Crypto-Nestorians

Following a link from one of Ponty's recent posts to an older one, I came across the following remarkable statement:

(Perry Robinson)

This is why Protestants say that everyone is in the same boat and they are just honest enough to admit it. For them, the Church just is a merely human organization of like-minded individuals. For them, the humanity of Christ is never truely united to his divine person. If it were, if it were deified by the energies of his divine person, then as a consequence it is easy to see the Church as having those same energies or properties. This supposed “honest recognition” by Protestants is a restatement of their Nestorian presuppositions—the church can’t be infallible because the church is only human. And a revisable set of propositional formulas is the best we humans can do.

Now, I pretty much approach any statement by a Catholic about what Protestants believe and how they think with the assumption that the statement is at best a crude characature, and at worse a lame libel. In the quoted passage, my expectations were fulfilled.

If the church were as unified with Christ as this passage implies, we would expect to see perfection of action by its members; and this we clearly see is not so. Moreover the Roman church concedes its fallibility on many matters (such as, famously, astronomy), which if the union were this complete it would not need to do. The church isn't "only" human, but it is human enough.

Indeed, what I see in the infallbility arguments is that the "infallible" churches are not satisfied to be merely the members of the body, fingers and toes which move at the will of the Head. No, it seems that they aspire to be the head.

A little earlier in the same article, Mr. Robinson posits the following logic:

1. Everything taught by God is doctrine.
2. Everything taught by God is infallible.
3. Therefore doctrine is infallible.
4. (Premise) No statements made by unaided fallible agents can be infallible.
5. No statements made by unaided fallible agents can be doctrine.

This definition of doctrine is entirely question-begging, and its premises again misstate Protestant belief. Classically, Protestants believed that no Christian was unaided; also, doctrine would normally refer to church teachings. It is one thing to say that everything Jesus himself teaches is infallible; but when the church teaches through a process of interpretation, it needs to be established that this process manifests God's teaching. It is not an obvious point, and it is hardly unreasonable to posit that this process is potentially capable of misstatement and other more serious defects. Indeed, there is an issue precisely because some such interpretation is seen to be erroneous, though in theory when in error it is being done outside the church.

The problem is therefore mispresented in this little exercise. The question is whether aided agents manifest the infallibility of the divine. Perhaps one can talk oneself into faith that it does happen, but such faith is against reason.

Paper

Over at All Too Common we have another pass at justifying remaining an Anglican. I think some of the pessimism expressed there is too strong.

It has become a commonplace to predict the death of the Elizabethan settlement. Now, it seems pretty clear that it is going to have suffer some limits. Without them, the exploitation of church polity that is the source of all troubles will remain a threat. But this goes too far:

It seems nice in theory, but what good is a church that refuses to dogmatize or declare the truth in many areas of the Faith? We are now witnessing the logical extreme of the via media, for now pure paganism is replacing orthodoxy. For how can three mutually exclusive theologies co-exist without a final authority? Liberalism (read: revisionism), Evangelicalism (read: Protestantism), and Anglo-Catholicism (read: über-English-Catholicism) all claim positives about God and theology that contradict the other schools of thought; they also all claim that the other schools err in one way or another.

Well, yes they do; and I think they do all err. But "mutually exclusive" is an overstatement. The obvious answer to the first rhetorical question is that, in seeing through a glass darkly, we are fatally tempted to dogmatize where the conclusive evidence and irrefutable reasoning simply are not there. And if we are tempted, our institutions are far more tempted to exercise dogmatism as an instrument of division-- which is to say, politics.

Likewise, the obvious answer to need of a final authority is that, on the one hand, the actual final authority is each individual, and on the other, that the desire of such an authority is not being given divine satisfaction. Maybe salvation is to be found or lost among the pious differences of opinion offered by the various parties, but I don't think so-- at least, not most of the time.

Back the first time around, Ponty said:

The great weakness of the Via Media is its claim to comprehend a plurality of beliefs under the “supreme authority of Scripture.” What is neglected is the fact that the Anglican reading of Scripture is ultimately ruled not by Holy Tradition and magisterial authority but Protestant private judgment.

I don't think that getting rid of private judgement is as easy as this, or even possible, but in any case for those of us who have already seen that much tradition is not holy and that magisterial authority is inadequate, this rejoinder isn't compelling. And no amount of argument can fix this, because argument is, in the end, an appeal to private judgement: my judgement. The constant hammering on private judgement has become something of a characture anyway; Anglicans don't really believe in doing theology in a vacuum.

Ponty also said:

Our Common Anglican has fallen in love with a paper religion, as has so many before him, including this lowly Pontificator. But paper religion is not real religion. It does not feed the deepest hungers of the soul, and it leaves one trapped within the prison of the self. Nor does it strengthen one against the onslaught of the principalities and powers. Only the Church of the saints and martyrs can provide what is truly needed.

It could be said that any religion of theological propositions and dogmas is paper. I did not fall in love with a paper religion; I did not fall in love with propositions, but a real church in a real place, and now the proponents of Roman conversion tempt me with the paper goods of infallibility and a whole list of other dogmas. I am sorry for them that I do not feel a call to the Roman church, the fact remains that I do not.

The Fundamentals, Reconsidered

A post by Benjamin Myers on "fundamentals" has been attracting a lot of attention around the blogosphere. I have some sympathy for what he says, but as seems to be inevitably the case, I think he overstates.

Say "fundamentals" and inevitably one brings to mind that liberal swear-word: fundamentalism. The real thing is reactionary in the truest sense, and it overcompensates, and it has become almost a synonym for anti-intellectual, angry, hypocritical factionalism. In ECUSA, tagging anything as fundamentalist is tantamount to refutation.

But then we have statements like this:

The most serious error of the early fundamentalists was that they tried to turn faith into a law, into a set of doctrines that must be believed—but faith is only ever a matter of freedom and permission, not of law or obligation.

As Al Kimel says, this fails as a reflection of Christian history. Until a century or so ago, Christians were united-- even Anglicans-- in their insistance that faith in Christ Jesus entailed believing the right things about Him. I have to agree with Al on this point, which has been taken up by many others, e.g. C.S.Lewis. It is fashionable in some Eastern and Roman circles to belittle Lewis's notion of "mere Christianity", but it's really not hard to establish a core set of beliefs, in which the Nicene Creed holds pride of place. Modern latitudinarian theology really needs to own up to its rejection of this consensus.

The "danger" lies in the temptation of systematically converting all of what you believe into core dogmas. Of course, if you are infallible, it's not a danger, but an invitation. And thus, as I've remarked before, faith in the institution becomes reckoned as unto righteousness. Thus, when Michael Liccione writes (in comments to Al's post):

The problem with Ben’s approach is the same as with all versions of ecumenical Protestantism: it turns the issue of the content of Christian faith into a scholarly exercise rather than one calling for the obedience of the whole self to something that has nothing to do with one’s own mind.

... I am not convinced that executing this obedience by submitting to someone else's "scholarly exercise" is an improvement. "Scholasticism", after all, is practically the name of Roman theology.

All Christian theology has the problem that it is manifestly the result of human intellection, whatever else it may be. It lends itself to the interpretation that it is the product of people talking about God behind His back, as it were, instead of speaking to Him face-to-face. He who listens to good theology should be hearing what God Himself has said, or at least what is the right conclusion of what God has said. If one follows the direction of bad theology, one simply gives one's obedience to other people, instead of giving it to God.

There is surely the possibility in this for theologians to mix bad theology with good; and that is what I believe happens as a matter of course. It is the obvious consequence of human nature, both in its limits, and in its Fall. Other sciences take this in stride; as a whole, theology would appear to need to do the same. Invocation of infallibility appears, in the same larger context, as a political response to the difficulty of acheiving sufficient consensus.

And that leads to some big problems. First, the insinuated coupling of ecumenism with rejection of the Nicene consensus simply isn't true. There are people who can be "ecumenical" with anyone, and there are plenty more (such as myself) who find ecumenism possible only within a certain consensus. It's not all or nothing: Roman Catholic anti-ecumenism is one extreme (and Eastern Orthodox opposition more so), and unitarianism the opposite extreme. They are not alternatives; they are endpoints of a scale. The badness of theology is thus potentially one of degree; and I personally believe that all theology is contaminated, to one degree or another, with this badness.

The second problem, though, is where the trouble really lies. If fealty to The Church is where it's at, it's abundantly clear that claims as to who exactly represents the church are humans talking about God. Maybe they are, but given the sinfulness of humnas, I'm betting they're talking about themselves.

Salty's Letter

Via titusonenine I came across the Salty Vicar's response to a "Letter From a Young Catholic".

Salty and I tend to disagree a lot, but I would like to commend this letter, though I disagree in degree with its valuation of searching perhaps over and against finding.

Over at Pontifications, of course, there is a reply. It is a reply that doesn't speak to me, for reasons that I think might resound to Salty and be a rebuke to Ponty, who says:

But how does one discern the will of Jesus, given the manifold and contradictory voices in the world? If the Catholic Church is the Church, then assent to her authoritative teachings is assent to Christ; obedience to her commands is obedience to Christ. [....] When I became Catholic just under a year ago, I made this profession: “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.”

In a sense, I have no problem making the same profession, because I do not agree that the Catholic denomination represents the Church in the fullness which it claims. One can assign infalliblity to almost any human authority, and with sufficient will and possibly derangement of thinking one can perhaps maintain this indefinitely. But when one sees falliblity, there is nothing one can do but place limits on one's fealty; and if the failures are severe enough, so may be the disillusionment.

The obvious answer to Ponty's first question is, "imperfectly, because we are imperfect, sinful humans." And of course I may well see this imperfectly, but the reality I see is that the reification of teaching by Catholics into an infallible Catholic teaching overreaches. I say this with the acknowledgement that by and large Catholic teaching is pretty good. Its claims for authority, however, are too political. Teaching that is really infallible shouldn't have to resort to authority for its defense.

The truth is that in the largest picture, picking the truth out of "the manifold and contradictory voices in the world" is actually difficult. But in one sense, the difficulty is overstated, especially by Catholic converts from other Christian denominations. In someone like Al Kimel or any number of other high profile convert ex-clerics, the Church of Rome is gathering the harvest that another has planted and raised. These and many others testify in their deeds, if not their words, to the breadth of the fundamental Christian consensus about who Jesus was and what his life means for us.

But in the other sense, the problem is actually difficult. Constantinople and for that matter Mecca, Salt Lake City, and wherever the Scientologists camp out vie with Rome, and at some point infallibility is just another claim to puzzled through in all those voices. If it is hard "truth", the harder and truer truth is living without it.

Sorry For the Snooze

I apologize to anyone who dropped by looking for new material in the past two months. Things have been a bit crazy personally, and then there was the Cold From Hell that led to the Bronchitis That Never Ends. One of the penalties for having a powerful singing voice is having a powerful coughing voice to go with it.

Over the next few days I expect to get back into the posting business.

New Patagruel Interviews McLaren

I've now been through my rector's "emerging church" seminar, and in poking around I've come across an interesting interview in The New Pantagruel.

Brian McLaren (associated with Cedar Ridge Community Church, about two miles from my house) seems to be both an important spokesman (a term I think he might object to) and lightning rod for whatever "emerging church" is (again, the taxonomy of this thing is disputed). One can start from the interview and read a few more traditionally analytical criticisms of the whole idea in general and McLaren's writing in particular, and while these are of some interest (and make, I think, some valid points) the interview is, to me, more interesting because of the way that Dan Knauss (the interviewer) interacts in a way which seems more acceptable to McLaren. More acceptable, and yet probing.

At this point I don't know what more I should say, so I urge you to read the interview and post some of your immpressions in the comments.

The Future, Part IV

This time from Ask the Priest:

My guess is, General Convention 2006 will probably maintain the status quo. It will agree to a moratorium on Episcopal consecrations of people in same-sex unions until after Lambeth 2008, it will restate its position on local-option on same-sex blessings, and it will express regret for the breach in the "bonds of affection" around the consecration of Gene Robinson. This will fulfill the letter of the Windsor Report - at least until after Lambeth.

Well, maybe it will, and maybe it won't. This is at least plausible. The question is whether the liberals will be able to restrain themselves from enacting gay marriages. I disagree that the status quo is approval of local option on this; we have local option, but it's because neither side has the power to enforce discipline, not because anyone wants the current situation. I tend to believe that the Windsor Report will get a "Thank you for sharing, Victoria. Now put your head down" courtesy resolution and will be otherwise ignored, and that spiting Akinola will be the prevailing mood. The liberal anger that he would dare to pass judgement on them is openly expressed all over the internet, and GC is the perfect place to realize that anger in action.

But if they do manage to forestall the divorce, then Lambeth? I'm not sure why I am supposed to believe that Akinola thinks he can "win" by threatening a boycott, when he can win much more commandingly by attending and getting the conference to vote ECUSA out.

The Future, Part III

Canterbury Trail has another response to the post in Kenesis on the future of ECUSA:

I think that we need to go back to our roots and reaffirm some basic doctrines and beliefs. This does not mean that we make any less room for those who question, or who doubt, or who see things differently. Welcoming, and listening, and affirming the different ways that God speaks to us is in our DNA…but I believe that we still need to have some sort of foundation…some sort of fundamental commitment to a form of “mere Christianity,” if we are to offer a cohesive witness instead of a noisy din of dissonant voices.

I think there is going to be a lot of resistance to doing this. It's hard for me to imagine an ECUSA stripped of its traditionalists and summoning up more nerve to anathematize the next Spong.

But the other issue is more basic. Actual teachings of Jesus from the gospels and actual teachings of the epistles are gravid with moral dictates. Commitment to the Quadrilateral by the bishops is mostly easy, therefore, because the four principles do not make reference to any moral issues. It is also therefore mostly meaningless. To the Catholic and Orthodox, catholicity and orthodoxy do not end where moral teaching picks up.

And indeed, the issue is likely to back up into basic creedal issues because the gender/sexuality issues which are driving the split now are also driving an effort to make fundamental changes in God-language. I question whether ECUSA could ultimately resist, for instance, the urge to reword the creed in language which Orthodox and Catholic believers, in conformity with their traditions, could no longer say. That would in effect abrogate the quadrilateral, but when push comes to shove I have to suspect, if not claim, that the liberal moral vision would prevail and that ECUSA's claims to any kind of orthodox faith would be increasingly open to challenge. In ECUSA, I do not think that 'mere Christianity' is safe; I think that in a conflict between it and liberal morality, the latter is likely to win, with the church paying no more than lip service to orthodox belief, while in reality positively rejecting its tenets.

The Future, Part II

Bouncing around the end-of-year posts, I came to a few more links prognosticating What Will Happen.

So, here we have Bishop Swing, in an article contemptuously titled This Mutiny Will Fail; the Church Will Abide:

What they don't realize is that the Episcopal Church has more staying power than they suppose. When our bishops, priests, and deacons took a solemn oath at ordination vowing to be loyal to the doctrine, discipline, worship of the Episcopal Church, we meant it.

Come now, Bishop, to whom do you think they'll have more loyalty: you, or Jesus? Isn't it just possible that every cleric will take any release given to the network bishops as a liberation from their loyalty oaths? And suppose Pittsburgh calls your bluff, and three quarters of the diocesan clergy and vestries simply get up and walk away from their properties. Do you really think that their former parishioners are going to be so loyal to you as the representative of the national church that they will stay?

Has anyone ever noticed that this is a Protestant church, and that loyalty is earned in direct proportion to the perception that the church honors and serves the gospel? "Mutiny" is such a telling word, as though an Anglican bishop somehow can claim the sort of absolute despotism that obtains on shipboard. It is a deeply self-righteous word, under the circumstances. The one thing that I take away from this article is that the liberal establishment intends to fight, tooth and nail, to force the Network and whoever joins them to walk away with nothing more than their clerical collars and their MDiv deplomas.

I had seen Thomas Bushnell's speculation on What would +Rowan do?, and I continue to believe that ECUSA establishment confidence in Canterbury endorsement is misplaced. When he says that

And we know, with dead certainty, that the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of Wales, and the Episcopal Church of Scotland (and plenty others) will all be in the same group when push comes to shove.

... well, I'm not counting on that. It's pretty clear that Canada and ECUSA will end up in the same boat; it's immediately obvious to me that the situation in the Church of England is not so clear-cut. Ordination of women in the USA was resolved by a single vote, thirty years ago; in England they are still sorting through the polity of it.

But what I do see here is, again, this emphasis on making sure that the liberals end up with all the assets:

Duncan and Iker are smart men, and they know as well as I do that this is the upshot when all the dust finally settles. This means that all their noise is not an attempt to achieve some other (essentially impossible) result, but rather an attempt to simply carry away as many toys as they can in the end. It is up to the rest of us, who don’t intend any leaving, to decide how many toys we are willing to let them steal.

This is utterly in contradiction to the sentiment expressed in Kenesis:

{The new Episcopal Church] will be leaner and less encumbered by the bloated budgets that come from maintaining old buildings and expensive real estate.

As I remarked before, I don't for a moment see this happening. What I see is that the liberal establishment seems to intend the bitterest divorce possible.

Literally Stupid

Over at titusonenine I seem to have missed a hilarious resolution from the Diocese of Vermont for a "Episcopal Coalition to Abolish Biblical Literalism" whose purpose would be to

free our Episcopal and Anglican Church from the slavery of Biblical Literalism which might be used to separate us from our sisters and brothers made in the image of God and used to marginalize persons who may be different from us: persons of color, women, and gay and lesbian persons

As at least one commenter says, it's hard to distinguish this for parody, and as one John B. writes:

This is the sort of thing that makes traditional Christians believe that reappraisers in ECUSA are acting in bad faith when they promote “diversity.” As this resolution shows, once reappraisers are in power, they really don’t want diversity.

It wouldn't be the first time, of course; the canonical changes to force ordination of women on every diocese is a precendent.

Looking for biblical literalists among the Anglicans is, naturally, a pretty pathetic affair, and the hunt for them is an exercise in "cheap shot" theology. In this particular resolution, the operating principle of "we'll not have the bible teaching us anything about sexuality, thank you!" is obvious; if liberalism is a problem (and in ECUSA I don't think it ever is) then this resolution is the preposterous overreaction in the other direction.

What is utterly obvious is that serious discussion of sexuality is impossible, if so inane a principle is even to be given a hearing.

Infinity Over Infinity

Out at Grace Cathedral they're stretching our cosmic boundaries again:

[Anglican orthodoxy]understands that God’s infinity and essential unknowability requires that revelation in the Bible and in Creation must contain an infinite multiplicity of meanings.

There are times when it is handy to be a mathematician, such as when the statistics-spinning begins, or when people start talking about inifinities as though there was something profound about them.

Infinity is something that it is quite easy to introduce and quite difficult to introduce in a way that is meaningful. Here's an example: Suppose you asked someone to draw a smiley-face at least an inch high and wide in a two-inch-square box. How many different such faces could be drawn? Well, to the geometer, an infinite number, and in practice the number of real variations is close enough to infinity for most purposes. This infinity has no real impact.

The same issue arises with regards to divine revelation. I'm not sure I even agree with the implication being stated, but I would note that "infinite multiplicity of meanings" doesn't imply that the meanings vary by much. It seems to me that the Orthodox Anglican line always was that there was an essential center, a core meaning about which variation could be tolerated. Tis is the truth out of which arose the Quadrilaterals. Dean Jones seems (by ellipsis) to imply that the incarnation-- that is, Jesus and what the Gospels tell of him-- is something of a blank slate upon which nearly any image can be graven.

This particularly comes out in an example he gives:

The Russian icon, the Rublev Trinity, expresses brilliantly what we are about - three figures sitting at a table on which sits a chalice.

The thing is that this icon wasn't written as just three figures to which one can impute a meaning of one's choice. They were written that the viewer might, knowing the figures to be Abraham's visitors, see in them a revelation of the triune persons. Meanings of the icon which exclude this simply aren't true. What Spong says these days is irreconcilable with any true meaning taken from the icon, just to give an extreme example. Even Bp. Tennis's notorious "core doctrine" finding in the Righter trial acknowledges this principle; the problem with the court's decision was in it's presumption of identifying where exactly that core lay.

This seems to me to lie at the heart of a lot of the battle against Anglicanism. The extreme modernists in practice deny that there is a core, by erasing any particulars from it. The Ortho-Catholic anti-Anglican line also pretends that there is no core-- an unhistorical misrepresentation of the current crisis as an everpresent fault.

Over in RatherNotBlog the following observation is made:

In other words, the appeal to apophaticism is an excuse for lazy thinking, a pseudo-clever way of getting around making hard choices.

This is a little bit of an overstatement-- but only a little.

"Anglican Distraction Syndrome" Considered

Over in the blog of the parish of St. Margaret's Emmaus (PA) we have reference to an extract of a letter from Bp. Paul Marshall concerning "Anglican Distraction Syndrome":

History teaches that Episcopalians would rather do anything than spread the Kingdom. We tend to invest our energy in debates about liturgy, women's ordination, language, where national headquarters should be, and so on, in a way that is disproportionate to their significance. These are all important issuses, but my constant sorrow--and I have been saying this for decades--is that we historically let ourselves get so concerned with these and other issues that our primary mission is obscured.

The thing is that all of these "distractions" occur in the course of arguing about how we should go about spreading the kingdom. They get argued about because people say or have said that we have to change the liturgy, we have to ordain women, we have to have acknowledged homosexuals in positions of power, we have to change the language used to talk about God, have spend less money on our national church institutions, and so forth. If discussion is the obvious problem, then "leave well enough alone" is the obvious solution. Leave the text of the BCP unaltered; leave +VGR as a singularity; forget about rites for homosexual marriages; leave headquarters at 815; and so forth.

There is, of course, not a snowball's chance in hell that this is going to happen. And if Bp. Marshall really wanted to cast a vote in this direction, he would have witheld consent on +VGR.

What is my model of church?

You scored as Sacrament model. Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church.

Sacrament model		78%
Herald Model		67%
Mystical Communion Model		50%
Institutional Model		44%
Servant Model		11%

What is your model of the church? [Dulles]
created with QuizFarm.com

You Call That a FUTURE?

As the first rays of 2006 appear over the horizon, thoughts in ECUSA turn towards General Convention, and the likelyhood that the church will be divided at that point. And thus we have at Kenesis some speculation on what the "new church" will look like.

Mostly I think the vision related there is self-affirming nonsense:

"The new Episcopal Church will no longer be comfortable with position, wealth, self-satisfied liberality, and our role as a "mainline" denomination." It's really hard for me to imagine how the new, "blue" ECUSA could be anything but all of these things. ECUSA is already tightly coupled to upper-middles, and shucking the "red" portion is not going to change that. The image of ECUSA as "the Republican Party at prayer" is decades out of date.

"It will be leaner and less encumbered by the bloated budgets that come from maintaining old buildings and expensive real estate." Please. The big old expensive Gothic piles are in old established liberal dioceses. Is ECUSA really going to give away St. John the Divine and the National Cathedral? (If the answer is "yes", I'll be glad to accept the latter.)

"The new Episcopal Church will be mission-driven; we will cease to be satisfied with maintenance and demand growth." If the statistics from 815 are to be believed, the new "blue" ECUSA will do worse than before in the growth department. "Blues" don't spawn; "reds" do. Conversions? Historically ECUSA has been a church of converts, but the problem is that the kind of people who join ECUSA don't reproduce enough. Latino cleaning ladies? Mostly they'll stay Roman Catholic.

"The new Episcopal Church will be orthodox, catholic, and reformed." That I doubt. Never mind that "orthodox" and "catholic" are, to a great extent, owned by others. The whole process of getting to where we are involved, on the one hand, "we dare you to stop us" outrages, and on the other, a lack of will and structure to rein anyone in. Without the traditionalists there will be even less of a check on theological innovation, and therefore I expect the "blue" ECUSA to become determinedly unorthodox-- that is to say, far outside the consensus of the churches as a whole.

"The new Episcopal Church will practice radical hospitality in an atmosphere of community." I would say "whatever that means" were that history thus far has elucidated "radical hospitality" to mean "being as formless as the UCC and the unitarians". That pretty much puts the kibosh on orthodoxy, but then I wrote that off above; in any case such extremes of hospitality won't be very welcoming to the genuinely orthodox.

Here's what I think will happen: the liberals will push homosexual marriages through GC, and the divorce proceedings will begin. There will be a terrible temptation for each side to spite the other by taking away their buildings and institutions, reinforced by the opposed, towering senses of moral superiority exhibited at the extremes. Even in the least acrimonious case there will be plenty of conflict over property and plenty of people on either side willing to fight to take away churches and the like from the other side, even when there's really no point in having it for themselves. Except in a few dioceses in certain states, the prestige properties will end up with the new, "blue" ECUSA.

The new ECUSA will end up with a lot of people who are moderate or even somewhat conservative, partly out of inertia and partly out of a complex of other reasons. The situation for these people will be bleak. I expect the 1979 BCP to be suppressed within a decade, and it wouldn't surprise me to see new liturgies introduced that are ostentatiously heretical, or at least spinelessly latitudinarian. Numbers will continue to drop, not so much because of flight (thought there will be a lot of that at first) but because ECUSA will continue to have children well below the replacement rate. Mission attempts will fail to cross the ideological class barriers that are increasingly entrenched. Spongian heretical bishops will continue to appear and will continue to escape any kind of discipline. Condescension to the troglodytes will continue unabated. Association with "blue" politics will continue, with the church taking increasingly leftist positions.

Mind you, I make no claims about how good the other side will be. The opportunities for angry disdain and fractiousness are obvious. But they have much or to establish in terms of institutions and attitudes, so I don't feel much confidence in predicting which way they will go.

Wisdom From Durham

In the course of his pastoral letter on "civil partnerships" N. T. Wright hammers home exactly what is wrong with the way innovation has progressed in ECUSA of late:

If people want to change the rules about this or anything else, there are ways of doing so. We have voted as a Communion and a Church to have women priests, to admit children to Communion before Confirmation, and so on. Change can and does happen. But it can’t happen by people creating ‘facts on the ground’, deliberately flouting the church’s well-known teaching, and then requiring that the teaching be adjusted to fit. As Archbishop Rowan has stressed, we are being called to grow up to a new maturity as a Church, and part of that is that we learn how to discuss contentious issues and live within a common discipline as we do so.

Mind you, his discussion of the essential duplicity of the Act is worth your time too.

(a tip to titusonenine for the link)

Emergent Christology

Over in Pontifications there is a long series of comments about an exchange in Open Source Theology concerning Christology. I find the exchange interesting in part because it manages to stay away from the "of course Catholic theology solves everything" through most of the middle portion of the discussion.

It's interesting that in the original discussion "Chalcedon" doesn't appear until the middle of the exchange, and it is brought up by a catholic (small-c). Much of the rest of the exchange is devoted to the original respondent's sense of unease with the formula. In mainline catholic theology-- including, I would imagine most Anglican discussions-- "Chalcedon" would appear as soon as possible, because it's the most important historical consideration of the issue, and people in those intellectual traditions emphasize historical perspective. And I would agree to this emphasis, if only because knowing the history of an argument is a great help to avoiding wasting time in recapitulating it unknowingly.

On the other hand in the original discussion there is little or no sense of historical perspective; and when it is introduced there is a surprising resistance to really accepting it. We disappear into what obscurity there may be in ante-Nicene theology, the inevitable refuge of "start from scratch" Protestant theology. It's ironic that the mainstream of evangelical theology is increasingly abandoning this and looking back to the councils and the church fathers. Whatever the emergent movement is needs to get past this calculated naivete; intellectually there is simply no excuse for not being aware of the major historical approaches to these problems.

Meanwhile, Al Kimel observes:

My first impression is that many em’s are reacting against what they perceive to be the personally destructive dogmatism of the evangelical/fundamentalist churches in which they were raised. My second impression is that they are embracing the kind of experientialist, anti-dogmatic theology that has been characteristic of liberal-Protestant theology for the past hundred and fifty years. Flush in the excitement of being on the evangelical cutting-edge, they do not realize how very old-hat they are.

Maybe Al and I have been reading different liberals, but I think his statement here seriously mischaracterizes what has gone wrong with mainline theology. Mainline theologians are not going to get around to Chalcedon because someone else brings it up; they are going to have at it, for good or ill, from the start. They come out of a catholic theology in which they have all been educated in all this stuff, and they are brim full of opinions about it. Those in OST, by contrast, hardly seem to have heard of Chalcedon.

And unfortunately Chalcedon is a very clear formulation of the the principles it expresses-- at least, not to the average modern person. I had the benefit of being walked through it in Robert Farrar Capon's Hunting the Divine Fox before I really had to deal with it in discussion, but without guidance the formula is rather opaque. And it has the dubious distinction of being the focus of Christendom's oldest surviving theological division. I am convinced that what Chalcedon teaches is "true", but in the exchanges in the two lines of discussion, I'm not seeing a great teaching moment. What's tending to happen instead is that the Catholic end of the discussion has mostly retreated from trying to explain the formula and has gone back to the usual intellectual sin of trying to argue from authority to people who do not (yet) accept the authority.

And OST is clearly a place where real teaching is appropriate and even possible. It saddens me to see that its potential in this wise isn't being exploited.

I Haven't Picked on the Liberals Lately

I'm getting tired of "Catholic theological solipsism", so it's probably just as well that over on Fr. Jake the Insignificant Minority Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory has popped up again. I have these conflicting impulses of laughter and annoyance. "Covert operatives"? The reasserters organize and plan, and it's evil; the liberals organize and plan, and it's just prudent.

I't s about time the liberals gave up on the claim that they are in any way persecuted. I'm not sure when the last time that happened, but I doubt it has happened within my lifetime.

A Proper Concern for Doctrine

Everything over in Pontifications these days seems to come down to remarks like these:

Something [in Lewis's writings] seems to be missing. What this is, I think, is a lack of a proper concern for doctrine. He notes often, very rightly, that as a layman with little theological training it is not his concern in his books to decide sticky points but to stick to the basics of Christianity. But this is only possible to a certain extent. What was that comment of his on the Eucharist? “Jesus said, Take, eat; not, Take, understand.” This is true but it bothers me that Lewis seems unwilling to pick a side.

While there’s no forgetting Lewis’s huge positive impact on me, as a Catholic I have had to outgrow his doctrinal “squishiness”. As well meaning and ecumenical as it is, the idea of “mere Christianity” is about as silly as the idea of a “mere Jesus” (and, yes, by that I mean I am reminded of Jefferson’s ‘improved’ New Testament).

The last reference is a cheap shot, and it serves as an emblem of the inevitable doctrine that any relaxation of dogmatism leads straight to utter latitudiarian indifference. It's rubbish, of course; Lewis himself stands as an object counterexample.

Surely it is reasonable to deduce that the abundance of wrong answers-- that is, heresies-- is driven in large part by the deep desire to have answers. Where the material isn't sufficient to support this urge, error is inevitable, because one's critical faculties are dulled by the desire to come up with something. I'ts not the only source of error, of course; rationalizing one's behavior is obviously important too.

But Lewis's "Mere Christianity" is plainly what you get when you impose a consensus on Christendom as a whole. And when it is neglected in favor of controversies over everything else-- the inevitable outcome of "proper concern for doctrine"-- it becomes impossible to resist the consequence that these other issues are what is important.

The original article that set this all off skips over the bigger reason why Tolkien is more palatable to the masses than Lewis: unless you read The Silmarillion, which can be a rather daunting task, the essential Miltonian character of Tolkien's created world isn't evident. Indeed, it is masked to the point where I believe that Christians see it as Christian only because they know of Tolkien's Catholicism. Others do not.

I am particularly struck by the focus on Lewis's lack of doctrine on the Eucharist. But really it cannot be necessary for someone to hold an opinion on the mechanics of the Godly presence in communion, and the notion that the only unacceptable position is to hold the wrong view is lame. All of this of course is argued out over the background of rejecting Lewis's church for its deviations.

The Problem Concept of "Validity"

The discussion of communion with the unbaptized that started on Titusonenine has not at all suprisingly moved to Pontifications (since, after all, it is yet another opportunity to tar Anglicans in general with the broad brush of the crazy ones). I'll have a few comments to make on the issue itself later, but what I find more worthy of immediate comment is the spat that has broken out about (you could have predicted this too) validity of orders.

On one side we have George Russell citing Lateran IV:

Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors. [....] To me this is fairly clear. Whatever becomes of bread consecrated by Anglican priests (who do not simultaneously happen to be Catholic priests), it is not the Body and Blood of the Lord, and Anglican Eucharists are not a sacrament.

On the other side, Al Kimel:

George, the passages from Lateran IV and the CCC simply identifies one of the necessary conditions for a valid Eucharist. In the absence of the fulfillment of this condition, the Catholic Church cannot and does not affirm that a sacrament occurs. I agree. So does Fathers Coventry and Hughes. But this is not identical to denying the possibility that God may, in his gracious freedom, answer the prayers of, say, a Lutheran congregation and bless them with the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood. To deny this possibility is to deny God’s freedom. [....] I am responding here strongly because it is very important not to misrepresent Catholic teaching on this point. Many readers of Pontifications are seriously examining the claims and teachings of Catholicism. Misrepresentations of authoritative Catholic teaching undermine the evangelistic purpose of this site.

We're still having a problem here with this word "valid". Under Al's program, one can replace "X is not valid" with "the Church does not acknowledge X." That tempts me to shrug and reply, "too bad for the Roman church," but there are two other points here.

First, there is Al's comment about the importance of conveying the correct Roman teaching. Now, looking at the Lat. IV statement, I don't read it as being hedged in the way that Al interprets it. Indeed, the paragraph in which the quoted statement appears begins with a strong, Cyprianic statement denying salvation outside the church. I believe the council's claims to be wrong for exactly the reasons that Al gives, but that isn't the point. I believe that Russell correctly relates what the council taught, and I do not accept the implication from Al that the council intended to teach otherwise.

The impression I get instead is that eventually the church had to back down from the rigorous Cyprianic insistence of sole proprietorship. But the consequence of this is having to abandon the use of the word "invalid", at least in any sense stronger than "we don't acknowledge...". In any case the temptation to take the stricter interpretations of old church statements is clearly very strong, to the point where an outsider has to wonder who to trust.

More on "Infallibility and No Taste"

So there I was, a High Church Anglican in the middle of a bunch of first and second generation Slavs, in Johnstown for the folk festival. We're all in the Slavic Male Chorus of Washington DC and we've been slated to sing all of our performances at the tent in front of the Croatian church-- every time we sing another Serbian song, it seems as though the audience gets smaller.

The folk festival that year sat among one of the densest cluster of churches I've ever seen. Almost all of them are Catholic; and all the ones I saw were "ethnic" parishes. At one end is the Irish parish, and then a few blocks along the Italian parish. On another street there's the Croatian church, and in the next block a closed Hungarian parish. The next street over has a Polish parish and a few blocks from that is the Greek parish. Most of these are pretty good sized, and the exuberance of the decoration starts at overwhelming and escalates to jaw-dropping. It's a window into a Catholicism that has largely passed away where I live.

The most astonishing single object is the baldicchino in the Greek church. It's this huge polychromed terracotta thing with half-"lifesize" angels at each corner. Back in the early twenties, when it was ordered from Italy, it cost $250,000. Can you imagine that? It would be beyond price to make it now. And they're ALL like that. For an Anglican it's a relief to step into the little Lutheran church that sits in the center of the neighborhood and see nothing but plaster, dark wood, and brass. (I wondered why they were hawking pierogies, but then I found out that it's a Slovak Lutheran church.) I wish I could show you pictures, but none of these parishes appears to have a website.

The exception to this is the Croatian church I've mentioned several times. It's pretty small, in comparison with the others, but the exterior gives no clue that there's something wrong with the interior. But inside, anyone can see that something drastic has been done. The space is a square box with an apse, but there's nothing much in the apse. Instead, the altar has been moved to the "South" wall, on a low platform, with the seats arranged in circular rows. All hint of ornament has been supressed. And then, on the "West" wall, there's a reproduction of the Western Wall: huge grey-painted chunks of styrofoam. You may press slips of paper between the blocks, just as in Jerusalem.

Possibly the people didn't think much of this, because there was a pamphlet explaining how this arrangement is superior to what they had earlier. I of course had never seen to original furnishings, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have chosen them. But I felt my spirit sink when I entered it, as it is now, and I had to shake my head at what had been done in the Name of the Lord.