Posted on 06/16/2007 10:31:36 PM PDT by sionnsar
Why has the controversy over Gene Robinson created the firestorm that it has? Why was it the factor that caused many of us to leave parishes in which we had spent most if not all our lives? After all, many of us rationalized our way through episcopal atheists like John Shelby Spong, besides whom Robbie is a model of Christian orthodoxy.
For me, it was not just the fact that the Episcopal Church had voted in convention that it would not let the Bible get in its way anymore. It was the decision's titanic arrogance. In 2003, ECUSA created a fact on the ground and destroyed, in one stroke, 2,000 years of Christian and Anglican teaching and every measure every GenCon had ever passed on the subject without caring about or being particularly interested in what the rest of the Anglican world thought about it.
And ECUSA knew what was coming. Because in October, 2003, the Anglican primates told Frank Griswold this, among other things:
At this time we feel the profound pain and uncertainty shared by others about our Christian discipleship in the light of controversial decisions by the Diocese of New Westminster to authorise a Public Rite of Blessing for those in committed same sex relationships, and by the 74th General Convention of the Episcopal Church (USA) to confirm the election of a priest in a committed same sex relationship to the office and work of a Bishop.
These actions threaten the unity of our own Communion as well as our relationships with other parts of Christ’s Church, our mission and witness, and our relations with other faiths, in a world already confused in areas of sexuality, morality and theology, and polarised Christian opinion.If [Robinson's] consecration proceeds, we recognise that we have reached a crucial and critical point in the life of the Anglican Communion and we have had to conclude that the future of the Communion itself will be put in jeopardy. In this case, the ministry of this one bishop will not be recognised by most of the Anglican world, and many provinces are likely to consider themselves to be out of Communion with the Episcopal Church (USA). This will tear the fabric of our Communion at its deepest level, and may lead to further division on this and further issues as provinces have to decide in consequence whether they can remain in communion with provinces that choose not to break communion with the Episcopal Church (USA).
A document the Presiding Bishop signed his name to. But several months later, Frank told Stephen Bates:
[Griswold] told the Guardian: "Certainly, none of us had anticipated the effect of the ordination in New Hampshire.
It was telecast around the world. Possibly naively, we thought it was a local event."
Something that even Bates didn't buy.
The remark is surprising since - a fortnight before the consecration - Bishop Griswold attended a London meeting of Anglican primates at which a unanimous statement was issued serving warning that the communion would be in danger of being torn apart if the service went ahead.
Frank's comment to Bates suggests three possibilites. He didn't read what he signed. He didn't think the primates were serious. Or he didn't care. All of which suggest the profoundest possible indifference to and contempt for people with whom he and his church were supposed to be in communion.
But Episcopal arrogance is nothing new. Remember the ordination of women?
These principles emerged with clarity in 1973 just after the General Convention in Louisville declined to authorize the ordination of women to the priesthood. On July 29, 1974, the principle of “push ahead anyway” was activated when 11 female deacons were ordained to the priesthood in Philadelphia, in defiance of the General Convention and contrary to the Constitution and Canons.
How did the church respond? The 1976 General Convention (Minneapolis I) was persuaded that the illegal ordinations in Philadelphia, and four more in Washington, were prophetic rather than defiant. By the margin of a hair’s breadth, the 1976 convention consented to a minor change in the canons that allowed the ordination of women as priests and bishops.
So 2003 was not an innovation. And Anglicans are not the only fellow Christians ECUSA has spit in the faces of.
But contrary to recent assertions of Bonnie Anderson, the new president of the House of Deputies, that change was only pushed through because it was understood that the ordination of women would be permissive only, never mandatory. No bishop or diocese, we were assured at the time, would ever be forced to adopt this new practice which was contrary to the theology of holy orders held by many in our own church, and also flew in the face of Roman Catholics and Orthodox with whom we were actively pursuing ecumenism.
When your church unilaterally makes a decision as momentous as that one without so much as asking for the views of fellow Christians with whom you are supposed to be in ecumenical dialogue, thus torpedoing the possibility of anything concrete ever resulting from those discussions, your church obviously cares nothing for ecumenical dialogue. Or, since you've just wasted years of their time, the people you're talking to.
Other examples of Episcopal arrogance are too numerous to mention. There is the relentless invocation of Episcopal "polity" as a reason why Gene Robinson should be a bishop and why the rest of the Anglican world shouldn't be allowed to say anything about it. There's its corollary, the idea that the whole problem is that the rest of the Anglican world doesn't understand Episcopal polity.
There was the peremptory summoning of Rowan Williams to the September bishops meeting. There was this recent condescending pat on the head from Mrs. Schori:
BILL MOYERS: If biology, as I understand it does, tells us that homosexuality is a genetic given. And religion says homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God, can those two perceptions ever be reconciled?
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: How do we come to a conclusion that it’s a sin in the eyes of God?
BILL MOYERS: Well, you’re the-
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: What texts do we read that-
BILL MOYERS: But you know, all of your adversaries say that it is.
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: Well, I would have them go back to the very sources they find so black and white about that, and ask what’s the context of this passage? What was it written to address? What was going on underneath it that this appears to speak to? And I think we find when we do some very serious scholarship, that in almost every case, it’s speaking about a cultural context that looks nothing like the one in which we’re wrestling with homosexuality today.
BILL MOYERS: So how do you read Jonathan and David, that story?
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: I think it’s got some challenging things to say to us who have said for hundreds of years, thousands of years that it’s inappropriate for two men to love each other in that way.
And this one.
BILL MOYERS: When you look at what the other side says about homosexuality, and the Scriptural tradition, do you grant them anything?
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: Absolutely. That has been the traditional way of seeing things. It was also why Galileo got in so much trouble. The traditional way of seeing things was that the sun went around the Earth, not the other way around. If you expect things to be in a certain way, it’s hard to see data that ask you to see the world in a very different way.
BILL MOYERS: So you would concede that as people like you want to modernize the Canon, the tradition and the Scripture, the traditionalists who look back and say, "This is our sacred tradition," would not want to come along on that journey.
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: Absolutely. But, I would take them back into that tradition to see within it far more complexity than they’ve been willing to admit.
Add to all this Leo Frade's recent assertion to the effect that if you think homosexual activity is a sin, you're basically a Klansmen and you have a church that does arrogance better than any Christian tradition around. Which is odd considering how little ECUSA has to be arrogant about.
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Speak the truth in love. Eph 4:15
I am speechless - the arrogance of the TEC leadership is beyond description!
Agreed — though I confess I couldn’t make it through the entire transcript.
Hmmm... Who said, “Tell a lie enough times and it becomes truth” or some words to that effect...
FYI..the link in the article is to the full transcript of the interview between Schori and Moyers..worth reading..
Thankfully, I live in a Diocese where our Bishop is very conservative as are most priests within the diocese. So I believe that in my lifetime, I won't face the dilemma of having to take communion from a practicing homosexual celebrant. For anyone who thinks I'm a "homophobe," please understand that I wouldn't take communion from my priest if I knew he were a practicing bank robber, or violating Scripture in other ways.
However, should that happen, I'll have no problem walking out and joining another church. Given the tendencies of the other churches today - Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist - the only church in my small town that might fulfill my spiritual needs would be the Roman Catholic church.
But I moved to the Diocese of Olympia (though that might not have changed the outcome, as I was formerly/last in the Diocese of El Camino Real) a quarter-century ago -- and for all that folks look down on the Continuing churches I have had a happy home here ever since. (We have three bloggers in our parish: try http://anglicanparishpriest.blogspot.com/ and http://continuinghome.blogspot.com/ for two of them.)
BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: I think it’s got some challenging things to say to us who have said for hundreds of years, thousands of years that it’s inappropriate for two men to love each other in that way.
So if two men are said to love each other, that must mean they engage in sodomy together?
This obsession with aberrant sexual practices has become ridiculous.
In defense of the Episcopal leadership, the Anglicans have always tended to be long on talk and short on action. And while there has finally been a tiny bit of movement by the African Bishops, even at this stage, they are not exactly moving with dispatch.
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