I do hope that no LGBT people fall into the trap of believing that they, here, are the targets of shame. This is not even remotely the case, and is evident if one examines Fr. Martins’ words (thanks to Fr. Fountain for finding them), or even if one quickly scans them.

The greatest condemnations in the New Testament are not about faulty teaching concerning sexuality; they are about bringing another gospel into the church. Teaching things such as, that Christ did not rise from the dead, or that whether He did or not is unimportant, and that this has rather to do with maintaining progressive ethical views, are much more reasonably considered instances of bringing another gospel into the church, than any teachings regarding sex, or any possible sex acts.

However, we Anglicans are in a situation regarding such denial of Christ like no other church in history; I know of no church claiming to be Trinitarian in which a leader at its highest level has uttered remarks going so far in denying the divinity of Christ and the resurrection as we have with one of our Primates. This is a sad truth which all Anglicans share, and we all live in a shared, communal condition of apostasy. It is this which fuels the greatest passion in the debate. From the beginning, the worry regarding sexual ethics was, that were we to embrace something which many consider to be contrary to Scripture, we would lose our very faith in Christ. Now, we have in a very significant sense lost this faith in Christ. If there is one thing of which we can be sure, I think it is: that this is by no means the fault of LGBT people.

All this, of course, makes almost everything else we do as a church seem trivial, including actions which emotionally wound, skew deliberative processes, or deceive – or anything any of us might say about sex, or even whatever kind of sex act any of us might engage in. Nonetheless, I have a few very, very trivial words about this most trivial issue.

A church in such a situation as ours is in a state much like a civil war. One finds one’s self doing irrational and unjust things, with unintended victims. Here, though Canon Naughton is such a staunch supporter of LGBT ministry, the LGBT people are the unintended victims of his own desire “to score debating points,” the very thing of which he accuses Fr. Martins. He claims even that Fr. Martins had no principled disagreement with the resolution: we would then conclude that Fr. Martins wishes simply to shame for the sake of shaming, without even any reason or cause; that a man who a diocese wishes to have as their bishop, sees fit to shame and stigmatize gay and lesbian people for no reason whatsoever.

Canon Naughton does not wish Fr. Martins to obtain consent as bishop. He feels (perhaps rightly), that long-term, the cause of partnered LGBT people in ministry will be diminished were Fr. Martins to gain consent.

He publishes a piece extracting three words from Fr. Martins’s address to General Convention, without linking to the source. Though those words apply very clearly to Fr. Martins himself (he says “we”) and the other members of General Convention, and Fr. Martins presents his principled disagreement very clearly, Canon Naughton more or less says that Fr. Martins is shaming and stigmatizing LGBT people for no reason whatsoever.

Thus, LGBT people feel shamed and stigmatized in a highly bigoted manner, with an entire diocese behind such bigoted stigmatization. The comments left concerning the article, sadly, demonstrate this quite clearly.

Canon Naughton most certainly did not wish to make LGBT people feel shamed and stigmatized when he set out writing this. But he could not resist the opportunity of finding a reason that might impede Fr. Martins’s progress toward episcopacy. I do not believe he wished to deceive when he first sat down to write this piece; but the final result is indeed deceitful, and it encourages LGBT people to believe they have been shamed and stigmatized where they have not been. How is this good for LGBT people? I do hope that Canon Naughton prefaces the piece with a few words apologizing to his readers and distancing himself from these opinions; I do not think he wishes to be deceitful or harmful, but that he sees that his piece shows a lack of judgment on multiple counts, written with a misguided zeal in the fog of war.

The Anglican Communion is a dangerous place for LGBT people. Spiritually, it is no less so than the battleground of a civil war for those who are on the front lines. They may be shot at from all directions. Sadly, here, the LGBT people are made to believe that they are being shot at not for any strategic aim, but simply because they are hated. But sadly, it is a stray shot, and that shot is not coming from Fr. Martins.

For obvious reasons, no one who associates with the church likes it when someone points a finger at them and says, “you are an apostate.”
Furthermore, anyone who does so must ask themselves, “how did this condition arise, such that this person is bringing into the church another gospel?”
We will find that it is not merely “this person,” but a whole set of conditions which allowed for this to happen. All of these conditions must be addressed. It could be that the person at whom we are pointing is rather innocent. Allow me to give a rather extreme example. If we were to bring a devout Muslim into the church, and our pastor introduces this person, saying: “Here is someone who will tell us about Jesus – listen! This is the truth about Jesus which we all should believe.” And then the Muslim goes on to explain how he believes that Jesus was a prophet, but not the Son of God, etc. etc. …

Of course, this is a very far-fetched example. But it does illustrate the person that we may first be likely to point at, is not necessarily the one who we should be most concerned about regarding apostasy. In this case, it is most clearly not the devout Muslim about whom we should be concerned. There is another dynamic going on which allowed this to happen, and it is this general dynamic which we should study more carefully, and about which we should be concerned.

The apostle Paul very rarely points out individuals when he deals with discipline problems in the church; he addresses “you,” meaning the whole church. Jude does not single out individuals; nor does John in the epistles.

When addressing the issue, however, we are always asked to bring evidence to the table. It is not enough for us to say, “we have become apostate.” We are in a kind of a Catch-22 situation; someone asks for evidence, and then someone else accuses us of “throwing stones.” There is little that we can do here except to be charitable in our treatment of our subjects, while being honest; to not ascribe blame where there is not adequate evidence; and to continue to point to how this issue is more an issue of corporate guilt, rather than it is the guilt of specific individuals. What I am saying here is that we should not be saying, “Bishop X is apostate”; rather: WE ARE APOSTATE, with the emphasis on “we,” rather than us as individuals. Individuals who are Anglicans and faithfully follow Christ needn’t worry that they are “condemned” as individuals, though they should worry at the state of their whole church and about their corporate guilt.

It is not in the scope of this short piece to address why I believe that we suffer from a general condition of apostasy in the Communion; it is an issue, however, which I think needs to be addressed with the greatest seriousness, and which we in general are avoiding as we are so focussed on issues of sexuality (and missing Christology, where symptoms of apostasy are most obviously present).  For symptoms of our apostasy, see our article on Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori on the Resurrection and the Divinity of Christ.

No one likes to speak about apostasy, or to shine a light upon our apostasy. Very few undertakings are as excruciatingly unpleasant as reflecting upon apostasy. However, this undertaking is for ourselves, rather than others to do for us; and if we do not do so, the wider Christian community will need to take up its responsibility in shining upon us this awful light.

In studying apostasy, we must take account of many things. What kind of language is used by people who are advocating positions which we feel may lead to apostasy? Do they ask questions with hidden presuppositions? Are there any confusions, which we can dispel with a bit of simple logic or demonstration that the assumption rests more on a faulty linguistic construction rather than an actual state or condition? What sort of behaviors and attitudes are there in our interactions which could be contributing to a loss of faith? How can doubt and lack of faith amongst the ordained best be dealt with? Does it help if we make clear that we feel corporate pain when there is a lack of faith, and how can we best express such corporate pain without diminishing the dignity of the individual? What steps take place when an individual clergyperson makes the transition from doubt to advocacy of positions which are contrary to the Gospel, at what point is a person truly stepping over the line and “bringing another gospel into the church?” What do we do when entire communities of faith seem to be predicated upon beliefs which are themselves apostate, or at least count such amongst the things which they in some way or other hold sacred? Is it better in some cases for a person who has lost faith to leave a church community, rather than remain in it? Etc. etc..

I also believe that we need to make more clear to the LGBT community: that they are not the cause of apostasy in our midst. Many LGBT people are suffering needlessly because of how we have chosen to engage in the conflict we currently have in the Communion.

It has now come to my attention at least one place “where she might have picked it up” – or perhaps she was already a rather fervent fan of the Jesus Seminar. This comes form a little sleuth work in piecing together some of her statements.

I won’t go into detail just now, but may do so later; right now I’ll just provide the basic links. Anyone who’s a bit of a “Schori scholar” will be able to put the links together.

There is no “proof” here – only possibility – but quite a lot of circumstantial evidence, and I believe the vocabulary specifically chosen makes this evidence more than noteworthy.

KJS notes regarding her self-appellation as “Dean” of a “school of theology” -

“The Good Samaritan School of Theology was the then-rector’s term for all adult education programs, both internally and externally focused. They included … Lenten and Advent series; satellite downlink programs with discussion (begun in the days when ECTN and Trinity were doing so many effective ones);

(link – emphasis mine).

One of these ECTN satellite downlink programs – in 1996, one of the years that KJS was at Corvallis as pastoral associate – was “Jesus at 2000″ (note that its date is 1996, to spare confusion for speed-readers). This was a kind of extension of the Jesus seminar with Marcus Borg, Dominic Crossan, N.T. Wright, and Luke Timothy Johnson.

At the time, I believe that Marcus Borg was at Oregon State University, Corvallis – he may have even been a parishoner at the church where KJS was a pastoral associate. The event itself was held in Corvallis. It seems to me, then, very likely that this was one of the satellite downlink programs to which KJS refers. More info on this program here: http://www.markgoodacre.org/xtalk/conversation.html and here.

Marcus Borg is one of the two individuals explicitly thanked in Jefferts Schori’s book A Wing and A Prayer as one “who opened the Bible to me in new ways.” The other person mentioned in this regard is Mary Timothy McHatten, OP. (also of note: +KJS provided a book blurb for a novel written by Borg about a young woman teaching at university who comes into conflict because of faith – actually, this might also help shed light on the phenomenon of apostasy and the first steps – challenge to faith, temptation toward bitterness, conflict with Christians, etc. etc.. – we must be open to insights regarding this phenomenon even amongst those with whom we may vehemently disagree. His book is called Putting Away Childish Things. It would be interesting to hear if any things are classified as “childish” – attitudes? specific teachings? bitterness? etc. etc..)

Another was held in 1994 – “The Jesus Summit: The Historical Jesus and Contemporary Faith.” This is also KJS’s first year as pastoral associate in Corvallis (I don’t know when her tenure began), and may have been broadcast before she began there. It included Borg, Crossan, and Burton Mack; Karen King moderated. Jenkins has this conference distributed by video; this article has it as another satellite downlink program. I have not read the sources linked here, only skimmed for relevant info, so I can not endorse their comments or meaningfully agree or disagree with them.

It is entirely possibly that the materials to which KJS entreated her adult education classes were other ECTN satellite downlink programs. I don’t know, however, if programs other than these were downlinked. I think it is safe to say though that the evidence of KJS’s language in the Parabola interview, her description of holding sessions of ENTS satellite downlink programs for her adult education classes, the placement of Borg in Corvallis and the hosting of the 1996 event in Corvallis significantly corroborate the theory that it is affiliated with the Jesus Seminar materials.

If you stumble by this, please note, this is not meant to “smear” KJS – my views that she denies the resurrection and the divinity of Christ are also not held with the intention of “smearing” her, I am rather pointing to the condition of a lack of appreciation in TEC for good Christology, and a widespread phenomenon which could perhaps be described as “apostasy” – not one in which I wish to point any fingers at any individuals in particular, but rather for which I believe all of us Anglicans to be corporately responsible. It is as a body that we need to deal with such matters, and those who are implicated are frequently, in multiple ways, victims themselves of apostasy as a general phenomenon.

Unfortunately, this kind of research is necessary since KJS uses such obfuscatory language from areas of discourse which don’t tend to be understood by many – both laymen and clergy.

[update: This is a "mini-review" based on excerpts of Dr. Borg's book found at day1.org - the excerpt that I find most illustrative is the first, found here. From all accounts of reviews I've read, the main drama of the story occurs between Kate, teaching a college class about religion, and Erin, who is a member of "the Conservative Club" on campus called "The Way." It seems that "The Way" stresses that its members should avoid contact with all other Christians who are not members of "The Way," and members are also counselled not to listen to non "The Way" members about religious matters. It frankly sounds rather nutty in some of the details. "The Way" then would function as "the dark" which Borg talks about in his bit on mysticism (with figure Michel), supposedly, which seems like a kind of gnosticism contrasting enlightment/light with darkness/lack of enlightenment. Kate describes to her class how "The Englightenment" came to the conclusion that the Bible and church teachings did not come from God, but are the results of cultural contexts and perceptions. This is a rather "monolithic" assessment of "The Enlightenment," and is essentially arguing about peoples and groups - i.e., "This group of very educated scholars called the Enlightenment held these views," rather than talking about the arguments themselves and exposing them to critical light. More reasoning via academic peer pressure, like Spong, than with arguments that would hold the attention of anyone who has done a little reading on the matter. It's also more than a little naive. In such a huge clash, of course sheltered, sectarian Erin has problems with Kate, who calls herself a Christian but yet is teaching that God does not reveal Himself to us in Scripture. Borg admits in his preface that the book is rather "didactic," and it does indeed have a highly didactic tone. It will appeal to people who enjoy reading about the passions of terribly repressed, sheltered persons when exposed to people who believe themselves to be teachers of Christian "reality" but are not Trinitarian Christians, and read the Bible, but without knowing why they should read this book rather than any other book. You could perhaps call it the ecclesiastical equivalent of a bodice-ripper, where the pale, sheltered heroine is confronted with a dark, virile, intriguing figure and swoons in his arms - a lot of tension, but not much to think about when all is told.

I suppose that in many ways it is quite symptomatic of the ideals and fantasies of many contemporary Episcopalians. They are on a great crusade against something very dark and evil, against Fundamentalism ... but since the real Christians they meet are so boring and hardly worth fighting, or functioning as the legitimate antagonist of the cause, such Christians must be imaginitively embellished - much as Edward Saïd describes the phenomenon of "Orientalism." So Erin has been taught by her spiritual authorities never to listen to others outside of the sect.

Borg does not need to counsel his readers not to read other texts on the Enlightenment, because if they are already reading his novel, they are probably lazy readers and more interested in some pre-packaged description of what "The Enlightenment" was supposed to be than the whole era and clash of various ideologies that it really was. Borg's readers would be in for a real shocker if they were to confront the "real" drama of the Enlightenment with all of its vivacity and color - including religious figures Hamann and Jacobi - and the tensions in Enlightenment thinking which live on with us to this day. It would also put aside many of the "myths" which Borg teaches us in the mouth of Kate.

Borg is not a philosopher or a historian of ideas, so there are mitigating circumstances regarding this didactic and simplistic notion of "The Enlightenment." I do wonder if an actual reading of Enlightenment texts might disabuse him of his own notions of the enlightenment, and at the same time, perhaps even set aside some pride and some intellectual barriers to faith.

Anyone interested in a less "tame" and pre-packaged version of the Enlightenment can read Frederick Beiser's book The Fate of Reason. Readers interested in this direction of inquiry should also peruse Charles Taylor's book Sources of the Self ]

[ Update: here is an article by Katherine Jefferts Schori herself for The Living Church, March 3, 1996, about the conference: At Trinity Institute, Many Ways of Understanding Jesus - notable is the closing paragraph:

The institute was marked by a desire to open dialogue with conservative Christians and people of other faiths. Professors Segal, Cox and Smith made especially pointed pleas to reflect on what can be learned about the Christ of faith in dialogue with those of other theological persuasions. Several of the speakers pointed to the continuing usefulness of the ancient credal formulae in this age of great change and questioning.

Notice here of the conjunction between "conservative Christians and people of other faiths" and how these two are so effortlessly cojoined. Notice also the phrase "continuing usefulness of the ancient credal formulae." ]

Suffice it to say – I believe that we are now at a stage at which, given the absence of any clear teaching of the bodily resurrection on the part of +KJS, and her formulations about which a very strong case can be made that she denies the resurrection and the divinity of Christ – that even if tomorrow she were to begin clearly teaching the bodily resurrection of Christ, it would seem quite inauthentic and as a kind of gesture merely for the purpose of forestalling consequences for the Episcopal Church within the Communion, or for the purpose of “smuggling” favorite teachings of The Episcopal Church into unsuspecting other churches by simply appearing Trinitarian. That at this point, little can be done for TEC besides thorough, genuine repentance, with programs set in place to address this program, with genuine “follow-up” occurring by third parties who have, to this date, not appeared to be proponents of the new course which TEC has been taking – preferentially, not “the Western provinces.” Of course, none of this is “my business,” but I think it is worth pointing out the damage done to the entire Communion and the difficulty there will be on TEC’s part of restoring confidence in its interest in good Christology. And that as such, we as a Communion have terribly let down the people of the Episcopal Church in having allowed this to happen; and above all, we have let down Christ in failing in such a practical way to acknowledge Him.

One of you wrote:
“That death has been downplayed and diminished even in how it is handled in KJS’s Easter sermons. Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. And He submitted to God fully even unto death.

To deny or diminish even a portion of Jesus’s sacrifice is reprehensible and offensive to many of us. That many including (a few of you) don’t grasp how horrific it is and can just wave their hands like it didn’t happen diminishes their credibility.”

I think that the objection is not that your own personal words imply a lack of sensibility, but rather your refusal to acknowledge how awful KJS’s words are in the way they diminish Christ’s teachings about who He is raises certain questions.

One of you has contended that since I do not cite a phrase in which she patently and directly denies e.g. the resurrection, that he is ethically free to ignore my words since he is bound to treat me as a hostile and unethical interlocutor, and the best treatment is to ignore such an interlocutor. Or something similar – I am “expanding” his rather simple words in order to try to understand the full warrant of this belief and failure to address the issue in a serious manner. Others have said that they are not convinced that she denies these things, though they have not taken the effort to describe any mistakes I have made in drawing these conclusions.

It is difficult to draw the conclusions since she uses a convoluted mixture of words and most certainly does not wish to be pointed at as someone who denies Christ. However, she is most certainly denying the importance of the resurrection by substituting its position in faith with some “meaning” (and context allows us to reasonably imply that this is environmentalism and some other ethical mandates – all very good ones, by the way). One might think that they would take the time at least to address how sad her choice of words is, or to commit themselves to protesting that TEC embraces a more robust and clear Christology, even though some will most certainly complain that this involves “defining” such things (thereby leaving the door open to reducing the word “God” to nothing more than a signifier for a particular form of ethics tied to therapy).

For them I can say:
- there is indeed some kind of “shock value” in hearing “KJS denies the resurrection” – though I find her words to be clear enough that she is doing this, and that we need to be woken up
- many when confronted by something shocking are numbed by it instead of woken up. I am aware of this risk. It may also damage the faith of some who were unaware of this. I am aware of this risk as well, but I believe the risk of not exposing her words to the lamp of reason is far worse.
- many who are at first numbed will nonetheless, later, see that something is very, very, very wrong and find time to reflect on this matter.
- it is incredibly difficult for Episcopalians to criticize their church leaders for this type of issue. They risk estrangement or being branded as someone who is an extremist, wishes to destroy the church, or is homophobic (no matter what their views on sexuality).
- there is no “gentle” way of addressing this issue in a manner which also does it justice. Cf. Paul in Galatians 1:6-8. So it is terribly polarizing. Schori’s own formulation, I believe, was intended to “bring together” those who believe in the resurrection, and those who don’t – but she errs thereby in denying the importance of the resurrection and creating the myth that there is some “meaning” of an event which can be separated from the event itself.
- this is not a situation of their making, and in fact ALL of us who are Anglicans are in a way responsible for it. KJS is not “the only one responsible here” – she justly points out that salvation is not an exclusively individual phenomenon, but has communal aspects. Mutandis mutandis, when we have a problem of this scale, it is also, in some sense, all Anglicans who are culpable. And they may not yet feel that other Anglicans are supporting them, but rather trying to “paint” them in the same corner as KJS, and declaring themselves somehow as “pure” and sin-free.
We might not have been in this situation had the Communion acted on the ugly Christology of Spong in addition to its actions regarding sexuality. And for a Trinitarian, the denial of Christ by a church leader is by far worse than any imaginable sex act or abuse.
- there is something so ugly in even the thought that this may have occurred that one wishes to avert one’s eyes.

One of you asks another of you why you, if concerned, do not write to KJS if you are an Episcopalian? I suppose you might, but I wonder why a church claiming more than 2 million adherents, apparently none has done so yet? Or why no one seems to think this is a “big deal?” This confirms for me that there is very very little hope that TEC can be “saved” in the next generation and that the Communion as a whole must repent of what it allowed to happen. None of us are “innocent.”

I would suggest that it is probably easier for those outside of TEC to look at this more objectively, since TEC is so embattled, and members of TEC often feel they are being pointed at and castigated, and must struggle to defend their institution. Much is “exaggerated” about TEC – I find much of the reporting about TEC sadly uncharitable, and this must be apparent to many members of TEC.

I wish there were a more “friendly” way of pointing this out, a more “gentle” way. I am afraid that there is none. I only hope that the Communion recognizes this as a serious issue, and acts in such a way as to inspire those in power to select as successors persons within TEC who have a confident faith in the Risen Christ (and there are quite a few), and perhaps in a generation or two TEC might be deemed as a place which is “safe” for us to send our brothers and sisters who do not already have a robust faith.

As it stands, we Anglicans are no longer Trinitarian Christians in practice, and we would do best to inform our ecumenical partners of this fact so they can help us in whatever ways they find fit; and preventing the assumption that we are Trinitarian from damaging or diminishing their own faith.

Neither Spong nor Schori are particularly brilliant, neither engages in scholarship and thinking that are truly challenging for a person with a minimal education in religious matters. We have given up our Christology for this ugly, cheap stuff. Such a condition could only come to exist in a backwater of a dismal lack of education in theology. We often pride ourselves as being “educated” and “open-minded” but in truth we are rather ignorant compared to other churches, and we are rather dogmatic in our pronouncements of the flaws of these other churches. These other churches – whom so many Anglicans accuse as “leaving their brains at the door” – are in general far better educated than we are in theological matters, and they don’t engage in telling lies about other churches in an attempt at helping their adherents to feel better about themselves (Spong).

Friends in dialogue who find it difficult to accept these criticisms of KJS – I do not wish to imply that any of you are like Spong or KJS in any way. And I understand “where you are coming from.” I was once an Episcopalian myself, but am no longer after having changed continents. I enjoyed bashing non-denominational evangelicals, Catholics, baptists, pentecostalists, etc. etc., without realizing what utter tripe my own denomination was peddling to the weak and intellectually destitute with this Spong stuff. I must step back and admit my own error. In the area of intellectual integrity and theological education, we Anglicans are definitely at the very bottom of the pile. We need these non-denominational evangelicals, these Catholics, these baptists, these pentecostalists to come to us and teach us who Jesus is, and to show us that many of our preconceptions about them are simply insular stereotypes garnered from the media or the Anglican grapevine, and that they are much, much better at elucidating challenging, nuanced, and difficult areas of faith in a rational and charitable manner than we are. And that so many Anglicans go about saying that “we don’t leave our brains at the door” – is utterly pathetic when one thinks about it, pathetic enough to drive one to tears. All in all, as a Communion, we are neither witty, nor intelligent, nor kind.

One might say, “Wilf, it sounds like you don’t have much respect for KJS, or for people who like Spong.” All I can say is, if you are a Spong fan, that I am ashamed that the institution to which I belong let you down by failing to teach you some very basic facts that should be a part of the education of any Trinitarian Christian, and which are taught in many basic catechism classes; and that we allowed ourselves to pollute your sensibilities to such an extent that you are attracted to material which is more full of ad hominems and straw men than it is informed by honest and reasoned argument, and which is so appealing to one’s sense of schadenfreude.  I would advise you to look back at the texts, the arguments, and the emotional appeals, and the implicit appeals to the reader to feel better than other classes of persons who, we are taught, believe in such things as “divine sperm” etc. etc.., and that a more charitable reader would have first ascertained whether there are any such people who believe such things, before being drawn to believe that people of other denominations are so blightedly irrational and reprehensible in their moral vision – something which should be apparent, to quote Spong, to “anybody who is able to read, though parts of Georgia and Kansas have a hard time with that.” You should cultivate “alarm bells” that warn you of language which tempts you to believe by arrogating yourself above others, or the implication that you are worthless if you do not believe.

It appears that the answer here is a resounding “yes” – the degree however to which the churches they are a part, are contributing to these teachings, and the degree to which these are “significant churches,” remains in question.
http://www.bible.ca/cr-united-Can.htm

Jesus’ divinity doubted

Church leader holds controversial views

By BOB HARVEY Southam Newspapers “The Ottawa Citizen” October 30, 1997

The divinity of Jesus and the reality of heaven and hell are irrelevant, says the new moderator of the United Church of Canada.

What really matters, says Right Rev. Bill Phipps, is mending a broken world.

In a free-wheeling debate with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen, Phipps said Jesus was more interested in life on Earth than the afterlife and had more to say about economics than any other subject. “I don’t believe Jesus was God, but I’m no theologian,” Phipps said.

To add to this matter, for many years now, supporters of TEC – often high-ranking clergy – have been implying that persons who oppose TEC do so because they do not “want their gay and lesbian friends and relatives to be part of their church communities.” This last quote is from Diana Butler Bass – a church historian whose writings I have enjoyed, and is usually a good bit more honest than this. I have never known an Anglican who does not want gay and lesbian people to be part of church communities, and the Anglican Communion’s official teaching on sexuality (known as “Lambeth I.10″) makes very clear that gay and lesbian people must be welcomed and provided pastoral care. I am concerned about this trend of attempting to paint all opposition to the Presiding Bishop as stemming from homophobia, or opposition to female leadership amongst respected Episcopalians, especially when it involves ample deception, as is so often the case.

In the Diana Butler Bass article, one of the respondents who seems to identify himself as an attorney writes: “Rowan Williams personifies the lower terminus of the alimentary canal.” Is it not obvious that writing such untrue things will induce some to extreme prejudice against those it targets, and are not such comments clear evidence that this may be happening? Is it not worth trying to paint a more honest picture of the beliefs, values, opinions, and actions of the group one is criticizing? Does she not realize that some gay and lesbian people who oppose Jefferts-Schori because of her Christology will also be thus tarred with the same brush as persons who do not wish to have any gays and lesbians visit their churches (and I repeat, I have never met any such person who is an Anglican)?

I must warn people in the other provinces of the Communion that TEC is frequently defended by words which are either untrue or patently false – and that even respected “moderates” such as Diana Butler Bass are capable of engaging in such.

Anyone who is still in doubt regarding the integrity of inviting Jefferts-Schori to the Church of England, and in the general credibility of the General Convention of TEC and its other reigning bodies, should look into what occurred at the time of the Presiding Bishop’s election. A major problem was found in the materials given to convention delegates describing Jefferts-Schori’s accomplishments – while she had been an assistant clergy member at her church (I believe 200 or so parishoners – the number dropped during her tenure), she was in charge of adult education. Someone – perhaps she – chose to describe this as being “dean” of a “school of theology,” and on the CV it appears just like this – “Dean of the Good Samaritan School of Theology.” She later provided an explanation for this fanciful description, which I find quite unconvincing, here, though she doesn’t explain why the language is so deceitful, nor if it was she herself was the one who provided the CV information, nor why she did not tell General Convention that the information was false before they voted. This was discovered shortly after the election occurred, though it was a few months before she was invested as Presiding Bishop. No inquiry was made, as far as the public knows, and no transparency was brought to the weighty questions arising from it.

This has far-reaching consequences for issues of trust regarding the structures which govern The Episcopal Church. If they are willing to tolerate deceit to their very General Convention, and when this is discovered, do nothing to investigate it in a transparent manner, where else might deceit be tolerated, and under what conditions can we trust the governing structures of The Episcopal Church? And if, as is very likely, this deceptive language came from the Presiding Bishop herself, to her own General Convention, how difficult it becomes in trusting her in her words to the larger Communion at such a time that there is so much tension, and so much to gain for The Episcopal Church by representing things in a manner other than how they actually stand?

I would plead with loyalist supporters of The Episcopal Church to be generous in honesty when engaging in dialog with others, and especially when describing those who they feel are opposing their views and aims.

The original CV is still on the site of The Episcopal Church here – and if it is removed from their site, a copy is available from this site: PB.Booklet.EnglishFinal

I shan’t judge whether election fraud took place, or not; this is immensely trivial compared to a Primate of the Communion who denies the resurrection and the divinity of Christ. I write this for the sake of those who are still wavering in faith about the reality of Christ – that you might not be deceived by the information you are hearing from TEC’s loyalist supporters. They are under stress, there is something understandable about using extreme characterizations of their opponents; and we must forgive and not judge. But forgiveness does not mean that we must agree with them, nor relinquish a healthy skepticism.

_______________________________________________________________

Bishop Spong has nailed his ’12 theses’ to the Internet, and urged the Church to debate them. Rowan Williams considers them, and finds them neither defensible nor interesting.

Bishop Spong’s argument

Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity in The Voice. I will post my theses on the Internet and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognised Christian leaders of the world.

My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The Issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.

Rowan Williams replies…

Is it time for a new Reformation? The call has gone out quite a few times in the past three or four decades, and the imminence of the Millennium adds a certain piquancy to it.

The Right Reverend John Spong, Bishop of Newark in the US, is right to say – as he has done in his diocesan journal – that his own version of this demand is of a rather different order from the earlier Reformation; and this surely makes it imperative that his bold and gracious invitation to debate these theses should be taken up with some urgency and seriousness, not least on the eve of a Lambeth Conference that will undoubtedly be looking hard at issues of Christian identity and the limits of diversity.

So I had better say at once that, while I believe Bishop Spong has, in these and other matters, done an indispensable task in focusing our attention on questions under-examined and poorly thought through, I believe that these theses represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find astonishing.

He has rightly urged the Church to think more clearly in many respects about issues of sex and gender; but I am bothered by the assumption here that the Church has failed to think through a number of central matters on which quantities of fairly sophisticated literature have been written over the entire history of Christian theology.

The implication of the theses is that the sort of questions that might be asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former would have been unintelligible or devastating for Augustine, Rahner or Teresa of Avila. The fact is that significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.

Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited. I’m thinking of a good number of Eastern Europeans I know who have found their way to (at least) a fascinated absorption in classical Christianity through involvement in dissident politics and underground literature. Or of some American writers who will, I’m sure, be known to Bishop Spong, from Denise Levertov to Kathleen Norris, who have produced reflective and imaginative work out of the same adult recovery of the tradition. Is this tradition as barren as Spong seems to think?

To answer that requires us to look a bit harder at the theses themselves. In a way, the first of them indicates where the trouble is going to come: for there are at least three quite distinct senses of theism current in theology and religious studies, and it is none too clear which is at issue here.

At the simplest level, theism is, presumably, what atheists deny. Spong doesn’t appear to think of himself as an atheist, so this can’t be it.

In a more specialist context, scholars of the phenomenology of mysticism have sometimes distinguished ‘theistic’ from ‘monistic’ experience – theistic experience being defined as focused upon a reality ultimately distinct from the self (and the universe), as opposed to a mysticism of final unification. I’m not convinced that this distinction is actually a very helpful strategy, but that is another matter; it may be that something more like this is what Spong has in mind.

But there is also the sense, recently discussed by writers like Nicholas Lash, of theism as the designation of that abstract belief in God independent of the specific claims of revelation that flourished in the age after Descartes – a sense quite close to but not identical with that of ‘deism’. It is in this sense that large numbers of theologians would say that classical Trinitarian orthodoxy is not a form of theism.

I suspect that Spong is feeling his way between the second and the third senses. His objections seem to be to God as a being independent of the universe who acts within the universe in a way closely analogous to the way in which ordinary agents act. The trouble is that, while this might describe the belief of some rationalist divines in the modern period, and while it might sound very like the language of a good many ordinary religious practitioners, it bears no relation at all to what any serious theologian, from Origen to Barth and beyond, actually says about God – or, arguably, to what the practice of believers actually implies, whatever the pictorial idioms employed.

Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the universe. To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one agent and another in the world. God is not an object or agent over against the world; God is the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an activity that activates all that is around God is more intimate to the world than we can imagine, as the source of activity or energy itself; and God is more different than we can imagine, beyond category and kind and definition.

Thus God is never competing for space with agencies in the universe. When God acts, this does not mean that a hole is torn in the universe by an intervention from outside, but more that the immeasurably diverse relations between God’s act and created acts and processes may be more or less transparent to the presence of the unconstrained love that sustains them all.

The doctrine of the incarnation does not claim that the ‘theistic’ God (i.e. a divine individual living outside the universe) turns himself into a member of the human race, but that this human identity, Jesus of Nazareth, is at every moment, from conception onwards, related in such a way to God the Word (God’s eternal self-bestowing and self-reflecting) that his life is unreservedly and uniquely a medium for the unconstrained love that made all things to be at work in the world to remake all things. Jesus embodies God the Word or God the Son as totally as (more totally than) the musician in performance embodies the work performed.

I don’t find this bankrupt; I don’t find that it fails to make sense to those trying to learn the language of faith.

And the same point about God not competing for space is pertinent to several of the other theses. Exactly how the presence of God’s action interweaves with various sets of created and contingent causes is not available for inspection. We have no breakdown of the relations between God and this or that situation in the world.

Theologians have argued that the holiness of a human individual or the prayer of a believer may be factors in a situation that tilt the outcome in a particular way. This is an intellectually frustrating conclusion in all sorts of ways, but seems to be the only one that really manages to do justice to the somewhat chaotic Christian experience of intercession and unexpected outcomes (miracles, if you must). If the world really does rest upon divine act, then whatever you say about the regularities of casual chains is relativised a bit by not quite knowing what counts as a ’cause’ from God’s point of view, so to speak.

Bishop Spong describes the resurrection as an act of God. I am not clear how an immanent deity such as I think he believes in is supposed to act; but if such a God does act, I don’t see why it should be easier for God to act in people’s mind than their bodies. ‘Jesus was raised into the meaning of God’; yes, but meanings are constructed by material, historical beings, with cerebral cortices and larynxes. How does God (or ‘God’) make a difference to what people mean?

Spong clearly has no time for the empty-tomb tradition; so it is no surprise that he also dismisses the virginal conception (though why on earth this makes Jesus’s divinity ‘impossible’ I fail to understand). I am aware that there are critical historical grounds for questioning both narrative clusters and I don’t want to dismiss them. But I am very wary of setting aside the stories on the ground of a broad-brush denial of the miraculous.

For the record: I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.

The virginal conception looks less straightforward, if you are neither a fundamentalist nor someone committed to the principled denial of miracles. Is it possible to believe in the incarnation without this? Yes, I think so (I did for a few years). But I also have an uncomfortable feeling that the more you reflect on the incarnation, the less of a problem you may have. There is a rather haunting passage in John Neville Figgis about – as it were – waking up one day and finding you believe it after all. My sentiments exactly.

Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don’t believe in a God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it’s harder to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.

Perhaps, too, it has a bit to do with the sense of utterly unexpected absolution or release, the freeing of the heart.

The cross as sacrifice? God knows, there are barbaric ways of putting this; but as a complex and apparently inescapable metaphor (which, in the Bible, is about far more than propitiation) it has always said something sobering about the fact that human liberation doesn’t come cheap, that the degree of human self-delusion is so colossal as to involve ‘some total gain or loss’ (in the words of Auden’s poem about Bonhoeffer) in the task of overcoming it. And that human beings compulsively deceive themselves about who and what they are is a belief to which Darwinism is completely immaterial.

Of course, if you want to misunderstand Darwin as establishing a narrative of steady spiritual or intellectual evolution, you will indeed want to say that all existing ethical standards are relative. How, then, are you going to deal with claims by this or that group that they are moving on to the next evolutionary stage? In what sense can ethics fail to be about the contests of power, if there is nothing to which we are all answerable at all times?

Of course the parameters of ethical understanding shift: but the shifts in Christian ethics on, for example, slavery, usury and contraception, have had to argue long and hard to establish that they are in some way drawing out an entailment of what is there, or honouring some fundamental principle in what is there. In other words, these changes in convention have had to show a responsibility to certain principles that continue to identify this kind of talk as still recognisably Christian talk.

It makes for hard work – as is obvious with current debates about homosexuality or nuclear war; but it is hard work because of the need to continue listening to what is said and written.

But then we discover in Spong’s theses that there is, after all, a non-negotiable principle, based upon the image of God in human beings. Admirable; but what does it mean in Spong’s theological world? What is the image of a ‘non-theistic’ God? And where, for goodness’ sake, does he derive this belief about humans? It is neither scientific nor obvious.

It is, in fact, what we used to call a dogma of revealed religion. It is a painful example of the sheerly sentimental use of phraseology whose rationale depends upon a theology that is being overtly rejected. What can it be more than a rather unfairly freighted and emotive substitute for some kind of bland egalitarianism – bland because ungrounded and therefore desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more robust ideology? It is impossible to think too often of the collapse of liberalism in 1930s Germany.

It is no great pleasure to write so negatively about a colleague from whom I, like many others, have learned. But I cannot in any way see Bishop Spong’s theses as representing a defensible or even an interesting Christian future. And I want to know whether the Christian past scripture and tradition, really appears to him as empty and sterile as this text suggests.

It seems he has not found life here, and that is painful to acknowledge and to hear. Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.

Does he know that generations of believers have argued the need to separate hope for life after death from earthly rewards and punishments? They believe that the present and future delight of enjoying God’s intimacy made all such talk irrelevant.

Does he see at all that the recognition of God’s image in everyone, in such a way as to drive people to risk everything for it (Wilberforce? Dorothy Day? Desmond Tutu? Bonhoeffer? Romero?), seems persistently to come from an immersion in the dark reality of God’s difference and in the uncompromising paradoxes of incarnation of the Almighty?

Culturally speaking, the Christian religion is one of those subjects about which it is cool to be ignorant. Spong’s account of classical Christian faith simply colludes with such ignorance in a way that cannot surely reflect his own knowledge of it. I think I understand the passion behind all this, the passion to make sense to those for whom the faith is at best quaint and at worst oppressive, nonsense.

But the sense is made (in so far as it is made at all) by a denial of the resources already there – to the extent that Spong’s own continuing commitment to the tradition becomes incomprehensible.

Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?

Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this; and – if I can’t try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit – I don’t know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.

At the time of writing Rowan Williams was Bishop of Monmouth. Rowan Williams is now Archbishop of Canterbury.

Transcribed and reproduced with permission from the 17 July 1998 edition of Church Times

We are not unlike a family with a prominent member who attacks and maims passersby before its home, but then lies to the authorities about these events, and fails to curb the predations of this member, justifying itself to others by saying it cannot do otherwise because it values charity.

“Unity” pertains not only to life amongst our own little group of Anglicans representing a small percentage of those committed to Christ, but also to how the whole body of Christ behaves together.

We are inducing fundamentalism in many areas of the communion and the whole body of Christ with our Primate who denies the resurrection and the divinity of Christ. We are the agents of spiritual death for the many who come into contact with Anglican priests, bishops, and church leaders, who deny the very things that Christ taught us about Himself.

Maintenance of unity within the Anglican Communion is sowing massive division within the body of Christ. As long as this is the case, the question of “what serves unity best for Anglicans” must be moot compared to the question of “how can we best serve Christian unity, and prevent our own diseases and evil from afflicting those around us.”

We are no longer a body that needs worry about schism; we ourselves have become a schism within the church catholic.

James Coder is a layman in the diocese of Europe