By Robin G. Jordan
I have been reading the reactions of various conservative Episcopalians to the 2012 General Convention’s sanctioning of transgender clergy and church workers and its authorization of the trial use of same sex blessing rites. The Episcopal Church has been on this track for some fourteen odd years. Did they really expect General Convention to put on the brakes or switch the train to a siding for a layover or switch tracks altogether? What lies at the end of the track, only God knows. The Episcopal Church has gotten up a head of steam and is not going to slow down. Conservative Episcopalians are aboard a runaway train.
If the American Psychiatric Association (APA) drops pedophilia from its diagnostic manual, we can anticipate that the Episcopal Church will welcome pedophiles along with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals into the ranks of its clergy and church workers. The problem we will be told is not that of individuals struggling with what for them may be an unwanted sexual attraction to children but society’s rejection of individuals who are sexually oriented to children. Instead of working with parents to protect their children from sexual predation, the Episcopal Church will be putting pedophiles in positions of authority over children, making it easier for the more predatory of the pedophiles to find and exploit victims. This may eventually involve the Episcopal Church in costly litigation as it has the Roman Catholic Church. However, the Episcopal Church appears to be set on pushing the envelope of inclusivity.
The few remaining conservative dioceses and congregation in the Episcopal Church are a part of a denomination that is rapidly moving away from Biblical standards of faith and morality. Their ability to maintain an enclave of Biblical orthodoxy and morality in the Episcopal Church is limited. The revenue that they provide the national church or diocese buys them a measure of tolerance as long as they maintain a low profile and do not stir up trouble. If they begin to withhold money from the national church or the diocese and protest the actions of General Convention, the Presiding Bishop and the Executive Council, the Diocesan Convention, or the Diocesan Bishop and the Diocesan Council or Standing Committee in other ways, the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church can be expected to react punitively.
The national church has the new disciplinary canons, which can be used against lay persons as well as members of the clergy. A number of dioceses have adopted changes to their constitutions and canons, which permit them to employ a variety of sanctions against congregations that do not pay their assessments. A parish can be reduced to a mission; its clergy and vestry removed, and a priest who does not share the views of the congregation put in charge. While the use of these measures may lead to a further loss of members, the prospect of this membership loss will not keep the liberals from using them. It has not happened to date. It is not likely to happen.
The remaining conservatives in the Episcopal Church have few options open to them.
1. They can do what they can to maintain the enclaves that they have established, strengthening them the best that they can. They can expect the Episcopal Church’s liberal wing to grow more provocative and less tolerant with the passage of time. They can also expect to find it more and more difficult to practice their conservative beliefs and values in the increasingly radical environment of the Episcopal Church and to pass these beliefs and values onto the next generation.
2. They can loudly protest what is happening in the Episcopal Church, including withholding monies from the diocese and/or the national church and suffer the full weight of the sanctions that the Episcopal Church can bring to bear against dissidents. They can expect to eventually be forced out of the church, thrown off the train.
3. They can plan an orderly exit from the Episcopal Church and affiliate with the Anglican Church in North America. They cannot, however, expect the train to stop to let them off. They will have to leap from the train.
Dioceses and congregations can expect to lose buildings and other property. Congregations can also expect to experience difficulties in finding meeting places, including running afoul of fire safety and zoning laws and boards and commissions not convinced of the benefits of a new church in their community. They face the very real possibility of not ever having their own building again due to a depressed economy and high real estate and construction costs.
The Anglican Church in North America suffers from its share of problems as I have described elsewhere. A number of these problems are quite serious. Among the problems of the ACNA is that the ACNA offers an environment that is no friendlier to conservative evangelicals and traditional Anglican evangelicalism than the environment that the Episcopal Church offers. Conservative evangelicals can ride the ACNA train but only if they leave their luggage at the station where they boarded it, and go where it is going. They also must ride in a second or third class coach.
4. They can form their own breakaway organization and then succeed from the Episcopal Church. Here again dioceses and congregations can expect to lose buildings and other property. A new breakaway organization, however, could avoid the kinds of problems that trouble the Anglican Church in North America, could embrace the full range of conservative Anglican opinion, and could offer a fresh start for an orthodox Anglican alternative to the Episcopal Church.
5. They can acquiesce to the growing radicalization of the Episcopal Church, passively going along with the liberal agenda. They can huddle in their seats, gazing at the passing scenery as the Episcopal Church rushes to its doom.
6. They can jump off the train on their own, one at a time. They can migrate to another denomination. Or they can stop going to church altogether. Clergy can find secular employment.
Conservative Episcopalians can talk all they want about taking back the Episcopal Church. But the time has long past where that might have been a realistic possibility. The best they can do is to fight a holding action.
Liberalism is like a disease that has reached a stage at which it cannot be treated. It must be allowed to run its course. The person infected with the disease may survive or he may not. The patient’s immunity system was compromised a long time ago—perhaps even before he was born. The patient refused to take steps to immunize himself against the disease but exposed himself to conditions that increased the likelihood of infection and hastened the onset of the disease.
If we study the history of the Church, we learn that churches do die—not just individual congregations but entire dioceses and provinces. They disappear and vanish. Christ in the Revelation to John warns the church in Ephesus that if it did not turn from its sins, he would take away the church’s lampstand from its place (Rev. 2:5). The church in Ephesus kept on sinning and Christ did what he said. The church no longer exists. The Episcopal Church has so far not turned from its sins. Paul in the Letter to the Romans tells us how God gives over to corrupted minds those who do not honor him (Romans 1:28).
Conservative Episcopalians must recognize that they are in a church that is under God’s judgment. They must turn to the Bible for counsel and guidance, prayerfully seeking in its pages what God would have them do. As for those of us outside the Episcopal Church we should lift them up to the throne of grace in our prayers, asking God to show them the path that he would have them take.
11 comments:
Conservatives can also take a deep breath and look around...has your parish suddenly changed? Does your bishop mandate clergy to perform liturgies with which they have personal reservations? Are you being prevented from speaking or teaching or serving in your parish? Are you being discouraged from your vocation?And if not...why give in to propaganda and leave? It is YOUR church as well as mine...we need YOU and want YOU as YOU are...
On another website a conservative Episcopalian makes an interesting point. Liberal Episcopalians do not need conservative Episcopalians. They do, however, need their money. Otherwise, they would be glad to see them go. After all, conservative Episcopalians have so far been unsuccessful in taking buildings and other property with them.
In the Episcopal Church a conservative Episcopalian is free to think what he likes. BUT he is not free to practice what he believes or to teach his beliefs to others. As for being left alone to practice and teach his own beliefs in his own parish don't kid yourself. I live in the liberal Diocese of Kentucky and the liberal bishops of the liberal Diocese of Kentucky have gone out of their way to make sure that the rest of the diocese is on the same page as they are
Upon further reflection I would add that the Scriptures warn against welcoming false teachers. Those who welcome false teachers become partners in the evil things that they do. While the Scriptures do not teach that we should withdraw from the world and to avoid evil people, we are instructed to call sinners among the brethren to repentance and if they persist in sinning and are unrepentent to excluded them from the fellowship of the church and to shun them. At the same time we are also instructed to warn those in danger from their own sinful conduct and seek to turn sinners from their evil ways. Nowhere in the Scriptures do we find anything that suggests that we can turn a blind eye to what is happening in other churches of our denomination if it is sinful from the perspective of God's Word. Homosexual behavior is not one of those matters on which Episcopalians and other Christians may agree to disagree and on which they may hold a diversity of opinions. As has repeatedly been pointed out over the past twenty or more years, liberal opinions related to homosexual behavior conflict with long-held Anglican views of revelation, salvation, and the sacraments, which are grounded in the Scriptures and derive their authority from the Scriptures.
I thank you for the succinct statement of the traditionalist perspective on certain sex acts. I concur that it is completely in keeping with a literal reading of the Bible and is in fact in line with the formal teaching of most if not all Christian denominations including most if not all Anglican churches. That it speaks of greater reliance on Paul than Jesus is of course completely beside the point. Thank you again for your statement!
Jesus in his teaching about the things that make a person unclean refers to "pornia," the immoral things that the evil ideas that come from a person's heart lead to. "Pornia" includes homosexual behavior. Jesus also taught that only a man and woman may marry and become one flesh. The view of homosexual behavior that you would describe as "traditionalist" and I would describe as "Biblical" or "scriptural" is based upon the whole counsel of God as found in the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, and not solely upon the writings of Paul. This is old ground that has been covered many times in the debate over the normalization of homosexuality in the Episcopal Church in the past twenty odd years. To maintain the positions that they have adopted liberals in the Episcopal Church and liberals in other Anglican province jettison the Scriptures and make personal experience their authority.
Man dishonors God when he claims God's sanction for what God does not sanction and invokes God's blessing upon what God does not bless. Jesus reiterated the teaching of the Old Testament in what is sometimes called the Great Commandment. Loving God means heeding what he has revealed in the Scriptures. Jesus himself described them as the Word of God. Loving our neighbor means calling him back from the brink when he is about to cast himself into the abyss. It is not love to let him leap!
I appreciate your writing, Robin: Before I became a follower of Christ at age 46 I was an observant Jew and taught OT among other subjects and made a point of including the traditional plain meaning of texts without casuistry as one of the 70 faces of Torah the Rabbis acknowledge.
I offer the thought that in Torah it is the sexual act which is proscribed. That loving same gender relationships worthy of blessing without having any homosexual overtones are Biblical, I note the love of David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi.
I also note the Rabbinic teaching that one should build "seyag le-Torah" a fence around Torah which includes warning others away from wrong-doing...but as the Rabbis go on to say, building a fence around Torah does not mean building a fence around a fence...smile
But we're not talking about loving same gender relationships without homosexual overtones, are we? We are talking about homosexual liasons that involve homoerotic activity.
The Scriptures provide their own fence if what it meant is a barrier to mark a boundary. They reveal God's will concerning human behavior, what honors God and what does not. They also warn against moving or removing boundary markers as I recall--a reference to property boundaries--but elsewhere we read that God does not smile approvingly upon the moving or removal of moral and spiritual boundaries.
I believe you are long on assumptions about relationships, Robin. I know gay and lesbian couples who have been together 30+ years and hetero couples who can't stay together 1. I'd say the former set are better examples of loving relationship than the latter.
I also know more than a few hetero couples who have morganitic relationships or platonic relationships and folks who spend their lives together with no sexuality at all either by choice, medical condition, or they are best friends but not lovers....
One of the problems with your critique is that you read in the worst possible scenario (from your POV) and apply it to all persons without knowing particulars...perhaps your insistence on others alleged sins blinds you to your own?
Thoughts?
How long a homosexual couple stays together, as I think you know, is irrelevant. So is who is the best example of a loving relationship--a homosexual couple who stay together for a long time or a heterosexual couple who break up after less than a year. Equally as irrelevant are the long-standing friendships with which you are familiar. Bring these things up serves to muddy the water and to divert attention from the real matter at hand--what does the Scriptures say?
As for reading in the worst possible scenario and applying it to all persons without knowing particulars, that is far from the truth as you also well know. The Scriptures clearly do not sanction homosexual activity whether a casual encounter with someone met in a bar or repeated activity with the same partner in a committed relationship. They make no allowances for the attachment a couple may have for each other or how others perceive the couple's relationship.
Suggesting that my insistence upon the alleged sins of others blinds me to my own is an old dodge. What we have here is not a question of removing the log from one's own eye before helping someone else remove the the fleck of sawdust from his eye. I have encountered that misuse of Scripture in the past. Inferred is bigotry, homophobia, or prejudice is motivating the person who is pointing out the Bible's position on sexual activity between members of the same sex. It is typically brought up to evade admitting what the Bible clearly says--no sexual activity between members of the same sex and no mitigating circumstances that makes such activity permissible.
Indeed all the arguments that you are making seek to evade the unpleasant truth that the Scriptures do not permit sexual activity between members of the same sex under any circumstances. The principle behind Jesus' teaching that whoever lusts after another man's wife in his heart has committed adultery with her also applies to experiencing sexual desire for someone of the same sex. One does not have to act upon the sexual desire to sin, only to entertain it.
A number of the arguments that you are seeking to employ can also be used (and are being used) to justify sexual activity between members of the opposite sex who are not married to each other, between adults and children, and between multiple partners of both the opposite and the same sex.
"That it speaks of greater reliance on Paul than Jesus is of course completely beside the point."
Jesus never opposed any moral provision from the Torah but always assumed their continuance. He only abrogated the ceremonial law.
The same goes for Paul, actually. He taught the abrogation of the ceremonial law, but never of the moral law.
So anyone trying to change morality is up a creek without a paddle.
Robin...I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian. I get that your disappointed with what is happening in the Episcopal Church. Friends of ours, who are Methodist, are going through the same nonsense. The Protestant Churches are being overly influence by what the world Thinks. I identified strongly with being Roman Catholic. I was able to maintain the same intensity I felt for my Catholic Faith, without having to deal with the scandalous abuse priest stories and annoying politics of the Roman Catholic Church. I feel more connected and more Catholic being Orthodox then I ever did being Roman Catholic. There is no more beautiful liturgical service on earth then you'll experience in the Orthodox Church. Most Eastern Orthodox churches in the U.S. use the English language in their service. There are pockets of the country where ethnic languages are spoken, but those are few and far between. The Anglican, Episcopalians and Catholic share in all the same sacraments as the Orthodox and are Apostolic, so we have a lot in common with each other. There is no major transition from one to the other faith practice. We have been using the same liturgical service since the sixth century and the Orthodox Church was the source of the faith from the very beginning. The Orthodox strongly believe in maintaining the faith as it was handed down to us. I can tell you our views on marriage and all the sacraments will not change. There are of course liberals who are parishioners in the church, but there is never an issue of popular culture politics when we gather as faith believers. I would encourage you and your conservative like-minded parishioners to explore and investigate the Orthodox Church as an alternative to the Episcopal Church. All large church communities have politics and money issue differences, but as liberal or conservative Orthodox Christians, we are all solid on maintaining the ancient first century faith without alteration. I can tell you, you will not regret the move, if you decide to do make it.
God Bless and keep you strong in your faith.
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