Lydia Evans, a lay deputy from South Carolina to the recently concluded Episcopal Church General Convention, has an excellent summary/analysis of the events. She not only deals with the sexuality resolutions, but the theological incoherence and financial difficulties that are also plaguing the denomination:
The Episcopal Church has become mired in her own polity, expecting discernment to arise from our legislative process — a system which attempts to settle matters of theology within a body of impatient laity and clergy. In struggling to discern matters of human sexuality, we have begun to dispense convenient answers to very complex questions. All too often these days, the Church, taking her cue from cultural contexts, seeks to provide a pastoral response by reconsidering questions settled long ago. But as Christians we are called to be long-suffering and to look beyond our horizons — to reflect on centuries of Anglican teaching and tradition, and to listen carefully to our brothers and sisters in Christ — before we dare to move forward.
Read it all.
July 24, 2009 at 9:00 pm
…”by reconsidering questions settled long ago.”
That was pretty humorous.
I don’t think “settled long ago” in our narrow time frame means very much from God’s perspective.
July 25, 2009 at 8:17 am
I have a rather mixed reaction to what Lydia is saying. On the one hand, if Lydia is right, and TEC is indeed looking primarily to its polity to sort out questions of truth, then I agree that this is the worst kind of folly. When questions of truth get supplanted by questions of procedure, that’s the day when Christians need to seriously assess what (or who) the ultimate source of truth is, and soberly evaluate whether they are looking to this source or looking somewhere else. Polity absolutely positively does not create or sustain unity; shared values and faith commitments do. Even secular businesses understand this. Good new hire orientations baptize new employees in the company’s core values; they tend not to stress the company’s org chart. Polity can set a unifying tone (or not), and is indispensable when it embraces the values of the church. But polity can never replace those values without becoming completely unhinged and splintering the denomination.
On the other hand, while I agree that TEC leadership in particular is looking to culture and the MDG to drive its own articles of faith, this doesn’t equal a watered down faith; it just equals a different kind of faith. If TEC is willing to splinter internally, schismatically break communion from its worldwide family, and ultimately fold into unitarianism and lose any distinctively Christian identity, all for the sake of going its own way on Scriptural authority, this is hardly a weak and tentative faith. To the contrary, TEC is quite fundamentalist in its level of commitment to positions that may well ensure its demise. Put simply, they are willing to die over the issue of homosexuality and all the prior-order decisions farther upstream that get them to their position on homosexuality. This means I’m not really sure TEC is looking primarily to its polity to tell them what to believe. Their steadfast commitment to positions that create schism (which is ironic considering that Jefforts-Schori recently told Rowan Williams that actions that precipitate schism are unchristian (if the shoe fits)) are not loosely held and don’t strike me as being built on the shifting sands of polity. Rather, I think TEC is doing what most mainline denominations are doing – they are looking to their polity to ratify and enforce positions they’ve already embraced as ‘truth’, and hoping that such polity ratification will stop the fighting (and the bleeding). I think this is a misdirected hope, but I don’t question the sincerity of their faith commitments. I question the truthfulness of those commitments, and how they can be reconciled with the commitments of orthodoxy. I don’t believe they can.