The Moral Perils of the Consumer Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redde Mihi Stolam Immortalitatis

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

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


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



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

1979 and All That

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not That Kind of Relationship

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

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

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

HarperCollins and the Velvet Elvis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Odd I May Be

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

Does This Mean Anything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Communion Worth a Bath?

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

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

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

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

All Over?

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

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

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

2009: The Numbers

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

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

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

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

Epic Statistical Fail

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

Except that they can't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Aging of Clergy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

It's Not Just Me

For years I have complained about the liberal strategy in the church of breaking the rules against progress first and then getting their violations authorized ex post facto. Well, finally it seems someone else has noticed.

Philip Turner, writing on the Anglican Communion Institute website, is warning everyone not to trust ECUSA when it comes to "dialogue":

Dialogue, for TEC, is not a process of disciplined argument designed to clarify issues, expose false reasoning, and arrive at a truth both parties can hold. It is not even a process of critical examination that occurs before taking a disputed action. Rather it is an aggressive form of self-promotion built around “talking points” rather than disciplined argument—talking points that are meant to beat down opposition to a disputed action already taken. In short, the decision made by the Standing Committee is in reality a decision to allow TEC more time to gain acceptance for its actions. It is not, in TEC’s mind, a time to subject those actions to “consequences” or to critical examination.

Turner then goes right back to the point I also identify as the start of this strategy:

TEC’s recent history makes the truth of these charges abundantly plain. Let us begin with the first of the more recent challenges to the Communion’s common life–the ordination of women to the priesthood. Before I begin this tale, I wish to make it clear that I am a strong supporter of the ordination of women both to the Presbyterate and to the Episcopate. What I do not support is the way in which TEC made this change. The way in which it was done opened Pandora’s box, and now TEC seeks to spread the bad habits it learned though this event to the rest of the Communion.

He then outlines exactly the same steps I see: the "prophetic" step beyond the bounds, the "justice" supposedly denied by not working in process, and the failure of any discipline from church organs, presumably because to dare to insist on church order was to risk being tagged an oppressor.

It's pretty clear at this point that the larger agenda is for the liberal establishment to gain control of the first world Anglican churches, and the communion can go to hell after that because that establishment doesn't really care that much about Africa, Asia, or South America since they are too backward to be persuaded, especially since the American troglodytes have taught them some politics. That takes us right back to the deeper social purpose of the Episcopal Church, which is to make the world safe for the upper middle class. The possibility that they would listen to any truly prophetic voice is pretty much gone now, once they have converted the Church of England (a project now in progress in the form of the campaign to drive the Anglo-Catholics out by making sure they have no place in the hierarchy), they will be finished. Holding their members' feet to the fire over their sexual sinning-- not homosexuality, but their lack of interest in marriage-- is not going to be on the list. There will never again be a serious confrontation over abortion, because the freedom to copulate without consequences is going to always trump responsibility towards the children thus engendered. The persistent lie that they are in conflict with the establishment, when in fact they are the establishment, isn't going away either.

The only possible opening I can see in this is that the establishment is also so patently heretical. There is some hope that the next generation-- mine is too tainted-- will tire of all the clerics telling them to give up on any conventional faith, and will restore the church to some foundation of integrity, actually living out the charity and tolerance to which, at present, they only pay lip service.

Sacred Cow Tipping

Derek Olsen continues his campaign against modernist sacred cows with a pair of articles on the Virgin Birth and the Perpetual Virginity of Mary (part 1/ part 2). He and I come to different conclusions, as I (perhaps too modernist-tainted myself) have taken the interpretation that the PV is the result of excessive Marian piety. What is far more telling is that the remarks, from the beginning, have been dominated by controversy over the Virgin Birth itself.

It is a commonplace among various Catholic partisans to assert that the Protestants are all doomed to go to theological pieces because they don't have infallibility. This thread illustrates the more complicated reality and the weird power struggle behind the theology.

For example, consider this discussion of the proposal to put WEB DuBois on the ECUSA kalendar. DuBois did not, to put it mildly, have a positive opinion of the church, and his admiration for Stalin was at best delusional, at worst a defense of a mass murderer. As far as his advocacy of racial causes is concerned, I think it is a very safe bet that when November 14 rolls around we are not going to see a commemoration of Booker T., nor of the more overt religious GW Carver when his day comes up. I do not want to get too caught up in racial politics here, but the preference for the upper middle Yankee DuBois over the southern ex-slave Washington is quite telling. In any case I'm not the only one wondering why we are putting yet another non-Christian on the calendar.

Which brings me to the comments to Olsen's posts, in which I find myself engaged in a lopsided conflict with someone who is apparently some sort of Heidegger aficionado and who, along with another, prefers to refer to scripture as a "faith text", though apparently "faith text" means specifically "something we don't believe in". The resurrection is not an event, but a doctrine (which is apparently some modernist code phrase for "something the apostles just made up"). These are only more extreme examples of sentiments expressed by others; doubt apparently comes easily, but for whatever reason its proponents seem to have some trouble following through on the rejection of the gospel story.

At the same time we find another person chastising John Robison for "nitpicking" at the addition of DuBois to the kalendar. We should be feeding the hungry instead of wasting our time on such theological concerns, we are told. Of course, that one can use that juxtaposition against anything is sufficient reason not to take it seriously. But more telling is the implication in this that the nature of Christian life is essentially moral, and that matters of theology or worship can be set aside as unimportant. This perhaps also explains why at St.Gregory of Nyssa's dancing saints can include Malcolm X with his famous denunciation of Christianity as the "white man's religion", beyond the sheer radical chic of the thing. Moralistic therapeutic deism, crossed with liberal social activism, has become the theology of the those who like to see themselves as the church's ruling class.

Actually, they don't really believe that matters of theology are so unimportant as to justify simple acceptance of the tradition. They really believe that it's important for theology to express and realize their doubts. If they didn't believe that, they wouldn't keep making an issue of it, and the 1979 BCP would remain undisturbed. But instead-- and again, the form of this is quite telling-- the theology of the BCP must be altered specifically to make moral points about the place of women. But this is all OK because of this modernist doctrine that the scriptures really do not tell us anything definite and immutable. In any theological conflict, it is the (liberal) theologians who dictate what scripture says, even when a naive reading would say the opposite. Even Jesus is not immune: if he says "Father", well, we know better than the Son of God, and oh, that doesn't mean that he embodies God in any way, so his words can be set aside whenever they do not support our more enlightened principles.

This is what is going to destroy the Episcopal Church, not the fight over sexuality (though more on that anon). The persistent and increasing attempt by effective nonbelievers to control and direct the church is against the faith of the average believer in the church, who may or may not have a committed opinion on homosexuality but who more likely than not can say "born of the Virgin Mary" every Sunday without apology, and who, on low Sunday, hears the gospel account and has no trouble believing that Thomas's fingers were laid upon physical, living flesh. Having driven the evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics away, the ruling unitarians are going to run out of bogeymen; the cachet of opposing fundamentalism will pall when it turns out that fundamentalism includes, for instance, insistence on baptism. And even in sexuality the fight isn't ever really going to go away; people are going to keep their qualms in the closet, but I think it is quite safe to assume that reluctance about homosexuality is going to be with us in the church, because the spiritual authority of its clergy is so eroded by their faithlessness.

Meanwhile there is a new generation, whose members do not remember the glory days of civil rights and antiwar activism, and who do not make obeisance to mandarins of skepticism. At age fifty, I do not remember the glory days, and even in college I was impatient with the sophistry of "things no modern man can believe". Derek Olsen is a lot younger than I am-- decades younger, I would venture to guess.

The Ugly Party at Prayer

I have become dismayed at the rhetoric being thrown around politically these days. I am apparently not the only one, judging from Michael Gerson's editorial in the Washington Post. He coins the phrase, "the Ugly Party", describing its rhetoric as "shar[ing] some common themes: urging the death or sexual humiliation of opponents or comparing a political enemy to vermin or diseases. It is not merely an adolescent form of political discourse; it encourages a certain political philosophy -- a belief that rivals are somehow less than human, which undermines the idea of equality and the possibility of common purposes." I personally think he is being way too kind to adolescents who are well past their "grow up by" date, and he shies away from the rampant stupidity and blockheaded certainty which are part and parcel of the ugliness. Nonetheless e has it pegged, and it's obvious that nothing good is going to come of this.

And nothing good is going to come of its analogue in the church. Bryan Owen comments on the Church of the Ugly Party-- that is, an awful lot of our church, or at least an awful lot of our church commentators. I can understand some of the anger expressed over at StandFirm, considering the course of the Kennedys' departure. After that it goes downhill rapidly, with over-the-top and unwarrantedly bitter remarks tossed off about every move from the liberal establishment. And as Owen observes, the other side is not really any better-- indeed, I would say that, as they are consistently winning, they really have little ground for the anger that spews from their pens. Yet you can read the comments in the "Thinking Anglicans" blog (a title which holds a slim lead over "Anglican Mainstream" in the contest for greatest hubris), and see if you aren't struck by the nastiness and dismissiveness therein (see, for example, this snarky article from Episcopal Cafe).

Meanwhile, I see that Fr. Jones of St. Peter's London Docks is discontinuing his blog. The reason, of course, is that he does not wish to make a spectacle out of his now untenable situation. I shall miss him; his Catholicism is not my Anglican "eth", but his dedication and faith are obvious, and he after all has something to lose: not just his parish, but even (so I am told) his pension if he leaves.I am told that his sort are a tiny minority, which I suspect is not so true in England as (after thirty years) it is in the USA.

I will reserve my views on the future for another post. Suffice it to say that I find it increasingly difficult to live with the nastiness that has come pervade my church.

New Horizons in Liturgy

Given the reappearance of clown masses a few years back, my daughter suggested we needed a pirate baptism:

Celebrant: Are ye willing to walk the plank for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

Candidate: Aye!

The crew responds, ARRRRGH.

Hospitality, Inclusion, the Altar, and the Font

I have been following several discussions/posts about what Derek Olsen has taken to terming "communion without baptism" (or CWOB). As he and Tobias Haller have been engaging the Anglican Scotist (especially concerning this blog post), it struck me that I would prefer at this point to step back a little bit from the fray and take a larger view of those very current words, "inclusion" and "hospitality".

Now, as nearly everyone on the traditional side of the argument is wont to point out, the theology of the BCP is quite clear: baptism is what includes us in the church. Two passages from the catechism:

Q. How is the Church described in the Bible?
A. The Church is described as the Body of which Jesus
Christ is the Head and of which all baptized persons are
members. It is called the People of God, the New Israel,
a holy nation, a royal priesthood, and the pillar and
ground of truth.

Q. What is Holy Baptism?
A. Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us
as his children and makes us members of Christ’s Body,
the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.

Also, consider Cramner's words in the postcommunion prayer:

...and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people....

This rather puts me in a position very close to that of Christopher, who writes that "If I were to make a distinction in the parlance of our day, I would prefer "incorporation" rather than "inclusion."" I think, however, I must take a more aggressive stance. Let me reiterate my chief concern of a few weeks ago: that those so "included" in communion, in this age at least, are those with a commitment to syncretism that leads them away from Christianity.

Christopher, and BSnyder in the comments here, and Derek here, and I are all agreed: communion takes place in a Mystical Body in which the chief sacraments are not only about feeding or whatever, but that the Christian life is about being bound into that Body, which is the life of Christ. But that leads me to a much stronger negative response, one that is elicited by Paul's statements about the consequences of sexual immorality. The problem with offering communion to Hindus and Wiccans and random New Agers and other people who have no Christian intentions is that we are joining Christ back to them. We thus make communion a Hindu/Wiccan/New-Age/whatever sacrament.

If we want a feeding model, we would be better off looking to the Syro-Phoenician woman. At first, she seems to fit the bill; but note also that she who gathers up the crumbs from beneath the table specifically acknowledges Jesus' unique authority in approaching him in the first place. One should also note the cases in the Acts: conversion of gentiles leads directly to baptism. There is something of the restorationist in this movement, as though something was lost even before the Diddache, perhaps even before Pentecost itself. It's hard to take seriously a theory that is supposedly based in historical analysis and which appears to skip the entire history of the church.

My final observation is how deeply insecure this movement seems, underneath. BSynder sums it up thus: "Episcopalians have been so worried for so long about offending people that our preaching has become soft and atrophied." I would put it another way: that the radicals in the Episcopal Church are fine with the spiritual, but are scared to death of appearing to stand for anything religious. And I think this is hurting our evangelism, because in the end we increasingly cannot give anyone a reason for joining our church as a vehicle for joining with Christ. In this case, we are opening up the sacrament of our unity with Christ to people who do not want such unity and reject that inclusion. Surely that paradox is not lost on many who might convert rather than visit.

Addendum: I would commend to the reader a series of posts by Matt Gruner, beginning with Baptized into Eucharist.

Come See the Violence Inherent in the System

When the presiding bishop's pastoral letter was released, I didn't read it particularly carefully. Thus, I missed this quite remarkable passage:

We also recognize that the attempts to impose a singular understanding in such matters represent the same kind of cultural excesses practiced by many of our colonial forebears in their missionizing activity. Native Hawaiians were forced to abandon their traditional dress in favor of missionaries' standards of modesty. Native Americans were forced to abandon many of their cultural practices, even though they were fully congruent with orthodox Christianity, because the missionaries did not understand or consider those practices exemplary of the Spirit. The uniformity imposed at the Synod of Whitby did similar violence to a developing, contextual Christianity in the British Isles.

Now, I cannot speak to the other issues, for I am not as conversant with the situations in question. Early English church history, on the other hand, is something of a hobby with me, so when this passage was pointed out to me, I was aghast at her grotesque misrepresentation of the council.

As Mark Clavier writes:"We have here a sort of theological variation on Avatar"-- perhaps more apt an analogy than he intended, considering all the woad, er, blue skin in the movie. Of course, as he points out, the matter was nothing of the kind; the council was called to resolve differences in practice which were becoming too disruptive to continue tolerating. It is strikingly presumptuous for the PB to deny the assembled churchmen (and women-- remember that they met under the authority of Hilda) the right and authority to make the kinds of decisions which they made. The Celtic churchmen were not victims; they were parties to a dispute, which for the most part they acknowledged losing with grace and forebearance. The greatest saint of the era, Cuthbert, acceded to the changes and eventually assumed a short bishopric under the "new" (that is, Roman) hierarchy and rites.

Clavier notes, as he should, that Celtic Christianity serves as a object of romanticism. But he neglects another point, the continuing paradox of the present struggle: that 815 2nd Avenue stands not just for Iona, but also for Rome, and the General Conventions of the Episcopal Church might as well all be held in Whitby. And yet there is not the charity which characterized the English council, but indeed, only, war, legal rather than phsyical, but combat nonetheless. Or if I may jump, not so charitably, to a parable: the ruling clerisy in ECUSA is altogether too much like the servant who is forgiven his debt, but then presses all the more on those in debt to him.

There is no mythology of dissidence and freedom within the communion which cannot come back to haunt ECUSA in the treatment of its dissident and rebellious dioceses and parishes. And of course the reality is that the Episcopal Church is safe from having its parish churches and cathedrals confiscated by Cantuar, as opposed to the relentless litigating within ECUSA. But of course, unlike the Hawaiians or Navaho, the modern reactionaries are irredeemably wrong and have to be made to change their ways,

A Confused but Inclusive Mess

Judging from some discussions I'm seeing, the next assault on the church's theology is not going to be against the Father. Communion without baptism seems to have jumped to the head of the line. Now the prohibition against communing the unbaptized is so old as to be untraceable, to the point where in the New Testament baptism seems to be assumed. And while we're at it, in 2006 General Convention passed Resolution D084, confirming the restriction and asking the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops to make a presentation concerning the issue at the next GC. The paper so presented can be found here, and not too surprisingly it supports a pretty traditional yet middle-of-the-road understanding of baptism as an essential initiation into the life of the church, with communion being part of that common life together.

Nonetheless, the pressure against it continues, in the name of Inclusion. So, for instance, in the Daily Episcopalian we have a column by Linda L. Grenz, recently interim at Good Shepherd Silver Spring, presenting this line of thinking. So we get strung together the usual line of people we used to exclude: blacks, women, and homosexuals, with (for some reason) a detour to Hispanic workers for Walt Disney. We included them, the implication goes, so we should include everyone else.

This just completely ignores any kind of theology, because whatever exclusions there were varied widely, and the (good or bad) theology behind the exclusions was all over the map in the kinds of arguments made. Of course, women and blacks were always baptized. The exclusion of women from the clergy can be traced right back to specific statements in Paul's letters; whereas whatever theological justification can be wrung out of scripture for the exclusion of blacks from such positions was tortured at best. There was nothing in Paul, for instance, to hang the latter exclusion on, whereas the statement that in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek nor a long list of other, highly relevant distinctions plainly bears directly on the matter. This is surely why racial discrimination within the churches has been driven into fringey corners, while ordination of women must still fight for acceptance. Reconciling Paul's denial of distinction on the one hand and his flat prohibitions on the other requires theology, one way or the other.

Homosexuality is a quite different issue. Nobody claims it is sinful to be black or female; by contrast, the center of the homosexuality debate is over whether it is an ontological fact of sexuality which must be respected (and thus affirmed), or a manifestation of sinfulness which must be resisted. On the other hand, the rejection of Donatism implies that the only possibly insurmountable problem with Mary Glasspool's consecration is her sex, not who she chooses to have sex with. It stands as a symbol of the church's endorsement of homosexuality, but it doesn't delegitimize her office, at least if one accepts that a woman may be made a bishop.

All of this is preface to the observation that Grenz's essay doesn't come within miles of this. Indeed, considering the kind of inclusion that she discusses, I can only note Paul Goings's waspish remark at another place that he's "waiting for the movement to introduce ordination without baptism." I don't see the theology in this, only an inchoate urge towards Inclusion as the highest Christian value.

And furthermore, one should give a thought about how people who are not baptized may approach the rail (or should I say, altar, since rails are after all a realization of exclusion). People with strong religious commitments--faithful Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or atheists--are likely either to refrain out of piety or (perhaps in the case of the Hindus) reinterpret the act in the context of their own religion, in which case they may be ritual participants but not faithful participants. We cannot include these people with bread and wine.

From there we turn to that growing faith, the irreligious and the "spiritual but not religious". Here the paradox is made manifest: the problem these people have is their lack of religious commitment, so we "welcome" them by abolishing the requirement for that commitment! Or as I put it several years ago: "Open communion sends the message that you don't have standards." I have to think that these people are the ones most likely to transgress Paul's numerous warnings about approaching communion unworthily, not perceiving Christ in it. They are not being included; they are being indulged. They come to church with no commitment to Christ, and they leave the same way; in the middle they may persuade themselves that they've had some sort of deep spiritual (which, I am sad to say, is likely to mean aesthetic and emotive) experience, but the one person they do not want to meet there is John the Baptist demanding to know what they're doing there and calling them to repentance.

And naturally, as usual the clerics get to congratulate themselves on their radical hospitality. "Radical" means "rebellious", and if there isn't a bishop or the canons to rebel against, there's always the Baptists and the pope. "Hospitality" means catering to spiritual dilettantes. Meanwhile the church itself suffers, if only because of the old principle: "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"