Another Nail In The Coffin...(Part 2)

Continuing on the the subject of my earlier post on the excellent editorial in Modern Churchpeople:

COMMUNION, COVENANT AND OUR ANGLICAN FUTURE

MCU's reply to Drs Williams and Wright


The Archbishop of Canterbury, along with certain of his fellow bishops in the Church of England, bash the Episcopal Church, scold our bishops, and generally give the impression that the opinions of ordinary clergy and the lowly laity in the US church shouldn't count at all. A good many of us in TEC felt quite lonely as the folks in the English Church, with very few exceptions*, let us hang out to dry for so very long with the ABC pounding away at us, blaming us for the divisions in the Anglican Communion, disrespecting our church and our Presiding Bishop, and disregarding our laity and clergy.

Finally, finally more voices in the English Church are speaking truth to their leaders. Perhaps he will hear the voices coming from within his own church in his own land.

I take up where I left off:

The ethics of homosexuality

Central to the debate, then, is the question of whether homosexual activity is immoral. The policy of TEC's opponents is to suppress this question. It was excluded from the remit of the Eames Commission; the Windsor Report, which it published in 2004, took that exclusion to mean that as far as the Anglican Communion was concerned homosexuality was definitely immoral. Williams reaffirms this stance, warning against being

"completely trapped in the particularly bitter and unpleasant atmosphere of the debate over sexuality, in which unexamined prejudice is still so much in evidence and accusations of bad faith and bigotry are so readily thrown around (3.11)."

It is this strategy which enables them to present TEC as self-consciously deviant, and the debate as purely a question of how to discipline errant provinces.

Williams and Wright are of course aware of the common view that homosexuality is not immoral, but they claim to know little more.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Sorry folks, I learned that expression from my sainted Roman Catholic grandmother in my early days. When I read the words of the ABC, they often call forth that expression.

Does Dr Williams believe that the great mass of us in TEC relish "the particularly bitter and unpleasant atmosphere of the debate over sexuality"? Has he done his part to make the debate less bitter and unpleasant? Did locking Bishop Gene Robinson out of Lambeth ease the bitterness? What about his scoldings and blaming?

All right, I got a bit carried away there. Back to the article.

Both Williams and Wright dismiss the human rights and changing with society arguments for a possible adjustment in church policies, although...

Human rights

Human rights discourse has been immensely influential in Anglican discourse, at least since the seventeenth century, and should not be dismissed so peremptorily as alien.

Changing with society

Williams and Wright tar it by association with the view that the church's teaching should change to reflect society's attitudes. This is of course a straw doll: the only people who hold such a view are secularists who simply want to use religion for their own purposes. It is in any case quite different from human rights theory. Nevertheless the fact that Williams and Wright argue this way is revealing: denying that the church should always change its doctrines to suit society, they jump to the conclusion that in this instance we should attribute no value to what society believes.

Oh my, yes! Moving on to...

Suppressing natural desires

Wright emphasises that being a Christian involves suppressing one's natural desires, and appeals to texts in Paul's epistles.

There are indeed many times when we need to resist temptation and suppress natural desires. Whether homosexual intercourse always needs to be resisted, even by those with a homosexual orientation, is precisely the ethical question at issue, and these quotations do not answer it.

A more frequent claim in the Bible is that obedience to God's law should bring shalom, which is often translated as 'peace' but has a wider meaning including 'harmony' and 'fulfilment'. It is because of this biblical belief that we have been made by a loving God who wishes us well, that people ask 'Why did God make me with such strong homosexual urges and then forbid me to express them?'

We are given the impression that Wright does not himself have a homosexual orientation. To impose lifelong celibacy on those who do does not distress him at all. In general, moral rules serve people in two ways: to guide them in their own lives, and to give them bullets to fire at others. Wright uses the latter for all it is worth at no cost to himself.

Indeed "[w]e are given the impression that Wright does not himself have a homosexual orientation." As he said on Stephen Colbert's show, he has a wife and four children and grandchildren! Why should he give a rat's rear about imposing celibacy on gay folks? But wait! He's a shepherd. Shouldn't he pastor all his sheep?

What the church cannot do

Williams and Wright both insist that the church cannot bless same-sex unions and that people in homosexual partnerships be ordained to the church's ministry. Yet both know that these things happen. What is the meaning of this 'cannot'?

It is clearly not an empirical statement about any public ecclesiastical institution. Both are in fact appealing to a mystic 'true church', the institution desired by the mind of God, a kind of Platonic ideal describing what the public institutional church ought to be. Their 'cannot' therefore means 'ought not'.

Williams allows for change as a theoretical possibility but makes it impossible in practice, demanding 'the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole'.
....

It is hopelessly unrealistic. The whole of Christendom will never reach agreement on anything. What makes this Catholic vision seem credible is two limitations which are in practice imposed on it, though they are rarely spelt out: that the agreement of the whole church really means only the agreement of archbishops, Vatican and patriarchs; and that Christendom-wide agreement is only needed on a small number of issues. Which those issues are is never spelt out.

Wright's vision is Calvinist rather than Catholic. In this tradition, the 'true church' is an invisible entity known to God alone.
....

In this tradition there is no interest at all in the unity of the institutional church. What is of interest is the exact opposite: to clarify the distinction between true Christians and everybody else, and to ensure that one's own church is entirely governed by true Christians. It is this ecclesiology which responds to the fact that one of Anglicanism's 800 bishops is an open homosexual by treating it as urgent crisis needing to be resolved immediately.

"[H]opelessly unrealistic" is often enough an apt description of the ABC's thinking. And Bp. Right Wright seems to want to be in charge of separating the sheep from the goats, right here and right now.

That's enough for today, class. To be continued. I know your attention spans are not unlimited, and neither is my own. I get overexcited when I see writing as well-reasoned as this piece, especially coming out of England.

*Exceptions to my statement near the beginning of the post are MadPriest and Pluralist, who spoke out early and often.