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Transgender community works to gain protections in South Florida
The transgender community works to gain protections in South Florida.
Let’s see, in "GLBT", "G" and "L" are protected, now we’re working on "T," so that leaves "B." And the only reason why B doesn’t get much respect is because the existence of B muddies the identity of G and L.
Where the animals are tame and the people run wild…
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Kendall Harmon’s Radical Solution
Kendall Harmon’s radical solution for the Episcopal Church, i.e., the bishops absent themselves from Lambeth, is an interesting proposal. But it’s unlikely to get much traction where it counts. Let me look at this from a more political standpoint.
First, any kind of withdrawal from Lambeth–voluntary and temporary though it might be–would be interpreted as a de facto withdrawal from the Communion. And the TEC does not want to withdraw (or be expelled) from the Anglican Communion. Too much of TEC’s "brand identity" is tied up in being a part of the Communion, and that connexion gets mentioned repeatedly in the litigation to hold onto the property.
Second, such a withdrawal would also be an admission of guilt, that TEC’s action in ordaining Gene Robinson just might not have been a good thing to do (you can fill in the blank as to why.) And that is something that TEC just will not admit, even if they believed it. It is typical in our society to take strong positions and then spend all of our time concealing them in order to show how much comity we have. Such is what I call "fanaticism without conviction," and one of these days I’ll get into this in more detail.
Finally, it would take the Americans "out of the loop." And if there’s one place Americans hate to be, it’s out of the loop, irrespective of whether that loop is where they’re supposed to be or not.
Kendall Harmon’s idea presupposes a reasoned, Christian approach to the problem. What it would do, however, is induce shame in TEC’s "reappraisers." As any observer of the Middle East knows, shame leads to a shame-honour reaction. Even with liberals. That’s why this proposal is like a Republican President’s budget is with a Democratic Congress: dead on arrival.
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After half a lifetime…
Richard Kew’s piece After half a lifetime… confirms one of the things I mentioned in my email to the elf, specifically the problem of the seminaries:
It was when I started travelling around the church that I got to visit the seminaries that I started to discover how they functioned and what they perceived their role to be. Also, for a decade I happened to be officed in a seminaries so could see what happened there first hand. Gradually it dawned on me that my understanding of the nature of theological education was not what was going on in most of these places. There was little laying a firm foundation in Scripture, classic theology, philosophy, church history, and so forth, thereby equipping the next generation of ordained leaders for pastoral and missional ministry, but was more about propagandising the student body into seeing life, ministry, and God in a particular culturally-conditioned kind of way.
In these seminary settings some students rebel, a few are capable of cutting their theological and intellectual teeth in a constructive manner, but significant numbers swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker, and in the process often seemed to lose their first rich passionate love of the Lord Jesus Christ. A significant element of this prevailing seminary process is that it is predicated upon a hermeneutic of suspicion when handling the Scriptures, coupled with a sense of disdain for the wisdom of those who have journeyed the Christian way before us, and the notion that we now know better. When coupled with the desperate shortcomings of the Commission on Ministry system in most dioceses it is not difficult to see why leaders cannot lead, and the faith is not growing and blossoming as it ought.
I cannot agree with him about the following, as I explain elsewhere:
I have also become much more sacramental. I was formed to believe in the power of the Word, so wouldn’t have minded if we had had Communion just once a month. I am now grateful that the norm is to gather around both Word and Table each Sunday, the one preparing for the other, and the other reinforcing the one. Some years ago I went to be with a former Southern Baptist on his first Sunday in his Episcopal parish. I was looking forward to sitting at his feet as he opened Scripture – and to this day I remember the text: Romans chapter 7! However, it was not his preaching that left the most indelible impression that morning, but the humble reverence with which he presided at the Eucharist. The pre-America me would never have been able to admit such a thing.
May God bless him as he departs Tennessee and returns to the land of the Molly Dancers. In some ways, he has found out what Cecil Sharp did: to recover the British heritage, you must come to these parts first.
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The Options Run Out at the Episcopal Church
Recently I was contacted by one of the "elves" at Titusonenine, the weblog of the Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall Harmon (which I reviewed back in May.) Same first child of Iluvatar inquired about my idea concerning the Episcopal Church and its Anglican alternatives.
My response should not surprise readers of this blog:
What I am about to say is not only based on my years in TEC, but also being directly involved in church politics, an experience that always changes your perspective…
To my mind, from a reasserter standpoint TEC is toast. The problems the church is experiencing have been in the making for a long time, starting in the seminaries and working its way out through the parishes and ultimately the bishops themselves. It is very unfortunate that the ordination of an openly homosexual bishop is what it took to bring things to a head, but such is the way of churches. In many ways the beginning of the end took place when the church lost its nerve regarding James Pike.Beyond that, TEC is a centralised institution, and centralised institutions tend to encourage a stronger collegiality amongst their officials. It’s much harder to "rock the boat" in a centralised church when it’s going in the wrong direction as opposed to a congregational church. Now the reasserters simply don’t have the votes to reverse the changes on a churchwide basis, either in HOB or in GC. I have come to admire people like Kendall Harmon and his diocese for taking the stand they do, but I think that they are swimming against the tide.As far as the invasion by the Communion is concerned, it’s great but the proliferation of jurisdictions doesn’t bode for a very orderly development or organisation. And there’s always the Anglo-Catholic/Evangelical divide to complicate things.And nothing coming out of the HOB this week in NOLA has given me reason to believe otherwise.
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Yahweh in the Morning: Only You Are God
Emmanuel proclaims the most important thing in Only You Are God.
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Rowan Williams and Hermeneutics
The Blogging Parson’s piece on Rowan Williams and hermeneutics goes a long way to explain the Archbishop of Canterbury’s position–or more precisely his lack of one–in the current Anglican Communion row over homosexuals in the episcopate. But it also is an opportunity to stop and think about one of the most important issues in Christianity–the role and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.
The advance and acceptance of higher criticism was the main fuel behind the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of a century ago which led to the bifurcation of Protestant Christianity. Williams’ optimistic view of the Scriptures (their incompleteness as an opportunity for perpetual growth and reinterpretation) reminds one of the Book of Mormon’s take on the Fall: it’s great because it’s a chance to move up again.
There are a large number of problems with higher criticism. Much of it was formulated in the context of German philosophy rather than the realities of the Middle East, which meant that it had to be revised when people (such as Roland de Vaux and his École Biblique de Jerusalem) actually went there and, in some cases, did some serious digging (literally.) Moreover it’s hard for anyone who has written a book (or even edited it cut and paste style, as I did for Pile Buck) to understand how, with all of the theories of multiple sourcing for both Testaments, the text could have ended up in a coherent state.
Beyond that, Williams’ idea that the experience of the church can mould its understanding of the Scripture only makes practical sense if that experience is univocal. And that’s where the problem comes in: it’s not. The Communion’s current stance is a perfect example of that problem.
- For liberals in the U.S. and Canada, their experience is moulded by the upper middle class world of TEC/ACC, where homosexuals are important players. Rejecting them would mean ostracism from the circles they treasure, so they cave, rather than following a world-rejecting Gospel.
- For conservatives in Africa, their experience is moulded by their contact with Islam, which abhors GLBT people and their lifestyle. Accepting homosexuals would mean war with Islam. The Africans’ ace in the hole, however, is that the Scriptures are consistent on the subject of homosexuality, rejecting it in the Old Testament and repeating this rejection in the New.
And what about those of us who come from backgrounds with a strong secular component? What does the “experience of the church” mean to us, who live in a world of hard politics and economics? If churches such as TEC or CofE would answer that question reasonably, they might see a pick-up in membership.
“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” Isaiah 40:6-8, KJV.
The search for God is the search for the transcendent and permanent. It’s inevitable that people will interpret Scriptures in the context of their own experience. But William’s “moving target” hermeneutics is only a theological version of running Rusty.
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Move to empower laity raises church ire
The idea of the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney (Australia) to empower the laity raises the ire of many churches. It’s an issue that has some peculiarly Anglican implications, but it’s also interesting for many of the rest of us.
The "empowerment" they’re proposing is allowing lay people to celebrate the Holy Communion, which traditionally is a no-no in the Anglican world. Actually most churches reserve for their ministers the authority to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, irrespective of their theology of the church. And this isn’t challenged in most places either. The problems that these Australian Anglicans are wrestling with are a product of two trends in the Anglican world, one fairly recent and one of long standing.
The first is that many Anglican churches have made the Holy Communion the central order of worship. This is largely the result of Anglo-Catholic and Affirming Catholic influence. In the past Holy Communion, in common with other Protestant churches, was celebrated every so often (monthly, sometimes less) and the normal service was Morning or Evening Prayer. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer specifically allows lay people to celebrate the Morning and Evening Prayer (even giving suitable modifications.)
Where Morning and Evening Prayer are still the central orders of worship in Anglican life, lay celebration is certainly possible. But as long as Anglican churches insist on making the Holy Communion normative, they will not only be on the horns of the dilemma the Archdiocese faces, but they will also be a block to many visitors (since most Anglican churches still have closed communion.)
The second trend is the fact that the bar of entry into the Anglican ministry (I still hate calling them priests) is too high. Anglicans are too hung up on extensive formal education that may or may not prepare them for practical ministry or even give them a sound theological education. The classic example of this is the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Everyone knows he’s a brilliant academic, but his leadership capabilities leave a lot to be desired of (although he is in reality in an impossible situation.) I’m no advocate for institutionalised ignorance, but much of what is taught in seminaries these days–liberal and conservative alike–is not useful for real ministry or even basic management or people skills.
If it were not such a long business to obtain an education that people–lay and clergy alike–would sniff at contemptuously, the idea to accommodate the laity with the Holy Communion would not even be considered.
The Archdiocese needs to reconsider its options in this case.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 