Don't "Challenge the Culture"

By way of The Living Church we have this bit of advice from a missive by John Martiner, the just-retired rector of Christ Church, Christiana Hundred, Del.:

Finally, a rector must challenge the culture. OK, this is a hard one to understand. Everyone wants a rector who “understands us.” On the other hand, a rector who just fits in and blesses the status quo, in my opinion, is not doing the job.

On my worst days, I think, "Only a priest could write such nonsense." Every new rector comes in, and thinks, "boy, is there a lot about this parish I need to whip into shape." In spite of the supposed power of altar guilds, it seems to me that any reasonably determined priest can overcome it; and the rest of the congregation is pretty much powerless, except that the priest is willing to listen. It is not a situation that is conducive to clerical humility, and a rector who believes that shaking things up is of itself a good thing is predestined to be largely a destructive force.

Tradition is anamnesis, and anamnesis is central to Christian worship. While tradition cannot be above criticism, where tradition is held to be an impediment, connection with the past is eroded. Continual agitation is, in the end, essentially destructive; what is torn out and tossed away is not so easily recreated when the next rector finds it wanted. I despise and detest the dishonest language of opposing "traditional" with "contemporary" when talking about liturgy, and when I hear a "change" sermon, I wonder what the rector is planning to break this time. A change is good, or it is bad, and only in its own right; an attitude that values Change is an attitude that opposes stability. It is often said that growth requires change, but even a tree that sends up shoots each time it is cut down will eventually succumb out of exhaustion. In truth, it is not growth that requires change, but change which arises out of growth; change that is not growth is often enough change which growth must overcome.

One of the things I have found relaxing about having supply priests is that they, as a rule, accept that they don't have to be disruptive. I remember back in the days when I was acolyte master speaking with one of them before the service and having him tell me to direct him as to how things were done. It would be a better church if more rectors had the same attitude.

The Advent Puritans

For some reason, it has become the thing to do this year to harangue one's fellow Christians for paying attention to Christmas before, well, Christmas. We are not taking Advent seriously, we are told. This has gotten folded into the standard lecture about the overcommercialization of Christmas, to the point of practically accusing us of being traitors to our faith if we do any shopping. And heaven forbid we should sing a carol out of season.

I have a picture of a parade of assorted clerics carrying signs through the mall saying "NO CHRISTMAS YET". The puritanism of this has gotten out of hand, more so than the commercialism. It is not meet that we should prepare for the Nativity by being so crabby about it.

A Proper Concern for Doctrine II

One of the things that bugs me about Brian McLaren is that, like a lot of people coming out of the evangelical wing, he seems awfully oblivious to mainline Christianity and its travails. So here we have an exchange bouncing around the blogosphere, as quoted in Leaving Munster:

I remember hearing Brian Mclaren talk a few years ago about an interview he' d given at a conference. I believe it was with Dallas Willard and they were discussing why a trip to your average bookshop would reveal a great upsurge of interest in Buddhism and New Age, but a sharp disinterest with Christianity.
Willard's response was simple and - it seems to me - spot on: "Christianity is a set of doctrines, whilst Buddhism offers a way of life."

Now, this is a platitudinous misrepresentation of Buddhism in its native lands. Anyone who has read much about modern Japanese culture has run across the aphorism that "the Japanese are born Shinto and die Buddhist." Beneath that is a deeper truth: that a buddhist "way of life" is the fartherest thing from their minds. The Japanese are the only modern true pagans left, and religion as westerners tend to see it is just not part of their lives. There is nothing systematic about it; their way of life is Japanese first, and Shinto and Buddhist observances are simply subsidiary parts of that life, put on and off like (and for that matter as) ceremonial clothing.

And it's not at all irrelevant that, in the USA, Buddhism tends to get lumped with "spirituality" while Christianity gets lumped with "religion". The latter word suggests something ritualistic, to be sure; but it also suggests something systematic and even life-encompassing. "Spirituality" suggests dabbling and a lifestyle-accessory attitude.

The thing is that mainline Christianity has already had it out with the "doctrine" matter, mostly to a bad end. It's not really the doctrines of Christianity that are the problem. The papers like to claim that it is, but that's because they need to controversy to have something to cover, and because it makes them look smart when they really don't get religion. The big problem is that Christianity IS all-encompassing and sets out a way of life-- which people don't want to follow! The "solution" in the West was to make all sorts of distinction between Church and State and what-have-you, leading in Europe to the collapse of moral values that was WW II, and in the US to a corrupt bargain between Church and Business which Business gradually reneged on anyway. Throughout this there was always a mainline stream of objection; but since the western wolrd these days seems to be largely made up of rebellious children, the last thing anyone wanted was a church that told them what to do. So this fiction was made up of a "doctrine-only" Christianity, something that never ever existed and doesn't exist now.

Except....

It did exist to a degree in American fundagelical Christianity, because there the Church-Business bargain held. And because it held, it led to corruption, personal in the case of various now more-or-less fallen church leaders, but also more systematic. The US is the locus of the "sex is the only form of immorality" Christian ethics, even though mainline liberals had been criticizing business (lack of) ethics for decades.

Now, bookstores are stocked along strange reasons, as might be seen in my previous articles on bible buying. Christian bookstores and book services eat a lot of the Christian book market. But I suspect that, at the local Borders anyway, a lot of the wierdness can be traced to bookstores being heavily staffed by the kind of people who do buy into the spirituality as lifestyle accessory ethos.

Whch theologian are you?

On of them-there quiz thingies....

You scored as Anselm. Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?' Anselm 87% John Calvin 60% Karl Barth 60% Martin Luther 60% Charles Finney 53% Augustine 53% J�rgen Moltmann 47% Jonathan Edwards 33% Friedrich Schleiermacher 33% Paul Tillich 27% Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Bible Oddity II

OK, here's is where it gets wierd.

I checked out a Barnes & Noble, for completeness' sake. They hardly had a bible section, though the store was at least as big as the Books-a-Million I visited. (To be fair, a large section was taken up by a coffee shop.) The only Catholic bible they had was an RSV Catholic Edition (how ironic), and they had a spread of NIV and NLT and KJV and NKJV. That was about it. Clearly their heart was not in their religion section.

Before that, however, I visited the Potomac Adventist Book & Health Food Store. This is a "big box" store for SDAs, complete with a bronze statue of Jesus washing Peter's feet on the sidewalk out front. As you might guess, they have a HUGE bible section. They have LOTS of KJV editions, and NKJV, and all the other big commercial versions (though they don't push the NIV as much). But they also have all the traditional modern "liberal" translations (except maybe the NAB, now that I think about it). JB, NJB, Goodspeed, Moffatt, NRSV, REB (disguised as the Oxford Annotated Bible). They had the KJV apocrypha; they had the NASB; they had Lamsa's Peshitta; they had the JPS Tanakh; and they had a slew of parallel and bog-literal versions I'd never heard of.

So here we are at a conservative Christian bookstore, and it's the only place (other than a trip downtown to the shrine or the National Cathedral) to get the translations favored by liberals. THe irony is thundering.

Bible Buying Oddity

So here I am at Borders, and out of curiosity I drift over to the bible section. And what I find is really quite surprising.

If you wanted to buy a copy of the RSV, you would have been out of luck; they didn't have it. And they had a single edition/copy of the NRSV. Jerusalem Bible? They didn't have it, nor the newer edition either. New English/Revised English? Ditto. NASB? Nope. Today's English? I don't think so.

So what did they they have? Well, they had a few oddities, such as a copy of the Lamsa translation of the Peshitta. They had a fair number of New American Bible editions. But mostly what they had were King James, New King James, New International, and New Living Bible. Oh, and the English Standard Version, which, if you haven't run across it before, is a recent "conservative" redaction of the RSV.

Travelling over to Books-a-Million, I found a somewhat more restricted selection, plus the Holman Christian Standard Bible in various versions. It is apparently an attempt to produce an inerrantist formal equivalence translation (in other words, to replace the NIV, whose dynamic equivalence model ended up being criticized by almost everyone).

For an Episcopalian, the situation is passing strange. We have a canonically designated list of translations we can use, and hardly any of the bibles available at these general interest bookstores are on it. Of the current list, only the KJV, NAB, and NIV are (apparently) readily available, which is particularly an issue since the RSV is the reference version of scripture readings. So what we have is a very archaic Anglican bible, a heavily criticized RC bible (which is particular a problem because of the many textual reorderings), and a heavily criticized fundamentalist bible.

But even more interesting is what this says about what they think the bible market looks like. Now, some of this is surely distorted by publisher marketing issues. The Holman and the ESV are new translations; the NLT and NKJV and Holman are owned by specific publishers. But even so, what we see is a mass market which, with the exception of the Catholic NAB, is completely occupied by theologically conservative translations. From a strictly textual or translational perspective, they are not all conservative; the Holman, for instance, uses a modern textual basis, and the NLT is paraphrastic. But they are all connected to radically conservative Protestant groups.

What this would appear to say is that mainline Protestants are not an important bible market anymore-- or if they are, that they can be satified by strictly ceremonial copies of the KJV. You can't buy the preferred mainline versions in a regular bookstore. (I'm tempted to venture down to the Adventist bookstore, just to see.) Now, I haven't been to a Barnes & Noble, nor have I been to a variety of Borders shops. And who knows, maybe in a different city or state I might see something less odd. The two stores I did visit, however, are in two quite different communities.

And I also am not sure how long things have been this way. I haven't bought a bible in years, not because I don't own plenty (I have something like twelve different translations), but because I've come to rely on on-line bibles, except for liturgical use. For that I use my trusty RSV Common Bible, which I've had for a long time.

Sowing the seeds of change

The Deconstruction of Liberal Christianity by Theo Hobson from The Guardian: comment is free

Think of the Starving Children in India

The latest spin in the campaign to demonize the opposition seems to be this one, courtesy of the PB-to-be:

But it seems to me that the shame in all of this is that we’re being diverted from feeding people who are starving, and treating people with AIDS, and malaria and tuberculosis, and providing basic healthcare for children who are suffering in other parts of the world, because we can’t get get away from bickering about these issues. They are certainly important, but they’re not the most important thing in the lives of the whole world.

She must really think we are stupid.

The truth seems to be that she thinks that bending the church to the will of its homosexuals is AS important as working for adequate food, shelter, healthcare, etc., because she and her allies are willing to keep the church in a froth over it. In fact, I'll take a step further: it's MORE important in her scheme to gain and retain control over church institutions in order to put them in the service of achieving homosexual objectives. If she were really serious about the priorities she (and Fr. Jake, for that matter) keep bringing up, she would give up the fight, reconvene General Convention, and preside over the division of the church. That way both sides could have their sexuality status quo, and they could get on with the charity (and political arm-twisting of course) that she claims to be their basic work.

But instead the new line is that rebellious dioceses and parishes will be subdued and put to the work of the liberal establishment. It's OK for (again I turn to the Fr. Jakites) us to rebel against our British overseers, but not for those dissident conservatives to rebel against the "heresy" of the PB-to-be. So now more money is going to be spent by the national church to crush the rebellion, instead of letting the rebels leave and giving that money to the poor. The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty stinks. When 815 is abandoned in favor of Minot, North Dakota, when Mt. St. Albans is sold to the Baptists for a tidy sum and the proceeds all sent to Africa, when St. John the Divine is converted into low-cost housing, then I'll take this seriously.

{Tip to titusonenine)

R-E-S-T-R-A-I-N-T

(With apologies to Aretha)

Jim Naughton, who seems to have signed up to be the Episcopal Diocese of Washington's Canon Spinmeister, tries his hand at Rowan Williams's "Reflection" on the Anglican communion:

As I read the archbishop, he, like many others, is suggesting that the struggle in the Anglican Communion is not about homosexuality but about how we make decisions in concert. To me that is similar to saying that the American Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights. Both arguments allow you to ignore sins against humanity while you debate the nature of polity.

Well, perhaps Naughton ought to reflect a minute as to who the despot is in "Maryland, My Maryland". Casting John Chane as Abraham Lincoln might work within the diocese-- after all, look at how things went under Jane Dixon-- but in the communion as a whole, it isn't going to fly.

But perhaps Cantuar is supposed to stand in for the Tyrant Lincoln. Well, then perhaps the War of Northern Agression, the War Between the States, the War to Free the Slaves might then be a better analogue-- but for one fact. Cantuar is actually capable of no tyranny over PECUSA. He can expel us from the club, but he cannot do more than that.

And it is more than a little disingenious to suggest that homosexuality is the only issue presented by PECUSA. After thirty years, ordination of women is not universally accepted in the communion. What with the "Mother Jesus" sermon (which, coupled with Jefferts Schori's address to the deputies, gave us the repugnant image of Jesus giving birth to a montrous PECUSA), we have the next crisis: first sacraments, then morality, and next the language of theology itself. Williams's reflection fairly hammers on this point: that the succession of American adventures is in its essence a repudiation of conciliarity, and that therefore it's not at all unreasonable to deny the Americans a place at council.

There are in fact two struggles going on. At the moment, statements from Canterbury are but rumors of war. The bigger problem for the bishop of Washington is that his erstwhile liberal allies have (perhaps) reneged, and are choosing conciliarity over conscience. That's the real purpose of Naughton's statement: to pressure (say) the Bishop of Maryland to give consent if and when the Diocese of Newark or some other diocese elects the next homosexual bishop. If we are casting roles in the Late Unpleasantness, it's as easy to cast Chane as Leonidas Polk, especially considering the language of rebellion I hear from his corner. Over on Fr. Jake the war of choice is that of 1776, with Williams as, well, the British; I guess they prefer to cast GC as the Continental Congress. So-- has anyone seen Richard Henry Lee recently? Or would the troops of Chane's diocese rather fire on Ft. Pitt-- er, Ft. Sumner?

Electing Schori

Let me say that I don't have any chromosomal issues with the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori. She's not whom I would pick for the job, male or female, and if I were to pick a woman, it would probably be the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, who is probably the female cleric in PECUSA who is least acceptable to those who voted for Schori (or practically anyone else, for that matter). I mean, how many priests of either sex in the country appear in Geneva bands?

I don't doubt that Bp. Schori brings some considerable gifts to her new position. But she also brings considerable symbolism. At least one of those symbols is positive by anyone's standards: no longer need I suffer self-indulgent hand-wringing about the need for further empowerment of women in the church. I suppose I can sigh with the flounder and the fisherman when this turns out not be enough, and it must be that the Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the Pope, and the God in His/Her/Its/Their heaven must be a woman, but I personally think Presiding Bishop is enough of an aspiration for any Episcopalian.

The problem end is epitomized by this spin from Jim Naughton:

I don't know how the politics of this is going to shake out in the Anglican Communion yet. On the one hand, this is another "first" from the Episcopal Church, and maybe that won't be well received. On the other hand, the hand I favor, it now becomes clear that attacking the Church that deals fairly with gays and lesbians also means attacking the Church that deals fairly with women. The cause of the small, vulnerable gay population is now linked to the large and much less vulnerable female population.

That's one way to put it. But here's a better one: Schori's election is very much about rubbing it in the rest of the communion's faces that the leaders of PECUSA are going to do what they want, and to hell with everyone else. PECUSA is already the church whose female bishops represent a problem for the rest of the communion, and a problem which somehow has managed to remain dormant through the last Lambeth conference. Now, in the midst of a severe strain over the one issue, the other issue has been raised again.

Naughton has it exactly backwards. In the current context, Schori's election has linked the women to homosexuality, and not the other direction. The position of women in the communion has been weakened, not strengthened, because the coupling of the two issues has given conservative, moderates, and even some liberals a very strong reason to chuck us out of the communion. The message is that we are willful and don't care about the consequenceds for anyone else, and are in general impossible to live with. Everything that Rowan Williams and his emmissaries have said over the past few months indicates an increasing frustration with PECUSA. And on the other hand, I'm hearing increasing resentment from the liberal vanguard that Cantuar dares even to express an opinion, however veiled. Meanwhile, there are rumblings from the center, with Bp. Peter "Schism is worse than heresy" Lee of Virginia propsing a moratorium on such extreme terms that I can only read this as realization that (a) the current course is going to get us thrown out of the communion, and that (b) he values communion unity higher than PECUSA unity.

That last evaluation will destroy the denomination, or at the very least cleave it in two. Fudge is becoming increasingly difficult to make; and for that, too, perhaps we can thank Schori's electors.

My prayers for you, Bp. Schori. You are going to need all the Divine Help you can get.

Past My "Pray By" Date

I've tried not to afflict anyone who still bothers to read this with too much about the Sausage Factory-- er, the PECUSA General Convention now underway. But then I read (courtesy of T19) this ENS story about resolution D061 "Pastoral Plan to Revise the Book of Common Prayer".

The resolution itself seems almost innocuous:

Resolved, the House of _____ concurring, That the 75th General Convention direct the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to present to the 76th General Convention a pastoral plan for the future revision of the Book of Common Prayer.

That sounds like good idea, you might say. Well, here's the real message of the resolution:

“Our prayer book is already outdated and it is hard for my generation to relate to everything in it,” said a youth, identified only as Hannah, from Northern California.

and

The Rev. Stephanie Speller, 34, of Boston, also testified at the Friday hearing that she uses alternative resources for her diverse congregation. Our diversity “is a miracle of God’s grace, but…where people enter church on Sunday morning they may see a multicultural congregation but what they hear is all European American,” said Speller, whose congregation at St. Paul’s Cathedral includes African Caribbean, African, African American, Chinese, Latino and Anglo parishioners.

Speller added, “After awhile you begin to feel like the marginal voices are only found in the marginal text; at what point do those voices come to the center?”

Really? Thirty years of folk masses and clown masses and hip-hop masses and rave masses, and it's only now we've discovered that the prayer book is getting in the way?

I wish I could say that it was astonishing to hear this stuff, but it seems that the downfall of the Episcopal Church is going lie not in sex, but in the overwhelming urge to demolish the one thing that gave us any unity: the Book of Common Prayer. Thus it was drearily unsurprising that convention liturgies read anything but "it is right to give him thanks and praise"; some sullen, hidden vein of traditionalism in me want to say that it is their own damn fault for getting rid of the certified patriarchy-free response used from 1549 to 1928.

But let's go back to that word:

PATRIARCHY

I have to join with those who question the judgement of young adults who WANT to go to church conventions. Young people who would rather inflict all that bloviation on themselves, when they could be out copulating or tipping cows or doing almost anything else, surely need to reexamine their priorities. That dreary work should be left to their tired and jaded elders, who have already put decades of office work and parenting under their belts. But they point to what seems to be a very common belief: that church must be made juvenile in order for it to survive.

That's the real message of all the clown/rave/hip-hop/folk masses. And while I am not a Rite I partisan, there are times when Rite II retreats from a clean, modern language into childishness. But the problem with this is that (duh) people grow up. I did so prematurely, I suppose. I went to an Episcopal boarding school with a very high (in the church sense) standard of ritual, so all the "relevant" mid-week services we were sentenced to produce seemed impossibly dated once I set foot in college. (Indeed, the whole "hold hands around the altar" communion schtick of the chaplaincy seemed, in 1978, to be an embarrassing hangover of the '60s. And it's still with us.)

And here it is, thirty years later, and in a year I'll have a son in high school. And I think of those young women at general convention, and I wonder whether a service for their teenage children will be keeping them in church when I'm a white-haired elder. And my thirteen year old son, sitting next to me, informs me that he does not think that the BCP is hard to understand. Of course, his throwback of a father has already corrupted him.

Rev. Speller's words fly in the face of decades of Anglican practice. The BCP liturgy, unbowdlerized and even unmodernized, has proven adaptable to services from church camp eucharists to evensong of the highest music standard.

The last thing the church needs is to even think of revising the prayer book. There are certainly changes which ought to be made, but now is not the time.

It's an Episcopal Church, Isn't It?

So here we have Questioning Christian complaining about one aspect of the Angican covenant proposal:

I see no reason to entrust the primates with that kind of gatekeeper authority. The very idea rests on the outdated notion that the church is a flock, of which bishops are shepherds. This notion apparently derives from patristic times: Before leaving for Jerusalem, Paul reportedly exhorted the elders of the church of Ephesus to keep watch over "the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers," and to "[b]e shepherds of the church of God" (Acts 20.28). Perhaps taking their cue from Paul, some early church leaders wrote in a similar vein, notably Ignatius. All this presupposes that the rest of us are sheep who must be led by their wise, benevolent human overseers. Nonsense. Bishops are not divinely-appointed monarchs; they're "hired help," with specific jobs to do.

It is to laugh. Anyone who has ever watched a mainline church in the throes of controversy knows that bishops are not the leaders one looks to for theological restraint. Controversial votes in the ECUSA General Convention are decided by the deputies; the House of Bishops is always comfortably in the vanguard.

Those who hold the croziers for the dioceses of ECUSA lack almost any accountability to anyone. Hired help? They're more like "presidents for life". When it comes to shepherding, they are as wont to drive their flocks into new fields as they are to keep them within bounds.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but the language of liberals is all too often exactly expressive of the opinion that the laity are dumb sheep who need to be led to the green fields of tolerance and every other liberal virtue, and that without this direction, they would stray into choking down the thorns of bigotry. I have yet to find time to read the material about the proposed convenant, but it's rather obvious that the biggest problem with letting the primates at it is that the liberals would be consistently outvoted.

Paleo-ArtTheory

It is a common feature of traditionalist critics that they will attempt to theorize that traditional high art is objectively good and that anything else is objectively bad. This is amusingly constricted by one's tradition, so that for instance Russian harmonized chanting can be good or bad, depending on whether you are embracing that tradition or rejecting it as an innovation.

So here we have Daniel Mitsui railing against popular culture. Well, specific media, at any rate, as proxies for it. I'm surprised he doesn't take a few swings at modern high culture, but as he hasn't I'm to be deprived of the amusement of watching him try to drag himself out of that intellectual swamp.

Popular music and popular culture, as it is, presents enough problems. One only has to look at the situation of music in the early 20th century, particularly as it involves Americans. The class meanings of different categories and even nationalities are bloody obvious. Folk music of the period doesn't exist as, well, folk music; it exists as a sort of upper class archaeology, rendered acceptable by the suave touch of Vaughan Williams or Grainger or Sharp or Child. Gottschalk was reduced to popular music by dint of being an American. Gershwin, writing for the theater and the "dance" orchestra, swasn't respected as high culture.

Is American shape-note music folk music, or not? Well, it doesn't neatly fit into any slot. On the one hand, it is an isolated subculture; but on the other, it has from the beginning relied upon the technologies of printing and travel. And while we're at it, relying on the technology of music for income can be traced right back to Byrd and Tallis getting a monopoly on music printing.

What about Tchaikovsky's church music? Is it an imitation, or the real thing? Is the distinction even meaningful? I would say that it isn't.

And so, on it goes. It's very hard to point to popular culture as anything different from low culture-- which is to say, as a class difference-- before the late 1800s. Popular culture is a function of prosperity, of the lower classes being able to purchase art as easily as the upper classes. In music, it is closely coupled with the appearance of pianos in middle class homes, and then with recordings. But a funny thing happened: middlebrows took over the old high culture, and therefore the high culture had to invent something new-- preferably something that the middle would not appropriate. That's how we ended up with 20th century "epatez les bourgeous" "High Art With Furrowed Brow" (Peter Schickele, with lots of reverb). This freed pop culture to be the anti-culture that it is today.

But then again, the notion of artists as "humble craftsmen" is laughable. Artists as a group are notoriously arrogant-- often with some reason, of course, inasmuch as they express their talents. They are also prone to theorizing, a trait particularly evident starting in the 1800s, but also conspicuous in the theory-happy middle ages. Nor is the artist-superstar a particularly modern idea. Nodern communications and prosperity simply allows the lower classes to participate in the phenomenon, and thus amplify it.

If there is an argument to be made, it is in the totality and immediacy of film. I have always sensed something akin to envy on the part of wordsmiths in particular when they talk about music, and some of the same feeling I sense in discussion of film. Music is granted a gateway into the psyche that is barred to mere talk, a channel deemed dangerous in its power and disrespectable in its "irrationality". I see that film gains the same power.

But the notion that one will put such time to better use is verging on juvenile in its laughability. Some of us are destined to be polymaths, and some of us just need a break from shovelling coal. And a lot of us who fancy that we might be polymaths are destined to be no more than dilletantes.

Over in Serge's blog, where the real action on this seems to be taking place, Mitsui said (among many other things), "I see natural traditionalism as the primary way that the faith is preserved, not catechisms or papal pronouncements (the metaphor I use is that those are part of the armor, not part of the knight). Catholic art and liturgy and music and culture are part of Catholicism - to reduce the "teaching of the Church" to the moral and doctrinal precepts is to ignore the Church as an incarnate reality and an actor in history." Natural tradition is "doing what you've always done", and that's not Catholicism. Roman Catholic art is every bit as systematized as Roman Catholic doctrine; indeed, the schoolmen didn't see a distinction between one and the other, nor did their followers in later days feel any much compunction to halt its development at any given point. Going "back" to the middle ages was the province of Anglicans, not that they ever succeeded in truly doing so. But for many years the division between Anglican and Roman art ran neatly between Abbot Suger and Palladio, with the Romans firmly on the side of innovation in this.

I'm not going to see The Da Vinci Code. partly it's because, having children of a certain age, movie going has to be carefully rationed, and by most accounts this one isn't worth the aggravation. Part of it is because I would have to resist throwing rotten tomatoes at all the misrepresentations. But I'm not going to reckon this as unto righteousness.

Is This Liturgy Heresy? Please Discuss

It's our buddies at the Office of Women's Ministries again, this time with a Eucharist Using Female Nouns and Pronouns which is "for use in discussion". They want discussion? I can give them discussion.

One point which has come out of all the liturgical revision proposals is that the 1979 structure has become the de facto ECUSA standard. All the changes have concentrated on the words; none have suggested the kind of rearrangements that 1979 made. This has important positive and negative consequences.

The positive consequence is that a fixed structure reinforces examination about how church architecture supports the liturgy. I've had some discussion of this with others, and then there are those crazy liturgists at St. Gregory of Nyssa who are clearly working from the 1979 structure as the basis for a radically different space. (In my view, it's an unsuccessful experiment, but that's another post.)

The negative observation is, unfortunately, the one that matters more. Changing the words tends to imply a certain rejection of the old words. OK-- the whole experiment here seems to be to do without the male language for God. If that is so, then there are a lot of changes which go beyond this. For instance, the conventional change V&R at the end of the readings is changed from

Reader The Word of the Lord.
People Thanks be to God.

to this:

Reader The Holy Word.
People Blessed be.

The first change is obviously explicable by the desire to avoid the word "Lord". The second change is not; the original response ought to be utterly innocuous. What's more striking, as a number of the respondents on titusonenine have pointed out, is that "blessed be" is a conventional response among wiccans, and has no particular Christian precedent. This change is objectionable; we ought not to be replacing our own language with that of an anti-Christian group.

The puzzling changes continue in the prayers of the people. They have chosen to adapt Form III, which is a rather good use of the V&R form. But again, the changes seem to step far outside their program, because the only "problem" word is the first one: "Father". I wonder why there is a problem with saying "Grant that every member of the church may truly and humbly serve you; that your Name may be glorified by all people." (I've italicized the words that were changed, as in the following passages.) I also don't understand why we cannot say "We pray for all bishops, priests and deacons; that they may be faithful ministers of your Word and Sacraments."

WHen we get to the confession, the changes multiply, and some of the changes have a history of contrary objections. The invitation has many changes (which I've bolded): "Let us confess the ways we have separated ourselves from our Divine Mother, from our own best selves and our neighbors." "Sin" has been excised; "against" has been excised; and "our best selves" has been inserted. Getting rid of sin is a weenie revision, to begin with. But there's also the question of whether we can sin against ourselves. The confession itself seems to think so, and boldly inserts a third commandment after the two Great Commandments.

All of this is before I step up to the central change: calling God "Mother" and using a lot of non-biblical language to emphasize the feminine. There's a long record of objection to this which I mostly endorse, so I'll confine myself to two observations pertinent to this text. Right at the beginning, the celebrant says, "Blessed be the Lady who births, redeems and sanctifies us." Right off the bat, I'd object to the word "births". God made us. I also have to complain about the modalism that creeps in every time they have to work around the Triune Name, and following the greeting there is a seemingly needless rewrite of the COllect for Purity. But the choice of "births" is striking. All along there seems to be some implication that we-- well, that women need to feel some connection to the Persons of the trinity that is strong than the mere human image. Well, this gets tripped up by the sensible yet perverse judgement that Jesus' masculinity must be scrupulously preserved in the texts. They also do not dare to change the Lord's Prayer, though they do dare to resist calling Jesus "Lord". And in the one explicit reference to the second person of the Trinity, he is called "son". Well, isn't Jesus supposed to humanize the godhead? And so, isn't the scandal still there, that Jesus is and must be a particular sex? And therefore, doesn't this make the whole argument rather moot, because we must be able to relate to Jesus regardless of our own sex?

My reaction, in the end, is that if the words of 1979 need revision, for the most part at this point we can only justify some tinkering. It amazes me that, only thirty years after the most extensive changes ever made in the liturgy, we are already talking about wholesale change again.

Please, Thor, Make It Stop!

What is it with the pagans, anyway?!?!?

I come home, bring up titusonenine, and here's the first entry: Love Potion Number 815

I follow the link (the only content) to this article at Stand Firm, wherein it is revealed that the Episcopal Book/Resource Center (at good ol' 815 2nd Ave.) is selling a book of love spells and potions, written by a woman who is apparently reasonably well-known in wiccan circles.

Folks, I'd love to be able to say that "you can't make stuff like this up." Unfortunately, it seems as though we can expect this sort of thing at regular intervals from our friends in high places.

But fortunately, the bookstore has just the thing: The Book of Occaisional Services. "Restoring of Things Profaned" begins on Page 202 and "Concerning Exorcism" is on Page 155 of my 1979 edition. If they've taken them out in the 2003 edition, I'm sure I can make my copy available.

UPDATE:After numerous complaints, the book is no longer being offered. See also this very perceptive comment by Fr. Dean A. Einerson:

The problem is not paganism, but a dull, stupid secularism. The people that order books like that do not believe in witchcraft. They do not believe in anything except themselves. For them “Spirituality” is a hobby, a leisure time activity, a way to spend time and money that is no different than any other diversion. It certainly has nothing to do with heaven or hell. CS Lewis wrote the following in “Is Theism Important,” *God in the Dock,* p. 172. (Eerdmans, 1970): “When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. “If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.” What, I am sure, Lewis never imagined was how close we are to opening the General Convention that way. Fortunately for the bull, we are not there quite yet.

(tip to Common Reader)

Not a Prophet

Apparently I'm not the only person bothered by the frequent appearance of the word "prophetic" in revisionist statements. And frequent it is. As of this writing, there are fifteen articles on the front page of Fr. Jake's blog. None of them contains the word "prophetic", but there are seventeen occurances of the word in the comments, spread out over comments on eight of the articles. Perhaps its just my mistaken impression, but it seems to me that the word hardly appears in Catholic or Evil Right Wing blogs.

Matt Kennedy is not impressed. Neither is newbie Anglican. I can't say that I am all that impressed either. Nobody would ever mistake me for a prophet, nor would I ever dare to claim that my words here are any but my own. And if the councils of the Episcopal Church speak as the Spirit, where does that put the councils of all those other churches?

To me, this is the other great distasteful character of the revisionists. The unconcealed contempt (if not hatred) for their opposition is bad enough; that their repetition of secualr liberal shibboleths is prophecy is more than I can take. Yes, the opposition is often quite arrogant; but this is beyond the pale. I don't hear prophecy; I hear the Spirit of the Age.

Round the Table

Over at Fr. Jake we had a discussion that centers on the image of an extended family meal. A lot of interesting stuff happened in the course of this discussion, but all along I felt a certain discomfort at the image.

Five of the seven sacraments specifically refer to real aspects of our humanity. We are born (baptism); we cannot take care of ourselves or take full responsibility for ourselves until we grow old enough (confirmation); we eat and drink (the eucharist); we form families and have children (marriage); and we sicken and die (unction). I can't quite fit confession and ordination into this, but I don't think that's essential to the point.

When one talks about meals in this wise, the image calls up communion. But I don't think that the eucharist, for better or worse, is much like a family meal, especially the omnium gatherum thanksgiving day feast. Perhaps it ought to be, but that's not the point. No, I think the actuality of the eucharist is more like a restaurant, with the Father setting the menu, the Holy Spirit doing the cooking, and the Son picking up the tab. The clergy are like the hostess/maitre d', the waiters, and the busboys; and the laity are the customers. Now, this is not an ideal image either, but it's quite a bit more like the real image from scripture:

Then he said to his slaves, 'The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.' Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

Inasmuch as the weekly eucharist realizes on earth the wedding feast of the lamb, it is not a family meal. Great and small, known and unknown are all gathered together, not for conversation, but to enter into the joy of the master.

But sitting to table together, if we do not converse, is not so hard. The hard sacrament here is not communion, but marriage. Eating is a simple thing; forming a nousehold and living in fidelity and bearing and raising children: those are impossible things, by comparison. The subject is so complex as to support most of the fiction in the world, when it comes to that.

The Campaign Continues

The attack upon the ani-liberal forces continues, with Chane taking up where his communications office left off. This time it's in the pages of Episcopal Life:

Gifts from such wealthy donors as Howard Ahmanson Jr. and the Bradley, Coors and Scaife families, or their foundations, allow the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy to sponsor so-called "renewal" movements that fight the inclusion of gays and lesbians within the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches and in the United Church of Christ. Should the institute succeed in "renewing" these churches, what we see in Nigeria today may well be on the agenda of the Christian right tomorrow.

I don't know about Bradley, Coors, or Scaife; it has already been established that Ahmanson is Episcopalian. However, there's that weaselly "may" in the last sentence, the sure mark of alarmist claptrap. The diocese's revelation of Ahmanson's intent is weak and unconvincing, but in any case the image of ECUSA as a vehicle for some sort of sexual fascism is just silly. ECUSA's inevitable risk is turning into a club for right-thinking snobs who want a little religious ritual in their lives. Dog-collared Black Shirts? Preposterous.

WHen it comes to denunciations, I'm waiting for Chane to denounce, oh, Spong and the Office of Women's Ministries and any number of other heretical persons/organizations in ECUSA. Fair's fair, after all. If he doesn't denounce them because he agrees with them, then I'm happy to add him to my list of excommunicate bishops. Or maybe he doesn't denounce them because they are allies in the battle against the conservatives. But that would make his demands here, of course, hypocritical.

Big House Syndrome

Over at Entangled States we have some discussion of the overview of the Faith COmmunities Today study of Episcopal congregations.

Now, there are many, many statistical boobytraps in this study, and one of them has to do with parish size and growth. Now, from the report, we have these figures:

The median seating capacity in parish worship facilities is 175 persons. Only 16% of Episcopal congregations have facilities that seat more than 300 people, while one in four seats 100 or fewer.

And our commentator goes on to observe that these figures place an upper limit on possibilities for church growth.

Well, not exactly. First, there's the solution brought up by another: more services. But more fundamental are two other issues. First, let's look at a few more numbers. The report identifies 16% of parishes as rural/small town, and another 45% in communities of between 2,500 and 50,000. It's a little hard to decipher what that 45% means, but that's not all that important. What is important is that the 16% of small town/rural parishes significantly skew the numbers. It's a very safe bet that most of those parishes are on the small side, both in ASA and seats. So the median of seats of churches that have some expectation of growth is prabably rather higher than 175.

Or maybe not, because in my experience the biggest determinant of church growth, other things being equal, is what the community is doing. Huge spikes of growth around here (semi-rural/outer-suburban Maryland) are associated with established churches that get surrounded by development.

But the other side of the "too small to live" theory is that all of this presupposes expansion of parishes without increasing cleric staff and without doing any building. A building in the hand is a considerable asset, and something like Fr. Knisely's church is essentially irreplaceable. But even when the building is abandoned and the parish moves into school cafeterias and other rented spaces, the real savings comes from paying for one priest for 500 people instead of the more usual two.

Al of this is moot if there isn't any real pressure for expansion. I suspect that parishes (again all other things being equal) which do not feel pressure to expand will in fact experience significant contractions if the abandon their buildings. Expansion requires keeping the parish on the upper side of that magic 2/3s number. Also, in terms of programs, I wonder about the assumption that they belong to the parishes and not to the diocese.

Anyway, the point in the end is that this more complicated than just buildings that are too small.

Following the Money - The Wrong Way

In the continuing campaign to discredit the conservative opposition, we have a new entry from the Diocese of Washington, in the form of an expose of the funding of the American Anglican Council and other opposition organizations and of the connections between these groups and the Institute on Religion and Democracy. The timing of this missive, late in a Friday afternoon with very little trace on the diocesan website to show that it is even there, suggests a maneuver to get this in the Saturday papers (especially the Washington Post religion section) while largely denying the AAC the opportunity to present an effective reply. But perhaps my cynicism is misplaced.

About a third the way down the first page, the name "Howard F. Ahmanson Jr." is presented in big, not-so-friendly letters. This profile from Salon seems to give a better sense of what Ahmanson is about, but eventually even the diocesan article gets around to the inconvenient fact that Mr. Ahmanson is an Episcopalian, albeit in a dissident parish. It's not unreasonable, therefore, for him to direct his resources in the current crisis. Both the Salon profile and the diocesan expose take some pains to outline his connections with the (IMHO a bit cracked) R.J. Rushdoony, who is notorious as the father of Christian Reconstructionism. Reconstructionism is pretty far afield of any Anglican perspective, but the Salon profile seems to indicate some sort of break after Rushdoony's death, and it's unclear that Ahmanson's present positions owe much to reconstructionist thought per se. In any case, Ahmanson has a dog in this hunt.

The two articles both lean on Ahmanson's reclusiveness, though again, there reason is right there in the articles. If I were wealthy, and were held to be influential, and I suffered under Tourette's Syndrome, I'd be media-shy too.

So from there we pass on to the American Anglican Council. I wish the AAC website would 'fess up as to who its current officers are. Let's go back in time quite a ways, though, to an AAC chapter organizing meeting at St. Francis Potomac. (I should say at this point that I am not and never have been a member of the AAC.) The featured speaker? Mary Haines. Yep, the bishop of Washington's wife was there to denounce him. I mention this because the Diocese of Washington articles imply that the AAC was essentially bought by its funders without really producing much in the way of evidence. The reality out here in the parishes is that the conservatives do not need to be directed to find issues to object to in their dioceses. For instance, if I recall correctly the organizing meeting was not that long after the Haines/Dixon campaign of forcing Dixon on the parishes which continued to deny her sacraments.

And from thence we go back to Lambeth 1998, which the diocesan article passes over in a single sentence. I followed this fairly closely, unfortunately having to rely on the paired opposing weak reeds of Louie Crew and David Virtue, neither of whom could be accused of working from a neutral viewpoint. Lambeth was crucial to the current crisis, because it showed that if the conservatives could throw off the direction of their Anglo-American handlers, they had the numbers to dictate the future of the communion. The conference was therefore marked by a succession of such crises of control, and enlivened by some impressive displays of arrogance on both sides. Perhaps the most telling of these, for the present controversy, were the "chicken dinner" remarks. I don't for a minute think that the Africans and Asians needed to be bribed to vote against the Americans, and those who made these accusations in pbulic revealed a blistering condescension and contempt for third world bishops. The whole notion was conspicuously delusional.

Which brings us back to the present. Against the accusations which the article makes about AAC et al. external management of Dromontane runs the principle long observed about Anglican communion councils: "The Africans pray, the Americans pay, and the British write the resolutions." But recently the British resolution writing has not been that congenial to the American establishment, and none more so than in the person of Rowan Williams. There was great expectation at his appointment, on all sides, that as a card-carrying liberal he would be a mouthpiece and would marshall the communion in favor of liberal causes. This was met with dismay on one side and triumph on the other, but what very few foresaw (and if I may be immodest, I say it earlier than most did) was that Williams would foreswear advocacy of any position on the crucial matters, and would act strictly as a custodian of the expressed will of the communion. So when Dromontane came around, the conservatives were prepared, and liberals, as at Lambeth, lost the initiative.

And so we're faced with the following situation: two gay and one lesbian candidates for the Bishop of California, and a standing threat by the majority of the communion to excommunicate us if one of them is consecrated. And somehow, it is wrong for the conservatives to resist this-- not because of the moral argument, but because of some notion of fair play.

Those who've been paying attention will notice I've not mentioned the author of the expose. I've avoided doing so to point out something: this is not the advocacy of a private individual. It is the statement of the diocese itself, and thus is itself a poitical maneuver within the field of conflict. It's hard to say what the house of bishops will do, and it seems to me, ironically, that the most craven response would also be the most damaging to the conservative cause. If Chane and the other vanguard bishops get their way and get a gay or lesbian candidate with the necessary consents, they will end up in control of ECUSA as a whole, and probably almost all of the dioceses should they be hard-nosed about it. The reason is obvious: retaining power over the national church means retaining power over the dioceses, and retaining power over the dioceses means being able to impose their doctrines on the parishes. For again, we are back to the church as a locus of power, and a power which is presently delivered into the hands of the vanguard. And it's a power which draws its funds from many not entirely willing sources.

My parents are presbyterians, and my father was at one point clerk of the session at their church. It's sort of like being senior warden, except that the session delegates the housekeeping functions to the deacons (who are laypeople) and reserves all of the congregational governance to itself. Well. Over the same period as the parallel ECUSA problems, there has been a repetitive pattern of the national presbyterian church taking liberties with church prestige and influence, and with the reaction of being pulled back into line. Since they have no bishops, accountability is potentially complete. Episcopal accountability, by contrast, is almost nonexistent, and accountability of national church and diocesan offices is very low. So in both ECUSA and PCUSA people find their donations being directed to causes which they find morally (and often theologically) objectionable.

It's not hard, therefore, to deconstruct the whole thing in a different direction. I tend to suspect that a major part of the outrage which Ahmanson's funding is supposed to provoke finds its origin in the realization that the conservatives now have a source of support which the liberals cannot co-opt to their own ends.