Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

An Anglican Hero: William Reed Huntington


In the Anglican church calendar, today is the feast day of Episcopal theologian William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), whose achievements include spearheading the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and formulating what became known as the “Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral,” the four-point statement of Anglican/Episcopal identity that is still used today.

Huntington cared deeply about Christian unity. His intent was to articulate a few core beliefs that made the church distinctively Christian and Episcopal; beyond those, the church should make room for a wide diversity of views. Those four points were the Holy Scriptures as the word of God; the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds as the rule of faith; the sacraments of baptism and communion, as ordained by Christ; and the historic episcopate (bishops who traced their lineage back to the apostles). Bryan at Creedal Christian provides a nice overview of those principles and their implications in today’s post.

James Kiefer, who writes the saints’-day bios at The Daily Office, observes:


The reader will notice that the four points of the Lambeth Quadrilateral: Scriptures, Creeds, Sacraments, and Ministry, correspond roughly to the points listed in Acts 2:41f, where Luke speaks of those who received the Gospel as it was preached on Pentecost.

So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they continued steadfast in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.

These early Christians were in the apostles’ doctrine. That is, they believed what the apostles taught about the Resurrection of Jesus, and about His victory on our behalf over the power of sin and death. That is to say, they believed the doctrine summarized in the Creeds.

They were in the apostles’ fellowship. That is, they did not seek to serve God as unattached individuals, nor did they form groups of persons of like minds with their own in whose company they might worship. They joined themselves to the existing band of believers, whose nucleus was the apostles. That is, they were united by participation in the ministry of the apostles and those whom the apostles deputized to carry on their work.

They participated in the breaking of bread. That is, they were regular participants in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. (That they had received the Sacrament of Holy Baptism has already been specified.)

They participated in the prayers. As far back as our records go, Christian services of worship have consisted principally of two things: (1) the reading of the Holy Scriptures and preaching based on them, accompanied by prayer, and (2) the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The pattern was set by Our risen Lord at Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), when He first opened the Scriptures to His companions, and then “was known to them in the breaking of bread.” The former part, the prayers and readings and sermons, would often be referred to simply as “the prayers.”

Huntington’s classic The Church-Idea: An Essay Towards Unity is available used at Amazon.com.

Why Not Church?

 

Yesterday I wrote to a friend who heads my women’s Bible study group:

 

It has become quite clear to me that fear of sin is one of the things keeping me from church. The current cultural landscape is such that I will eventually end up offended by something I hear either in the conservative or the liberal church, and I am afraid of being unlikable and conflict-causing when I offer a different viewpoint.

Since the whole point of being a Christian is the grace not to be driven by fear of sin any longer, this is obviously a problem. She wrote back:

I too feel if I went back to [the evangelical church], I would be screaming
You people are crazy don’t you see that I am right and you are wrong

and if I went back to [the liberal church] I would be screaming
You people are crazy don’t you see that I am right and you are wrong

Once I put that down in writing, it gives [the liberal church] a less compelling pull on me. If I’m likely to be a screeching lunatic wherever I go, might as well go somewhere where Jesus is Lord.

Or to put it another way:
Girl…It’s not about you!!

The One-Room Schoolhouse


My church is beginning the rector search process, and already we’re feeling sorry for this person because of the conflicting expectations he or she will have to manage. We want a firm administrator who’s also a gentle pastoral caregiver; someone who can address the unique needs of the elderly, singles, young families, Sunday School kids, and college students; someone to balance our budget without disrespecting any of the programs that our strong lay leadership holds so dear. I’m sure this dilemma is common to any church that can boast of a diverse congregation and a large menu of activities. St. Paul addressed it in several epistles with the reminder that we are members of one body, with Christ as the head.

The issue preoccupying me right now is how people who are at different stages of religious commitment can worship together. It takes a skilled minister not to direct his entire attention to one of these groups and treat the others as an obstacle to his agenda.

Seekers and beginning Christians have one set of concerns: How do I know there is such a thing as religious truth, and that this is it? Will this community accept me and be patient with my doubts? Is there space here for beliefs and attitudes from the other worldviews that previously guided my life, or am I expected to repudiate them? Can I trust the Bible or any other religious authority?

Other members who are already firm in their commitment to Christ will have different concerns: How can I experience Jesus more fully as a loving presence in my life? What acts of service is he calling me to do? Why don’t I always act consistently with my beliefs, and how can we as Christians help one another stay on that path? How can I begin hearing God’s voice through the Bible?

In our liberal community, we’re more likely to overshoot on the seeker-sensitive side. This can leave longer-term Christians (I don’t want to flatter myself with the words “more mature”!) feeling that faith beyond a certain level is not encouraged, almost in poor taste. We rightly don’t want to shame or pressure new believers. On the other hand, we deprive seekers of an important hope for their journey when we don’t give them any role models of Christians who’ve found what they seek. At the risk of repeating the only idea I have, I’ll say again that this is what happens when we try to prop up people’s egos with anything other than the forgiving love of God in Christ.

St. Paul’s image of the body of Christ may be too intense for a group where not everyone is on the same page about Christ’s lordship in their lives. It begs the very question that we’re trying to work out: what are we doing here? A less fraught metaphor might be the one-room schoolhouse. Everyone still has a lot to learn, and we’re learning it together. The teacher doesn’t feel his authority is threatened when the big kids help the little ones with their sums. Six-year-olds aren’t criticized for not knowing algebra. Sixth-graders don’t have to hide their copy of The Scarlet Letter inside a Dick-and-Jane primer.

What holds it all together is a teacher who believes there is a real body of knowledge we’re all studying in common. He’s not simply a cafeteria worker scrambling to cater to everyone’s existing tastes for strained peas or spicy tacos (to mix my metaphors for a moment). I pray that our church finds someone who can lead this way with kindness and patience.

Trinity, Atonement, and the Coherence of Doctrine


Years before I found Christianity believable (or truly understood what there was to believe), I found its coherence as an intellectual system immensely satisfying. Now too, the more I learn, the more I appreciate how its core concepts are inseparably entwined. Take away the Resurrection, for instance, and the Crucifixion goes from triumph to tragedy. However much disbelievers in miracles try to recast Jesus’ death as an inspiring martyrdom, if the story ends there, it really isn’t all that inspiring — just another tale of how good guys finish last.
Similarly, Bryan at Creedal Christian points out in a recent post that the doctrine of the Atonement would seem barbaric without the Trinity. The objection is commonly heard, “What kind of father would be so wrathful that he could only be appeased by the death of his son?” Isn’t that the essence of human sinfulness, after all — that there must be a doer and a done-to, a consuming ego and a devoured other? That power struggle vanishes only when we see that the two characters in this drama are really one:


God sending the Son to suffer and die on the cross can only be construed as sado-masochistic if – as Arius taught – the Son is less than the Father. But if, as the Nicene Creed affirms, the Father and Son are one, then Jesus’ willing submission to the cross is not a concession to the Father’s vicious will. Rather, the Divine will is ONE will – a loving, redemptive will for Jesus’ death to be the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.

When we see Jesus’ voluntary submission to the cross, we see God’s will for the redemption of the world unfolding. We see the reason why Jesus was born.

Both liberal-modernists who deny the divinity of Christ, and Calvinists who fixate on God’s naked power to the exclusion of His love for humanity, have at times obscured the Trinitarian paradox that works through our sinful structures of abuse and domination in order to delegitimize them once and for all. Catholic theologian James Alison eloquently argues this point in his 2004 lecture “Some Thoughts on the Atonement”:


[N]ormally, in the theory understanding of substitutionary atonement, we understand the substitution to work as follows: God was angry with humanity; Jesus says, “Here am I”; God needed to loose a lightning rod, so Jesus said, “You can loose it on me”, substituting himself for us. Boom: lightning rod here: sacrifice: God happy. “Got my blood-lust out of the way!”

The interesting thing is that it worked in an entirely different way: what Jesus was doing was substitute himself for a series of substitutions. The human sacrificial system typically works in the following way: the most primitive forms of sacrifice are human sacrifices. After people begin to become aware of what they are doing this gets transferred to animal sacrifices. After all it’s easier to sacrifice animals because they don’t fight back so much; whereas if you have to run a sacrificial system that requires you to keep getting victims, usually you have to run a war machine in order to provide enough victims to keep the system going; or you have to keep the pet “pharmakons” around the place – convenient people to sacrifice, who live in splendour, and have a thoroughly good time, until a time of crisis when you need people to sacrifice, and then you sacrifice them. But this is an ugly thing, and people are, after all, human; and so animals began to be sacrificed instead. And in some cultures from animals you get to more symbolic forms of sacrifice, like bread and wine. You can find any variation on the theme of sacrificial substitution.

The interesting thing is that Jesus takes exactly the inverse route; and he explains to us that he is going in the inverse route. “The night before he was betrayed…” what did he do? He said, “Instead of the bread and the wine, this is the lamb, and the lamb is a human being.” In other words he substituted a human being back into the centre of the sacrificial system as the priest, thus showing what the sacrificial system was really about, and so bringing it to an end.

So you do have a genuine substitution that is quite proper within the atonement theory. All sacrificial systems are substitutionary; but what we have with Jesus is an exact inversion of the sacrificial system: him going backwards and occupying the space so as to make it clear that this is simply murder. And it needn’t be. That is what we begin to get in St John’s Gospel: a realisation that what Jesus was doing was actually revealing the mendacious principle of the world. The way human structure is kept going is by us killing each other, convincing ourselves of our right to do it, and therefore building ourselves us up over and against our victims. What Jesus understands himself as doing in St John’s Gospel is revealing the way that mechanism works. And by revealing it, depriving it of all power by seeing it as a lie: “your father was a liar and a murderer from the beginning”. That is how the “prince” – or principle – of this world works.

So what we get in St John’s Gospel is a clear understanding that the undoing of victimage is not simply a liturgical matter, it’s not simply a liturgical fulfilment, but is the substituting himself at the centre of what the liturgical thing was covering up, namely human sacrifice, therefore making it possible for us to begin to live without sacrifice. And that includes not just liturgical sacrifice, but therefore the human mechanism of sacrificing other people so that we can keep ourselves going. In other words, what he was beginning to make possible was for us to begin to live as if death were not, and therefore for us not to have to protect ourselves over against it by making sure we tread on other people.

Read the whole lecture here.

Why Church?


I’ve always managed my personal life on the theory that a bad relationship is worse than none at all. Ever since I was a very little girl, my fantasies revolved around falling in love and getting married. (Well, that and saving the world from evil.) Because I cared so much about being in relationship, I actually didn’t date a whole lot, and never got serious with anyone till I met the man I eventually married. I just didn’t have the time to waste. At least when you’re alone, you know you still need something. Like those annoying people who leave a shopping cart in a parking spot at the supermarket, filling that void with a lesser form of intimacy blocks the space where the real thing could enter your life.

As a Christian, it’s part of the deal that I have to be in fellowship with other believers. The church is the body of Christ. The Bible is very clear on this. Like marriage, this is my ideal. But also like marriage, there are worse things than being alone. I won’t settle for the false choices that the current cultural landscape presents. In the liberal church, even suggesting that the main qualification for clergy should be love of God and a personal relationship with Jesus draws the mocking response that those who want “that sort of thing” should become “holy-roller” fundamentalists. In the conservative church, the whole purpose of being in community is obviated if the price of belonging is to remain silent when gays and non-Christians are marked for damnation.

It’s dangerous to be a solitary Christian. We may pride ourselves that we’re too orthodox to endure diversity of opinion, or too compassionate to settle on any particular religious path. Christ endured the shame of being misunderstood and rejected, so none of us should be surprised that this is sometimes the price of living together, inevitably confronting our imperfect understanding and failures of charity toward one another. But…

Is it possible or healthy for an individual believer to cultivate sacrificial, self-giving love for a church community when that community doesn’t understand itself as the body of Christ? Can I be married to someone who doesn’t think he’s married to me?

Can I focus on my personal need to be recharged by a “religious experience” of worship with zealous believers, and ignore that their interpretation of certain Bible passages drives many more suffering people away from considering a relationship with Christ?

As I pondered this blog post today, an email newsletter from Relevant Magazine appeared in my inbox, with Leslie Herron’s article “Church, or Experiencing God?”


It is interesting to note that Abraham had no church affiliation, no denomination and no spiritual designation other then “Man Who Knows God.” His children and his children’s children had no religion either. Abraham had a running conversation with God for well over 25-years, yet God never felt it necessary to tell him how to live, how to worship or how to raise his children through a set of rules. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were without a religion, yet all three had mighty encounters with God.

God told Abraham to leave his country and to follow Him (Genesis 12); Abraham obeyed and was richly blessed for the rest of his life. Isaac was so blessed that even the evil sinners in the land recognized that God was with him (Genesis 26:28). Jacob, following after his dad’s pattern, was quite the deceiver, yet God gave him many children, finances and great favor. Even Esau (Isaac’s favorite son), from whom Jacob stole the blessing and the birthright from, prospered far above those around him.

It appears that none of these three men attended a church. The scripture never mentions that they followed a pattern of what we would consider worship, tithing or sacrifice. None of these men benefited from living in a country that was Godly or from teaching tapes, great preaching or what we would consider spiritual gifts.

Yet, all of these men walked with God in the middle of a grossly sinful and violent culture. They more then survived; they were wildly successful to the point that surrounding kings took notice.

When reading the story of Abraham and his children, it almost feels as if they have no way to know God except through a real experience with Him. There is no Christian worldview for them to be intellectually swayed by; there is no excellent worship service that would draw them in emotionally; and there are definitely no cultural benefits of serving just this One God.

Their relationship with God was raw and real, open and honest. They were rugged men who heard and responded to the voice of One they came to know better and better. They did not base their knowledge of God upon what someone else told them, but rather walked according to who they knew God to be from personal experience.

Read the rest here.

Now, before you start shaking your head and muttering “subjectivism” and “individualism”, let me repeat that I’m not saying solitary spiritual experience is all-sufficient. Only that for me, right now, if I really believe in the grace that I’m trying to sell to everyone else, I have to follow the path God seems to be sending me on, even though it doesn’t fit any socially approved templates. I don’t have the security of other people telling me that they also see the six-foot pink rabbit. But I see him, and if I’m only hallucinating after all, either he forgives me or this whole topic is irrelevant.

35 Books for my 35th Birthday


The list below is something of a self-portrait in books. Most of them reflect, and in many cases helped shape, my current worldview. I recommend them for their beauty and wisdom, and the originality of their vision. They’re the books I reread while hundreds of their newer siblings languish on the shelf.

Poetry and Fiction

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Elegance and coherence of Christian ideas revealed in poetry

Katie Ford, Deposition
Contemporary poet chronicles via negativa in thorny yet beautiful language

Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Poems shine with hard-won affirmation of life

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur and Other Poems
Mystical joy explodes normal patterns of meter and syntax

Mark Levine, Enola Gay
20th-century poetic Apocalypse

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)
Christian science fiction; CSL shares his beatific vision

Walter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows
Barnyard allegory of the gospel

Walter Wangerin Jr., The Orphean Passages
Master storyteller tells tale of minister who loses his faith and is saved by community’s love


The Arts

David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear
Overcoming perfectionism and self-doubt in order to find one’s artistic vocation

George Steiner, Real Presences
Literary critic argues that positing a transcendent God is the only guarantee of meaning in literature and art


Christian Living

Henry Cloud & John Townsend, Boundaries
Healthy relationships; Christian altruism without codependency; a life-saving book

Garret Keizer, Help: The Original Human Dilemma
Complex meditations on effectively giving and receiving help

Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin
Uniquely balanced and compassionate assessment of the righteousness of anger in the Christian life, as well as its obvious dangers

Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil
Biography of quirky saint who transcended weakness and absurdity through radical obedience


Christian Spirituality and Theology

Robert Farrar Capon, The Mystery of Christ…and Why We Don’t Get It
Grace, grace and more grace

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy
Early 20th-c. Christian apologist refutes modern heresies in witty prose

Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels
Best book about the Incarnation, sex, death, the Eucharist, the body of Christ in the church

Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
Christian love versus Gnostic narcissism and self-annihilation; history of the myth of self-transcendence through Eros

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
How friendship, familial love, eros and agape are distinct yet woven together in a Christian worldview

Richard F. Lovelace, Renewal as a Way of Life: A Guidebook for Spiritual Growth
Basics of Christian belief as a foundation for church unity, spiritual revival and social transformation

N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus
Jewish historical and religious context for Jesus’ messianic claims


Pluralism and Religious Truth

Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and It’s a Good Thing Too)
Bad-boy law professor and Milton expert debunks liberal-secularist epistemology

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Critique of Enlightenment epistemology argues that we know things by personal commitment; faith should not be on the defensive vis-a-vis “objective” science

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions
Maintaining uniqueness of Christ while humbly declining to speculate on salvation of non-Christians

James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?
How postmodern philosophy is more open to religious faith than the modernist- scientific paradigm that preceded it


Other Religions

Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, Minyan: Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity
Jewish spirituality informed by Eastern mystical practices

Diana Winston, Wide Awake: Buddhism for the New Generation
Clear, lively introduction to meditation practice, mindfulness, compassion, and other Buddhist principles

Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience
Buddhist teacher’s accessible memoir chronicles the stages of conversion and spiritual growth


History of Ideas

Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth
How different cultures have balanced our needs for the three kinds of happiness: euphoria, daily contentment and a worthwhile life

Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
Acerbic history of modern utopianism and its limitations

Robin May Schott, Cognition and Eros
Marxist-feminist philosopher critiques classical and Christian mind-body dualism and projection of negative traits onto female body


And one to grow on…Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead didn’t make the list because I disagree with more of her ideology than I did when I first read it at age 13. However, I’ll always be grateful to Rand for teaching me to think philosophically and systematically about human behavior, and for giving me the courage to trust my own vision as an artist regardless of anyone’s opinion. Those lessons have been the foundation for my entire development as a writer and a Christian…though I doubt she’d recognize me as one of her progeny. A message of humility for us writers: we can’t ever foresee all the ripples of the little pebble we drop in the pond.

Beauty in Absence


Why do encounters with beauty often make us sad? Along with euphoria, I experience pain as I become more aware that my limited senses and attention span cannot fully comprehend or exhaust the possibilities of the sublime reality before me. As Edna St. Vincent Millay exclaimed, “World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!” Yet that pain is, in its own way, sweet. Brett McCracken reflects on this fact in “The Aesthetics of Absence” from Relevant Magazine:


The climax of watching the sun set is knowing that in a scant few minutes, it will be gone, consumed in the revolving horizon. And we feel this tension of impending loss—as joy, as tragedy, but above all as beauty.

And the more I think about beauty—and art—the more I realize how central absence is. What hits us the most—what goes beyond our senses and touches our souls—is not what is present, but what is absent. For good or ill, the state of being hungry and seeing some delicious food is undoubtedly more thrilling than constantly having a full table. To want, to pine, is always more fulfilling than constant satisfaction.

The importance of absence in art can be easily seen if we look at the aesthetic manifestations of it. In music, for example, beauty comes from a withheld melody or an elusive “home” chord. If a song is full of dominant chords, we don’t have any reason to keep listening; if it is all melody, it would be boring….

But why is absence so central to art? Perhaps absence is crucial to art for the same reasons that art is crucial to human existence. Art is how we cope with time.

If you think about it, everything in our conscious lives is some sort of absence. Our memories are about the past; our worries and hopes are about the future. Our every movement, mental process, emotion, etc is a reaction against something that is now over or might be coming. The pain we feel when we step on a nail may seem instantaneous, but it is really a delayed—however minutely—reaction. Presence is instantaneous, lived for a moment and then gone. All else is absence….

We long for the experience of presence—the suspension or transcendence of time. But in this life, presence is as permanent as the wind. What we are really longing for is heaven, God, the eternal. In this spinning planet, where the sun sets, rises and then sets again, the only constants are decay, change, goodbyes and impermanence. But thanks be to God, he gave humans a mind to see beyond this depressing state. He endowed us with memory, imagination—the ability to conceive of and hope for places beyond ourselves, for presences outside the asphyxiating stranglehold of time….

Art should not shy away from those things we associate with absence—loss, sadness, depravity, uncertainty. For without absence, there would be no reason for art. Art comes from the heart, and every human heart is like that empty tomb on Easter morning: missing something.

Second Life Versus New Life


Rich Braaksma at Relevant Magazine muses on whether anything like the Incarnation of Christ could happen in the multiplayer virtual reality game Second Life. Most of the piece is rather fluffy, but he touched my heart with the conclusion:


As much as we may wish to escape our world and its harsh realities, it is this world Christ joined and engaged. We may wish for a new family, new friends, a new place to live and a body that won’t age. But God’s great mercy is that He didn’t come to save the best version of yourself that you can muster—He came for the just plain, fallen, real you.

I have such trouble going through the day simply as myself, experiencing the present in all its awful contingency and overwhelming vitality. I prefer to be lost in thoughts of my novel characters, abstract arguments, the ice cream I might have after dinner — my own version of Second Life without the cumbersome technological interface. To be exposed to my own awareness is to be exposed to God. As if I could hide from Him otherwise…! The fig leaf of imagination only fools one of us.

Without raising this issue explicitly, Braaksma’s article also made me wonder if we emphasize the wrong aspects of Jesus’ story when trying to “Christianize” a secular environment or art form. He spends much of the piece discussing how the literal episodes of Christ’s life (virgin birth, healings, walking on water) could be staged in Second Life, and why they wouldn’t seem like a big deal in a virtual environment where everyone is already defying the constraints of matter.

Similarly, in modern technological societies, physical miracles may not seem like the most necessary or impressive part of the gospel. Its essence is God’s grace and forgiveness — a hard sell in a virtual world (and the real culture that generated it) where actions once thought sinful can be made to appear consequence-free. The ancients understood that our characters are shaped by what we focus our attention upon. Having traded this awareness for a legalistic divide between thought and action, we indulge in virtual murder and pornography as if our distorted desires could be switched off when we step away from the computer.

Bringing the Incarnation to Second Life would require more than a “just add Jesus” approach to the carnival of avatars and miracles floating around this virtual world. The Incarnation begins with a reminder that we bring our whole selves everywhere we go, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Sydney Lea: “Ghost Pain” (excerpt)


This poem from the Winter 2003-04 issue of Image Journal is too long to reprint here, but here is a characteristically lovely excerpt:

A dear friend down south has gone;
his church’s prayer chain couldn’t hold him.
Not this time. People die.

The stars outdoors are sharp as razors,
and Orion the Hunter huge and bold above 
   the river—
as if he could send an arrow flying right 
   through us here.
All manner of things fly through the no-fly zone
elsewhere, the homeless huddle under cardboard,
all the brutal rest, and no, since you inquire,

we can’t account for it. It’s Pearl Harbor Day,
hours of light down to nine, to fewer.
If God be for me, whom then shall I fear?
Easy enough to say, the mockers might say, 
   from in here.
I might be out there among them
were the world not served,

we have to believe, in there being
one more safe tiny place amid the 
   great unsafe.

Read the whole poem here, and visit Image’s artist page on Lea, the editor of the New England Review, here.

Anglican Absolutism


Chris at The Eternal Pursuit notes with sadness that the conservative breakaway parishes and clergy within the U.S. Episcopal Church, who seek to put themselves under the authority of foreign bishops who oppose homosexuality, are asking for more than freedom to follow their own conscience. It’s an all-or-nothing strategy that would delegitimize the existing Episcopal Church in America, thus undermining two mainstays of our 400-year-old Communion: the authority of bishops and the ideal of fellowship among Christians with different views. Chris writes:


There are certainly real issues that lead people of faith to disagree. Some of these issues, particularly those around human sexuality, are especially difficult. Some find the scriptures to be very clear on these issues. Some argue that the overarching message of the Bible seems in conflict with a few particular passages. On all fronts, some argue that the Bible alone is the sole authority, and others seek a mediated dialogue with the scriptures. Some seek a definitive type of authority in the governance of the Church, and some are tolerant of more ambiguity.

These are all developing edges for the Episcopal Church, and we are not alone, as Christians, in this. The point is that the Minns and Akinola crowd are not seeking resolution or reconciliation. They are seeking to leave with as much of the property of ECUSA as they can take with them, and replace the existing church.

The word reform implies, rightly, that the Church could always be more faithful. The Church could always live closer to the foot of the cross of Christ. At various points in history, the Church has erred grievously, and most certainly will again. The Church has endured, because people of faith have worked to reform her. We can’t just dispose of an historic expression of the faith, because we disagree.

When conservatives call this a battle over the authority of Scripture, I have to wonder whether they’re applying a legalistic definition of authority, one in which the entire book stands or falls by your attitude toward a single verse. This is how St. Paul described the futility of obedience to the Law without Christ: fail in one particular, and you’re guilty of them all.

We saw this in previous generations with six-day creationism, another modernist blunder that whose lasting legacy was to perpetuate a stereotype of Christians as rigid, ignorant yahoos. The issue for which so many preachers were willing to raise their blood pressure was totally unimportant, in itself, to most people’s lives. Who cares how long it took to create the universe? It’s not a pizza delivery; you don’t get a discount if it’s not ready in half an hour. No, it’s the principle of the thing, they say.

Similarly, homosexuality presents an abstract principle that the majority can safely denounce or defend without any personal cost to themselves. But when we do this, we send the message that Christianity is about purity, crystalline doctrinal perfection, a completely transparent and authoritative system that is somehow also so fragile that a single pebble can shatter our glass house. The corollary, as the Pharisees would have understood, is that we can’t worship with people whose hands aren’t as clean as ours.

If Christianity is anything distinctive at all, it is the complete opposite of that attitude. “Garlic and sapphires in the mud,” as T.S. Eliot wrote. We should be very, very careful before disfellowshipping someone because they disagree with us on matters not necessary to salvation.