Lambeth and Legitimacy

Lambeth is about legitimacy. It is unpleasant to have to point that fact out, but it is becoming more and more evident as the Conference draws to a close. Consider:

1. All of the buildup and speculation in 2007 to the point when the actual invitations were mailed.

2. The reactions in The Episcopal Church when it was learned that practically all of its bishops had been invited.

3. The reactions in the Anglican Church of Canada when it was learned that all of its bishops had been invited.

4. The initial reactions to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s refusal to invite Bishop Robinson, followed by the continued pressure exerted by TEC to allow Bishop Robinson to attend.

5. The reactions in The Episcopal Church to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s refusal to invite the Bishops in CANA or AMiA.

6. The pointed refusal by the Archbishop of Canterbury to reach out to any of the leaders at GAFCON, and his issuing a critique of them instead.

7. The wangling of an invitation for the newly but illegitimately appointed Bishop of San Joaquin, and the decision to spend a significant potion of that fledgling diocese’s kitty to take him and his wife to Canterbury.

8. The reaction in The Episcopal Church again to the news that Bishop Lamb was invited, and that Bishop Schofield would not be attending.

9. The arming of TEC bishops with carefully drafted “position papers” for them to use in the discussion groups, so that they would all be heard with one voice.

10. The concerted circus mounted by Integrity and other LGBT groups around the periphery of the Conference to make their presence known.

11. The spending, again, of a significant sum—reported to be in excess of $70,000—to bring the uninvited Bishop Robinson to Canterbury, along with a security team and a videographer to make a film documentary of his crashing the Conference.

12. And now the latest evidence—the reaction of those at the Conference to the Archbishop of Uganda’s forthright declaration of the reasons his Church did not attend:

I bump into a senior church figure near the Conference's Marketplace, a hangar behind the Sports Centre where you can get dressed as a bishop and buy all their books. I ask him what he makes of remarks from Henri Orombi, Archbishop of Uganda, about the Archbishop of Canterbury being little better than a remnant of colonialism and, unlike the Pope, being unelected and appointed by a secular government.

My eminent friend looks distant for a moment. "It's Orombi's way of getting into the conference," he replies. "If he's got something to say to us, he should have come here to say it. It's a sign of how frustrated the boycotters are that the Anglican Communion is getting on with its business without them. And it's a very childish response." [Update 08/01/2008: see more responses here.]

Yes, the Anglican Communion is “getting on with its business”, all right. That business has everything to do with sitting down to talk and talk and talk, and nothing to do with upholding important consensus—such as Resolution 1.10 passed at the previous Lambeth Conference.

Resolution 1.10 has to be one of the most denigrated resolutions ever passed by any body anywhere; in terms of being “honored in the breach more than in the observance,” it is right up there with resolutions passed by the Security Council. The first and most common way to denigrate it is to point out that it is only advisory, and not binding (see p. 8). Yet precisely in that characteristic lies its strength, as expressing the mind of the Anglican Communion. Honoring what it says shows respect for each of the members of that Communion, just as surely as refusing to follow its advice shows profound disrespect.

The second way the Resolution is denigrated is to contend that “things have changed since 1998---what a difference a decade makes.” But as a matter of fact, the bishops at Lambeth now affirm that the majority of them (even without the Ugandan and Nigerian bishops present) would still take the same position today.

The third way it is denigrated is to argue that the Resolution was “rammed through” in 1998 by a conservative wing, well-equipped with pagers and cellular telephones (an innovation adopted by TEC's liberals in 2008), that plied the Africans for their support with chicken dinners. Once again, that assertion is simply untrue.

And the fourth, and most effective, way to denigrate the Resolution is simply to break it, and to do openly that which it advises against. In doing so, of course, you claim that you are being motivated by the Holy Spirit, who is doing “new things” in your Church.

But if you take this last approach, you have a genuine legitimacy problem. Because the Resolution was adopted by a Lambeth Conference, your dishonoring of it cannot be seen as legitimate unless that act is honored—or at least forgiven, or excused—by another Lambeth Conference. Hence stems the struggle to achieve that legitimacy at Lambeth 2008, as witnessed by the evidence cited above.

Another problem, however, comes from the fact that Lambeth 2008 will not be adopting any new Resolutions. So you cannot get an official acknowledgment that your actions contrary to Resolution 1.10 may, in the long run, be seen as adiaphora about which the Communion can agree to disagree.

What, then, do you do? You see to it that the final “Lambeth Reflections” document acknowledges that you were there, that everyone sat down and talked things over with you, that you were heartfelt in your apologies for the consequences of your actions, of which you were totally unaware at the time, and that you will continue to maintain the dialog begun at Lambeth, especially with those with whom you disagree. You make these same points to the press, using your own press conferences as necessary to get out the message. And above all, you see to it that the final document does not contain (a) any condemnation of your actions, (b) any commitment for you to observe a moratorium on future actions, or (c) any indication that you have been asked to withdraw from the instruments of the Communion. And you take your leave, pleasantly satisfied at having accomplished all that was necessary to achieve legitimacy from Lambeth. The money was well spent!



Then you go back to your office and approve the draft of the resolution to depose the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan for “abandonment of the communion of this Church.” Next you check up on the latest in your lawsuit against Bishop Schofield, and you touch base with Bishop Lamb about his plans to depose the sixty-odd clergy who went with +John-David to the Southern Cone.

Oh, yes—and you send a thank-you letter to ++Rowan for his hospitality to you at Lambeth.

Whither the Anglican Communion?

There is an important new post by Dr. Andrew Lilico, whose profile you may peruse here, on what the future split of the Anglican Communion will look like, and on how the coming split is inexorable. In contrast to the rumors and speculations you can read at the mainstream media sites, this writer gives informed specifics, broken down by each interest group, and also analyzed against the peculiar background of the Church of England's Erastianism.

After you have absorbed Dr. Lilico's post, go and read Cranmer's additional thoughts on how there will always be a Church of England---at least, so long as there is a reigning British monarch.

Then, for dessert, read this piece at Fr. Al Kimel's blog: Is The Episcopal Church Truly a Catholic Church?

Each of these articles is pertinent to my title, especially in light of the second Lambeth address given last night by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr. Lilico sees most clearly what I think all the fuss and bother at Lambeth about sexuality--- now we'll discuss it, now we won't---is obscuring: the Church of England is coming apart right under Archbishop Rowan's nose. The refusal of General Synod to make continued provision for its Anglo-Catholic wing means that they will not be able to stay in the same Church with women bishops: they regard the latter as an invalidation of the historical apostolic succession. The evangelicals, meanwhile, will not tolerate the election of practicing homosexuals to the episcopate in clear violation of Scripture, as I explain in this post; with the Anglo-Catholics gone, there will be no means of halting the inexorable trend that begins, as TEC has seen, with the ordination of women, and the Church of England will have at least one openly gay bishop before Lambeth convenes again. Dr. Lilico foresees a two-thirds reduction in the number of CoE priests when these two groups take their leave. At the same time, however, he does not predict that the separate groups will fall out of Communion with each other, but will remain as "sister churches"---because of the incredible complexities of property ownership going back to medieval times. (He also believes that the departing evangelicals and the Anglo-Catholics will maintain their present alliance. I am more skeptical that they will both make the break at the same time, and so think that they will end up separate because they will break off that way.)

As for The Episcopal Church, does anyone doubt that it will be a return to business as usual once the September meeting of the House of Bishops convenes? Will our bishops' experiences at Lambeth cause them to change course, to drop the phony deposition threat against Bishop Duncan, and to work with him, San Joaquin and Virginia on a way to end all the litigation? I have seen nothing from the remarks of our Presiding Bishop thus far to indicate that. Thus if the bishops "depose" Bishop Duncan in September, the Diocese of Pittsburgh will follow the Diocese of San Joaquin out of The Episcopal Church, and the Dioceses of Fort Worth and Quincy will leave shortly after that. There will then be enough of a critical mass to organize a new North American province for those who have left TEC.

That new province will receive immediate recognition from the GAFCON Primates' Council, but to be accepted as a province of the Anglican Communion will require action by the Anglican Consultative Council and all the Primates of the Communion, and the process would have to begin with the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, as explained in this article:

Since the geographic United States is already a province, it would have to be split in some manner for another province to be formed. This has never before happened for doctrinal reasons.

The ACC requires the presiding officer or primate of the original province to request it to begin the process leading to division. That could be the first formidable hurdle for a theoretical new Anglican province in the United States. "I don't envision the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church requesting such a division," Sessum said.

Indeed---nor do I, so long as it is Katharine Jefferts Schori whom we are talking about. However, once the total bill for her disastrous litigation strategy comes due, I predict that she will not serve out her full term in that position. Even if she does, then the person elected to replace her will have different marching orders, because by then the entire Anglican Communion will look very different from what it is now. As Dr. Lilico foresees, the Church of England will follow the Queen. (It probably does not want to wait for Prince Charles to assume the throne, because he has long intimated that he would regard himself in that post as the "Defender of Faith", not the "Defender of the Faith.") So, presumably, will the Archbishop of Canterbury. And if the Queen decides for the traditional Anglo-Catholic wing, then the liberals in the Church of England will have to call themselves something else, to say nothing of the evangelicals if they are then separate.

Having an Anglo-Catholic Church of England would facilitate rapprochement with the GAFCON group, and in a short time after the dust settles, we could have a new Anglican Communion, surprisingly along the lines currently envisioned by Archbishop Rowan in his plans for a Covenant. There would be the core national Churches who signed onto the Covenant, presumably including the new North American province, which would be part of the compromise reached with GAFCON. (Once there are two or three different Anglican churches in England, all objections to two separate Anglican churches in the territorial United States will become meaningless.) Then there would be the non-covenantal, or "affiliate" churches like TEC and ACoC, still nominally "in communion" with the Archbishop of Canterbury, but preaching an entirely different, "inclusive" Gospel, as described so well by Fr. Kimel. Finally, there would be those on the fringe, not in communion, but preserving the Anglican faith in various forms, just as we have with the Continuing Churches today. (The new North American province may also splinter in time, between its own Anglo-Catholics' views on the ordination of women, and its evangelicals who are not opposed to women priests. If that happens, the United States will end up mirroring what happens in England.)

Against all these interacting currents, the two weeks of Lambeth 2008 will seem like the calm where interfering waves temporarily cancel each other out. The turbulence will emerge beyond, just as though there had been no interference. Anything of significance that is accomplished at Lambeth will be whatever is done to advance the draft of the Covenant. For if all turns out the way envisioned in the articles above and in my own added comments, it will be around such a document that the core of the New Anglican Communion coalesces---and quickly. (Already the voices in TEC are saying that they will not be able to take up the subject of a covenant at GC 2009 because of the timing, and that its consideration will have to wait for GC 2012. That is exactly right, and by 2012 any contribution to it by TEC will hopefully have become irrelevant.)

Sic transit gloria Communionis anglicae . . .

What Is So Hard About Reading Scripture?

The Lambeth Conference is threatening to come apart over the issue of consecrating gay bishops. (Yes, I know---blessings of same-sex marriages are also a subject of dispute, but tell me: do you really think The Episcopal Church, or the Anglican Church of Canada, would go to the mat and risk their affiliations with the Anglican Communion over some non-liturgical mumbo-jumbo that they regard as "not core doctrine"? Concede their right to elect gay bishops, and same-sex blessings will follow as a matter of course, but the converse is not by any means as true.)

The Windsor Continuation Group has issued a preliminary draft of yet a fourth call for a moratorium on the election of any more gay bishops. Reaction from the bishops who heard it was, not surprisingly, mostly confined to the North Americans (18 out of the 25 who spoke), from both sides of the issue. One witness said in frustration: "They were basically just slagging each other off." (And no wonder, given the long-standing dysfunctionality of our House of Bishops.)

The bishops at Lambeth have been engaging in regular morning Bible study for over a week now. Since they are supposed to be pondering the role of a bishop in the Communion, what I wonder is why they could not leave the Gospel of John for one day and concentrate just on this passage from Titus 1:6-9, which lays down first-century criteria for a person to be an "elder" (Greek presbyteros---"elder," "older/senior"; applied, for example to a member of the Sanhedrin):

An elder must be blameless, the husband of one wife, with faithful children who cannot be charged with dissipation or rebellion. For the overseer must be blameless as one entrusted with God’s work, not arrogant, not prone to anger, not a drunkard, not violent, not greedy for gain. Instead he must be hospitable, devoted to what is good, sensible, upright, devout, and self-controlled. He must hold firmly to the faithful message as it has been taught, so that he will be able to give exhortation in such healthy teaching and correct those who speak against it.

This is the New English Translation; let's compare it with some others. Here is the more literal English Standard Version (with verse 5 included for context):

5 This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you— 6 if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. 7 For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, 8 but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. 9 He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

And now we are ready to look at the familiar King James Version:

5 For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee: 6 If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly. 7 For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; 8 But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate; 9 Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.

Can there be any question as to the meaning of this passage as applied to the case of V. Gene Robinson? (The word "overseer" in verse 7 is, as the KJV has it, the English equivalent of the Greek word "episkopos", or "bishop" in today's language.) From 1611 to today, the translations have not varied: a bishop must be "the husband of one wife". Let us look at the Greek original; it is even clearer. (In the link, you can move your cursor over each Greek word to see its meaning and its form.) It says "mias gynekos aner"---literally, "man of one woman", or phrased in more contemporary language, "a one-woman man".

A "man of one woman," or "a one-woman man," could not be more specific: the phrase cannot be applied to those in a same-sex relationship, however committed, and no matter how long-standing. Thus I have a difficult time with all the debate and anguish over the issue of whether it is in accordance with Scripture to elect an openly gay man to the position of an elder in the Church. Forget about all the arguments over what the Old Testament says about homosexual behavior: Paul in his letter to Titus is absolutely clear that a bishop should not be "married" to a person of the same sex! (It also means---sorry, Christina Rees et al.---that women bishops were by no means sanctioned in the early Church; but see what you think of this argument.)

We do not have to take the testimony of Paul's letter to Titus as the sole example of this teaching. Here it is again, in 1 Timothy 3:2-7 (NET):

The overseer ["bishop"] then must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, an able teacher, not a drunkard, not violent, but gentle, not contentious, free from the love of money. He must manage his own household well and keep his children in control without losing his dignity. But if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for the church of God? He must not be a recent convert or he may become arrogant and fall into the punishment that the devil will exact. And he must be well thought of by those outside the faith, so that he may not fall into disgrace and be caught by the devil’s trap.

We have the same standard reiterated, plus something further: the prospective bishop "must manage his own household well"---for "if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for the church of God?" (Whatever else he may be a model of, V. Gene Robinson is not a model head of household.) And there is more: a bishop "must be well thought of by those outside the faith." Again, while Gene Robinson may be well thought of by those in the gay and lesbian community, the bishops at Lambeth heard how he is regarded by Anglicans in the Sudan and other areas in Africa that have to contend with the forces of Islam. Thus it is difficult to reconcile the plain words of Scripture with the elevation of V. Gene Robinson to the episcopacy, even though all the procedures were duly followed. (Don't forget that the Emperor Caligula followed all the prescribed protocols to make his horse Incitatus a Roman senator.)

We also have the testimony of one of the early Church fathers as to the importance of maintaining the apostolic succession according to the guidelines laid down by the apostle Paul:

. . . the Tradition of the Apostles has been manifested to the universal world in the whole Church, and we can enumerate those who have been constituted bishops and successors of the Apostles up to us […] [The apostles] wanted those whom they left as their successors to be 'perfect and irreproachable' in everything (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6-7), to entrust the Magisterium to them in their place: If they act correctly it will be followed by great usefulness, but if they fall, it would be the greatest calamity" (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, III, 3, 1: para. 7,848).

Thus we have two independent passages about the qualifications to be a bishop in the early Christian church, backed up by an explicit citation to both of those passages by a second-century bishop and leader of the early Church. (From the days of the Church fathers, it has also been argued that Paul's language excludes from the episcopacy those who had been divorced, and though I could cite scholarship to that effect, I do not need to---the disqualification of V. Gene Robinson follows not from the fact that he is divorced, but from the fact that he is not a "one-woman man." Moreover, see this thread and its comments.) The question thus arises: how do the supporters of the consecration of V. Gene Robinson defend their actions in light of these two New Testament passages?

It is remarkable that the only defense of the election of V. Gene Robinson against these two passages which I could find on the Web occurs in the publication prepared by The Episcopal Church for presentation at the 2005 meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, in response to a request from the Windsor Report (paragraph 141) and the Primates at Dromantine in 2005 (paragraph 16) that The Episcopal Church provide an explanation of "why their proposal meets the criteria of scripture, tradition and reason." This publication, entitled "To Set Our Hope on Christ," avoids the issue by sidestepping it. The document first sets up an elaborate straw man---the candidate for the episcopacy who believes unreservedly in the bodily resurrection of Christ, based on the example of St. Paul:

But then God “crucified” his world, and, in so doing, called him to be an apostle to the very group he had once tried to destroy. St. Paul later describes this as God’s great act of grace and mercy towards him when he himself was an enemy of God without knowing it. He had been absolutely certain that he was doing God’s will, only to find out that he was blocking God’s will instead (1 Corinthians 15:3-11). That experience caused the Apostle Paul to understand apostolic credentials in terms of service to others, not power over others—a service that could only spring from his own life-changing share in Jesus’ death and resurrection. For, as he says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). . . . Over against Cynic philosophers who bullied their followers and ruled as tyrants over them, Paul insists on a model of leadership that imitates the gentleness and kindness of Christ. Real eligibility, indeed real authority, in leadership, he insists, is seen in human willingness to be used by God for the empowerment of others.

What does this have to do with the qualifications Paul elsewhere sets out for a bishop? you ask. Well, just wait---they are getting there, by their own route:

[4.3] Bearing these features of St. Paul’s life and teaching in mind, we can see that what makes leaders fit to serve the whole Church of God is the universality of Christ’s mission—and a minister’s fidelity to Christ’s way of serving that mission. This is the foundational quality that reaches across every human boundary. This is the fundamental ground upon which locally chosen ministers may be servants for the Church throughout the world. Thus the Christian family must, in discerning God’s call to this apostolic ministry, be able to recognize such an authentic witness to the cross and resurrection in a candidate for episcopal service. Within our own Anglican tradition, Archbishop Michael Ramsey affirms that the wellspring of the Church’s life is nothing less than the dying and rising of Christ, and clarifies how this must shape the Church’s new Gospel understanding of reality. Men and women, he writes, are now found to be identified with Christ’s death in such a way that they think of themselves no longer as separate and self-sufficient units, but as centred in Christ who died and rose again. They used to think of Christ as an isolated historical figure (“after the flesh”[2 Cor. 5]); now they think of Him as the inclusive head and centre of a new humanity, wherein a new creation of God is at work.

Still not there yet; but now watch how Archbishop Ramsey (who would be turning over in his grave at this abuse of his teaching!) is called into service:

The implication of this passage is far-reaching. Christ is here defined not as the isolated figure of Galilee and Judea but as one whose people, dead and risen with Him, are His own humanity. [Footnote omitted.] The transforming power of Jesus’ death and resurrection, overcoming every division, unites his faithful people as the living members one Body. Thus the people of God, in the power of the Holy Spirit, discern God’s call to episcopal ministry in those in whom they recognize the charism of true, faithful, and, if need be, costly witness to the power of the Lord’s death and resurrection. Such witnesses are notably marked by a deep and continuing conversion to God’s purposes, as St. Paul understood, and by a gentleness, kindness, and humility that corresponds to the way of Christ. Across the centuries and in every region of the globe, the organic life of Christ, in the limbs and members of his Body, has expressed itself in this Spirit-guided authority to discern rightly such calls of God; the bishops of neighboring dioceses, in giving their consent to these elections and participating in the ordination liturgy, have affirmed the faithfulness of these communities in so discerning the call of God. Such, we devoutly believe, was the case in the recent calling to the episcopate of the Bishop of New Hampshire.

The authors of this tract are still not ready to deal with the passages in Titus and 1 Timothy. But note how the criteria in those passages have already been winnowed, and made marginal. What really counts in the election of a bishop is the ability of those electing him to let themselves be "Spirit-guided", and that the candidate's "gentleness, kindness and humility" model the image of our ideal Christ. Now we are ready for the culmination of this disingenuous argument:

Further Qualities to Be Discerned in the Ordained

[4.4] In addition to this foundational emphasis upon witnessing to the resurrection of Christ, the present ordination rites of the Episcopal Church (following earlier Anglican custom) identify other particular qualities and capacities for service which must be remarkable in one called to episcopal ministry. Among other features, one must be discernibly called “to guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church... and to be in all things a faithful pastor and wholesome example for the entire flock of Christ” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 517). These elements in the Examination of the bishop-elect reflect long-standing traditions in the Church’s ritual life, tracing back to the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (c. 215) and behind that to the Pastoral Epistles (cf. 1 Tim 3:1-7; Titus 1:6-9).

Wow! There are the two passages, openly acknowledged as being "long-standing traditions" in the election of bishops! So how do the authors of "To Set Our Hope in Christ" deal with them? Watch carefully: this is a "bait and switch" carried out right in front of your eyes.

It must be noted here that if the Church had not adopted a canon of interpretation such as the foundational nature of Christ’s death and resurrection, all the personal characteristics called for in the Pastorals would have to be given equal weight: this would most certainly prohibit the episcopal election of anyone married more than once (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6), or of any who have unruly or unbelieving children (1 Timothy 3:4; Titus 1:6), or of any who have a propensity to be quarrelsome, arrogant, or quick-tempered (1 Timothy 3:3; Titus 1:7).

". . . if the Church had not adopted a canon of interpretation such as the foundational nature of Christ's death and resurrection . . . this would most certainly prohibit the election of anyone married more than once . . ." What in the world does this mean?? When, exactly, did the Church adopt a "canon of interpretation" that changed the applicability of the criteria set out by Paul in Titus and First Timothy? Please re-read the lead-up of the argument to this stunning assertion. You will have to conclude that the "canon of interpretation" is based on Paul's own life, which witnessed to "the foundational nature of Christ's death and resurrection" (and possibly also as construed by Archbishop Ramsey in recent times). So we have a "canon of interpretation," supposedly drawn from Paul's own life, which contradicts (or makes superfluous) what Paul himself wrote! Could any argument be more specious?

But wait---there's more (I shall now go to a fisking format to deal appropriately with the outrageous assaults upon common sense that now ensue):

[4.5] The history of episcopal ordinations throughout the Church’s history suggests, rather, that the people of God have indeed interpreted all such prescriptions of personal qualities in the light of Christ’s redemptive work.

Oh, really? Just who are "the people of God" to whom you refer? And could you provide some examples from history of how they "interpreted all such prescriptions of 'personal qualities'", as you so quaintly describe Paul's criteria?

[Silence.]

Instead, the hand-waving continues:

The Prayer Book calls for the ordination of a bishop to take place on the Lord’s Day (Book of Common Prayer, p. 511); and this reminds us again that all the qualities of the bishop-elect are understood as signifying and testifying to the power of Christ’s resurrection. This is emphasized by the resonance of high priestly language in the ordination rites over time: in the Apostolic Tradition the candidate is called, using sacrificial language, to be blameless, gentle, pure, and humble.

And also to be the husband of one wife!!

Now that the difficulties presented by Titus and First Timothy have been swept under the rug, the dissimulation continues apace:

[4.6] In this way, the prayer for the ordained to be filled with the love of God points us again to the new bishop’s identity as a witness to the death and resurrection of Christ: the whole of the episcopal ministry is to exemplify the sacrifice of Christ, and the qualities of purity, gentleness, and holiness are not the new bishop’s own possessions but can only be the continual outpouring of Christ who “loved us, and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” This means that the electing community must be able to discern in a candidate for episcopal ministry an authentic obedience to the love of Christ and a capacity to point, as St. Paul teaches us, not to the candidate’s own self but to Christ at work in the full power of his sacrificial holiness. And this is the testimony of the people of God in New Hampshire—laity, priests, and deacons—and of the bishops and deputies from every diocese consenting.

[4.7] So while there may be differing forms in which the sacrificial holiness of Christ embodies itself in differing circumstances, there can be no doubt that the electing local community must be able, by power of the Holy Spirit, and confirmed by the consents of neighboring bishops along with clergy and laity from every diocese, to discern in candidates for episcopal office genuine charisms of obedience to Christ and so of authentic disposal of self to the service of Christ’s sacrificial love. In the Examination of bishops-elect, after they confirm that they believe themselves to be called by God to episcopal ministry, the very first question asked is, “Will you accept this call and fulfill this trust in obedience to Christ?” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 518). It is by means of this fundamental orientation of their entire being “in obedience to Christ” that bishops may bear witness in all their words and deeds not to their own particular qualities but to the power of the crucified and risen Lord whom they serve. While a bishop is, necessarily, recognized locally as called of God, it is precisely this obedience to the universal mission of Christ that fits the bishop to serve the universal Church. Again, it is their testimony that this is what the people of God in New Hampshire and the bishops and deputies consenting have discerned in electing their bishop.

I defy anyone reading this to demonstrate how these arguments could not also be used to justify the election of a confirmed polygamist to be a bishop of The Episcopal Church, provided only that he sincerely answers "Yes" to the question: "Will you accept this call and fulfill this trust in obedience to Christ?"

The argument goes on for pages more, and uses every rhetorical trick that can be mustered. (Those who want to see for themselves can follow the link given above.) Is it any wonder that, given such blatant dishonesty to the word of God as expressed by the Apostle Paul, no one continues to defend this propaganda today, or to cite it as a rationale for what TEC is doing?

It all comes down to this: either The Episcopal Church honors the Anglican Communion by respecting the consensus of its bishops that Scripture plainly does not sanction the election as a bishop of those who serve as a model for the gay lifestyle, or it decides to walk apart, in pursuit of its ideals that contradict the Scripture it claims to honor and uphold. Like the authors of "To Set Our Hope on Christ," its bishops can resort to elaborate evasions that fail to engage those who study their Bibles and endeavor to apply its precepts in their own lives. They may be successful, for a time, in satisfying the self-indulgent cravings of those who cannot bother to go back to the source. Eventually, however, they will be swallowed up, along with their church, in the great Sea of Irrelevancy. For if Scripture can be so easily set aside, then what more substantial is there that could possibly take its place? Even if they are accompanied by all the pomp and ceremony in the world, babbled untruths are scarcely the rock on which a church may be founded.

History Repeats Itself at Lambeth 2008

[A note to the reader who happens by this site: Apparently, criticism of the role which V. Gene Robinson has been playing in The Episcopal Church, and lately also at the decennial "Lambeth Conference" of all Anglican bishops at Canterbury, is taken in certain circles as an instance of gay-bashing, homophobia, or even worse forms of mental perversion. Like many others, the Curmudgeon has not been immune from this form of criticism (see the first comment to this post). Being a curmudgeon, however, he has never let any thought of how his remarks might be perceived by others influence either their character or their tone. The following essay, therefore, remains what it is, regardless of how any given reader may choose to interpret it: it is nothing more than a criticism (along with an accompanying historical parallel) of a bishop in the Episcopal Church who persists in conduct that is anything but episcopal. Were Pope Benedict XVI himself to visit Canterbury Cathedral for propaganda purposes, and to arrange to have himself filmed in doing so, this Curmudgeon would be no less severe in his criticism of that august figure. So be forewarned: if you are one of those who might perceive any criticism of Bishop Robinson as upsetting, or as a form of gay-bashing, or worse, then please stop reading, and find something here that is more to your liking. And for those who are not upset in the least, you might also enjoy this post (the latest in a series), which includes a game in which you can take part in order to mitigate the impact of all those personal pronouns that +Gene employs.]  

We learn from the Weblog of Gene Robinson that he had a little run-in with the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral when he tried to use that historic shrine as a prop in a film that he is making to record, presumably, his experiences in being excluded from the 2008 Lambeth Conference. First he sets the stage for us:

Since arriving in Canterbury, I had not yet visited the Cathedral. I went nowhere near the place on Sunday's opening service. The ever-anxious leadership had provided the Cathedral security guards with a large photo of me, posted at the security checkpoints, presumably to keep me from "crashing the gates" of the opening service. No one believed that I would be true to my promise to the Archbishop not to attend.

Note the self-serving projection here: Bishop Robinson, seeing himself as the divinely-appointed leader of the movement to win equal rights for gays within the church, conceives that such a leader probably ought to "crash the gates" rather than allow himself to be excluded from Lambeth. This sets up feelings of guilt, since he has not in fact done so, and he projects these feelings of guilt onto "the ever-anxious leadership" of the Anglican Communion, who simply cannot believe that he "would be true to [his] promise" not to do so. (Of course, does anyone doubt that had the Lambeth Conference not taken any security precautions at all, Bishop Robinson and his Episcopalian enablers would have taken advantage of that circumstance to hustle him in to create "an event"? Otherwise, what would be the point of having him come to Canterbury at all?) Thus, as +Gene projects his feelings of guilt onto the Lambeth leadership, we are already off on a very unepiscopalian note. As Archbishop Rowan Williams told the assembled bishops in the pre-Conference retreat, "bishops can never, however much they’d like to be, become the spokesperson of a single nation, or cause, or group, however worthy they may be. . . Therefore we can never simply be servants to one subgroup."

Next +Gene reveals that he is in fact making "a documentary" to be released---oh, in 2010 or so (no need to give the details, because all will be disclosed in time):

On Thursday, knowing that the conference attendees would leave early in the morning for London -- for the MDG walk, lunch at Lambeth Palace, and tea with the Queen -- it seemed like a good, low-profile time to make my own pilgrimage to our Mother Church. I told no one of my intentions to attend -- except I had my security person follow the properly courteous protocol of alerting the Cathedral to my visit. I had him also seek permission for a videographer to accompany me on my visit for a documentary to be released sometime in 2010. We were informed that the videographer could NOT accompany me or film me inside the Cathedral. Fair enough. We were told that he could accompany me to the gate onto the Cathedral grounds, and, standing in the public street, could at least film me walking into the Cathedral through the gate's archway.

So he picks the day when he knows most of those attending Lambeth will not be around, and arranges to bring his cameraman. His cameraman?? Is it not remarkable that a bishop making a pilgrimage to Canterbury imagines, before all else, that it would be wonderful to star in a little documentary of his visit, in which he could be filmed kneeling at the shrine to St. Thomas à Becket, and admiring the other features of that most holy site? (See the still pictures at his blog for an idea of what this would be like.) Would he still have made the visit had his camera- man been unable to come, I wonder? (The fact that this curmudgeon is having to ask such a question goes to the heart of the criticism being made: what kind of a documentary needs to be made about a visit to Canterbury, if not for purposes of the gay-rights agenda? And just what is "episcopal", anyway, about starring in a documentary?)

+Gene recounts what happened next:

We contacted Cathedral security to let them know of our imminent arrival, as had been request[e]d. When we got there, we were met by a gentleman, representing the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral, I think. He intercepted me and told me that I could not be filmed walking into the Cathedral (even from the public street outside) after all. The reason he gave took me by surprise, rendering me speechless (an uncommon experience for me!). "We can't have any photographs or film of you entering the Cathedral," he said, "because we want this to be a church for ALL people." Presumably he meant that my being seen walking into the Cathedral would cause others not to want to come.

What a conceit! "[A] gentleman representing the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral, I think." (Emphasis added---Gene was too self-absorbed to take in who was addressing him.) But the next conceit is still greater: "Presumably [by saying 'we want this to be a church for ALL people'] he meant that my being seen walking into the Cathedral would cause others not to want to come." [Emphasis again added. And now, a warning again to those who are sensitive (see first warning above): the criticism is about to become severe. Depart, or forever hold your peace.] 

These words manifest a distortion of reality so great as to border on megalomania. Bishop Robinson is not even certain as to who ordered him he could not take a propaganda film of his walking into the Cathedral. OK, let us grant him that one, because he was obviously flustered after thinking he had slipped one by those in charge of the Cathedral, only to be told (even though he did not recognize the reason) that he could not use the shrine of a martyr as a backdrop for his little "documentary." But then the megalomania sets in: he projects again that what is forbidden is to be "seen" walking into the Cathedral---not filmed for a documentary, mind you, but "seen" by others.  In +Gene's distorted projection, in other words, his very figure is so upsetting to orthodox Anglicans that just the sight of him walking up the steps to Canterbury Cathedral is enough to deter them from their own plans to worship there.

Can the man not even see how his declared intent to star in a film at the site struck those who had the responsibility of guarding it against just such abuses? He confesses that their protest took him aback:

This was one of those breathtaking moments when you just can't come up with the right thing to say. The rest of the day I thought of all the things I SHOULD have said. Like, "so you mean that I am not included in 'ALL people?!'" Or, "isn't this MY cathedral too?!" Or, "so what am I, chopped liver?!" The moment was so surprising, after having been so forthright in our notification of our visit and going through all the channels to ensure courteousness, I just couldn't come up with anything to say except, "okay," and accede to his wishes.

But the fact is that he was allowed to "walk into the Cathedral"---indeed, he was even assigned a genial and capable guide so that he could have a tour, just like any other pilgrim:

We were taken to the Cathedral's visitors office, where we were introduced to Theresa, a competent and warm guide who provided me with a wonderful, informative and hospitable tour of the Cathedral. But I simply couldn't shake the feelings engendered by the previous "welcome" a few minutes before.

He never gets it. If, indeed, the problem was with his being seen walking into the Cathedral, so that the very sight of him doing so would deter other worshippers, why did the staff assign him a guide to take him around the entire church? Why does he think they allowed him in the place to begin with? (As I say, logic is not his strong point.) 

The rest of his post is as self-serving as what I have already quoted, if not more, and it would be beating a dead horse to continue with this criticism. I shall note only the fact that the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral was entirely within his rights to stop +Gene from turning his Cathedral into a scenic prop for the gay rights agenda, for yet another documentary to be aired in 2010. How many bishops of the Anglican Communion have not one, but two documentaries coming out about them within a three-year period? (I refuse to give links to the first; you'll have to find it on your own if you want to see it.) Is this the role of a bishop---to make documentaries about how the rest of the Communion keeps him from their meetings, and about how he shows up anyway? "Episkopos" means "overseer", not "film star" or "gate-crasher."

And now it is time to answer +Gene's questions. Recall what they were: "So you mean I am not included in 'ALL people'? "Isn't this MY cathedral, too?" "So what am I, chopped liver?" (Well, maybe I will leave the third question to those more knowledgeable than I.)

I submit, Bishop Robinson, that in your focus on just yourself and your agenda for Lambeth, you have forgotten the history of the first Lambeth Conference, in 1867. You might want to remember that an even greater percentage of bishops---nearly fifty percent---stayed away from that Conference than the percentage that stayed away from this one. The reason? Because in 1867, the idea of a gathering of all the bishops of the Anglican Communion was so novel. It had never been done before, and to the many who stayed away, it sounded as though they would be coming together as a "council" of the Anglican Communion, and would pass resolutions that were intended to be binding on all its members, whether present or not. Even the Archbishop of York, whose title as "Primate of England" makes him a close second to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the "Primate of All England," decided not to legitimize the first Conference with his presence, and he was joined by the Bishop of London.

All in all, only 76 out of the 144 bishops of the Communion attended the first Lambeth Conference, which was just five days in duration. The agenda at the Conference was dominated by the current strife between the Bishop of Capetown and the Bishop of Natal, whom the former had claimed to depose, but who had been reinstated in his position by a judgment of the Privy Council, as I have explained in this post. The Archbishop of Canterbury had planned to hold a concluding festival service with the assembled bishops in Westminster Abbey. The Dean of that church, however, declined to allow the service to be held there, for reasons explained by his biographer:

The Conference concluded with a special service. Before the opening of the proceedings the Archbishop expressed a wish to hold this service in Westminster Abbey. In the uncertainty that [Dean] Stanley felt as to the purposes for which the Conference was summoned, he feared that it might be used for party objects, such as giving support to the Bishop of Capetown, repudiating the Judgment of the Privy Council, and confirming the alleged deposition of the Bishop of Natal. He therefore declined to promise the use of the building for the proposed special service . . .   

We have, indeed, the actual letter written by Dean Stanley to the Archbishop of Canterbury declining to make Westminster Abbey available for the purpose requested:

Deanery, Westminster, Sept 21st 1867. 

My dear Lord Archbishop, ---  I have been honoured with a communication from your Grace through the Bishop of London requesting the use of Westminster Abbey for a special service to be held for the English, American, and Scottish bishops now assembled in England---to be held, as I understood, on September 28. On all occasions it is my earnest desire to render the Abbey and the precincts of Westminster available for purposes of general utility and edification, and this desire is increased when the request comes from your Grace.

You will kindly allow me to state the difficulty which I feel in the present instance. I have endeavoured to act in such matters on the rule of granting the use of the Abbey to such purposes, and such only, as are either coextensive with the Church of England, or have a definite object of usefulness or charity, apart from party or polemical considerations. 

Your Grace will, I am sure, see that however much your Grace's intentions would have brought the proposed Conference at Lambeth within this sphere in fact, it can hardly be so considered. The absence of the Primate and the larger part of the bishops of the Northern Province [York], not to speak of the bishops of India and Australia, and of other important colonial or missionary sees, must, even irrespectively of other indications, cause it to present a partial aspect of the English Church; whilst the appearance of other prelates, not belonging to our Church, places it on a different footing from the institutions which are confined to the Church of England. And, further, the absence of any fixed information as to the objects to be discussed and promoted by the Conference leaves me, in common with all who stand outside, in uncertainty as to what would be the proposals or measures which would receive by implication the sanction given by the use of the Abbey---a sanction which, in the case of a church so venerable and national in its character, ought, I conceive, to be lent only to public objects of well defined or acknowledged beneficence. . . .

Thus, Bishop Robinson, I say to you that the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral was only following in a venerable tradition when he declined to let you film yourself walking into or around his church for purposes of making a documentary to advance the narrow agenda of those whom you represent. It is not that the Cathedral is YOUR Cathedral, but that it is a Cathedral belonging to the WHOLE Church---"to ALL the people," precisely as you were told. In 1867, Dean Stanley felt that the Lambeth Conference was not representative of the entire Communion---let alone the Church of England, whose Northern Province had largely absented itself. Consequently, he used his authority to bar even the Primate of All England from using Westminster Abbey as a theater for a culmination of the Lambeth proceedings. How much less of a claim, therefore, could you have to employ the hallowed precincts of Canterbury Cathedral for your own agenda, which is so much at odds with the rest of the Church you profess to serve? 

Surely, as Santayana noted, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. To which I will add the following observation, from Karl Marx: "Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." 

A Modest Proposal to Solve the Lambeth Deficit

There have been several stories in the news reporting that the Lambeth Conference is running a sizeable deficit. Here is Damian Thompson on the topic; he parallels this earlier story at the Times Online site:

The problems of homosexual bishops and same-sex blessings are not the only difficulties affecting the Lambeth Conference. Organisers are facing a budget shortfall of up to £2 million. The funding crisis is so severe that even in sky-high temperatures organisers have been unable to pay for air conditioning inside the sweltering conditions of the large blue circus-style tent in which plenary sessions are being held.

An emergency meeting of the Archbishops' Council and the Church Commissioners has been called as soon as the conference ends next month. The Commissioners who have the funds to bail out the conference are not allowed by their charitable trust deeds to fund any except Church of England bishops.

Ironically, the one church that has the funds to bail out the conference is The Episcopal Church of the US. One senior source told The Times: "At the moment we just cannot pay for it."

Two million pounds is quite a shortfall---almost four million U.S. dollars at current rates. Appeals have gone out to the Compass Rose Society, and at least one check for US $100,000 has arrived. At that rate, however, it will be weeks before the deficit can be retired. Meanwhile, the bishops are sweltering in the summer heat, because the cost of air conditioning the gathering spaces is simply beyond the Conference budget.

It turns out that one does not have to look very far for a source of funds that could cover the shortfall (and more, much more!). For in England the Members of Parliament have just gone on vacation, after collecting £5.5 million from the taxpayers to subsidize the dozen or more bars that are operated for the House of Commons! The ineffable Guido Fawkes reports:

The House of Commons Refreshment Department operated on a subsidy of £5.5 million of taxpayers’ money in the 2007/08 financial year, which is equivalent to the total annual tax receipts from 35 pubs. The subsidy is equivalent to £8,500 per MP - that is approximately £50 per diem on top of the £30 per diem they voted to award themselves every working day in cash.

The subsidy, which for some inexplicable reason was not published in the House of Commons’ Annual Accounts, was £693,000 higher than in 2006/07 - a 15% increase. No belt tightening for MPs despite the Chancellor's warnings.

Fifty pounds per day! (How would the visiting bishops like to have that kind of a per diem---just for drinks! You get another thirty pounds a day for food---but who's keeping track? It should be possible, since the rooms are already provided, to eat and drink fairly well in England on $160 per day.) The subsidy comes to a remarkable forty-three percent of the cost of operating those one dozen bars, or, as Guido Fawkes puts it:

[This means] that the taxpayer coughs up £4.30 for every £10 spent refreshing our politicians: even before they claim back their outgoings without receipts through the expenses system. These figures don't include the multi-million pound re-fit of the wine cellar.

Wine cellar??! Oh, yes, of course there would have to be a Parliamentary wine cellar. And as Guido Fawkes explained in an earlier post, it was recently completely remodeled at a cost to the taxpayers of only---

Seven million pounds. That's just under fourteen million dollars. (The Curmudgeon has a modest wine cellar and knows a little bit about what they cost. But his mind reels at what kind of a cellar could be built for $14,000,000.00. That is more than the cost of many a modest five-or six-story building, and it probably exceeds even the cost of this famous cellar, considered one of the world's largest. Note: I am not talking about the cost of the wines to stock it; we are dealing here with just the cost of remodeling it.)

Back to Mr. Fawkes. He includes some more outrageous information:

MPs are members of the best London club with a dozen bars on the parliamentary estate, plenty of dining rooms, brasseries and banqueting suites all operating without a licence and no restrictions on hours - you can even smoke in some.

Apparently in addition to receiving subsidized booze, Members of Parliament regularly turn in their "expense accounts" to be reimbursed. Mr. Fawkes explains in the footnote (indicated by the asterisk) that the salary of an MP used to calculate the statistic trumpeted in red does not include "all the additional expense claims for essential new kitchens, appliances, window cleaning, garden pergolas, plasma TVs . . . ."

It would seem that the Right Honourable Members of Parliament, having been at it for many hundreds of years longer than our own Members of Congress, are much more practiced in the art of feeding at the public trough. Guido Fawkes supplies some detail of where all that booze money went, which he obtained from this press release put out by the ever-watchful ALMR (Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers):

A pint in the Stranger’s Bar costs £2.10, outside parliament in the West End you pay £3.50 to £4.00. An 8-year-old Scotch costs £1.35, while our politicians can enjoy a Pimm’s on the pleasant Thames-side terrace for just £1.65 - which is a third to a half of prices a mile down the road. Do you really think they need to pay politicians more to attract people?

We don't have the details of how much a bottle of, say, 1975 La Mission Haut-Brion might set back a Member in the Parliamentary brasserie. (The linked price is for a double magnum, the equivalent of four single bottles, so it has to be adjusted accordingly.) But given the details in the press release, we may be certain that the $14 million was not spent just to house cases of Horace Rumpole's favorite plonk, Château Thames Embankment.

And so just what is my "modest proposal"? Well, the idea came like a flash when I saw this sentence buried in a note on page three of that ALMR press release:

The Bishops’ Bar and the Lords’ Bar, operated by the House of Lords, are also on the Parliamentary estate.

The Bishops' Bar? Archbishop Rowan has been holding back on us. No need to run a deficit at Lambeth when the taxpayers already subsidize the bishops' tabs at the Bishops' Bar. Simply put it on your expense account, Archbishop, and let it be run through the taxpayers' books. After all, £2 million is nothing---a mere trifle!---in comparison with the amount spent to refurbish the Parliamentary wine cellar. And who knows what kind of fellowship and good will might ensue if you invited all the indaba groups to be your guests at the Bishops' Bar?

On the Gulf That Divides Us

The Most Reverend Dr. Daniel Deng Bul, the Bishop of Juba and the Archbishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, has dared to speak truth to power. At the Lambeth Conference, he requested that the Press Office arrange for him a briefing with the press. When they declined to do so, he walked over to the Press Room (which is some 15 minutes away from where the bishops are meeting) and held an impromptu press conference of his own. He was following up on this eloquently drawn Statement which had been approved by all of the bishops in his church, and released the day before:

Statement of the Sudanese Bishops to the Lambeth Conference on the ECS Position on Human Sexuality

July 2008

In view of the present tensions and divisions within the Anglican Communion, and out of deep concern for the unity of the Church, we consider it important to express clearly the position of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan (ECS) concerning human sexuality.

We believe that God created humankind in his own image; male and female he created them for the continuation of humankind on earth. Women and men were created as God’s agents and stewards on earth We believe that human sexuality is God’s gift to human beings which is rightly ordered only when expressed within the life-long commitment of marriage between one man and one woman. We require all those in the ministry of the Church to live according to this standard and cannot accept church leaders whose practice is contrary to this.

We reject homosexual practice as contrary to biblical teaching and can accept no place for it within ECS. We strongly oppose developments within the Anglican Church in the USA and Canada in consecrating a practicing homosexual as bishop and in approving a rite for the blessing of same-sex relationships. This has not only caused deep divisions within the Anglican Communion but it has seriously harmed the Church’s witness in Africa and elsewhere, opening the church to ridicule and damaging its credibility in a multi-religious environment.

The unity of the Anglican Communion is of profound significance to us as an expression of our unity within the Body of Christ. It is not something we can treat lightly or allow to be fractured easily. Our unity expresses the essential truth of the Gospel that in Christ we are united across different tribes, cultures and nationalities. We have come to attend the Lambeth Conference, despite the decision of others to stay away, to appeal to the whole Anglican Communion to uphold our unity and to take the necessary steps to safeguard the precious unity of the Church.

Out of love for our brothers and sisters in Christ, we appeal to the Anglican Church in the USA and Canada, to demonstrate real commitment to the requests arising from the Windsor process. In particular:
- To refrain from ordaining practicing homosexuals as bishops or priests
- To refrain from approving rites of blessing for same-sex relationships
- To cease court actions with immediate effect;
- To comply with Resolution 1:10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference
- To respect the authority of the Bible

We believe that such steps are essential for bridging the divisions which have opened up within the Communion.

We affirm our commitment to uphold the four instruments of communion of the Anglican Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council; and call upon all Provinces of the Communion to respect these for the sake of the unity and well-being of the Church.

We appeal to this Lambeth Conference to rescue the Anglican Communion from being divided. We pray that God will heal us from the spirit of division. We pray for God’s strength and wisdom so that we might be built up in unity as the Body of Christ.

Archbishop Deng explained to the press the reasons he and his bishops had decided to issue the statement, and answered their questions. In this account by Cherie Wetzel at Anglican Mainstream, his responses only are given; as she notes, the questions can be inferred from what he says in response:

“Gene Robinson should resign for the sake of the Church and the entire Anglican Communion. We are pleading with them (the others at this conference) for the Anglican World, to not throw that away.

“We do not want to throw any people away, either. But we are here to determine how to remain united. That begins with forgiving one another for errors made. Gene Robinson is an error. The American church has not admitted they are wrong and we cannot forgive them until they do.

“I do not see a way out of these problems with the Indaba groups. The main issues have not been touched.

“300 bishops are not here because of Gene Robinson. Can he not resign to allow them to come? Why has he not done that?

“He is a human being and we are not throwing him away but the norms of the Anglican Communion have been violated. The question is not if Gene Robinson comes but what are we being challenged to do by GAFCON?”

“Let the Anglican world be united and be a normal, respected Christian body.”

“We have not punished the American church yet. We are asking them to repent. I am talking about the institutional church in America, no specific bishops. I am here to speak within the House. I cannot be silent on this issue; I must speak to the House for the reality I know with my people. I should not hesitate to be here since I have been an Anglican since I was a child.

When asked what would happen to the Communion if Robinson did not resign, the archbishop continued, “I cannot predict what will happen if he will not resign.”

Ruth Gledhill of the Times of London asked the archbishop who would pay for this conference, reportedly 2.6 million pounds in debt at this minute, and [with the Communion] not able to pay for this by the parishes in the Church of England, if the American church was not invited. He replied very gently, “Issues of faith cannot be mixed with materialism.”

The baiting by the press had begun with Ruth Gledhill's sarcastic question. There followed this exchange with an unnamed Western reporter or blogger accredited to the Press Room; the comment following the quoted sentence is an editorial addition by Cherie Wetzel:

When asked if he knows any gay people in the Sudan he replied, “They have not come to the surface. We do not have them.” The press from TEC that were in the room did not laugh out loud at this statement, but nearly.

And naturally, another reporter or blogger had to ask his position on women's ordination:

The final question was about the women and ordination, an issue that is still a smoking topic in the Church of England. “Yes,” he said. “Women are human beings that have ministered with the Lord Jesus Christ and to the Lord Jesus Christ.” He does believe in the ordination of women.

From the point of view of the Westerners asking the questions, the trap had been set, and the Archbishop had walked right into it. Susan Russell is as good an example as any of this one-sided mindset:

When asked about ministering to the gays and lesbians in his province, the archbishop declared that he did not think there were any homosexuals in the Sudan as “none had come forward.” And when queried about his position on the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate said he “believed in women priests and bishops because they were human” – leaving listeners to wonder if the inference was that homosexuals were not.

. . .

What is news is that the Archbishop of the Sudan helped make the case on Tuesday that the schism facing the Anglican Communion is the direct result of hard-line reactionaries who will stop of nothing short of compliance with their narrow, exclusionist agenda as their criterion for being in communion.

What is news is that a bishop in the Church of God would deny the existence of gay and lesbian members of his province despite the call for listening to the experience of homosexual people throughout the communion.

Susan Russell, of course, is at Lambeth promoting the "gay/lesbian rights" agenda, and specifically the film "Voices of Witness: Africa", whose shallow and manipulative content has been fully laid out for all to see. Note that Susan accepts without reservation the questioner's blind premises, namely, that (a) Sudanese gays and lesbians, in the poorest region of the world, take their identities from their orientation, just as do those in the West, and see themselves as a separate segment of society; and (b) they would consequently come forward and expose themselves to punishment or death in that country's primitive, war-torn and religiously divided society. Making such assumptions is further evidence of the gap that divides those openly advocating gay and lesbian rights within the Church from the majority of the Anglican Communion. A commenter over at StandFirm echoed Susan Russell's views:

“When asked if he knows any gay people in the Sudan he replied, “They have not come to the surface. We do not have them.”


I commend the press from TEC for keeping a straight face. It would have been very hard to do!

So ... let me get this...; Some who post here are okay with the idea that someone who does not know a single gay or lesbian person can make statements like these and be lauded for his defense of orthodoxy? And you see nothing wrong with that...?

IMHO...maybe he needs to enlarge his list of acquaintances, or open his eyes...he comes across as poster child for someone in need of the “litsening process”!

As it was intended to do, this jibe drew several quick and sharp responses:

Your understanding of the situation in the Sudan seems rather uneven. One word from the Good Bishop that he knows homosexuals and the Muslims will be all over it, saying “See, we told you they are all demons!” So it doesn’t exist. And, from my Peace Corps understanding, it is not that homosexual acts don’t happen. No one, however, self-identifies as homosexual. To do so in that environment is suicide. The homosexual culture does not exist. It was that way 20 years ago and I assume it is even worse today.

Gee, . . . I can’t imagine why, if Sudanese Anglicans are being murdered on the grounds that other Anglicans merely support the gay agenda, that actual gay Sudanese wouldn’t be waiting in line to come out.

Life in the Sudan is not a Will and Grace rerun. People there are focused on life or death issues. They do not need to expand their circle of friends so that people in this country can feel better about who they are sleeping with.

To which last the original poster responded:

Should their own issues of life and death not be their focus at Lambeth? Or is it sermonizing from a position of relative ignorance about who people in the US should be sleeping with?

Consider how the point of view expressed here has isolated itself from the reality on the ground in the Sudan. The Archbishop comes to Lambeth because he is greatly concerned how the consecration of a gay bishop has led to the persecution and deaths of Christians in Africa, and particularly in the Sudan. It has also greatly hindered his mission, as we shall see. And when he speaks out at Lambeth, he is caricatured by Susan Russell and her ilk as a "hard-line reactionary" who is "sermonizing from a position of relative ignorance about who people in the US should be sleeping with." This is a case of projection in the extreme, of seeing everyone who proclaims the truth of the Scriptures as making a personal attack on one's lifestyle.

A while back there was a similar flapping of the jaws over the failure of Archbishops Akinola and Orombi at GAFCON to jump on the bandwagon of condemning violence against homosexuals in their respective countries---again in response to a baited question at a press conference. The usual commenters on the left could not avoid ascribing Western psychological terms like "homophobic" to the two African Archbishops. It is amazing to see how so much prejudice and anger can be projected onto two of the men most responsible for increasing the numbers of baptized Anglicans today---and who are doing so in the face of horrendous violence and difficulty---while the reporters and bloggers give a free pass to visiting Moslem leaders, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the same subject.

In short, the inability of the gay rights activists to perceive the narrow selfishness of their point of view, and their utter disregard for the consequences of their actions on the wider Anglican Communion, are simply monumental. Let us return to the Archbishop, and let him spell out some of those consequences for us:

“This issue of homosexuality in the Anglican Communion has a very serious effect in my country. We are called ‘infidels’ by the Moslems. That means that they will do whatever they can against us to keep us from damaging the people of our country. They challenge our people to convert to Islam and leave the infidel Anglican Church. When our people refuse, sometimes they are killed. These people are very evil and mutilate and harm our people. I am begging the Communion on this issue so no more of my people will be killed.

“My people have been suffering for 21 years of war. Their only hope is in the Church. It is the center of life of my people. No matter what problem we have, no material goods, no health supplies or medicine; no jobs or income; no availability of food. The inflation rate makes our money almost worthless and we have done this for 21 years. The Church is the center of our life together.

“The culture does not change the Bible; the Bible changes the culture. Cultures that do not approve of the Bible are left out of the Church’s life; people who do not believe in the Bible are left out of our churches. The American church is saying that God made a mistake. He made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Adam.”

Not all Westerners are so blind to the significance of the Sudanese statement, however. Be sure to read Brad Drell's post, and watch the video of the Archbishop's press conference. And here is blogger Karen B., at Lent & Beyond:

It has come as something of a surprise in the last 24 hours to read of the bold statement passed by the Province of Sudan at the Lambeth Conference. The Sudanese bishops, and their new Primate, the Most Reverend Dr. Daniel Deng Bul have created huge waves at Lambeth by calling for the resignation of bishop Gene Robinson, as the press coverage today demonstrates. (Here are a few links to some of the articles that have appeared in the last few hours: Telegraph, Christian Today, Guardian, Times Online, Anglican Journal (how interesting to note the absence of US Press coverage so far!)) Archbishop Deng Bul gave a press briefing today which you can read here.

As I read this news and think about the stand taken by the Sudanese bishops, I’m reflecting on the crisis in Sudan. I have close personal friends who have worked in Darfur. I know quite a bit about the suffering and need in Sudan. How much easier it would have been for the Sudanese bishops to ignore the problems in the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion and be consumed by their own needs. How easy it would have been for them to close their eyes to the actions of TEC and NOT make waves, so as to continue receiving much needed gifts from wealthy Episcopalians. And yet, that is not what they’ve done. They have done the opposite.

And here is Derek the Ænglican, who usually sides with the left, but not this time:

* The real key quote: “Asked whether there were homosexuals in Sudan, Deng said, ‘They have not come to the surface, so no, I don’t think we have them.’” It’s one thing to look at homosexuality as it currently is lived out in the Western world, to analyze it as we analyze other behaviors, and to come to the conclusion that the Bible, Church tradition, and reasoned evidence in light of scientific and spiritual truths leads one to believe that Christianity does not and cannot sanction it. It’s another entirely to reject a thing without having a grasp on it. This statement shows that Archbishop Deng is speaking from a paradigm that fundamentally does not intersect the North American situation. (And I’d wager a great deal we do exactly the same when we shoot off our mouths about polygamy…)

* Some interviewer asked if conservative Americans were behind the statement; the archbishop denied it. Based on the people and clergy that I have personally known from the Global South… Actually, back up… From the African people and clergy I have personally known, all of them have been vehemently opposed to homosexuality. I do believe some Westerners are of the opinion that conservative Americans are driving African and other Global South bishops to say something that they wouldn’t ordinarily say. And I think that’s false. I think the Africans would be saying this even if there were no conservative American party. As we all know, however, there is and they are stirring things up in the sense that their support emboldens primates like Archbishop Deng and others to say what they believe with reduced fear of reprisals, financial and otherwise.

. . .

Update

I think it’s important to include this. These further statements found at Anglican Mainstream give us a bit of background for the archbishop’s paradigm and some of the issues that make this whole situation harder:

“This issue of homosexuality in the Anglican Communion has a very serious effect in my country. We are called ‘infidels’ by the Moslems. . .

Globalization is a complicated force that we still have no clue how to handle.

Not only do we have no clue how to handle it, but the problem is exacerbated by assuming that our "advanced" civilization gives us the right to set the pace for all to follow. Look at the Presiding Bishop's response given to an interviewer from the Boston Globe:

"Where the protesters are, in some parts of Africa or in other parts of the Anglican Communion today, is where this church and this society we live in was 50 years ago, and for us to assume that people can move that distance in a year or in a relatively instantaneous manner is perhaps faithless," [+Jefferts Schori] said. "That kind of movement and development has taken us a good deal of pain and energy over 40 or 50 years, and I think we have to make some space so that others can make that journey as well."

"That kind of movement," indeed. "That kind of movement" is not going to happen in Africa---not while there is a life-and-death struggle going on in the Sudan and elsewhere with the forces of Islam. Instead, "that kind of movement", continuing in America, will serve only to widen further the gulf that now divides us from the rest of the Anglican Communion.

[UPDATE 07/22/2008: Bishop Robinson has now responded to the Sudanese demands that he resign---not officially, but in a monologue on his blog (I have interspersed some editorial comments):

I have decided not to make any official kind of response. It seems to me that the challenge is not so much to me as it is to the Episcopal Church, and specifically to its House of Bishops, our polity as a Church, and the canons which were followed to the letter in my election and consecration.

To paraphrase the good Dr. Johnson, "polity is the last refuge of a scoundrel." No one takes issue with the fact that The Episcopal Church scrupulously followed its canons in electing and consecrating Bishop Robinson. The issue is whether TEC just as scrupulously followed scripture in doing so. By this same reasoning, TEC could "follow its canons" and elect a polygamist to be a bishop. (Nothing in the canons says that a bishop can have only one wife; that restriction comes from scripture.) The polygamist would have the title of a bishop, but he would not be recognized as a bishop by the churches in the Anglican Communion. Bishop Robinson continues:

First, this is also about the faithful people of New Hampshire who called me to be their bishop. Everyone seems to forget that I am not here representing myself, but rather all the people of the Diocese of New Hampshire, with whom it is my privilege to minister in Christ's name. They have called me to minister with them as their Bishop, and suggestions that I resign ignore the vows that I have taken to serve my flock in New Hampshire. I would no more let them down or reneg on my commitments to them than fly to the moon. We may be the one diocese in the entire Communion who is, for the most part, beyond all this obsession with sex and are getting on with the Gospel. They would be infuriated, as well they should be, if I entertained any notion of resigning. And it is not just Gene Robinson who is being denied representation at the Lambeth Conference, it is the people of New Hampshire who have been deprived of a seat at the table.

Once again, this is a resort to "church polity." To continue my analogy, if the good people of New Hampshire had elected a polygamist as their bishop, it would hardly make sense if they then complained about being "unrepresented" in the Communion, and of "being deprived of a seat at the table" when the Communion at large refused to recognize him. Never forget: TEC was warned in advance that this would be the consequence of consecrating V. Gene Robinson as a bishop, yet it went ahead and did so. For TEC's bishops now to complain about his exclusion from Lambeth is , as I have stated elsewhere, like robbing a house and then whining that you are "excluded from decent people's society" by being required to spend time in jail.

Second, those calling for my resignation seem to be under the impression that if Gene Robinson went away, that all would go back to being "like it was," whatever that was! Does ANYONE think that if I resigned, this issue would go away?! I could be hit by a big, British, doubledecker bus today, and it would not change the fact that there are faithful, able and gifted gay and lesbian priests of this Episcopal Church who are known and loved for what they bring to ordained ministry, who will before long be recognized with a nomination for the episcopate (as has already happened in dioceses other than New Hampshire), and one of them will be elected. Not because they are gay or lesbian, but because the people who elect them recognize their gifts for ministry in that particular diocese. We are not going away, as much as some would like us to. That toothpaste isn't going to go back into the tube! Not if the Bishop of New Hampshire resigns. Not if the "offending" bishops leave the Lambeth Conference. Not ever.

And so we get to the real reason for why V. Gene Robinson stood for bishop in the first place, and why the social activists champion his case at every opportunity: he is the embodiment of a "cause" for civil rights, notwithstanding that scripture itself makes him ineligible to be a bishop. (And please: let's not have an attempt at justifying his episcopacy by pointing to other bishops who have been divorced and remarried. Two wrongs can never equal a right, and there is already way too much argument from that premise. Besides, the language of Titus 1:6 ["one man of one woman"] excludes homosexual couples without question; its application to singles and to remarried couples is not by any means as clear.)

As the bishops learned during their retreat with ++Rowan, "bishops can never, however much they’d like to be, become the spokesperson of a single nation, or cause, or group, however worthy they may be." By turning himself into a cause, and by allowing himself to be used as its symbolic figurehead, V. Gene Robinson demonstrates each day he remains in Canterbury, giving interviews and preaching at services, how his gay-rights message is more important than his mission as a bishop in the Church. And the fact that there are many more behind him, willing to take on the same role if he steps down, spells nothing but trouble ahead for The Enabler Church.

A Bandit Bishop?

George Conger reports that the Presiding Bishop has responded to the letter written by the Diocese of Central Florida objecting to the irregularities in the "depositions" of Bishops William J. Cox and John-David Schofield last March at Camp Allen. (I have written extensively about those irregularities here, here and here.) He includes quotations from her letter in response:

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has rebuffed pleas for compromise from conservatives and rejected calls for the American Church’s House of Bishops to revisit the cases of deposed Bishops John-David Schofield and William Cox, saying the matter is closed.

“I have no ability to reverse or set aside any decision of the House of Bishops, nor does the House once the meeting [of bishops] is adjourned,” Bishop Schori wrote to the Diocese of Central Florida on June 2. However, should the two bishops “wish to re-enter” the Episcopal Church and “seek reinstatement, that is eminently possible,” she said.

She went on to explain that the depositions were of no practical consequence to anyone but The Episcopal Church (as though this justified her massive failures to follow the canons):

In her letter to Central Florida, Bishop Schori stated the deposition of the two bishops did not affect their ontological status as priests, but was merely a housekeeping task to straighten out the church’s books.

The two bishops had made it “abundantly clear” they no longer regarded themselves as members of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Schori explained. “It is a necessary duty of the leadership of this Church to clarify the status of clergy who no longer regard themselves as members. That is what deposition means in cases like these.”

“It is not, and is not meant to be, punitive, but rather clarifying in regard to the person’s ability to function as a member of the clergy in this Church. We hold a theology of ordination that says it is indelible. Deposition does not affect that theological understanding,” Bishop Schori explained.

She noted that objections to the deposition proceedings could not now be raised. Central Florida and the other dioceses lacked “standing” to object as protests could only be brought by bishops “who must object, during the meeting, if they wish clarification. No one did so.”

It is interesting that the Presiding Bishop should raise the issue of "standing." It was, of course, she who, without any "standing" to do so under the Constitution and Canons, intervened in the Diocese of San Joaquin to call a "Special Convention" on just seventeen days' notice, with no quorum, to confirm her uncanonical choice as "Provisional Bishop"---a man whom she had selected because he was willing to act as a puppet plaintiff in the lawsuit she wanted to be immediately brought. Her letter to Central Florida may show that she knows how to raise the topic, but her actions in San Joaquin demonstrate beyond cavil that she has no understanding of or respect for what it means.

(Note: I realize that Archbishop Rowan Williams is holding up as a model for inter-Church relations today the Desert Fathers, who were extremely critical of themselves and never judgmental of others. I am judging the Presiding Bishop harshly here not as a bishop per se, but as one who has the ultimate say, for better or worse, on Church canon law and what it means. Her obstinate persistence in refusing to undo her illegal actions---when she alone has the power to correct them---brands her as a fitting object for the scorn of those who have given their lives to the practice of law. Nothing arouses this curmudgeon's ire more than a bishop who defies---and thereby defiles---the canons.)

 

I have news for the good Presiding Bishop. There is no need for anyone to "object" to her uncanonical actions in purporting to depose Bishops Cox and Schofield. Those actions were, and remain, a nullity. (Oh, yes, they allowed The Episcopal Church the dubious achievement of removing its oldest living bishop from its books, but Bishop Cox had already indicated that he could no longer be a part of the Church anyway.) As a nullity, no one is required to treat the depositions as having happened. Instead, the proper way to regard the votes to depose is as having failed---they failed to pass by the required number of votes. So Bishop Cox and Bishop Schofield are fully entitled to regard themselves as still bishops of The Episcopal Church, if they wish to do so. (They certainly do not have to accept her disingenuous offer to request permission to rejoin the Church.) What the Presiding Bishop thinks in the matter simply does not count, unless and until she decides she will follow her own canons.

Now we have another test of the Presiding Bishop coming: the "Showdown in Salt Lake City" this September. Because she is who she is, as anyone with any doubt can tell from the tone of her response to the Diocese of Central Florida, I do not hesitate for one minute to predict that she will press forward at that meeting of the House of Bishops with her uncanonical move to depose Bishop Robert Duncan. When she does, however, she will not encounter the meek and silent crowd that was at Camp Allen in March. For one thing, Bishop Duncan will be there with his attorneys. And for another, the bishops of all the dioceses that have written to join the protests over the proceedings against Bishops Cox and Schofield should be there as well.

"So what?" you say. "They can object, but she will overrule their objections. And when they appeal the ruling of the Chair, Rule XV of the House's General rules says:

All questions of order shall be decided by the Chair without debate, but appeal may be taken from such decision. The decision of the Chair shall stand unless overruled by a two-thirds vote of those present and voting.

"Bishop Duncan and his supporters will never muster a two-thirds majority to overrule her," you continue. "That's why she is so confident she can continue unhindered in her course."

When the leader of a political organization proposes to trample underfoot the rights of the minority, the proper response for the minority is to get up and walk out. The proceedings at the September House of Bishops Meeting to depose Bishop Duncan will be in the highest degree political. Thus when the resolution to depose is brought up, and all objections to it are overruled, I hope that those bishops who are now in such close and collegial prayer groups with each other at Lambeth will have the backbone to get up and walk out of the meeting. It is the only signal that can be sent to tyranny. 

And when the Diocese of Pittsburgh votes to leave The Episcopal Church, followed closely by the Dioceses of Ft. Worth and Quincy, no one will be able to say they left of their own accord. They will have been booted out by that ultimate of oxymorons: a bandit bishop.
 
 

The Teaching Continues

Archbishop Rowan Williams may not be the best leader the Anglican Communion has ever had, but he is turning out to be one of its best teachers. During the initial retreat of the bishops assembled at Lambeth, he is giving them two daily meditations in Coventry Cathedral, following their group Bible studies. In an earlier post I wrote about his meditations given yesterday, in which he taught that "bishops can never, however much they'd like to be, become the spokesperson of a single nation, or cause, or group, however worthy they may be."

Today (Friday) he continued with his theme. The Bishop of New Jersey shares his account here:

He began his third address on the role of the bishop as both friend and stranger. A bishop is at home among the people and yet stands apart. A bishop speaks the language of the people, but speaks the word of God.

Here is how the Rt. Rev. David Rossdale, Bishop of Grimsby, recounts the meditation:

……and so to Canterbury Cathedral for the second day of the retreat. The Archbishop began with the observation that a Bishop is bound to be both a friend and a stranger. Someone who is traveling and adapting their language to the conext in which they find themselves. Never quite belonging, but coming as a Christlike stranger with the humility to address the needs of the local community.

The Archbishop also offered us a reflection from William Stringfellow, the American lay theologian, who suggests a difference between a religious person and a biblical person. A biblical person is someone caught in the spotlight of God’s attention and call - a fearful place to be, but as Archbishop Rowan reminded us, we hear in the gospel “Do not be afraid”. The Bishops as a biblical persons know that they are never going to satisfy the demands and expectations, but hear the words “Do not be afraid”.

In his second meditation of the day, the Archbishop of Canterbury developed his theme further. First, from the Bishop of Grimsby:

In the afternoon, the Archbishop addressed the theme that bishops are called to live in community not only with their congregations, but also with each other. We model what the life of the church is like.

Next, from the young Bishop of Qu'Appelle:

The second address of the day focused on the exercise of Episcopal ministry as a collegial one. We exercise it in community, both locally and globally. The ministry of a bishop is not an individual task, but exercised by all bishops together, and in concert with the community. He spoke candidly about our situation in the Anglican Communion during this section. Gently, but clearly challenging us to see our differences, not as simple diversity, nor as an excuse to go silent or walk away, but as a sign that there is work to do in our common life - and we need to get at doing it. Leadership in the Church, we were reminded, is by definition leadership in Communion.

And here is the Bishop of New Jersey again:

The fourth address began by quoting an early Christian theologian who said, a single Christian is no Christian. Our need as bishops is to be in council with other bishops. We’re called to live in community and to live in communion.

He also said the Gospel is only truthfully spread by those who are in communion.

Bishop Porter Taylor of Western North Carolina gives his impression of the talks:

The Archbishop talked about communion and about the Anglican Communion. He said that faithfulness to an Anglican identity involves faithfulness to one another as much as to a standard of teaching.

I interpreted that to mean that we must not just talk about church, but we must be the Church in the talking. We are to model what this ideal of the Church looks like even as we are praying and working our way towards it. My sense is that we have to check our inclination to make "those other people" agree with us and look at ourselves to see if we are treating them as our brother and sister Christians.

The Bishop of Arizona summarizes the afternoon talk this way (he also includes a video of its opening thirty seconds, so you can see how the bishops are gathered to listen---in two long rows, facing each other across the nave of the Cathedral):

The ABC's address this afternoon was the most interesting of the four we have heard so far. He noted that we were a wounded church and that healing would come not through legalities but through fellowship. He implied that just as "a disciple without a community is no disciple", so a bishop with out a communion is no bishop. This was an impassioned plea to get on with our work of praying for and with each other.

At the end of this fourth meditation, the Archbishop then invited the gathered bishops to put these ideas into practice:

The very challenging suggestion the Archbishop made was to identify one other bishop about whom one feels nervous, and ask that person to pray with you. It was a very powerful challenge to us to work to restore wounded communion.

I wonder whether we will ever hear about the choices made by those who followed this suggestion. Would Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori feel nervous about Archbishop Drexel Gomez? Would Bishop Dorsey Henderson feel nervous about Bishop Robert Duncan? Would Bishop Stacy Sauls feel nervous about Bishop Jack Iker?

There is much to do "to restore wounded communion" at Canterbury.

[UPDATE 07/19/2008]: Bishop Wayne Smith of Missouri gives an excellent summary of the Archbishop's third and final day of teaching:

The bishops' retreat continued yesterday and ended at noon. For me the most compelling idea from Archbishop Rowan came from his expanding on a quotation from Tertullian: "A single Christian is no Christian," a principle that brilliantly summarizes core teachings of the New Testament, but one which is sometimes at variance with popular expressions of Christianity in Western cultures. The Archbishop went on to apply that communal norm to the life of bishops--within the communal life of their own dioceses, yes, but in their life together with other bishops. He challenged us to deepen that sense of belonging, both at home and in the whole world, during a time of profound tension within our communion. He did not put it this way but I will: A single bishop is no bishop.

He described two particular resources from the tradition for the work ahead, and I think that the resources have bearing for all Christians, not just bishops. Archbishop Rowan first cited the Desert Christians, those ancient ascetics who fled the cities and populated the deserts of Egypt and Syria beginning in the third century. He noticed something about them I had never before recognized, that while they were absolutely rigourous about their own lives, both spiritual and material, vigilant never to give in to false fantasies about themselves, they resisted the impulse to apply that same rigor to the lives of others. They held themselves under continual judgment and at the same time practiced the principled suspension of judgment toward anyone else. What a concept! In conflict made toxic by the immediacy of communication, when judging the other is as quick as a few key strokes, what if we practiced another discipline? What if we were to scrutinize self without reserve but refuse to confess the sins of anyone else? These wildly excentric Christians from the past did just that, and their devotion to prayer without ceasing made it possible.

The Archbishop cited the Rule of Benedict as a second resource, especially appropriate as we were gathered in a cathedral whose very existence grew from the work of Benedictines. And in particular he talked about obedience, a hard word for moderns to hear, but one that can be oddly liberating. He encouraged us to hear Benedict's idea of obedience not as a hierarchical one but one that is radically inclusive. The word of every monastic, according to the Rule, may become the word to be obeyed--and that includes even the young and inexperienced. In a community, theirs might be the true word of wisdom. Transposing that insight to the Anglican Communion, he encouraged the bishops to attend to the small Churches, and the newer ones, the marginalized ones--and to expect wisdom to emerge from unlikely quarters. Again, it is the life of prayer which undergirds such life-giving obedience.

Finally, today Archbishop Rowan expounded on Hebrews 10:19-25, to describe a style of leadership that might be called Christian and to state the obvious: The only way for a Christian to lead is to follow where Jesus has gone before. Hebrews suggests that there is a way cleared for us already, and Jesus is the one who has done the clearing.

Bishop Christopher Epting, the Presiding Bishop's deputy for ecumenical and interfaith relations, gives a summary of the entire three days of teaching at his blog; it is too long to reproduce here, but is well worth reading. Bishop Porter Taylor, Diocese of Western North Carolina, gives a brief account of the last day's teaching here. Bishop Marc Andrus, of the Diocese of California, offers no summaries, but has some interesting reflections that manifest the impact of ++Rowan's meditations. 

We will leave the last word to the Bishop of Grimsby, the Rt. Rev. David Rossdale, who sums up the final day with these words:

In the last session of the retreat, Archbishop Rowan picks up from the theme he left us with yesterday about bishops being in communion and prompts the question “What is Christian leadership like”?

The simple answer he offers us is that Christian leadership is not about commands or making decisions, but about following the example of Jesus in “clearing the way and going before”. The quality of such leadership depends on the ability to discern the way which lies ahead. So he picks up on Alan Ecclestone’s paper to the 1978 Lambeth Conference which suggests that a bishop’s leadership has to be both insight and oversight.

We need courage to be set free for some institutional risk-taking and be prepared to ask whether what is being suggested or promoted is part of the new way of God. When we fail in leadership it is because we have been too much about command and not about being part of the new living way.

In conclusion he asserted that it is essential for us to know that their is a new way - to know what God has done, is doing, will do. The Archbishop then asked us to keep silence together and let that soak through us.

It was a very profound silence - 650 bishop at one in silence. Thus ended our days of retreat during which we had experienced some very profound and accessible teaching from the Archbishop in his role as a focus for unity in the Anglican Communion.

Bishop Rossdale also gives us his overall impression of Archbishop Rowan's teaching:

There are many critics of the Archbishop, but, as I hear them, they want to judge him by measures of leadership which are wholly inappropriate for the leader of a worldwide communion of Christians. In the meditations which he offered us over this time of retreat, Rowan has given us a different tool for discerning and exercising leadership. The impact on those who have come from around the globe appears to be profound. When we come to discuss the difficult issues which lie before us, I hope that our engagement will be enriched by a very different understanding of the quality of leadership lying at the heart of the Anglican Communion - a quality vastly at variance to the distorted caricature that has been promoted by the media and by those who use negative criticism to promote their own agenda.

There can be no question but that Archbishop Rowan has struck exactly the right note in his teaching over the last three days. It is just what a healer would prescribe for such a broken Communion. But if the bishops are to profit from its wisdom, they cannot allow themselves to fall back into the old machinations and schemes of power, and the championing of "causes". The question I think the bishops in TEC and the ACoC should be asking themselves is this: 

If we had attended this conference in July 2003 instead of July 2008, would it have made any difference to how we proceeded afterwards?

The Most Important Teaching of Lambeth Thus Far

It has not made the headlines, but this message of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the bishops assembled at Lambeth in the Bible study he led this morning (as paraphrased by the Rt. Rev. Alan Wilson of Buckingham) is tailor-made for the social activists of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, and is in my view the most important teaching to come out of Lambeth thus far:

In Galatians 1:15 Paul says God reveals himself not “to” me (safe option in most translations) but (Greek) “in” me. So every calling or vocation is an invitation to become, gradually, a place where God’s life is revealed, his promise and judgment. We sometimes meet fellow disciples who make us realise, with devastating clarity, how far we need to change. This is holiness. So we thank God for all who do this in their calling as Bishops, including (especially?) those unable to join us. The Christ we are all called to reveal is one whose body is real, in time and eternity, who gathers God’s Children from the corners of the earth into his kingdom. This is the prime vision we were called to represent and enact. II Corinthians 11:28-9 —

Besides other things I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble and I am not indignant?

". . . a place where God's life is revealed, His promise and judgment. . . . The Christ we are all called to reveal is one whose body is real . . . who gathers God's Children from the corners of the earth into His kingdom." And note: "We thank God for all who do this in their calling as Bishops, including (especially?) those unable to join us." This is fine teaching, and I think Bishop Alan could remove the question mark; the sentiment was undoubtedly sincere. Archbishop Rowan now continues to emphasize the special calling of bishops:

So the only way of being a successful apostle is to be incapable of distancing oneself from the weakness of others. Bearing apostolic witness we have to speak of a new humanity in which we bear others burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ. Represent Jesus Christ and your defences will be down, and you will share in the weakness and loss of all, and your assumed loss will be part of the pain God takes upon himself in his infinite love. Paul sees the Church as being called to living the death and resurrection of Christ in the world.

Note well, TEC (and all other) Bishops: you have to learn "to be incapable of distancing oneself from the weaknesses of others." So much of what passes for deliberation these days in TEC's House of Bishops , and all of the litigation TEC is embroiled in, shows exactly the opposite face to the Communion, and to the world as a whole. Think again about the oxymoron of a church that fully endorses abortion, and ponder on the Archbishop's words.

Having set up the assembled bishops for their special role, Archbishop Rowan now delivers the clincher:

Therefore bishops can never, however much they’d like to be, become the spokesperson of a single nation, or cause, or group, however worthy they may be.

Simply wonderful! This is what TEC's social activists need to hear. He says it once more, for emphasis:

Some will call it dithering — we have to find ways to make it prophetic. It would be much easier to turn the church into an association of people who sign up to particular ideas, or reflect the nation in some vague way.

Such as abortion, gay/lesbian civil rights, liberation theology---you name it, it has been promoted in the name of our church and social justice. Just in case anyone is still wondering about the message of this study, Archbishop Rowan now says it a third time:

What we actually have to do is express in our living the whole new humanity that is being gathered up in Christ. Therefore we can never simply be servants to one subgroup. We have been taken hold of by Christ. We may of course want to affirm this person or that, but we cannot without also some note of challenge as well as affirmation. Therefore bishops have to prioritise living and proclaiming the life of a Christ who gathers lost humanity into one in himself.

And now Bishop Wilson summarizes in his own words (not the Archbishop's, I presume), and shows that he, for one at least, heard the message loud and clear (I have added the emphasis):

So Unity is not just everybody feeling good about each other, a quantitative thing, but a qualitative thing — each person impoverished by the another’s loss, each person enriched by others’ holiness. This is what Church is for, according to Saint Paul; and we’re off with some homework to reflect on what it means in our own lives.

Please, I pray, do reflect---not just Bishop Alan, but all of you there at Lambeth, and especially those at the forefront of our church's activist stance. To live in Christ is to have God reveal Himself in you, where you are incapable of distancing yourself from the weakness of others. It is not about taking up the banner of this or that cause in the name of the church that you represent, because in the very act of doing so, you distance yourself (and the church, as a consequence) from the weakness of others. I shall add to this some words I wrote in an earlier post, because they supplement what the Archbishop so importantly taught today, and help explain (not justify, but just explain) why a quarter of the Communion's bishops are absent from Lambeth:

The fallacy in bringing a civil rights point of view to matters of Church polity is not just that sinners have no "civil rights", but also that one cannot champion civil rights in a representative capacity. A Bishop represents his diocese to the church catholic, as the above quote observes. If that Bishop feels strongly about women's rights, or gay and lesbian rights, or both, or still other rights, he or she may march in all the demonstrations and parades, and even get arrested if civil disobedience is felt to be the only way to gain attention for the cause. But when a Bishop marches, or is arrested, he is placing his individual liberty on the line. (I shall switch to using a generic "he" at this point, because it is simply too cumbersome to keep repeating "he or she," "his or her," etc. Let the gender-neutral intent be understood.) As a Bishop of his Church, however, his authority does not extend to placing his Diocese on the line, because he only represents the Diocese; he is not the Diocese itself.

Indeed, civil disobedience makes sense only from an individual standpoint, as I noted in an earlier post. There is no admirable sacrifice of liberty, no example for others to follow, if you use your representative authority to get someone else to go to jail for you. And this has been the problem with how TEC (and the ACoC) have gone about advancing the cause of gay and lesbian "rights" within the Anglican Communion. (I place the word in quotes, remember, because it does not make sense to speak of demanding from God a "right" to be ordained, or to receive God's blessing on one's relationship.) They claim to have done so in order to "be a witness" to the "new things" which the Holy Spirit is doing in the Church---that is the language of (religious) civil rights demonstrators. In fact, the compulsion for former Presiding Bishop Griswold to be a witness was so great that he could leave the Primates' Meeting at Lambeth Palace in October 2003, having signed a statement that urged TEC not to go forward with the consecration of Bishop Robinson, and then officiate at the ceremony just seventeen days later; he left it to his deputies to justify his conduct to the Communion. And the compulsion of the current Presiding Bishop to brook no opposition to the social justice agenda was foreshadowed even before she was elected.

In order to send a signal that they were witnessing to the cause of gay and lesbian civil rights, the Bishops of TEC and ACoC did not just pronounce that Lambeth Resolution 1.10 was not going to be followed in their churches; TEC actually consecrated a Bishop who, it was warned in advance, would not be able to represent his diocese to the wider church, and who could not be invited to the gathering at Lambeth without making a mockery of the actions taken there. And asked to clarify its stance, the Anglican Church of Canada responded with an ambiguous authorization to hold rites for the blessing of same-sex unions. Each of these actions, be it noted, constituted official acts of the respective churches, performed and approved by their delegates in their representative capacities. No one's individual liberty was placed at risk by such Anglican disobedience; instead, what it called into question was the churches' willingness to remain as full partners in the Communion.

It is very difficult to remain impartial about the different sides of this dispute, because there is so much at stake once the disobedience went to a representative, as opposed to staying on an individual, level. Some devout Episcopalians, whose sincerity cannot be questioned (even though the other side will not credit it), believe (along with Lambeth 1.10) that participating in or approving the ordination of a non-celibate gay or lesbian to the ministry simply cannot be reconciled with Holy Scripture, and quite a number of these Episcopalians also believe that it concerns one's salvation. The other side believes just as sincerely that gays and lesbians have for too long been discriminated against by the powers of the Church, are determined to put an end to the discrimination they see, and think that what they are doing is strengthening, not weakening the Church. The problem is that by taking action in the name of the whole Church, the activists have made it impossible for those who disagree to remain neutral or indifferent. The reasserters (to use the neutral terminology now current) cannot accept what has been done, and what continues to be done, in their name. And for their part, the reappraisers are just as determined to continue with what they have started, and to do so in the name of the Church as a whole.

One of the predictable consequences of such an impasse is that the reasserters will seek to be led by Bishops and clergy whom they see as faithful to Holy Scripture, and will reject the leadership of those who are approving and performing gay and lesbian ordinations and blessings. The results are the withdrawals, the joining of other Anglican provinces, and the border crossings by Bishops.

To those who have borne with me thus far, I hope you will join me in praying that all of our Bishops---on both sides of the controversy (pax, Cany)---open their hearts and their minds to the Bible teaching offered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that in reflecting on its wisdom they achieve a new and better understanding of the roles they are called on to play as our Bishops.

Amen.


Postscript: I shall add below, as I find them posted, other bishops' accounts of the Bible study they experienced with the Archbishop. The first one shows the motive power of ++Cantuar's spiritual force, for which we may all be thankful; is it too soon to say that it also shows the force of collective prayer? Time will tell---please continue to pray. (See also this moving account by Bishop Nedi Rivera of the Diocese of Olympia.)

Bishop Porter Taylor (Western North Carolina)

Bishop Coadjutor Stephen Lane (Maine)

Bishop Gregory Kerr-Wilson (Qu'Appelle)

Bishop David Rossdale (Grimsby) (he really took it in!)

Bishop Wayne Smith (Missouri)

It is, of course, too much to hope that all the blog posts will be as detailed as the one featured above. Here is the Bishop of Northwestern Pennsylvania, who at least was motivated to think back to his ordination. The Bishop of Arizona, however, devotes just a single sentence to the experience. Bishop Pierre Whalon, of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe, gives no details, but is "hungry for more." The Bishop of Arkansas is struck by the sounds of Canterbury Cathedral in taking in the Archbishop's message. The Bishop of Connecticut's reaction was like that of the Bishop of Northwestern Pennsylvania. And Bishop Stacy Sauls of Lexington sums up in two sentences: "There were two addresses by Archbishop Rowan. They were both thought-provoking."

Finally, the contrast of the Lambeth experience as shown by the bishops above to the experience of the one who was not invited could not be more painful, even though TEC was warned from the outset that this would be the consequence. This report "from the inside" by a priest who is one of the Lambeth stewards offers yet a different perspective.

A Tale of Three Bishops

This is Part III of a Special Series in honor of the opening of the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Part I is here; Part II is here.

This is a story about three very different bishops. Each belonged to a church in the Anglican Communion.

The first bishop was considered by the great majority of those in the Anglican Communion to be in the highest degree heretical. He was considered so heretical, in fact, that the Archbishop of Canterbury deliberately did not invite him to the Lambeth Conference---the (approximately) decennial gathering of all Anglican bishops.

Although this bishop was duly consecrated in accordance with the prescribed rites and laying on of hands by other bishops, the great majority of remaining bishops in the Anglican Communion later refused to regard him as a bishop within the Communion.

This bishop did not see himself as leading any kind of a movement in the church, but only as being true to his own (strongly held) convictions. He refused to depart from his path or change his ways, no matter the abuse and calumny that was heaped upon him. He lived a long but somewhat lonely life (although he never regarded it as such), ministering faithfully to the communicants in his diocese.

The second bishop in this tale was also considered by the majority in the Anglican Communion to be heretical. Unlike the first bishop, he was never formally charged with heresy. Like the first bishop, however, he was deliberately not invited to the Lambeth Conference. Although his own church claimed that his consecration had been validly performed, many of the other churches in the Anglican Communion refused to recognize its validity.

Nevertheless, this bishop also continued to function as the chief pastor to his own diocese, despite the vociferous objections to his consecration and ministry. Unlike the first bishop in our tale, our second bishop saw himself as the leader of a new movement in the Church as a whole, and his life was by no means as lonely---although it did manifest from time to time the signs of a sense of alienation.

The third bishop, in contrast to the other two, was considered by the rest of the Anglican Communion to be highly orthodox---and no doubt to some his orthodoxy was seen as so rooted in ancient tradition as to border on what they now considered to be the heretical. Nevertheless, just like the other two, there came a time when his status as a bishop was no longer recognized by many in the Anglican Communion, and in this case, not even by most of those in his own Church. He, too, was made unwelcome at Lambeth, and he, too, suffered obloquy and vituperation for his firmly held views.

Like the other two in our tale, this third bishop lived out a long life in his own diocese, faithfully ministering to his flock, and undeterred by the reverberations emanating from his fixed course.

Now, from what I have told you about our three bishops, can you guess the identity of each?

If not, here are some more clues:

The reason that many in the Communion did not want to recognize the first and the third bishops is that each of them was "deposed" after formal charges had been lodged against them on account of their conduct. However, in each case, the validity of the procedure followed to depose them was very much in question.

The controversy surrounding the first bishop was a major factor in pulling the rest of the Anglican Communion together; indeed, they came together as never before (and probably never since). In contrast, the controversy surrounding the second bishop was a major factor in pulling the Anglican Communion apart---once again, most probably as never before. That controversy also resulted in the charges leading to the "deposition" of our third bishop.

Their own respective churches each tried to bring down the first and the third bishops by erecting new dioceses that overlapped with their original ones, and by appointing new bishops to have jurisdiction in the new dioceses so created. It took many years for the confusion and uncertainty thereby engendered to be resolved. Nevertheless, the original bishops remained steadfast in their posts, and withstood all the turmoil swirling around them while they went about their pastoral duties.

Now you should be able to identify each of the players in our little tale. Scroll down when you are ready to continue.













The third bishop is the Rt. Rev. John-David Schofield, who is currently the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin. The Episcopal Church claims to have deposed him, but nearly all canon lawyers and a good number of Episcopal dioceses agree that the vote to depose was insufficient. Acting on her own authority and without any canons to support her, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori brushed aside the diocesan Standing Committee, summoned a new convention on very short notice, and had the attendees---each of whom had to sign a loyalty oath to TEC as a condition of being seated---form a new diocese. (Actually, it was a new unincorporated association under California law, because the previously existing one followed Bishop Schofield; the Presiding Bishop has simply treated it as if it were still the old one.) With a new bishop, and covering the same territory as that of the Diocese of San Joaquin headed by Bishop Schofield, the Episcopal diocese of San Joaquin is a case of history repeating itself, as we shall see in a minute.

The second bishop is the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire, who needs no further explanation, since he is the subject of so much coverage in the news media today. He was never charged with or deposed for heresy, but his consecration remains a stumbling block for those provinces in Africa where homosexuality is still taboo in the local culture, and for many other individuals in the Communion whose theology bans any such ministry in the Church.

And the first bishop in our tale is the Rt. Rev. John William Colenso, about whom most of us today could probably use a refresher, but who (like Bishop Robinson today) would have needed no introduction to Anglicans of the 1860's, because he was in all the headlines. Appointed to be Bishop of the Diocese of Natal in the Province of South Africa, he used his time there to be a true shepherd to his flock, and he is still admired as a hero by the Zulu tribes today (for those who can take a sizeable download, here is a brochure published by the Diocese in his honor in 2003). A gifted classical and Hebrew scholar, he mastered the Zulu language in short order, and published a Zulu-English grammar and dictionary that are still in use today.

Bishop Colenso got into trouble with his peers by following his scholarship unstintingly where it led him. It is difficult today to translate our 21st-century minds back to the "higher criticism" controversies of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that scholarship taking root in the German universities began to call into question aspects of the historicity and accuracy of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Bishop Colenso began with a translation of and commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, "Explained from a Missionary Point of View," published in 1861. Applying many of the text-critical methods of the new scholarship in ways that blazed a path wholly new at the time, he shocked traditional Anglican scholars with his analogies of the Jews addressed by Paul to the colonial settlers in South Africa; the "Gentiles" of the Epistle, whom he thought the Jews treated as unclean and inferior, he analogized to the Zulus to whom he preached. This was pouring gasoline on the flames that had already leapt up with the publication earlier of Essays and Reviews, a collection by the new generation of Anglican scholars which set off alarm bells and cries of "heresy!" throughout all England, and which resulted in charges of heresy brought against one of its authors, named Rowland Williams (collectively the seven authors had been labeled "The Seven Against Christ").

It was into this charged atmosphere that Bishop Colenso in 1862 decided to publish his commentaries on the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua. In this series of volumes, published over the next seventeen years and continued despite the charges brought against him, he discussed many of the ideas that are now considered commonplace, such as the multiple authorship of the so-called "Five Books of Moses." He also found occasion to express again his own views, gained from years with the Zulus, on what the Old Testament allowed in regard to polygamy. The cumulative effect of his published opinions caused his metropolitan, the Rt. Rev. Richard Gray of Capetown, to entertain charges from his Dean and Canon to depose Bishop Colenso for heresy.

Bishop Gray convened an ecclesiastical court in Capetown in December 1863. Bishop Colenso ignored the summons, but was represented at the hearing by a canon lawyer. Not surprisingly, the tribunal voted unanimously to depose him. Citing numerous technical grounds, Bishop Colenso appealed the decision to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In 1865, it sustained his appeal and ruled that since, at the time Bishop Gray received his commission as the metropolitan of the Province of South Africa in 1853, South Africa had its own parliament competent to act in the matter, the letters patent issued to Bishop Gray from Queen Victoria were of no force and effect in South Africa. Consequently, Bishop Gray had no jurisdiction over Bishop Colenso, and the deposition was invalid.

Bishop Gray was peeved that a decision on the merits of the controversy had thus been avoided on technical grounds. He proceeded to "excommunicate" Bishop Colenso, i.e., to depose him on spiritual grounds, and then prevailed on the Archbishop of Canterbury to withhold from Bishop Colenso an invitation to the first Lambeth Conference convened in 1867. Although the Archbishop initially ruled out the Colenso affair as a subject for discussion at the Conference, Bishop Gray threatened to resign his post in Africa if the Conference failed to ratify the decision the previous year by the Convocation of Canterbury to declare the see of Natal vacant, and to appoint a new bishop. Thus began the officially Church-sanctioned establishment of the Diocese of Maritzburg, whose boundaries were coterminous with the Diocese of Natal (the story of what happened at Lambeth on this topic is dramatized in Part I of this series).

Three bishops, three tales: as mentioned earlier, the Colenso affair was part of what pulled the Anglican Communion together, in the convening of the first Lambeth Conference, because of the fear that the rulings of the Privy Council had cut the colonial churches off from the Mother Church. Without any governance from England, and without such a periodic gathering, the fear was that as time passed the other churches would become less and less "Anglican."

The Robinson affair, however, has had the opposite effect. Whether the Communion can now remain together will largely depend on the outcome of this year's Lambeth Conference. The Archbishop of Canterbury has distributed to those attending a paper which emphasizes the harm to the Communion done by those who have decided not to attend. Those who have stayed away, however, decry the "lack of respect" on the part of their brethren that leaves them with no alternative:

"Respect is earned. When it is thrown away, gathering it can be difficult. From the Mother Church of England, there is the assumption that therefore we can do anything and Africans will automatically come with us, or respect us. I think that is an insult.

"So now Gafcon is an alternative to that, where we can cry together, look at our struggles, HIV and Aids problems, infant mortality, all those issues that dehumanise us as Africans. The wider Anglican world, if you ask my opinion, don't want to listen to us."

Indeed, the demonizing of the conservatives by those attending this year's Conference seems to have begun. The first casualty of the conflict appears to have been Bishop John-David Schofield. (UPDATE [07/17/2008]: For more on what internal processes at Lambeth may have led to "the suggestion" to Bishop Schofield that he might want to stay home, see this story.)

By the way, Bishop Colenso would have felt right at home at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, with its Zulu-based "indaba" groups. Remember---he authored the first published Zulu-English Dictionary. Here is how he defined the word:

DABA (In), n. Story, tale, adventure; report; matter, case, affair, business, doing: plur. izindaba, news.

And that is exactly what we have going on now at Lambeth.

Americans at Lambeth, Then and Now

This is Part II of a special series in honor of the opening of the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Part I of the series is here. Part III is here.

Dr. Ephraim Radner has written an impassioned plea for the assembled bishops at Lambeth to take some decisive steps, including a declaration that those who support the actions of TEC in consecrating V. Gene Robinson as a bishop, and the actions of both TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada in allowing and approving blessings for same-sex unions, must now withdraw from all further participation in the councils and institutions of the Anglican Communion. He urges:

You are Esthers before the king, come for such a time as this (Est. 4:13-14). And as Augustine notes, it is up to God to change the king’s heart, not you: yours is to witness faithfully. You must find a way to bring these matters before your colleagues; you must press them with vigor, charity, and focus; you must be untiring and hopeful that God will bless your testimony. If not you, who shall it be?

This call for action harkens back to a long time ago, when the first Lambeth Conference was assembling in London at Lambeth Palace in September 1867. Among the bishops present was Irish-born John Barrett Kerfoot (1816-1881), the first Bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh from 1866 until his death. Bishop Kerfoot came to London in the company of his son, the Rev. Abel Kerfoot (who could not, however, attend the deliberations of the Conference). Each kept a diary, and each wrote letters home to their family; Bishop Kerfoot wrote as well about the Conference to the Rt. Rev. William R. Whittingham, diocesan of Maryland, a close friend who was unable to attend. Extracts from Bishop Kerfoot's letters and diary were included in a biography published after his death, and may be read online. I have chosen some passages from them to illustrate the mood 141 years ago as the first Lambeth Conference opened, passages which I think demonstrate great insight into the political realities of the situation (as well as into the extensive socializing that goes on at a Lambeth Conference), and that show how little has changed from then to now.

First and foremost, the trip to Lambeth was joined both beforehand and afterwards with sightseeing excursions, both in England and on the Continent. Here is what they did before the Conference: 

And here is what they did after the Conference (which lasted just five days) was over:

Thus they were in Europe nearly three months for a Conference of just five days, in the tradition of the Continental "Grand Tour." 

The next vignette, describing the social and ceremonial preliminaries to the opening of the Conference, comes from a letter written by Bishop Kerfoot's son to his sister back in Pittsburgh. He describes how he meets the Bishop of Capetown, Dr. Robert Gray, and explains the latter's concerns to have the Lambeth Conference address the problems stemming from his attempted deposition of the Rt. Rev. John Colenso, Bishop of Natal in the Province of South Africa (for background to this dispute, see my posts here and here):

The next day (the Saturday before the Conference began, on Tuesday) the Kerfoots had a surprise visitor, who wanted to do some politicking in advance of the first meeting:

The next observation by the young Rev. Kerfoot is surprising, both in its astuteness as well as in  its relevance to how the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes to manage the Lambeth Conference that begins this week:

 "The English bishops . . . are afraid to wink without some permission from the State. They are afraid of some opposition to this meeting, or of its attracting too much public attention, or somehow something might possibly in some way have a chance to happen; and so they . . . don't want to do anything."  Could that be an apt description of the English hierarchy's attitude toward the 2008 Conference, with its "Indaba" groups, and ban on the adoption of any resolutions? The Rev. Kerfoot was so struck by the hesitant attitude of the English bishops that he repeated his observation when describing the actual opening of the Conference:

Midway through the Conference, Bishop Kerfoot wrote his wife, but shared little of the detail of the heated deliberations that were going on:

Toward the end of the Conference, the Rev. Abel Kerfoot recorded in his diary a gathering of many of the Bishops at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, at which the Archbishop of Canterbury himself intervened to postpone fundraising for a new Bishop of Natal to replace Bishop Colenso, probably on the ground that it was too soon to take precipitous action:

I cannot leave out this extract from the Rev. Kerfoot's diary about a post-Conference welcome for his father and other American bishops at Oxford, where they received honorary degrees with all the pomp and pageantry of that institution, accompanied by catcalls from the students and a welcoming speech in Latin, "easily understood by all" (o tempora! o mores!), and followed by a choral service in King's Chapel which sounds every bit as glorious as such services are today:

 The final bit of these extracts comes from a lengthy letter which Bishop Kerfoot wrote aboard his ship on the return voyage to America. It was addressed to his colleague, the Rt. Rev. W. R. Whittingham, Bishop of Maryland, who had been unable to attend the Conference. Bishop Kerfoot begins with a general summation of the work and the collaborative mood of the assembled bishops:

Then he adds an observation which is striking in its resemblance to that of his son, quoted above and made before the start of the Conference, and which then ventures further into a perceptive description of the relationships between the English, the American and the colonial Bishops:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it was precisely the concern of the colonial bishops about being set adrift from the ties which had heretofore bound them to the Church of England that led to the convocation of the first Lambeth Conference. Notice, too, how the American bishops at the time were holding back in deference to their British and colonial colleagues---quite a change in role from the one they are playing today, where they literally dominate the Conference. Nevertheless, the seeds of American independence and self-reliance were already there, as Bishop Kerfoot intimates in the next paragraph:

 

Not all Church of England members welcomed the part played by the Americans, however. One of the founders of the Oxford Movement, Dr. Edward Bouverie Pusey, had sounded a warning that reached Bishop Kerfoot's ears:

Dr. Pusey was in the unfortunate position, in my opinion, of sounding his warnings just about one hundred years too soon. (The American House of Bishops censured, but failed to discipline, Bishop James A. Pike in 1966.) And the response of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the English House of Bishops to the heterodoxy of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada today is just as weak---and just as limited by their fear of creating a very public disturbance---as was their response to the challenges of Bishop Colenso more than 140 years ago, at the first Lambeth Conference. In short, the Erastianism of the Church of England is endemic, and will block its ability to rescue the Anglican Communion from the depredations of those in America and Canada who are hell-bent on its radical transformation---or, to be less charitable, on its destruction in the form in which it has come down to us. 

The Ghost of Lambeth Past

This is Part I of a special series of posts in honor of the opening of the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Part II of the series is here. Part III is here.

[Author's Note: The following dramatic fantasy, borrowed and adapted freely from A Christmas Carol by Mr. Charles Dickens, is based on the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury has invited to attend the Lambeth Conference the Rt. Rev. Jerry A. Lamb, who calls himself "the Episcopal/Anglican Bishop of San Joaquin" (note the challenge to his rival), but whose installation was irregular, to say the least. The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin is coterminous with the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin; a fuller explanation is here and here. This drama collapses some of the historical events into a single time frame for the sake of the Aristotelian unities. A first-person account of the first Lambeth Conference may be consulted here.]

Scene: Lambeth Palace, on the eve of the opening of Lambeth Conference 2008. The Archbishop of Canterbury has fallen asleep at his desk in his study. The clock strikes midnight.

A low rattle of chains, getting gradually nearer and louder. The Archbishop shakes himself awake.

Archbishop: What---what is that sound?

Ghost: It is I, the Ghost of Lambeth Past.

Archbishop: Who? [Tremulously, seeing spectre with chains nearing his desk] Who---who are you?

Ghost: The Ghost of Lambeth Past. I am the Most Reverend Charles Thomas Longley, your predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1862 to 1868. My portrait hangs over there [pointing with bony finger at a wall].

Archbishop: You, I mean---Your Grace---Archbishop Longley? Who convened the first Lambeth Conference in 1867?

Ghost: The same. The peace of our Lord be with you.

Archbishop [automatically, by reflex]: And also with you. [Recovering] But---but why are you here, and now? And why are you in those terrible chains?

Ghost: I am the Ghost of Lambeth Past, and I am doing penance for my pride. I have come to show you how you are about to repeat the terrible mistake we made at the First Lambeth Conference.

Archbishop: Mistake? What mistake? I thought the first Lambeth Conference was a model for all the rest. There was restraint, the bishops agreed in advance---

Ghost [interrupting]: Not to call a Church council, and pass canons binding on us all? Oh, yes, we agreed to that, certainly.

Archbishop: Then what is this "terrible mistake" to which you refer?

Ghost: The affair with Bishop Colenso of South Africa---you must surely know.

Archbishop: Bishop Colenso? But wasn't he deposed by the Church of the Province of South Africa for going against the teachings of the Church? And as a result, not invited to your First Lambeth Conference?

Ghost: You are correct, but his deposition had been ruled invalid by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council---several years before the Conference began. Nevertheless, we did not invite him, because regardless of what the Privy Council said, [with the slightest touch of sarcasm] we knew we had deposed and excommunicated him.

Archbishop: But he continued as Bishop of the Diocese of Natal anyway, didn't he?

Ghost: You are correct again. But now let me take you to that First Lambeth Conference, and you may see for yourself what happened.

Ominous music and sounds; a fog enshrouds the scene. Through it may dimly be seen a hall at Lambeth Palace, with the bishops assembled for deliberation. The Ghost and the Archbishop move closer to the gathering.

Archbishop: Oh, yes, I recognize several of those attending---their portraits are here in the Palace.

Ghost: Be silent now, and listen.

The discussion in the gathering is animated and becomes audible, although the figures themselves are hazy and indistinct.

Bishop Robert Gray of Capetown: But I tell you, we cannot accept Bishop Colenso as a bishop in our Province! Even though I appointed him, it is I who now say he is a heretic, and is leading the natives astray!

Presiding Bishop John Henry Hopkins (Vermont): Hear, hear! We can't have that. Even if they are an inferior race, we are entrusted with the salvation of their souls.

Archbishop Longley of Canterbury: Now, now, Brother Robert, you know that I have ruled that we cannot discuss the case of Bishop Colenso here, since we have not invited him to the Conference. I have appointed a committee to consider the matter, and we will await their report. Moreover, as you well know, the Privy Council ruled that your deposition of him was invalid.

Bishop Gray: What do they know of the matter? They are no more than a gaggle of erstwhile solicitors and barristers; we're the ones who know our own canons! I tell you, I followed our canons when I deposed him, and I know best what they say, not some secular Privy Council away back here in the mother country.

Bishop of London: But if he hasn't been validly deposed, isn't he still the Bishop of Natal?

Bishop Gray: I tell you, he is not! I am the Metropolitan of all South Africa, and I say that I deposed him! And I now have the signatures of fifty-five of those who came to this Conference---some of whom had to leave already, but nevertheless who agree with me: they have signed this statement attesting that notwithstanding the fact his deposition may not have been legally valid, it nonetheless was, and I quote, "spiritually valid"! That is all that is important, and so I say: canons be d----d!

Archbishop Longley: Now, now, Brother Robert, there's no need to become excited. It's not good for your health, you know. Bishop Colenso refuses to accept that he was deposed, and the Privy Council agrees with him. We shall just have to find another path to the same end.

Bishop Gray: Your own provincial Convocation, the Convocation of Canterbury, has already met last year and declared that John Colenso is no longer a Bishop of the Church of England. I move, here and now, that this Conference ratify the decision of the Convocation of Canterbury on June 29, 1866 which declared his see, the see of Natal, to be vacant, and resolve that a new Bishop of Natal be selected and consecrated!

Archbishop Longley: Brother Robert, I have already ruled: this Conference ends today, and we shall await the report of the committee I have appointed to consider this matter in the interim. We adopted unanimously, as you know, this Resolution [picks up a paper and reads]:

That, in the judgement of the bishops now assembled, the whole Anglican Communion is deeply injured by the present condition of the Church in Natal; and that a committee be now appointed at this general meeting to report on the best mode by which the Church may be delivered from the continuance of this scandal, and the true faith maintained. That such report be forwarded to His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, with the request that he will be pleased to transmit the same to all the bishops of the Anglican Communion, and to ask for their judgement thereupon.

[Addresses Bishop Gray again] When we meet again in, say, ten years' time, we shall take up the committee's report, I promise you.

Bishop Gray [leaping to his feet]: And I say to all of you, that unless this Conference takes up my motion this very moment to declare the see of Natal vacant, and to call for the selection of a new Bishop, I hereby submit my resignation as the Bishop of South Africa! And the Church of England will never, ever again get tuppence for Africa from my family---who, as you all know, have made our mission in that Godforsaken place possible. The entire Anglican Church in South Africa will come tumbling round your ears, and it will be all your fault!

Much astonished muttering and murmuring among those assembled. Archbishop Longley, sensing the mood of those gathered, says calmly:

Archbishop Longley: Very well. It has been moved by his Reverence the Bishop of Capetown that we, the bishops of the churches in the Anglican Communion at Lambeth assembled, declare officially that the see of the Diocese of Natal in the Province of South Africa is now vacant, and that a new candidate for that post be selected and consecrated from the Church of England. Is there a second to that motion?

Bishop of Salisbury: I second the motion.

Archbishop Langley: Is there any discussion?

The Bishop of Labuan: Just a clarification, if I may be so bold. If the Right Reverend John Colenso, who you all know is my brother-in-law, and whose teachings, I hasten to add, I do not presume to defend before this august assembly---but if, as I believe we all understand, he does not intend to vacate the position of Bishop of Natal, since the Privy Council has ruled that he still is the Bishop of Natal, may I ask: would it not possibly be in the slightest degree confusing to all and sundry if we were to appoint another Bishop of Natal while there already was a person calling himself---without a scintilla of justification, I readily admit---but nevertheless, still calling himself "the Bishop of Natal"? Should we not just think this resolution through a bit more?

Bishop Gray: I shall amend my motion. I propose that we create a new diocese, covering the same territory as the Diocese of Natal, but with a different name. Since the capital of the colony of Natal is Pietermaritzburg, I move that the bishop we appoint shall have, in place of the title "Bishop of Natal," the title of "Bishop of Maritzburg."

Bishop of Salisbury: I agree to the amendment.

Archbishop Longley: Is there any further discussion? May I see a show of hands in favor of the motion? Against? [After a pause] Then the motion carries, forty-three to three. And that's that, then. Now, could we take up, please, this subject of the creation of a voluntary spiritual tribunal to resolve doctrinal disputes within the Communion . . .

The figures and voices fade away. The Archbishop is left alone with the Ghost, who stares unblinkingly at him.

Archbishop of Canterbury: [After an embarrassed pause] Ah, yes, very interesting, indeed, fascinating, I must say. But might I ask---how does what you have shown me relate to the Lambeth Conference that starts tomorrow?

Ghost: You in 2008 are about to make the same mistake that we made in 1867.

Archbishop: And that is? I'm sorry, it's very late.

Ghost: Yes, it is late---almost too late for you to undo what you have done. By inviting and seating Bishop Lamb at the behest of The Episcopal Church, you are sanctioning the creation of a parallel diocese with overlapping jurisdiction, just as we did in 1867 by creating the Diocese of Maritzburg to overlap with the Diocese of Natal. As you well know, the Anglican Church is still divided in South Africa, and has never recovered from that mistake.

Archbishop: But we're not "creating" Bishop Lamb's diocese---it's the same Episcopal Diocese it's always been. It's the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin that is the new diocese.

Ghost: You are about to do far worse. At least, when we established Bishop Macrorie as Bishop of Maritzburg, we followed our established canons and procedures---although we did, I admit, skirt around the Duke of Buckingham's edict. Take a look:

A new scene dimly appears before them---Whitehall, in the Office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. The Duke of Buckingham, as Colonial Secretary, is seated at a massive desk. The Bishop of Capetown is seated in front of him.

Duke of Buckingham: Now with regard to this matter of a new bishop in the colony of Natal, Robert, I must say you bishops at Lambeth have created a knotty problem for us. We are not free to ignore the ruling by the Privy Council. I have prepared a directive in conformity with the ruling which confirms that Her Majesty's Government recognizes Bishop Colenso as the only "official" bishop in that colony.

Bishop Gray: But, your Grace, then what will be the status of Bishop Macrorie, whom we are due to consecrate next January in Capetown?

Duke of Buckingham: He will be a bishop, since you have made him one according to the ordinal of the Church of England, but in that capacity he may minister only to members of the Church of South Africa who also happen to be in Natal. He will not be the "Bishop of Natal"---there can be only one of those, and according to the Privy Council, we already have our Bishop of Natal.

Bishop Gray: We have seen to that, Your Grace. We have given him a different title.

Duke of Buckingham: Since there is only one authorized Bishop of Natal, Bishop Macrorie cannot take his title from that colony, or from any place within that colony. Is that clear?

Bishop Gray: Oh, yes, your Grace. We have seen to it that his title is not drawn from the name of any place in Natal. He will be known as the "Bishop of Maritzburg", and there is no place called "Maritzburg" in Natal.

Duke of Buckingham: Natal's capital is Pietermaritzburg, is it not?

Bishop Gray: Indeed it is, Your Grace. Which is why we have not given Bishop Macrorie the title "Bishop of Pietermaritzburg". He is instead the "Bishop of Maritzburg".

Duke of Buckingham: I see. [Reflects a moment, and looks knowingly at Bishop Gray.] That will do, then. He is not the official bishop, and he has no place to call his see. [Chuckling] He will be "no bishop of no see." Yes, Her Majesty's Government can accept that.

Bishop Gray: Thank you ever so much for your understanding, your Grace.

The scene fades. The Ghost turns back to the Archbishop.

Ghost: Just as Bishop Macrorie could not be the Bishop of Natal, so Bishop Lamb is not the "Bishop of San Joaquin". The convention that appointed him was not called in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of the Diocese, and there was not a quorum present in any event. The "Diocese" he purports to represent is a new and different entity in the eyes of the law, because the old one voted to leave with Bishop Schofield.

Archbishop: But Katharine assured me everything had been done by the book---her own Chancellor directed the procedures.

Ghost: Do you also accept her assurance that Bishop Schofield was validly deposed?

Archbishop: She sent me a copy of the deposition certificate! It has her signature on it, attested by two witnesses. That proves it was done correctly!

Ghost: [ominously] I see that you are bound and determined to commit the same error that I did, when I thought I knew better than the Privy Council. I am going to leave you now, and you will shortly be visited by another spirit, the Ghost of Lambeth Future. Perchance that spirit may convince you of the error you are about to make. [Fades away.]

Archbishop: Your Grace! Don't leave . . .

The room darkens, and all becomes black. After a pause, the Archbishop senses rather than sees the presence of a spirit. His flesh tingles, and a slight puff of air startles him.

Archbishop: Who's there? Where am I? What is it?

An indistinct, dark shadow fills the space to the right. The Archbishop feels drawn into the shadow.

Archbishop: Are you the Ghost of Lambeth Future? What is it you want to show me?

The shadow moves further to the right, but there is nothing to be seen---only deeper and deeper blackness.

Archbishop: But I don't see anything. Is this the future of Lambeth?

Slowly, very dimly at first, then with increasing intensity, a large plaque on a stone wall comes into view. The lettering on it is at first too faint to read, but as the light on it intensifies, the following inscription becomes clearly visible:

On this site stood Lambeth Palace, the former residence of the personage known as the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was the nominal head of the religious body known as the Church of England, before that Church was disestablished by Act of Parliament in 2017. The decennial gatherings of the "Lambeth Conference" met here until they were moved to the University of Kent, to accommodate the ever-increasing number of bishops---a factor that played a major role in the subsequent decision to disestablish the Church. (With the large-scale departure of evangelical and Anglo-Catholic bishops following the consecration of a woman as bishop in 2012, the Church split into three separate overlapping and parallel jurisdictions, which proved unsustainable after just five years.) Following disestablishment, Lambeth Palace was purchased from the Government by the Emir of Dubai as part of the program to retire the deficit. It is now part of the complex of the Moslem University of London.

Archbishop: Oh, dear God! He faints. All goes dark.

THE END

On GAFCON, Bishops, and Border-Crossing

The Jerusalem Declaration adopted at GAFCON states in paragraph 13:

We reject the authority of those churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed. We pray for them and call on them to repent and return to the Lord.

In the concluding part of the GAFCON Statement, the drafters spell out just what this rejection entails:

We recognise the desirability of territorial jurisdiction for provinces and dioceses of the Anglican Communion, except in those areas where churches and leaders are denying the orthodox faith or are preventing its spread, and in a few areas for which overlapping jurisdictions are beneficial for historical or cultural reasons.

We thank God for the courageous actions of those Primates and provinces who have offered orthodox oversight to churches under false leadership, especially in North and South America. The actions of these Primates have been a positive response to pastoral necessities and mission opportunities. We believe that such actions will continue to be necessary and we support them in offering help around the world.

The Declaration and its elaboration thus represent the logical result of The Episcopal Church's (and the Anglican Church of Canada's) refusal to implement even the mildest recommendations of the Windsor Report, which stated in part D:

151. In only those situations where there has been an extreme breach of trust, and as a last resort, we commend a conditional and temporary provision of delegated pastoral oversight for those who are dissenting. This oversight must be sufficient to provide a credible degree of security on the part of the alienated community, so that they do not feel at the mercy of a potentially hostile leadership. While the temporary provision of pastoral oversight is in place there must also be a mutually agreed commitment to effecting reconciliation.

152. During this period it would be axiomatic that the incumbent bishop would delegate some of his or her functions, rights and responsibilities to the ‘incoming’ bishop. In this regard, we commend the proposals for delegated episcopal pastoral oversight set out by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (USA) in 2004 [footnote omitted]. We believe that these proposals are entirely reasonable, if they are approached and implemented reasonably by everyone concerned. We particularly commend the appeal structures set out in the House of Bishops policy statement, and consider that these provide a very significant degree of security. We see no reason why such delegated pastoral and sacramental oversight should not be provided by retired bishops from within the province in question, and recommend that a province making provision in this manner should maintain a list of bishops who would be suitable and acceptable to undertake such a ministry. In principle, we see no difficulty in bishops from other provinces of the Communion becoming involved with the life of particular parishes under the terms of these arrangements in appropriate cases.

153. We are conscious that the Anglican Church of Canada is considering the adoption of a broadly similar scheme, and we ask that their proposals too should be marked by and received with a willingness to co-operate together in accordance with the principles we have outlined above.

154. The Anglican Communion upholds the ancient norm of the Church that all the Christians in one place should be united in their prayer, worship and the celebration of the sacraments. The Commission believes that all Anglicans should strive to live out this ideal. Whilst there are instances in the polity of Anglican churches that more than one jurisdiction exists in one place, this is something to be discouraged rather than propagated. We do not therefore favour the establishment of parallel jurisdictions.

155. We call upon those bishops who believe it is their conscientious duty to intervene in provinces, dioceses and parishes other than their own:

to express regret for the consequences of their actions
to affirm their desire to remain in the Communion, and
to effect a moratorium on any further interventions.

We also call upon these archbishops and bishops to seek an accommodation with the bishops of the dioceses whose parishes they have taken into their own care.

We further call upon those diocesan bishops of the Episcopal Church (USA) who have refused to countenance the proposals set out by their House of Bishops to reconsider their own stance on this matter. If they refuse to do so, in our view, they will be making a profoundly dismissive statement about their adherence to the polity of their own church.

As is by now well known, neither TEC's nor the ACoC's House of Bishops complied with these recommendations, and so the intervening foreign bishops have not felt compelled to "express regret" for their roles in reaching out to disaffected clergy and their parishes (and lately, to entire dioceses), or to cease their interventions. It is sad to note the Windsor Report's apparent mistaking of the genuineness of the "delegated episcopal pastoral oversight" offered by the House of Bishops, which offered neither true delegation of authority nor actual independent oversight. (One wag referred to the acronym "DEPO" as standing for "Disguised Episcopal Parish Oppression". I shall return to a discussion of its meaninglessness below.)

GAFCON thus represents a natural evolution of the consequences hinted at in the Windsor Report. In response to the GAFCON Statement, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed pragmatic, and not historical, concerns, and stressed that the Lambeth Conference would be addressing the problem:

No-one should for a moment impute selfish or malicious motives to those who have offered pastoral oversight to congregations in other provinces; these actions, however we judge them, arise from pastoral and spiritual concern. But one question has repeatedly been raised which is now becoming very serious: how is a bishop or primate in another continent able to discriminate effectively between a genuine crisis of pastoral relationship and theological integrity, and a situation where there are underlying non-theological motivations at work? We have seen instances of intervention in dioceses whose leadership is unquestionably orthodox simply because of local difficulties of a personal and administrative nature. We have also seen instances of clergy disciplined for scandalous behaviour in one jurisdiction accepted in another, apparently without due process. Some other Christian churches have unhappy experience of this problem and it needs to be addressed honestly.

It is not enough to dismiss the existing structures of the Communion. If they are not working effectively, the challenge is to renew them rather than to improvise solutions that may seem to be effective for some in the short term but will continue to create more problems than they solve. This challenge is one of the most significant focuses for the forthcoming Lambeth Conference. One of its major stated aims is to restore and deepen confidence in our Anglican identity. And this task will require all who care as deeply as the authors of the statement say they do about the future of Anglicanism to play their part.

A much earlier article, by the Rt. Rev. Pierre Whalon, Bishop-in-Charge of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe, does not mince words. He sounds a direct warning about thinking that the situation of the Convocation churches offers any support for overlapping jurisdictions:

Every so often, someone in America is quoted as saying that the four Anglican jurisdictions in Europe are a fine example of how parallel jurisdictions work well. Why not, in light of the Robinson consecration, establish something similar in the States? This reflects a serious misunderstanding of the situation here in Europe, for we do not have parallel Anglican jurisdictions in Europe. Even worse, it is also an endorsement of the desirability of parallel jurisdictions as a solution to church conflicts. There is however nothing good about parallel jurisdictions.

However, Bishop Whalon is equating "parallel jurisdictions" with schism:

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church have parallel jurisdictions in the United States. This reflects of course the division that existed between the two until very recently. Full communion has done much to alleviate the strain of the overlap, however, as well as heal the scars of ancient rifts. Another example is the jurisdictions of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican bishops, which overlap and have very few structural points of contact outside ecumenical committees. These too testify to the divisions of the Church. Their existence is a continual reminder of the centuries of strife among Christians, giving the lie to all our claims to be following Jesus. For the Lord's commandment has no loopholes, admits no exceptions: we are to love one another as he has loved us (John 15:12). Overlapping jurisdictions are standing stones of witness to our failure to honor Christ in each other. They are a blight upon our preaching and teaching, a pollution of the waters of Baptism and a stain on all our sacraments. There is no more telling argument in the quiver of atheists to aim at us than our schisms and the institutions — the parallel jurisdictions — that embody them.

The leaders of GAFCON, however, went out of their way to insist that they were avoiding schism---the setting up of a parallel jurisdiction which would be a rival to the Anglican Communion. At the same time, their paragraph 13 stresses that they will not cede exclusive territorial rights to those bishops who are preaching doctrine contrary to Holy Scripture. Is this not the establishment of rival diocesan jurisdictions?

It would be that, and thus would constitute schism, if the GAFCON leaders granted any degree of legitimacy to those heretical bishops---but they do not. Instead of acquiescing in the legitimacy of their jurisdiction, they propose simply to ignore them, as irrelevant to the Communion of which they plan to remain a constituent part. Rather than parallel the earlier splits involving the Reformed Episcopal Church or the Continuing Churches, in which the separating bodies showed no desire to remain in the Anglican Communion, the Primates leading the GAFCON group are not separating, and they are not leaving the Anglican Communion. (Of course, other groups at GAFCON were never a part of the Communion to begin with.) This is a major difference, and makes inapplicable the use of the term "schism" to what is now happening.

To analyze further the consequences that the Jerusalem Declaration represents, and to spell out just how and why the heretical bishops have rendered themselves irrelevant to the path sketched out at GAFCON, I want to draw on what I said about "Bishops and Boundaries" in an earlier post. In essence, I am saying that the leadership of The Episcopal Church (my remarks apply equally to the Anglican Church of Canada, and the GAFCON Statement as quoted earlier makes clear that they extend the charge of "false leadership" to the Province of Brazil in South America as well) has forfeited its exclusive franchise to represent Anglicans in North America. They have managed to do this by taking TEC away from its role as a "constituent member of the Anglican Communion" and having it assume more the role of a champion of civil rights and social justice. There is nothing wrong with civil rights and social justice, of course, except that unlike other groups and organizations, a church is not free to take a corporate stance in favor of those goals if to do so would contradict its very identity as expressed in Holy Scripture, and as a member of a group of churches professing belief in the same Holy Scripture. Think about it for just a minute: how does a church rationalize "Thou shalt not kill" with a stance that supports abortion? The only way to do so is to assert that abortion is not encompassed by the commandment, and once you have engaged in such an exercise---as a church, mind you---you have forfeited the right to say that you speak for the Anglican Communion in North America. In short, TEC's recent history has been the triumph of polity over polis, of Constitution over Communion.

[UPDATE (07/17/2008): It would appear that no less an authority than his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury is now telling the assembled bishops at Lambeth the same thing: "Therefore bishops can never, however much they’d like to be, become the spokesperson of a single nation, or cause, or group, however worthy they may be."]

Now here are my earlier remarks about how border-crossings became not only necessary, but inevitable:

The mistaken belief that "the ancient councils of the Church forbade Bishops from invading each other's territories" has been laid well to rest (and see also this post). The appeals to ancient norms, however, are persistent. Sometimes, the appeal is simply to current "protocol", or to "the spirit and the letter of the Windsor Report" (one of whose authors, the Bishop of Durham, also has erroneously cited to the Council of Nicaea, as explained in the article linked above, by historian Dr. William J. Tighe). It is granted that TEC's own Constitution (Art. II, Sec. 3) limits a Bishop to exercising authority only in his or her own diocese, and that it has so provided since it was first adopted in 1789. What is to be said about the numerous instances in which former Episcopal congregations and clergy (and now even a diocese, with others perhaps to follow) have placed themselves under the jurisdiction of bishops in other Anglican provinces?

The first thing to note is that the phenomenon is largely, if not exclusively, confined to the provinces of The Episcopal Church and of the Anglican Church of Canada. That in itself says a great deal. Can it be just a coincidence that the boundary crossings are occurring in just the two churches in the Anglican Communion which have officially refused to abide by the resolutions made by all the bishops of the Communion meeting at Lambeth? Let's take a closer look.

It is inadequate to explain that TEC and the ACoC have rejected the recommendations made in Resolution 1.10 passed at the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Implicit in their rejections, and in their refusals to retract those rejections, is a statement about their respective polities. I do not think I could improve on this analysis by "AKMA", who (looking at the Statement issued by TEC's House of Bishops in March 2007) I think has it exactly right:

What might be wrong with our polity? It looks to me as though the Episcopal Church (on both “sides”) tends to regard bishops as though they were state governors — “our elected officials.” That neglects the two aspects of a bishop’s vocation that look most important to me: the bishop’s role as a teacher, and the bishop’s role as the point where the local church (the diocese) interacts with the church catholic. On that basis, churches in Iran really do have a stake in whom the Diocese of Chicago elects as bishop; a bishop who can’t function as a liaison (either because the world refuses them, or their home diocese does) can’t fulfill a constitutive aspect of the bishop’s role. The Episcopal Church tacitly recognizes this through its assent process, and (ironically) just exercised the prerogative to not accept a bishop’s election on the grounds that not enough dioceses felt they could rely on that candidate to remain within the Episcopal Church. [Footnote omitted.] Though we do not ask every diocese around the globe to consent to each episcopal election, the principle is the same: A bishop belongs both to the diocese and to the church catholic, and both need to accept the bishop in order to maintain sound polity.

So when the House of Bishops asserts that “the meaning of the Preamble to the Constitution of The Episcopal Church is determined solely by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church,” or that we have no intention of leaving the Anglican Communion but that our polity does not permit arrangements such as the Primates requested, they’re begging the question. It’s the polity itself that has come into focus as the problem. The Primates want a polity in which our bishops stand more fully accountable to the world church, because (on this interpretation) that’s part of their job description; and the Episcopal Church says, “You can’t exclude us because that’s not the way we do things.” The US position looks an awful lot like an assimilation of ecclesiastical roles to local civic models: the U.S. bishops should lobby on behalf of the citizens they represent to bring home favorable policies (and if the governors of Utah and Mississippi, even the President of the U.S., don’t like the governor of Iowa, it’s tough luck because the Iowans voted for her). That’s not my understanding of how the members of the Body of Christ work together to build up and strengthen the whole.

Indeed, The Episcopal Church's leadership is, if I may be allowed to say it, preoccupied with concerns of civil rights and social justice that have a full and necessary place in our body politic, but which, ironically, detract from the function of a body religious. Bishops are more than elected governors, and are accountable to more things than just civil rights and social justice. Remember: "God owes us nothing" (to use the title of one of Leszek Kolakowski's books). One cannot speak of mortal sinners demanding civil rights or social justice from God. One's eligibility to be called to God's service does not hinge on whether one has been oppressed, or denied elementary civil rights by a society, so that it is now "one's turn" to assume the leadership role, just so that the Church may be said to be doing "new things."

The fallacy in bringing a civil rights point of view to matters of Church polity is not just that sinners have no "civil rights", but also that one cannot champion civil rights in a representative capacity. A Bishop represents his diocese to the church catholic, as the above quote observes. If that Bishop feels strongly about women's rights, or gay and lesbian rights, or both, or still other rights, he or she may march in all the demonstrations and parades, and even get arrested if civil disobedience is felt to be the only way to gain attention for the cause. But when a Bishop marches, or is arrested, he is placing his individual liberty on the line. (I shall switch to using a generic "he" at this point, because it is simply too cumbersome to keep repeating "he or she," "his or her," etc. Let the gender-neutral intent be understood.) As a Bishop of his Church, however, his authority does not extend to placing his Diocese on the line, because he only represents the Diocese; he is not the Diocese itself.

Indeed, civil disobedience makes sense only from an individual standpoint, as I noted in an earlier post. There is no admirable sacrifice of liberty, no example for others to follow, if you use your representative authority to get someone else to go to jail for you. And this has been the problem with how TEC (and the ACoC) have gone about advancing the cause of gay and lesbian "rights" within the Anglican Communion. (I place the word in quotes, remember, because it does not make sense to speak of demanding from God a "right" to be ordained, or to receive God's blessing on one's relationship.) They claim to have done so in order to "be a witness" to the "new things" which the Holy Spirit is doing in the Church---that is the language of (religious) civil rights demonstrators. In fact, the compulsion for former Presiding Bishop Griswold to be a witness was so great that he could leave the Primates' Meeting at Lambeth Palace in October 2003, having signed a statement that urged TEC not to go forward with the consecration of Bishop Robinson, and then officiate at the ceremony just seventeen days later; he left it to his deputies to justify his conduct to the Communion. And the compulsion of the current Presiding Bishop to brook no opposition to the social justice agenda was foreshadowed even before she was elected.

In order to send a signal that they were witnessing to the cause of gay and lesbian civil rights, the Bishops of TEC and ACoC did not just pronounce that Lambeth Resolution 1.10 was not going to be followed in their churches; TEC actually consecrated a Bishop who, it was warned in advance, would not be able to represent his diocese to the wider church, and who could not be invited to the gathering at Lambeth without making a mockery of the actions taken there. And asked to clarify its stance, the Anglican Church of Canada responded with an ambiguous authorization to hold rites for the blessing of same-sex unions. Each of these actions, be it noted, constituted official acts of the respective churches, performed and approved by their delegates in their representative capacities. No one's individual liberty was placed at risk by such Anglican disobedience; instead, what it called into question was the churches' willingness to remain as full partners in the Communion.

It is very difficult to remain impartial about the different sides of this dispute, because there is so much at stake once the disobedience went to a representative, as opposed to staying on an individual, level. Some devout Episcopalians, whose sincerity cannot be questioned (even though the other side will not credit it), believe (along with Lambeth 1.10) that participating in or approving the ordination of a non-celibate gay or lesbian to the ministry simply cannot be reconciled with Holy Scripture, and quite a number of these Episcopalians also believe that it concerns one's salvation. The other side believes just as sincerely that gays and lesbians have for too long been discriminated against by the powers of the Church, are determined to put an end to the discrimination they see, and think that what they are doing is strengthening, not weakening the Church. The problem is that by taking action in the name of the whole Church, the activists have made it impossible for those who disagree to remain neutral or indifferent. The reasserters (to use the neutral terminology now current) cannot accept what has been done, and what continues to be done, in their name. And for their part, the reappraisers are just as determined to continue with what they have started, and to do so in the name of the Church as a whole.

One of the predictable consequences of such an impasse is that the reasserters will seek to be led by Bishops and clergy whom they see as faithful to Holy Scripture, and will reject the leadership of those who are approving and performing gay and lesbian ordinations and blessings. The results are the withdrawals, the joining of other Anglican provinces, and the border crossings by Bishops. The reappraisers can insist all they want that parishes in a diocese are not free to pick and choose whom they will individually have as their Bishop, that the majority rules, and that once a Bishop has been elected and consecrated the entire diocese has to live with that choice, or accept whatever that Bishop offers as alternative oversight. But for reasons I have set out in this post, those parishes have decided that when they joined The Episcopal Church, they did not delegate to their representatives the authority to take steps that would make them no longer a part of the Communion, or that could affect their salvation. Those decisions belong to the parishioners and their ministers alone, and they are voting with both their wallets and their feet. (Moreover, for an instance of why "Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight" [DEPO] as offered to reasserters is unacceptable, read carefully this link, especially pages 13-19.)

The anguish of having to decide whether to leave the Church is not being assuaged by the unsympathetic stance of the reappraisers toward those who are faced with the choice. From the Presiding Bishop on down, the attitude is: Leave if you must, but don't try to take any property with you, because our side has all the money in the world for lawyers who will plague you like locusts. Moreover, don't even ask if you can buy the property from us, because we won't sell it to you---we'd rather it went to a sleazy nightclub than to a parish "in competition" with us. So long as you try to remain part of the Anglican Communion without also being a part of TEC, we will depose your clergy and bishops so they can never minister in this Church again; we will not recognize those whom you ordain, we will hound whatever bishop takes you under his wing every time he tries to make a pastoral visit to you, and we will threaten to depose those in this Church who cooperate with foreign bishops. We will never recognize your affiliation, and if we can get the Archbishop of Canterbury to listen to us, he will not either. And don't try to blame us for forcing you to do this: you and your rigid and antiquated readings of Scripture are what is causing this to happen.

The position of TEC towards those who leave it borders on violating their First Amendment freedom to associate, as I noted here. If TEC had its way in the courts, it would be illegal for a parish within its geographical territory to join another province of the Anglican Communion, let alone a newly formed province in America itself (which would require the assent of the Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council). As the link just given explains, the Anglican Consultative Council gives consent to the creation of new provinces, not dioceses. With the latest news from the Province of the Southern Cone about amending its Constitution to allow it to include dioceses in North America, we may eventually see some kind of test in court of TEC's hard and fast position that no foreign dioceses can exist within its geographical territory. At this point, however, the issues are not well-defined for adjudication.

The Church has split before over matters seen as involving salvation, and it has never been accomplished without trials and tribulations on both sides. There is little hope of reconciling the two groups, given the current stances, for the reasons just given: one is acting out of conviction born from faith in Scripture, while the other is acting out of conviction born from faith in human dignity and social justice. What I hope the reappraisers will come to see is that the departures and the "incursions" are the inevitable consequences of presuming to decide questions at a Church level that were not theirs to decide (at least, not until the Communion as a whole was ready to do so). And what I hope the reasserters will come to see is that the early failures to object to the undermining of doctrine, and to the post-modernizing of the Church, served only to postpone the difficult decisions they now must make today.

I shall close with a juxtaposition that is apt of two quotes on this subject. The first is the aforementioned Statement from the House of Bishops:

Other Anglican bishops, indeed including some Primates, have violated our provincial boundaries and caused great suffering and contributed immeasurably to our difficulties in solving our problems and in attempting to communicate for ourselves with our Anglican brothers and sisters. We have been repeatedly assured that boundary violations are inappropriate under the most ancient authorities and should cease. The Lambeth Conferences of 1988 and 1998 did so. The Windsor Report did so. The Dromantine Communiqué did so. None of these assurances has been heeded. The Dar es Salaam Communiqué affirms the principle that boundary violations are impermissible, but then sets conditions for ending those violations, conditions that are simply impossible for us to meet without calling a special meeting of our General Convention.

— A Statement from the House of Bishops of TEC – March 20, 2007

And the second quotation is from John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman (hat-tip: I'd Rather Not Say):

If unity lies in the Apostolical succession, an act of schism is from the nature of the case impossible; for as no one can reverse his parentage, so no Church can undo the fact that its clergy have come by lineal descent from the Apostles. Either there is no such sin as schism, or unity does not lie in the Episcopal form or in the Episcopal ordination. And this is felt by the controversialists of this day; who in consequence are obliged to invent a sin, and to consider, not division of Church from Church, but interference of Church with Church to be the sin of schism, as if local dioceses and bishops with restraint were more than ecclesiastical arrangements and by-laws of the Church, however sacred, while schism is a sin against her essence. Thus they strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel. Division is the schism, if schism there be, not interference. If interference is a sin, division which is the cause of it is greater; but where division is a duty, there can be no sin in interference.

—John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845

Attempt at a Pre-Emptive Strike in Pittsburgh

Normally I do not do the kind of posts entitled "Breaking: This Just In," or similar attempts at being first to comment on the news. However, this post from Lionel Deimel in Pittsburgh just came to my attention, and he gives a link to the Supplemental Petition just filed by Calvary Church of Pittsburgh. The Petition, following up on a Stipulation entered into between Calvary Church and the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 2005, seeks the appointment of a court "monitor" to oversee the expenditure of funds and any transfer of assets by Bishop Robert Duncan preparatory to, or as a result of, the Diocesan Convention on October 4, 2008---at which there will be proposed, for second reading and final passage, amendments to the Constitution of that Diocese to withdraw its accession to the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church.

Without the prior Stipulation, the current Petition would on first impression appear to ask the court impermissibly to interfere in the internal affairs and operation of a religious body in violation of the First Amendment. Even with the Stipulation, however, the Court may still be drawn into "entanglements" with religious doctrines and proceedings if it attempts to determine, for example, whether or not the vote to be taken by the Convention on October 4 would result in a violation of its terms. For example, do the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church positively prevent any Diocese from so amending its own Constitution to remove the accession clause? (I have argued that they do not here, and that any attempt so to read them would itself violate the freedom of association clause under the First Amendment.)

The Petition asks that the Monitor be appointed to "assure . . . that such [diocesan] Property is not used for purposes of separation from the Episcopal Church in the United States of America." Can a court of the United States tell a group of people that they cannot decide by majority vote how to spend their funds? And if the group of people happens to be organized into a religious diocese, can a court appoint someone to step into their midst and tell them that they can spend their funds only in support of The Episcopal Church, and no other religious body? (Even worse: the Petitioners request that the court Monitor see to it that the Diocese of Pittsburgh cannot use diocesan funds to defend against the Petition! Now that is real legal muscle, if you can obtain it---sue your opponent and then have the court prohibit him from spending any of his money on his defense.) To me---at first blush, anyway---such orders as the Petitioners are asking for transgress every principle enshrined in the First Amendment. And if the prior Stipulation leads the court into such a forbidden thicket, then there is a problem with the prior Stipulation, as well.

We may nonetheless be grateful that a few within TEC have seen fit to force the issue at this point. The suspense of waiting until the September Showdown in Salt Lake City, or until the Convention in October, was beginning to get on the nerves. Now there are documents to pore over, arguments to weigh, and decisions to be made. It's just too bad that Christians are more and more resorting to the secular courts for such actions to be taken. For in asking the courts to limit the liberty of those who want to change their voluntary associations, and by seeing nothing improper in requesting such interference, the Pittsburgh Petitioners have not only demonstrated the utter inability of TEC's own polity to address such matters, but have diminished our own personal freedoms as well.

The San Joaquin Lawsuit: an Update

The Diocese of San Joaquin is a California unincorporated association that was, from 1961 to December 2007, one of the dioceses of the national Episcopal Church, a constituent member of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The members of the Diocese were the local Episcopal churches (called "parishes" and "missions") located in fourteen Central Valley counties of California. The Diocese was, and continues to be, governed by its internal "constitution" and "canons" (akin to bylaws). The highest legislative body of the Diocese is its Annual Convention.

On December 8, 2007, the delegates to the Diocese’s Annual Convention voted overwhelmingly (90 percent) to end the Diocese’s spiritual affiliation with The Episcopal Church and affiliate instead with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone of America, another national member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Diocese of San Joaquin is the first diocese to leave the national Episcopal Church since the Civil War, when nine dioceses departed to form an independent church in the southern states. 

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, responded to the Diocese’s departure by doing three things: she declared that a motion to depose Bishop John-David Schofield had carried the House of Bishops, and that his see was now vacant; she declared that she refused to recognize the Standing Committee of the Diocese as its Ecclesiastical Authority, or for any other purpose; and she called on short notice a "special convention" of the parishioners remaining in TEC to consent to her designation of the Rt. Rev. Jerry A. Lamb, retired Bishop of the Diocese of Northern California, as Provisional Bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin. Once those steps were accomplished, the special convention authorized Bishop Lamb to file suit against Bishop Schofield and the diocesan trust entities he controlled to acquire title to all of the diocesan properties, investments and accounts. TEC joined Bishop Lamb and the newly organized Episcopal "Diocese of San Joaquin" as a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Plaintiffs subsequently amended their complaint to add Merrill Lynch as a defendant, because it was the custodian of the diocesan trust funds. Merrill Lynch has requested the Fresno Superior Court to be allowed to "interplead" all the funds it has in its possession, and to be dismissed from the lawsuit. By turning over the funds to the control of the court, and asking it to determine who is entitled to them, Merrill Lynch is abandoning any role as custodian and leaving it to the court to sort matters out. Pending the court’s order on the interpleader request, Merrill Lynch has on its own frozen all the funds so that no money may be withdrawn from the accounts without a joint agreement by the concerned parties.

Bishop Schofield and the diocesan trust entities have now responded to the first amended complaint. First, they have asked the court to strike it, on the ground that it was not drawn in compliance with California Rules of Court. Those Rules require, for instance, that in a case with multiple plaintiffs, as there are here, the complaint separately identify each plaintiff who is asserting each separate cause of action. The first amended complaint sets out seven causes of action in 142 numbered paragraphs, but it does not identify which allegations are made by The Episcopal Church, which are made by Bishop Lamb, and which are made by the plaintiff "Diocese of San Joaquin."

The defendants have also demurred to the first amended complaint. A demurrer in law basically challenges the complaint’s adequacy, by saying, in effect: "So what? Even if all you allege is true, you have not stated a case on which the court can grant you any relief."

The first ground on which defendants have demurred is that among the funds held by Merrill Lynch which plaintiffs are claiming, are moneys deposited in the names of two individual parishes: St. John’s of Tulare, and St. John’s of Porterville. Plaintiffs, however, neglected to join those parishes as defendants, and thus the court cannot declare who owns the funds without the churches being represented in the lawsuit. 

St. John's Episcopal Church in Tulare, however, has voted not to join the Diocese in aligning with the Province of the Southern Cone. Its rector, the Rev. Robert G. Eaton, also has declared his intention of remaining with The Episcopal Church. So let's understand what is actually happening on the ground here.  The Episcopal Church and its designated agent, Bishop Lamb, are claiming to own or control money belonging to one of their own parishes that has voted to remain in The Episcopal Church.  They are doing so regardless of the consequences, in order to maintain their fiction that Bishop Schofield "wrongfully" relinquished control of these funds to St. John's long after it had grown beyond the status of a diocesan mission. Simply by the expedient of a letter addressed to Merrill Lynch, The Episcopal Church has succeeded in having all the investment accounts of its rival Diocese, the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin, frozen---along with accounts belonging to churches that have chosen to remain Episcopal. Is it not remarkable that a New York investment firm would so act on the strength of nothing more than a letter from another New York entity headquartered at 815 Second Avenue? Could any of us have succeeded in having Merrill Lynch freeze a rival's investment funds by the simple act of sending Merrill Lynch a letter? This entire episode calls for the illumination a lawsuit will bring.

Next, defendants say that the plaintiffs failed to describe the real properties they are claiming to own (other than some parcels in Kern and Madera Counties) with any degree of particularity, so that they can be readily identified. Finally, the defendants point out that plaintiff Jerry Lamb, individually, is asking for relief that properly should be requested by the religious corporation sole of which he claims to be the incumbent. The corporation sole is the entity which by law is authorized by the Diocese to hold title to diocesan property, but it is not a party to the lawsuit as currently drafted. (It is a little like the president of Exxon Corporation suing in his own name, but asking for relief that has to be given, if at all, to the company which he heads.)  

So the first skirmishes have taken place, and it is now up to the plaintiffs to decide whether to redraft their complaint and change some of the parties to it, or to try to convince the court that their complaint as filed is adequate, and needs no changes. The court will not assign a date for trial until the case is "at issue"— meaning that the allegations of the complaint have each been responded to, and the parties are ready to conduct discovery and then go to trial. A hearing on the demurrers and on the motion to strike will take place in Fresno County Superior Court the afternoon of August 20.

Dr. Williams, Sharia Law, and GAFCON

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, created quite a stir last February when he suggested that the British legal system would do well to consider how it might accommodate the application of sharia law in appropriate circumstances. Rereading his speech on that subject, I find that he might want to consider applying much of what he said to his own (and other Anglicans') approach to the GAFCON movement in their midst.

The Archbishop, remember, greeted the GAFCON statement by asserting that "the vast majority of Anglicans in every province" would have no objections to "the tenets of orthodoxy" as set out in the Jerusalem Declaration. His concerns were rather with the issues of legitimacy raised by the formation of an independent body of Primates, and by the assertion that its members will not respect the diocesan borders of those bishops whom they regard as endorsing heretical views. 

Those concerns sound remarkably like the ones that the Archbishop addressed in his lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice last February, when he was telling the audience that the system of sharia law could exist within the British legal system without undermining the legitimacy and authority of British courts and the rule of law. I have reproduced below a portion of the Archbishop's speech, in which I have replaced the word "sharia" with "orthodoxy", words relating to Muslims with words describing the followers of GAFCON, and references to (British) law with words relating to the Anglican Communion:

. . . [I]t is important to begin by dispelling one or two myths about [orthodoxy]; so far from being a monolithic system of detailed enactments, [orthodoxy] designates primarily . . . 'the expression of the universal principles of [Anglicanism and] the framework and the thinking that makes for their actualization in human history'. Universal principles: as any [orthodox] commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular; but also something that has to be 'actualized', not a ready-made system. If [the Bible] designates the essence of the revealed Law, [orthodoxy] is the practice of actualizing and applying it; while certain elements of [orthodoxy] are specified fairly exactly in the Bible and in the [tradition] recognised as authoritative in this respect, there is no single code that can be identified as 'the' [orthodox brand of Anglicanism]. And when certain [provinces adhere to] what they refer to as [orthodoxy] or when certain [GAFCON] activists demand its recognition alongside [contemporary Anglicanism], they are usually referring not to a universal and fixed code established once for all but to some particular concretisation [as embodied in the recent Jerusalem Declaration]. . . 

Thus, in contrast to what is sometimes assumed, we do not simply have a standoff between two rival [theological] systems when we discuss [orthodoxy] and [current Anglicanism]. On the one hand, [orthodoxy] depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God; on the other, it is to some extent unfinished business so far as codified and precise provisions are concerned. To recognise [orthodoxy] is to recognise a method of [theology] governed by revealed texts rather than a single system. In a discussion based on a paper . . . at a conference last year . . . the point was made by one or two [Anglican] scholars that an excessively narrow understanding of [orthodoxy] as simply codified rules can have the effect of actually undermining the universal claims of the [Bible].

See how it fits? The Archbishop's case for sharia law is a pretty good parallel for GAFCON's case for Anglican orthodoxy.  Now look at how the substitution fits into Dr. Williams' argument that sharia law (orthodoxy) does not have to compete for legitimacy with British common law (Anglicanism); both can coexist in the same country (Communion):

But while such universal claims are not open for renegotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of [GAFCON] is not, in that sense, intrinsically to do with any demand for [orthodox] dominance over [Anglicanism]. Both historically and in the contemporary context, [orthodox provinces] have acknowledged that [the] membership of [GAFCON] is not coterminous with membership in a particular [Anglican church] . . . . Such societies, while not compromising or weakening the possibility of unqualified belief in the authority and universality of [orthodoxy], or even the privileged status of [GAFCON], recognise that there can be no guarantee that the [church] is religiously homogeneous and that the relationships in which the individual stands and which define him or her are not exclusively with other [orthodox believers]. There has therefore to be some concept of common good that is not prescribed solely in terms of revealed Law, however provisional or imperfect such a situation is thought to be. And this implies in turn that the [orthodox believer], even in a predominantly [orthodox province], has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful.

. . . [I omit here a long and scholarly discursus.]

So the second objection to an increased legal recognition of communal religious identities can be met if we are prepared to think about the basic ground rules that might organise the relationship between [provinces], making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction. Once again, there are no blank cheques. . . .

Here, Dr. Williams is making the point that society does not have to accept just any "unexamined systems that have oppressive effect," or to "allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction", i.e., a jurisdiction within the Communion in my substituted version. Does that not apply to the Anglican Communion's accepting the "unexamined" theology of The Episcopal Church or of the Anglican Church of Canada, and to its tolerance of their deposing clergy who transfer to other Anglican provinces? As he says, "there are no blanque checks." For if one tolerates such oppression in the name of diversity, society reduces to a war of "all against all", in which "a narrowly rights-based culture fosters . . . a manically litigious atmosphere" (such as the one within TEC today): 

. . . This is not to reduce [the Communion] itself primarily to an uneasy alliance of self-determining individuals arguing about the degree to which their [autonomy] is limited by one another and needing forcible restraint in a war of all against all – though that is increasingly the model which a narrowly rights-based culture fosters, producing a manically litigious atmosphere and a conviction of the inadequacy of customary ethical restraints and traditions – of what was once called 'civility'. The picture will not be unfamiliar, and there is a modern legal culture which loves to have it so. But the point of defining legal universalism as a negative thing is that it allows us to assume, as I think we should, that the important springs of moral vision in a [church] will be in those areas which a systematic abstract universalism regards as 'private' – in religion above all, but also in custom and [tradition]. The role of '[church]' law is not the dissolution of these things in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which [religious] liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual [clergy] are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no [legal] redress. 

In short, the Communion is larger than any individual church or group of primates within it, and the important principle is that all are seen as contributing to its common "well-being and order", including especially those striving to uphold orthodoxy within its tradition:

The rule of [interdependence] is thus not the enshrining of priority for the universal/abstract dimension of [a given church's polity] but the establishing of a space accessible to everyone in which it is possible to affirm and defend a commitment to [orthodox principles] as such, independent of membership in any specific [church] or tradition, so that when specific [churches] or traditions are in danger of claiming finality for their own boundaries of practice and understanding, they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of [Anglican interdependence] - and that the only way of doing this is to acknowledge the category of '[Anglican core beliefs]' – a non-negotiable assumption that each [church] (with [its] historical and social affiliations) could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of [the Anglican Communion]. It is not to claim that specific community understandings are 'superseded' by this universal principle, rather to claim that they all need to be undergirded by it. The rule of [Scripture and tradition] is – and this may sound rather counterintuitive – a way of honouring what in the [Anglican Communion] is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history, even though the [Anglican Communion] never exists without those other determinations. Our need . . . is for the construction of 'a moral framework which could expand outside the boundaries of particular narratives while, at the same time, respecting the narratives as the cultural contexts in which the language [of Communion] is learned and taught' . . . .

Thus, by giving orthodoxy its due, and by allowing it room to express itself and function as "a moral framework which could expand outside the boundaries of particular narratives," there is no threat to the traditional "hierarchical monopoly" represented by the four Instruments of Unity (the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting):

But to return to our main theme: I have been arguing that a defence of an unqualified [Anglican hierarchical] monopoly in terms of the need for a universalist doctrine of human right or dignity is to misunderstand the circumstances in which that doctrine emerged, and that the essential liberating (and religiously informed) vision it represents is not imperilled by a loosening of the monopolistic framework. At the moment, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, one of the most frequently noted problems in the [Communion] in this area is the reluctance of a dominant rights-based philosophy to acknowledge the liberty of conscientious opting-out from collaboration in procedures or practices that are in tension with the demands of particular religious groups: the assumption, in rather misleading shorthand, that if a right or liberty is granted there is a corresponding duty upon every individual to 'activate' this whenever called upon. . . .

In other words, the election and consecration as bishop of a man like V. Gene Robinson does not have to require every other member of the Anglican Communion to recognize him as a bishop.  The Archbishop continues:

Earlier on, I proposed that the criterion for recognising and collaborating with communal religious discipline should be connected with whether a communal jurisdiction actively interfered with liberties guaranteed by the wider society in such a way as definitively to block access to the exercise of those liberties; clearly the refusal of a religious believer to act upon the legal recognition of a right is not, given the plural character of society, a denial to anyone inside or outside the community of access to that right. 

Notice that no substitutions are necessary with the language the Archbishop uses here. The refusal of most of the Anglican Communion---including the Archbishop himself---to recognize the legitimacy of V. Gene Robinson as a bishop does not constitute a denial of any "right" that he has to be recognized as such, because the refusal is grounded in appropriate religious belief.

The point has been granted in respect of medical professionals who may be asked to perform or co-operate in performing abortions – a perfectly reasonable example of the law doing what I earlier defined as its job, securing space for those aspects of human motivation and behaviour that cannot be finally determined by any corporate or social system. It is difficult to see quite why the principle cannot be extended in other areas. But it is undeniable that there is pressure from some quarters to insist that conscientious disagreement should always be overruled by a monopolistic understanding of jurisdiction.

Yes, indeed; I believe that such pressure is coming from none other than The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. 

Dr. Williams concludes with a plea that "rights thinking" (i.e., the attitude that people are endowed with certain rights, such as the "right" to be a bishop of the Church) not be allowed to trump matters of "custom and conscience", in words that once again could apply to how GAFCON should be received: 

I labour the point because what at first seems to be a somewhat narrow point about how [GAFCON] should or might be regarded in our [Anglican Communion] in fact opens up a very wide range of current issues, and requires some general thinking about the character of [that Communion]. It would be a pity if the immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the [Communion]'s function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern [church] . . . . [I]t might be possible to think in terms of what [one author] calls 'transformative accommodation': a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that 'power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents'. . . . In such schemes, both jurisdictional stakeholders may need to examine the way they operate; a communal/religious nomos . . . has to think through the risks of alienating its people by inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law, and a universalist Enlightenment system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoising and effectively disenfranchising a minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity. Hence 'transformative accommodation': both jurisdictional parties may be changed by their encounter over time, and we avoid the sterility of mutually exclusive monopolies.

In other words, the Primates' Meeting and the Lambeth Conference might actually have to take some decisive steps about disciplining member churches that disregard their resolutions and communiques if they don't want the GAFCON Primates' Council to assume that role. Otherwise, they run the risk of becoming a "sterile exclusive monopoly." The Archbishop concludes:  

It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about [our Communion] what some would see as a 'market' element, a competition for loyalty . . . . But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or [Communion] loyalty, it seems unavoidable. In other settings, I have spoken about the idea of 'interactive pluralism' as a political desideratum; this seems to be one manifestation of such an ideal, comparable to the arrangements that allow for shared responsibility in education: the best argument for faith schools from the point of view of any aspiration towards social harmony and understanding is that they bring communal loyalties into direct relation with the wider society and inevitably lead to mutual questioning and sometimes mutual influence towards change, without compromising the distinctiveness of the essential elements of those communal loyalties.

In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between [GAFCON] and [the Anglican Communion], we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of [orthodoxy] or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of [what binds us together]. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism; and what I have called legal universalism, when divorced from a serious theoretical (and, I would argue, religious) underpinning, can turn into a positivism as sterile as any other variety. If the paradoxical idea which I have sketched is true – that universal law and universal right are a way of recognising what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject – theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you can imagine, I am not going to complain about that.

So, Dr. Williams---you may not have thought it when you said it, but your approach to GAFCON within the Anglican Communion might well be governed by the approach you urged Britain to take in regard to sharia law: a respectful tolerance of the sincerity of religious beliefs that underpin it, and an absence of fear for the consequences and changes that its introduction will mean for the Anglican Communion as a whole. "Theology [indeed] still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out." I pray that you will use your considerable gifts in that area to give GAFCON the assistance and support that it deserves in upholding core Christian doctrine.

We Have a Problem . . .

In this post, I want to compare and contrast certain words spoken and written by our Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Here she is at her most recent, reacting to the Statement issued at the end of GAFCON:

Much of the Anglican world must be lamenting the latest emission from GAFCON. Anglicanism has always been broader than some find comfortable. This statement does not represent the end of Anglicanism, merely another chapter in a centuries-old struggle for dominance by those who consider themselves the only true believers. Anglicans will continue to worship God in their churches, serve the hungry and needy in their communities, and build missional relationships with others across the globe, despite the desire of a few leaders to narrow the influence of the gospel. We look forward to the opportunities of the Lambeth Conference for constructive conversation, inspired prayer, and relational encounters.

Many others have commented on the insulting, demeaning tone signaled by the deliberate reference to the GAFCON Statement as an "emission." For now, just look at what she said in a statement issued on New Year's Day 2007:

Part of our evangelical task is making our worshiping communities welcoming in a deep, human, relational sense. The gospel is about radical hospitality, after all, and that is what we are meant to model.

The other side of this challenge is how we might speak good news in language and forms that people uneducated in Christianity can understand and welcome. If our language engenders fear, it is likely to drive people away. If it welcomes and invites, the possibility can be quite different.

This may not be seen in many places in the Episcopal Church, but consider your own reaction to “If you don’t believe the way we do, you’re going to hell.” Not only does hell not have much reality for the unchurched, there is an arrogance in that approach that many find repellent.

"Listening" was again her theme in a talk she gave just after the Primates' Meeting two months later in Tanzania:

Much has been said about the listening process urged by the last three Lambeth conferences. . . . I would like to encourage us as a church to consider how we ourselves might listen more carefully to those with whom we most vehemently disagree. Can we, in a focused way, pay attention to the grief and suffering, and the love for God and neighbor, in those in other places on the theological and rhetorical spectrum? If we gain nothing else from the coming months, that would be a great gift.

I have been in conversation already with the President of the House of Deputies about ways in which we can call the whole church to the kind of faithful listening that will be necessary before we make any decision. . . .

If we can lower the emotional reactivity in the midst of this current controversy we just might be able to find a way to live together. That was the genius behind the Elizabethan Settlement. A non-violent response to this situation will need space and time to operate, and perhaps an unexpected or even humorous response. While these issues are of major importance, it is our very intensity about them that is preventing a life-giving resolution.

Finally, as Lent continues, I ask you to continue to fast from ascribing motives to others, to seek Christ in the stranger, and to ask God to quiet your fears. May we continue to work and pray for those who die daily from hunger, lack of medical care, war, and oppression. Pray especially for those who suffer because of their minority status, whether sexual or theological, for in Christ we are all a minority. And, finally, give thanks to God who has created us in all our variety. As frustrating and annoying as that variety may be, it is the image of God.

This is a very interesting perspective: just who are the ones in the "theological minority"? According to her most recent statement quoted above, it is those who produced the Statement at GAFCON.

So The Episcopal Church has two faces. First, the one it presents to nonbelievers, of a warm, open and welcoming gathering of those who do not claim to have the unique answer to anything (we will just have to put up with the degree of upset this approach engenders among our own):

I have had the remarkable gift and opportunity in recent months to speak to people who don’t know much at all about the Episcopal Church or Christianity. Those opportunities have come through the secular media. Those interviews intentionally have avoided the language of Christian insiders for the reasons above.

The unfortunate result in some places has been anger when Episcopalians don’t recognize their own familiar language. Let me suggest a challenging exercise: How would you tell the great truths of our faith without using overtly theological language? How would you tell a new neighbor that God loves him or her without measure, and invite him or her to learn more? If we are going to hear that person’s story with grace, we have to leave the door open for a while.

And then, once you have been taken in by this approach, you may in time meet the other face of the Church, the one reserved for "insiders," that says: "Either go along with the program, or get out. And if you don't leave voluntarily (or maybe even if you do), we'll kick you out!"

Does anyone else see a problem here?

[P.S.: I am not sure that Father Tobias Haller's suggestion would be good for us to follow just now.]