remember that the prophets and righteous ones being welcomed are the disciples themselves. He reassures them, and he reassures us: the disciples, and those who speak the Word in this age, but also those who hear them, and in hearing them hear God. When we speak the Word, we speak for the Word, and those who hear that Word hear the Word Himself, Jesus the Christ. And those who uplift those who speak that word are blessed, because they welcome the Christ as they welcome his ministers. And therefore we must hold ourselves open to hearing that word, and open to those who bring it to us. Though we must turn a deaf ear upon that which is false, we must not shut ourselves off entirely.

So keep a glass of cold water at hand for Christ's ministers-- or better still, welcome them by keeping your pledge up-to-date for the summer!

Third Time the Charm

Word has reached me that Al Kimel has been ordained again, this time in a complicated three-way arrangement between the OCA, ROCOR, and the Antiochians, the latter being where he is going to function as a western rite priest.

His second ordination hurt, and though he had cut off communication between us, word did get back to him and he eventually published an apologia if not an apology. Now, I have little use for the argument he made, and if I have not formally forgiven him, time has put the hurt in the past. But it is all vacated, so that when he said

I have never, of course, denied the presence of God within Anglicanism nor have I denied God’s use of my priestly ministry during my twenty-five years as a priest in the Episcopal Church. I rejoice that many of those whom I have been privileged to serve testify that I have been a vessel of God’s love and holy presence in their lives. It is unfortunate that Charlie has interpreted my conversion to Catholicism as a denial of such grace. Perhaps even more unfortunate is his apparent misunderstanding of the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church on the reality of God’s grace within the Churches of the Reformation.

... my unwillingness to rely on his exposition of that "authentic teaching" is now made all the more easier by his abandonment of that authority for yet a third church. I've said it so many times, but it bears saying again: there is something fundamentally Protestant, and deeply unfaithful, about wandering from church to church based on one's own theological discernment. I regard this as one of the most spiritually dangerous practices out there, and I've seen so many people who have been deeply hurt by it, some to the point of apostasy. ECUSA may be the Whore of Babylon, but she's my whore, and I was called to her; I may eventually be driven elsewhere, but it won't because I went church shopping, nor because I divorced her in favor of another.

Your Anglican Covenant at Work

The Moral Perils of the Consumer Church

The stuff appearing in The Lead on the Episcopal Cafe is often mostly useful in tracking clericalist interest in (a) homosexuality and (b) making sure that the rest of the communion can't tell them what to do, but other little tidbits do manage to squeeze their way in. So in a collection of various links they come up with the following story from the Financial Post: Fair-trade coffee producers often end up poorer.

What's going on here? Well, here we have upper-middles, SWPLs if you like, who want to make sure that they aren't exploiting anyone in the addiction to caffeine, nor contributing to world pesticide and fertilizer usage. So we have all this certification corporate bureaucracy to assure them that their choice of Organic Gumutindo from Uganda is more virtuous than (say) Maxwell House or Safeway store brand grown who knows where. Well. Really poor farmers can't afford pesticides or fertilizer, so what they grow is organic by default. They also can't afford the certification fees required so that they can get that all-reassuring claim to be organic. Meanwhile the fair trade label typically involves membership in a cooperative or some other corporation whose administrative mouths need to be fed too, thus siphoning off profit which otherwise could go to the farmer. And you should not be surprised to learn that the certification and cooperative organizations are not free of corruption. The upshot of this is that on the average small farmers who stay away from the whole fair-trade/organic market are actually seeing better income than those who participate.

So in the end, what we have here is a little industry whose whole purpose is the assuage the guilty consciences of the exploitative classes--by exploiting the very people that are supposed to be helped by the program! It's like a Marxist parody made real. It's also a testimony to the upper-middle worship of credentials, but that's a whole 'nother class of sinning.

And so here we are, expected to "seek and serve Christ in all persons", to "strive for justice and peace among all people," and to "respect the dignity of every human being," in short, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and instead we get a program which isn't about that. It's about reassuring us that we are good people, or at least superior to the Baptists. Our church doesn't really have a place for the poor and troubled but it's oh so easy to find room for fair trade programs and other "think locally, act globally" ineffectualities. Lawrence Solomon writes above of trying to explain to the representative of some church group how the fair trade certification doesn't really help the farmers, to no avail:

After a long pause, the church official replied something like: “I still think the parishioners would feel better knowing that they were drinking fair-trade coffee.”

Yep, feeling better about yourself: that's what loving your neighbor is all about.

Redde Mihi Stolam Immortalitatis

For the most part the Bad Vestments blog is a testament to I don't know what, some hideous convergence of bad taste and slovenliness and maybe color-blindness. This one, however, defies easy categorization.

Easter Sunday, in the Episcopal cathedral in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the canons was vested thusly:


And lest you think this is a stunt picture having nothing to do with the liturgy, you may see her again at the left edge of this picture taken during Easter Sunday's baptismal rite:



Honestly, I cannot fathom this. Does anyone have any good explanation?

1979 and All That

Between the approach of Easter and the general slouch of the national church towards diminution and "inclusion" (which is to say latitudinarianism) there has not been the juxtaposition of motivation and time which leads to new posts. Moreover we are in mid-rector-search, and no man's parish is safe while that is underway.

At this point the various Anglican divisions in the USA seem set, modulo the tiny trickle in the Ordinariate (and all evidence is that it will indeed be tiny, and certainly not the revitalizing force which various RC traditionalists wish for). And for the most part, the liturgical dividing line will be between 1928 and 1979, with the various missals around the fringes.

Those of us who have been around long enough and have paid attention long enough will remember Peter Toon's various denunciads on behalf of the Prayer Book Society, and while in some respects he moderated his views, he nevertheless represents the party rejecting the books many innovations.

And innovations, if that is the word one wants to use for changes, are there in abundance. It is ironic, however, that the chief of all the changes, the restructuring of the Eucharist liturgy, has proven to be the most enduring feature, and that subsequent revisions, when they do not simply dismiss the book entirely, hew to the 1979 structure with almost no deviation. What happens instead is that people pick at the words. And here I see a parallel between Toon's program and the revisionists: there's an awful lot of claiming about what the 1979 words say that simply isn't there in the text.

Toon was certainly right to call attention to the various heretics wandering around in the ECUSA hierarchy. But he consistently missed the most obvious sign: that there were and are increasingly many clerics who will not say the words of their own prayer book. Five years ago the Office of Women's Heres-- er, Ministry put out a liturgy for discussion, and as I noted then, there was a lot of theological change hidden in the very many changes, little of which had to do with gender neutrality. It's hard to say that it has gotten better, or worse, or even different, but the inability to say "it is right to give him thanks and praise" persists.

Toon's argument was always that the differences between 1928 and 1979 wording lent themselves to various heretical interpretations. In my opinion, he was wrong about that. Certainly someone like Pike had no trouble interpreting 1928 in an unorthodox manner, and following him, Spong held to beliefs that could not be reconciled to the texts he mouthed on Sunday. Conversely, as I said above, the pressure to rewrite the words indicates that, if heresy is the intent, the current texts do not express it sufficiently.

But beyond that, there was another paradigm operating. Toon, it always seemed to me, operated from the assumption that the 1928 book represented a standard of orthodoxy. And therefore, it also always seemed to me that he assumed that the intent of pretty much any difference between the two books represented an intent to deviate from orthodoxy on the part of the 1979. Now I never used the 1928; I went directly from the services of the Green Book to the 1976 Proposed rites (which differed only in small ways). For me, therefore, taking the catholic stance of accepting the church's book, the standard of orthodoxy is 1979, not 1928. And since I do not participate in all these various heresies (and indeed see many beyond-1979 changes that explicitly encode some of these heresies), it is "obvious" to me that the texts do not imply what Toon would have them saying. And I think it is my view that is most prevalent, and that at least a few decades back that is how most people looked at 1979: they gave it an orthodox reading.

And furthermore, some of what he objects to could, I think, be defended. The most conspicuous case, also mentioned by Fr. Jonathan, is the "baptismal covenant".Here is where, in fact, I think we see the 1979 text in its most conservative and Anglican. It is inaccurate to say that its text turns away from a catholic and orthodox doctrine of the atonement: as Fr. Jonathan says, Prayer C, the most modern of the Eucharistic texts, hammers on it the hardest. What is novel is not this at all, but rather the acknowledgment that there is more to the Christian life than personal rectitude. And that realization is nothing more than say 150 years of hard-learned lessons about what the second great commandment entails. Respecting the dignity of every human being, striving for peace and justice: these are no more or less than what "loving your neighbor" demands. there is no reason for this to be controversial; nor am I constrained to interpret them to mean specifically the socialist program beloved of many church liberals.

and again, the tell-tale issue is that the pressure for change is on 1979's quite orthodox understanding of the need for atonement, redemption, and repentance. In that respect Toon was to some degree right in seeing 1979 as a step on the way towards corruption; but actual corruption has in practice brought forth an increasing mutilation of the 1979 text, so that now 1979 stands as the monument of orthodoxy against which the revisionists rail. Likewise, using the 1928 now doesn't mean for us what it did in 1928. It's a specifically reactionary and rebellious act.

Finally, Toon's line of argument reflects what I see as the most common error of liturgists: the notion that they can somehow control the faith of the church through these words. Fr. Jonathan assesses Toon's readings as "strained", which I would agree with; but insofar as such readings can be adopted, most laymen don't adopt them, and if it has gotten worse, I think it was not so long ago that the vast majority of ECUSA clerics also adopted straightforward, orthodox readings. The problem is not in the text, but in the readers. the best that one can hope for in a liturgy is that it encourages an orthodox and catholic reading; but one cannot write a liturgy that forces such a reading.

Not That Kind of Relationship

The Underground Pewster nails everything that is wrong with "dialogue" about sexuality: a hypothetical conversation between Bishop Waldo and a simple pewsitter.

I particularly loathe the phrase "living in relationship", which sits between "dialogue" and "living in community" on my Shelf of Theological Vacuity. Every two people live in some sort of relationship; the important thing is pinning down what that relationship needs to be like, and you know, God/people (your choice) invented these things called "rules" and "laws" to help us through this. "That kind of relationship" is discussed at length in scripture, and besides it doesn't take a lot of observation to realize that (a) long-term monogamy is what works best, and (b) "relationship" is a word which means "letting your sexual appetites and the drudgery of everyday life dictate your behavior."

At any rate, it took about thirty seconds for "not that kind of relationship" to become the new catchphrase in the Wingate household.

HarperCollins and the Velvet Elvis

The Christian and especially Anglican blogosphere is echoing now from the responses to the promotional campaign for Rob Bell's latest book. OK, so if you are a typical church-going Episcopalian, and you through some horrific accident stumbled upon this, you are wondering, "who in the heck is Rob Bell, and why should I care?" Well, you should care because Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church, one of those gratingly hipster "emerging" churches, located in this case in Grand Rapids, which also happens to be the home of Zondervan and Eerdmans, the biggest evangelical publishers (Eerdmans also publishes a lot of Anglicana).

I suppose I shouldn't let my personal prejudices get in the way of all this, but I see Bell and think, "isn't time he grew up?" The guy is in his forties and he is trying to look as if he's twenty-five; yes, he has young kids, but he had them almost as late as I did. If his first kid had been born when he was 25 instead of almost 30 he would have a teenager now, and everyone knows that parents of teenagers cannot be hip. And probably wearing vestments isn't hip either, though one sees a lot of failed attempts to the contrary in the Episcopal Church. Vestments demand dignity, and what looks merely casual in hipster shirt-and-jeans (the shirt, of course, isn't tucked in) looks hopelessly undignified in vestments. (Vestments that are trying to look hip are grist for the Bad Vestments mill, which ranks lower on the scale than merely "undignified".) Yet there's a lot of wanabee Anglicanism (which is to say, Protestant Catholicism) on Mar's Hill's website, such as their recco of doing the Office, for which they link directly to an Episcopal Church site.

What I don't see is much Anglican influence in Bell's ideas. It's not clear how much the church's website reflects his personal views, but what he has written thus far reflects either an immersion in modernist theology, or at least a rediscovery of the same principles on his own. The example which everyone points to first is a passage from one of his early books, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith:

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archaeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of Mithra and the Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if you discover that in the first century the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at the time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being "born of a virgin" also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? (p. 26)

I remember discussing all of these things (except the last, which is a new one on me and of course he doesn't cite anything) back in high school sacred studies and then again in college religion courses, thirty years ago. We are right in the middle of modernist country here, and it might occur to you that a leeettle bit of theological discussion may have happened since then, and not only that, but for decades and decades prior to that. And you would be right, except that somehow the modernists never seem to be able to hear the criticisms of traditionalists and even mainstream theologians. But to continue, Bell back in 2006 was still in the mode of actually answering his own rhetorical questions. He frames this whole thing in a metaphor in which his new system is likened to a trampoline, which he characterizes creedal faith in this manner:

It hit me while I was watch that for him [a creationist] faith isn't a trampoline; it's a wall of bricks. Each of the core doctrines for him is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble. It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger.

Now, as usual, the deck is rigged by picking someone whom even most traditionalists outside of a subsection of radically conservative Protestantism think is quite wrong. And nothing is more bricklike than Roman Thomist or hardline Calvinist theology. But even ignoring that the history of theology shows that this claim isn't true, and that plenty of people are able to rebuild their theological edifices when parts of them are damaged in one manner or another, the real message here is based on the hipster values that trampolines are Cool and that brick walls are utterly UnCool. I suppose that means they never sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God", but really this is a pathetically lame basis for a theology. But never fear, he goes on to realize the similes and give a reason for preferring one to the other:

I affirm the historic Christian faith, which includes the virgin birth and the Trinity and the inspiration of the Bible and much more. [....] But if the whole faith falls apart when we examine and rethink one spring, then it wasn't very strong in the first place, was it?

Well, obviously it's going to depend on the spring, and Paul of course gives an absolutely contradictory answer. But like most modernists, Bell seems to have a problem with Paul. And in any case, as a thought experiment this runs up against the reality that one of my college classmates raised: nobody is ever going to come up with a strong disproof of the Virgin Birth, and we are always going to be forced to rely on believing the sources (scripture and the church) or not believing them. In the meantime, this has been discussed endlessly, but apparently not to Bell's satisfaction, so he has a new book coming out, and the emphasis is on raising questions again. Well, not really: at the moment, based on his promotional YouTube video, it's all about universalism. Not surprisingly, this set off a huge fight. Traditionalist altar-call Protestants simply aren't going to accept his answers, nor are traditional catholics. Equally unsurprisingly, the Episcopal "cool kids" love him. I suppose the fight is good publicity, just as "a Bishop rethinks" probably sold a lot of Spong's books, and I see that Bell has advanced from the unhip Zondervan to the with-it HarperCollins, the preferred publisher of the fashionably controversialist.

But I, personally, prefer to remain an agnostic on this at least to a point. Jesus and scripture spend too much time on the subject of damnation for me to dismiss the possibility that some people, maybe most people, end up there. Hell may be empty, but I'm not counting on it and I'm certainly not going teach that. On the other hand it's patently obvious from scripture that altar-call salvation is inadequate; behavior is important to salvation. There are people out there (for instance, Eugene Peterson) who are trying to find a better route between these Scylla and Charybdis of heresies, but this, I do not think, is going that route. Instead, what I see is that this fits into the Emergent path already trod by the likes of Brian McLaren of reinventing if not adopting the classic modernist errors of rhetoric and reasoning. There is a LOT of theology out there, and the reaction against (a) the Catholic Church or (b) fundamentalism or literalist evangelicalism is the erection of a strawman. There are and have always been other possibilities; if you look at a classical Anglican such as Lewis, for instance, you will find someone who not only does not adopt but actively avoids either position. Nobody who is going to make this kind of pronouncement should be doing so without at least surveying the literature, and Bell's writings seem to be those of someone who has taken a survey of the modernists and nobody else. I notice that his church commends Chesterton's Orthodoxy but I really don't see anything in his theses consonant with that book.

And also one again we see the essentially oppositional character of the Emergent movement, even if they don't see it themselves. One of the big issues that continues to plague the modernists is that they are stuck in eternal combat with the fundamentalists and Thomists and Calvinists and other hardline systematic traditionalists, but this century-old fight is completely irrelevant to my theology, and I say, a curse on all their houses. Too many Emergents are obviously in rebellion against American evangelicalism, and they show all the same traits of exaggeration and grandstanding and oversimplifying the field. Likewise, the whole hipster ethos is a rebellion against an earlier generation that should have ended a long time ago in an anamnetic religion. If there's one thing that should be learned from the history of 20th century theology, it's that reinventing theology is the fastest route to heresy and to that religion so memorably damned by H. Richard Niebuhr: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

Addendum: I commend to the reader this extended review of Velvet Elvis by an Orthodox Presbyterian minister.

How Odd I May Be

It occurs to me that my wife and I may be the first couple to be married in our parish and raise a child to adulthood in decades. I'm not entirely sure but we may be the only family at present who were married in the parish and have children of our own.

Does This Mean Anything?

Courtesy of Stand Firm we have an address by Walter Brueggemann as reported by ENS:

Walter Brueggemann told the opening session of the 41st Trinity Institute Jan. 20 that 21st century Christians need to stop being mired in old quarrels over scriptural interpretation and instead approach the Bible as "an intricate set of symbols and signs and signals that are arranged in a certain imaginative, artistic configuration that yield a new kind of reality."

Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, said that such an approach can help Christians engage with the Bible in a way that avoids pre-packaged interpretation. Instead, he said, Christians and the churches to which they belong need to engage with the Bible in a way that gives them a place to stand in their lives and their faith in the midst of "the power of nation states, the reductionisms of scientism and in the capricious power of the marketplace."

One is foolishly tempted to ask what much of this means. But the point of course is that it not only means nothing in particular, but it is a sort of word smoke screen that is supposed to make something profound out of the reactive antipathy to established theological tradition.

And it's easy to guess which tradition is the target:

"There is an enormous appetite for an authoritarian approach to the Bible," said [Mary] Gordon, adding that "a sense of certainty in God" can be lost in the sort of interpretation Brueggemann suggested.

"There's a reason why fundamentalists are doing better than the likes of us," she said.

Well, part of the answer may be in their use of simple, declarative sentences. Look, as an Anglican I don't read scripture with the kind of point-to-point reading that characterizes a lot of the most authoritarian theologies. But this kind of burbling obscurity seems intended, for the most part, to escape from the wrong problem of scripture: not that it is difficult, but that a lot of it isn't difficult. Or to be more precise, the problem of the bible for today, for intellectuals, is that they come to it with a lot of manufactured difficulties arising from their unearned alienation from the text.

Is Communion Worth a Bath?

Derek Olsen is out tipping over modernist sacred cows again, this time in a three part attack on the latest ECUSA liturgical innovation, Communion Without Baptism (or CWOB, if you like). (Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.) You can read the postgame show here.

I would say the most succinct response came from Benjamin Guyer:

If I may propose that your problem – your frustration – is the same as those which many of the rest of us have: trying to hold theologically serious conversation within the Episcopal Church (USA) is simply impossible. “Radical openness” is not a theology, but a flight from intellectual rigor, just as it is a flight from genuine political engagement and genuine moral commitment. It is, in other words, an “anything goes” system.

But I am also beginning to consider that there is another, more malign element here. I suspect that one reason why CWOB is being pushed is precisely because it is offensive to people who have theological standards, and especially traditionalists. Set beside the theological laxity has been a program of increasing political rigor: we are not allowed to hold anyone to any traditional theological standard, but we can't leave either, at least not without abandoning everything. I have to suspect that the time will come when clerics can be disciplined for refusing communion to unbelievers. But then, after all, only Pharisaic right wingers would ever do that.

All Over?

Word has come that the bishop of Massachusetts celebrated the Feast of the Holy Name by marrying two of his female clergy. It's hard to imagine a much more definitive statement that any moratorium on same-sex unions is over.

Update: Peter Ould has a discussion of the changes made in the 1979 liturgy in order to accommodate this rite. Besides the, um, curious second reading (well, at least it wasn't from the Koran, but then, I suppose it wouldn't be) I note a comment made by one Michael Harnois: "Here in the Diocese of Massachusetts I haven't heard about anyone who plans on rewriting the BCP marriage rite for straight couples, although I could have missed something, I suppose." Well, consider the Office of Women's Ministry rewriting Rite II in the interest, of course, of avoiding what male-favoring language there is in the 1979 language. I noted at the time that many of the changes could not be explained on the basis of their program, and that therefore there had to be larger theological pressures in play. I have to expect that the pressure on the marriage rite will be to make one unified form regardless of the sex of the participants, opening up the current rite to other modifications. And those modifications, I would expect, will go beyond neutering the references to brides and grooms. I expect the SCLM to promulgate some liberal (that is, unorthodox) theory of marriage, because historically they have preferred questionable rites. And it will be difficult to suppress whatever heresies they set forth because Justice will preempt the application of any kind of theological standard.

It is easier for moderates to tolerate same sex rites when they are merely an aberration which they can ignore because it happens in another parish, or at least at services which they do not attend. Changing the marriage rite as a whole is a far more significant issue, but I think it is a very safe bet that changes are in the works. The biggest threat that social liberals pose to the church is their poor record in keeping the Unitarians and other heretics out of power. The danger is very real, in this case, that they will allow the emasculation of the marital rite because they need the heretics to maintain the political weight keep the conservative troglodytes at bay.

2009: The Numbers

The 2009 statistics came out late this year, perhaps because of the need to get correct numbers for Ft. Worth and Quincy. At any rate, the diocesan totals can be found here.

Perhaps more interesting are the five year "fast facts", which contains a mixture of depressingly constant trends and curious statistical surprises. For instance, one can see that the rate of decline in membership and ASA has been fairly constant, but the five and especially ten year rates of decline have been growing. The median parish numbers have slid too, with a five year decline of 10% in membership and 12% in ASA. These numbers are each two percentage points smaller than the composite rates, indicating that not only are parishes shrinking, but that parishes are disappearing too. And looking at the top of the report, we see steady losses: a 4.2% decline over five years, with the rate increasing in the last two years.

Of course, at that point we are seeing the results from the departure of dioceses. The biggest decline in ASA, 65.5%, comes from Pittsburgh; second place is Ft. Worth, with 18.7%. Quincy, curiously, is among the gainers, at 3.4%. Twelve other domestic dioceses showed gains, but before we get all excited at this turn-around, it should be noted that only three dioceses had increases of over a hundred attendees, and only three domestic dioceses showed a increase greater than the domestic decrease decrease, all of them small: Utah, San Joaquin, and Quincy.

If one takes out Ft. Worth and Pittsburgh, then the declines are not so bad: a 2.4% decline in ASA instead of 3.2% for all domestic dioceses. Foreign dioceses, as usual, blunted the overall numbers. Haiti, however, did not report numbers this year, and as it accounts for a third of foreign membership and ASA, those numbers have to be considered very dubiously. Meanwhile, the drop in P&P continues, accelerating to 2.8%.

Epic Statistical Fail

The Studying Your Congregation and Community tables have been updated for 2009, and the next phase of departures can now be assessed (at least for the patient and dogged) for the effect on church numbers.

Except that they can't.

If you pull up the chart for the Diocese of San Joaquin, yes, it is still almost entirely gone. Pittsburgh also has dropped precipitously. The charts for Fort Worth and Quincy, however, don't look that different: Ft. Worth ASA shows a maybe 30% ASA decline, while Quincy shows a tiny increase. OK, what's going on here?

Well, the answer is that there is apparently a large scale pattern of misrepresentation if not outright fraud. Let's work with Ft. Worth, which in 2008 had 55 parishes. Well, looking through the charts, only 17 parishes show changes in reported numbers between 2008 and 2009, and there are only a couple more which show changes in reporting between 2007 and 2009. They are simply repeating the old values rather than acknowledging that the other parishes no longer count themselves as ECUSA congregations.

Of the seventeen that do show changes, only one does not show a loss from 2008 to 2009, and all show losses from 2007. Only three do not appear in ACNA Ft. Worth's list of parishes, and these three have relatively small losses (13%, 25%, and a gain of 11%). There are three other apparently contested parishes with relatively small losses (9%, 20%, and 35%). Every other parish lost at least 60% of its attendance, with the worst case going from 94 to 2 ASA, a loss of 98%.

Taken together these parishes have a combined ASA of 970, down from 2218 in 2008 for a loss of 56%. If one assumes that all the other parishes haven't reported numbers because they are no longer part of the ECUSA diocese, then given a reported 2008 ASA of 6945 (and this number isn't really accurate, because few parishes reported a change in ASA between 2007 and 2008) the drop in ASA was not around 30%, but in excess of 85%. It's a good thing that Ft. Worth is a relatively small diocese, because the loss I compute is 0.8% of total domestic ASA.

One hopes that there is a good (read, canonical and longstanding) reason for this kind of reportage. I'm told that the three phantom parishes in LA are still on the books, and one is led to suspect that there are others that haven't been checked. And of course, there's also Quincy, which at an ASA of 935 in 2008 isn't going to be sending statistical shockwaves out when its reporting is rectified, but still, it all adds up.

UPDATE
The diocesan numbers have now been released, and at least one of the peculiarities has been remedied: numbers for Ft. Worth now show departures. The Quincy numbers have also been updated, but they show little change from the previous year. I will have more analysis in a separate post.

On the Aging of Clergy

Over at The Lead in the Episcopal Cafe, we are pointed to an interesting table from the 2009 Clergy Compensation Report. Now there are some other curious numbers, such as why men are paid better than women except in curate positions, or my associates in Province VI are paid so poorly compared to those in other dioceses.

Table 5, however, offers the opportunity to recover some other demographics, if one is willing to indulge in a few suppositions, because it reports how many clergy are in each of four age brackets, and it breaks this down by gender. Now as Laura Toepfer points out in the comments, the clergy in each age range includes both those ordained at an earlier age and those newly ordained; therefore by making a few assumptions we can work out the ages at which clergy are ordained. The assumptions are actually pretty dubious on one level, but I believe that the likely errors tend to reduce the effects I am about to describe, so I'm not too unhappy about making then.

The central assumption is that the flow of people into each of the groups is constant, so that I can assume that the number of people ordained at a given age in the past is the same as it is now. This assumption, over the very long haul, isn't true, but when I say "long haul" we're talking before my lifetime: the pattern that is going to appear fits what I knew about ordination patterns back when I was in college. The second assumption is that people don't die or quit young. Again, this is a bad assumption, but the degree to which it is false will blunt the pattern, so it won't hurt to make it. The third assumption is that deaths and retirements in the last group are balanced by ordinations and aging into it. This is also dubious, but the likely error is in the direction of blunting the pattern, so again I'm not too concerned about this.

Using these assumptions, I can get the number of people ordained in each age range by subtracting out the number of people in the previous range from the number of people in the current range. Normalizing this over the these new quantities, we get the following:

Age group	Men	Women	Total
under 35	15%	15%	15%
35-45	13%	9%	12%
45-55	33%	38%	35%
over 55	39%	38%	39%

One result of this is very striking: only about a quarter of all ECUSA clergy are ordained before age 45, and over a third are ordained after age 55. I have a hard time imagining that this pattern obtains for any but mainline churches, and probably not even for most of them. It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Episcopal priesthood is, for most, a second career or even a post-retirement hobby.

And that conclusion is reinforced by the second pattern: the decided drop in women ordained in the 35-45 age bracket. Either a lot more women are reluctant to abandon careers in that age group, or child-rearing interferes with starting the ordination path. (I would note, BTW, that discernment processes, seminary and transitional diaconates apply about a five year bias to these numbers in terms of when people actually make their decisions to start.)

Of course one has to allow for the possibility that the Holy Spirit likes it this way. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that economic realities and diocesan policies are likely contributors. Having to largely go without pay for several years surely accounts for much of the dip in the 35-45 bracket: unless a spouse can support the family themselves, people with families to support are unlikely to be able to afford to drop everything, especially with the risk of being dropped from the process and having to pick up the pieces of their lives. Kids fresh out of college lack the obligations, but there has been a historic pattern of discouraging them as being insufficiently mature. So instead we see people waiting until the kids are old enough or indeed out on their own. In any case this presents a very different picture of the priesthood and how it is to be lived, when it is not a primary profession, but a second stage in life. And it creates a very strong bias towards a priesthood whose peers are older. One has to wonder how much this affects the causes espoused by those clergy, who are so much older than the population as a whole.

The Campaign

The level of rancor directed at the pope on the occasion of the his visit to England (including the beatification of John Newman) should, I suppose, be unsurprising. But then again, it should be surprising, because it is reprehensible. Perhaps he and Rowan Williams should feel a kinship as being, at heart, theologians who are cast into political struggles to which they are not naturally drawn.

The picture of Benedict as a tyrant is obviously false. It's clear that he wants to right a lot of what he sees are wrongs and abuses that have developed over the years; his vigor in pursuing this, however, is less than dictatorial. But for some reason it is important that the pope be this malevolent, cruel, heartless, fundamentalist tyrant, so that this what he is, at least when he is written about in the secular media. The level of dislike for him is wildly disproportionate.

So here we have Garry Wills misrepresenting a nine year old address by the then-cardinal, and here we have Jim Naughton commending the attack. I defy anyone, in a few minutes, to read what Ratzinger actually said in a few minutes and come up with a coherent and succinct summary of his views re Newman. The passage is subtle, complex, and highly nuanced; it is the address of a deep-thinking theologian meditating on one of his equals if not superiors. Wills's reduction of Newman to a dissident is absolutely wrong, and Naughton's commendation of this reduction is equally wrong.

But it is worse than just wrong, because Naugtton is, after all, an agent of the ecclesiastical establishment, not a dissident. So just two posts earlier in Episcopalian Cafe, he mounts an attack on the character of Dan Martins, bishop-elect in the Diocese of Springfield, which it is hard to characterize as anything other than a deliberate misrepresentation of what Martins said. And you can hear exactly what he said, or go from there to a copy of the remarks as he intended to say them, and you can see and hear for yourself that Naughton's claim of what Martins found shameful simply isn't true.

The posturing in the remarks on Naughton's post is, as usual, quite routine and tiresome, with plenty of powerful people bemoaning the rebuke to their acts. What is more striking to me is how this fits into a long pattern of Naughton serving as an agent of agitation for the liberal establishment. Naughton is, you may recall, the person behind publicizing the Chapman memo and trying to raise the alarms about IRD and Howard Ahramson. It all fits into a consistent campaign-- and everything shows that the present presiding bishop is a participant in it-- to deny dissenting traditionalists any access to power. I think Martins has a pretty good chance at this point to survive these attacks, because I think there are probably enough bishops in the middle who will stick to their guns in allowing him to be a dissident, especially since he isn't making any noises about taking his diocese out of the church. But the pattern of hypocrisy continues: people of power commending "dissidents" like Newman, and then moving to quash any dissidence within their own ranks, even if it means saying things about the opposition that really aren't true, and beyond that, attacking others for practicing politics when everything about their acts is political in the extreme. If prophecy is speaking to power, then these are the people to whom prophecy must speak, not a man whose words at GC were not heeded and whose ascent to power is in the hands of these so-called dissidents.