Ok, I haven't blogged in a while. Quite a while. Sorry. I have been working on a speech that I am going to try to reproduce here. It was delivered in Rochester, N.Y., on Dec. 9 at Bethel Christian Fellowship to a conference entitled
The Crisis in the Episcopal Church.
Thank you, Al, very much for inviting me and for arranging this conference. I knew when I heard of this event that I wanted to be here, however, I was not so sure that I wanted to hear myself talk. I am a pastor and not an activist nor a theologian. Al said that that was what he wanted, so I was obliged to say yes. We shall pray that God the Father be glorified in his Son by the work of his Holy Spirit.
I am very happy to be here with you today and I want to congratulate All Saints’ Church of Irondequoit on the 1-year anniversary of its expulsion from the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester. The theme you have chosen for this conference, He who has an ear, let him here what the Spirit says to the churches, comes from the 2nd and 3rd chapters of the Revelation to John where Jesus says it seven times to the seven churches John is writing to. All Saints’ might be compared to a number of the churches mentioned in the Revelation to John, like the first church Jesus addresses there, the church of Ephesus. Speaking to the church’s angel, Jesus says, “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary.” (Rev. 2:2-3) Then, after warning them in very strong words about not departing from their first love, Jesus says, “Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (2:6)
My friends, the Nicolaitans are back, but I’m going to call them liberals in my talk. I have great love and respect for old-fashioned liberals, who were also conservatives, but I’m afraid I’ve decided to surrender to the currents of the age (in this one thing) and use a formerly good word to describe a new, virulent development in church life.
By the way, the verse you have chosen for this morning is one very much loved by the liberals. It is now being used liturgically instead of “The Word of the Lord” after readings from Scripture. I’m glad you chose it because we can’t be giving away biblical texts to our enemies. For them it means that the Bible says one thing and the Spirit something else, and that the Spirit’s voice has to be discovered as something hidden within and different from the plain biblical text which is, pointedly, not the Word of the Lord.
[1] For us, the question posed by our Lord in these words asks whether we will attend to the words of Scripture themselves, the words printed right on the page of Revelation, chapter 2, as the voice of the Spirit. In language identical to the preaching of the mortal Jesus in the Gospels, the risen Jesus of Revelation addresses whoever has an ear to hear. For conservatives, there is no daylight visible between the audible words of Scripture and the message of the Spirit. The question is merely whether we shall allow the Bible’s words to be enlivened and applied to us today by the agency of the Holy Spirit.
[2] We stand in exactly the same posture as those so-often stiff-necked people of Israel wandering in Sinai: their predicament was not whether they could discern the true message of God underneath or within his commandments; it was whether they would accept the commandments themselves as his demonstration of love and election, whether, in other words, they had “ears to hear.” To take the liberal’s position, that there is this airy “spirit” that speaks underneath or around or even in opposition to the words on the page is in fact an invitation to the spirit of the age to lead the church. And it will, ferociously.
The same rejection of the concrete for the ethereal is evident in their treatment of sex.. Liberals, having jettisoned the clear rules for sexual engagement are now stuck with creating all manner of frothy principles that they think will exalt everyday, animal couplings to the level of a sacrament–or not, principles of perfect selflessness and perfect equality and that long list of other perfections demanded from these obstreperous bodies of ours. Are they spiritual? Yes, indeed. Very. As C.S. Lewis warned, we must beware of becoming more spiritual than God.
The conservatives say that intercourse between a man and a woman married to each other is good, even when it’s bad, or selfish, or thoughtless, or distracted, or 30 seconds long. Selfishness may be wrong; thoughtlessness is wrong; inattention to the needs of one’s spouse is wrong, sure. But that doesn’t make the sex wrong. The marital embrace is what it is: ordained by God and therefore good. Likewise, sex outside marriage is wrong, no matter how respectful and loving and attentive and up-to-date it may be. We can respect the partner to the heights, but we’re still not respecting God. Game, set, match. God, the creator of this whole male-female business, gets top billing. I’m not saying that simply being married before engaging in sex is the sufficient to respecting God. I’m just saying that it’s necessary to such respect.
Liberals, given their approach, then, are seriously trying to make sense of the Bible and of Christian faith in light of what they consider to be an irrefutable and spiritual truth: a loving God could not possibly restrict sexual pleasure to a certain group of people and deny it to everybody else.
[3] To them, that’s like trying to argue that the Bible teaches that the sun revolves around the earth. It simply cannot be done with a straight face. It’s nonsense on the face of it. If that is what the Bible was once thought to teach, obviously the Bible must be interpreted another way. For them, everybody knows that gay sex cannot possibly be inherently wrong just like everybody knows that the earth revolves around the sun. If they say, as they sometimes do, that they may be wrong, they mean it exactly the way one says that he may be wrong about the sun being at the center of the solar system. After all, I’ve never personally proven that the earth orbits around the sun, but I trust those who have. Theoretically, I may be wrong, but, realistically, I know I’m not.
I don’t buy the standard conservative line that this debate is not really about sex but about the authority of the Bible. The Bible could quite easily be perceived to say that God hates Edomites. Hates them. Detests them. Is eager to send them to torture in Hell. We all “know” (do we not?) that God in fact loves Edomites. Christ died for Edomites. (Calvinists might object here, but the Calvinists are wrong, deeply wrong.) So the Bible is overruled or, more precisely, appears to be overruled by the rule of faith, by the fact of Christ. This is the basic Christian precept that the rule of faith, that is, faith in Christ, shapes and determines the meaning of the rest of the Bible. This is not a “canon within the canon” as though some verse in Romans might be more true, more important than a verse in Nahum. Instead, it is that both Nahum and Romans are governed by the living Christ and the faith given to his body, the Church.
This, you will notice, is exactly what the liberals say. They say that the risen Christ determines the interpretation of the Bible’s texts about homosexuality. I say, they are right.
This debate is about sex. Specifically, it is about the resurrection of the body, and, more specifically, of the male body of Jesus. The question, “Is the risen Christ male?” is just a provocative way of asking, “Is Jesus risen from the dead?”
The recently retired Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church isn’t buying it. Jesus, he said in his final sermon as Presiding Bishop, is history. There’s Jesus, trapped in the first century, and then there’s the risen Christ, speaking, revealing and doing all sorts of new things in today’s world. In that sermon, Bishop Griswold strongly assented to the Chalcedonian doctrine of Jesus being fully God and fully man, yet he seems particularly weak on the hypostatic union averred in that document. Chalcedon insists that the two natures of our Lord, human and divine, are “without division, without separation . . . not as parted or separated into two persons.” It would appear that, for Bishop Griswold, Jesus was temporarily conjoined to Christ for his lifetime, then jettisoned at the resurrection. Now freed of his identity with Jesus, the risen Christ can do other things that Jesus would have abhorred. After all, as Griswold provocatively asserted, the question “What would Jesus do?” is the wrong question.
Now the difference between the conservative way of interpreting the Scriptures and the liberal way is made clear. We conservatives argue—or at least we ought to argue—that the whole thing revolves around Jesus. The Bible is properly understood only when his cross and resurrection are put at the center. Sex matters because Jesus’ male body was killed, then raised from the dead and later lifted into heaven. Quite true, Jesus himself says that there is no marrying or giving in marriage in the coming resurrection. (Mark 12:25) This could easily be interpreted to mean that there is no sexual difference in the resurrection, that male and female cease to be in the Kingdom. We could also interpret Galatians 3:28 in the same way. But we don’t, because Jesus is raised from the dead. The fact of his resurrection governs the proper interpretation of the whole of Scripture, even his own words in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. We therefore must interpret Jesus’ saying to mean that sexuality (now by “sexuality” I do not mean, as is so often meant, sexual desire and behavior; I mean more plainly the fact of us humans being created by God as one race in two kinds, male and female; sexuality means simply the condition or state of being sexual, that is, of being male or female)—Jesus is saying that, in the resurrection, sexuality is no longer used for procreation or even for pair-bonding in families, but is somehow transfigured into a higher key, in the same way that eating and singing and caring for one another are also transfigured.
[4]The liberals do not believe that Jesus is alive. They think that some other entity, a risen Christ, has replaced Jesus. For them, the Bible is reinterpreted by the actions of this unJesus Christ.
(You will find it quite difficult to distinguish between the unJesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.) For them, Jesus is not the antitype, the fulfillment of all the biblical types, but is instead just another type. He is an example of what Christ can do, even the preeminent example of what the Christ can do, but Jesus simply carries the Christ along. Jesus makes numerous breakthroughs in
his day that are evidence of him having–or even being–this Christ. Breakthroughs in our day, therefore, are evidence of this risen Christ at work.
This is a fairly strong Christology. It’s more than just saying that Jesus is a good man. He is God the Son, they would say, but only for his time. What’s determinative for them are themes in class=Section2>
Jesus’ life, not the specifics. Breaking through social conventions is one theme they discern. Reaching the outcast is one. Standing up to power is one. Courage under suffering is one. When such themes appear for us, we must perceive the Christ in us and play our part. So What Would Jesus Do still does matter, but only as an ideal or theme, not as a specific prescription. Jesus, as everybody knows, would have told the homosexual to go and sin no more. But that was just Jesus. The Christ in Jesus was saying, “Break the conventions; challenge assumptions.”
If anybody should be talking this way, it should be the Catholics. They have long been the ones to argue that they bear the risen Christ along in the very institutions of the church. A new St. Peter arises every so often with healing in his wings. They see changing church doctrine as a development, like the unfolding of a flower, yet they claim the power alone to determine what constitutes proper development of that flower.
[5] How very Romish is Bishop Griswold’s claim that the Christ (or the Spirit) is now revealing new truths to the church that heretofore have been obscured. Instead of a pope, we have a General Convention, uniquely tuned to the voice of the risen Christ. The fact that it speaks words once thought scandalous only proves how supernatural is that voice! Who else but Christ could be so scandalous and get away with it! Are the innovators persecuted? Of course! It’s just as Jesus predicted!
[6]The English Reformation can quite clearly be defined as a protest against the non-biblical claims of Rome that operated in favor of Rome’s power and desire. Now, the leading edge of Reformation Protestantism is doing the very thing it was created to oppose: making non-biblical innovations and claims for its own institutional importance in the kingdom of God. Maybe there’s more to the piling up of vestments and titles and liturgies in the new Anglicanism than we thought. Maybe it’s the natural accoutrements of a medieval view of Church authority. We are now regularly told that the Episcopal Church stands in the vanguard of the work Christ is doing in the world, with our female primates and our homosexuals installed in cathedrals.
Protestantism, or at least English Protestantism, instead viewed itself as a kind of placeholder Church. We are here to minister to the Christians of the day the solid, patristic core of Christian faith, complete with sacraments and church order, while the Roman Church is out to lunch. We are the church without authority and quite intentionally so. We hold to the Scripture not because Scripture is so obviously the Word of God, but because it is one of very few connections to the church of the Apostles that has not been tainted by Romish error. Scripture is in fact very complicatingly puzzling and we don’t pretend to have put it all together. All we can say is that it does one thing well: it delivers Christ to his church. We’ll just hang onto the Bible like a shipwrecked passenger hangs onto a life raft: we won’t tip it over, we won’t tear it apart and we won’t try to get beyond it. We don’t interpret any one part in such a way that it is repugnant to any other.
We realize that it’s Jesus, not Scripture, that saves us, but we don’t know any other Jesus than the one presented to us by the Apostolic Scriptures so there is simply no daylight between Jesus and the Bible. Sacraments and church order are likewise preserved as being recoverable from the wreckage of Romish failures. They are to be submitted to in humility. Beggars can’t be choosers. We trust, as Scripture teaches us to trust, in the promise of God. He visits horrible afflictions on his sinful people but he always saves a remnant. We believe that, due to no merit of our own, but only to his great mercy, we are that remnant. It will do for the remnant to sit down and shut up, to humbly walk with our God.
This, I submit, accounts for the enormous appeal of Anglicanism. It is humble. It is chastened. It is slow to anger. As either Archbishop Fisher or Archbishop Ramsey of Canterbury memorably articulated it, (I’ve seen it attributed to both) the Anglican Church teaches nothing that is hers alone, no special doctrine, no unique insights, but only the simple, catholic teaching of the ages. Many are the controverted questions left unanswered by Anglicanism, not because they do not matter, but because we haven’t got the authority to answer them definitively. We await a new day, perhaps in history, as some great Christian awakening draws God’s children back together, or perhaps at history’s end, when Jesus comes again. For now, we are a placeholder Church.
The liberals, by devising new doctrines, have squandered this gift. The conservatives, in reaction, are not far behind them. I’ve beat up on the liberals already, so let me attack the conservatives for a moment. The idea that Anglicanism itself is some sort of home for the soul is faulty. It is, at best, a home away from home. The last thing the world needs is another protestant denomination, and America needs it least of all. You might argue that conservative Anglican provinces could be a kind of placeholder for Anglicanism in the west, but I doubt the viability of a placeholder for a placeholder. We would start to exalt Anglicanism when Anglicanism was all about exalting Jesus Christ. The idea that more people can be brought to Christ by new Anglican denominations is far-fetched, as though the existing churches, Evangelical / Pentecostal, Orthodox and Catholic, weren’t sufficient to the task. As though what America really needed were more mitred bishops of piecemeal dioceses, more endless canonical wranglings and more evidence of a disunited church. What keeps the existing churches from making even more–and truer–converts is not the lack of an Anglican option but the fractured disunity of the church. This is a deficiency that is not going to be solved by more church division.
I am personally coming to the position that Anglicanism, the American sort anyway, is already gone. It is one of those things in history, good things like the village commons or the neighborhood grocer that simply pass out of history. The liberals and the conservatives are oddly arguing for the same thing. They both insist that something wonderful about Anglicanism is essential to the future of Christ’s church. But that old, wonderful Anglicanism is gone already. Christ’s church, needless to say, goes on.
I sometimes feel, as a pastor of a church that has not and will not secede from its liberal diocese, that I am something of a quisling. It’s true, I guess. My church is not burning up with evangelical zeal, praying in small groups, fasting and waiting on the Lord. We’re Episcopalians, for heaven’s sake. We don’t pray so much as we say our prayers, and we try to get by with faith in Jesus in this world, not separated from it. We believe, strongly, in loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Our church has been stolen by the liberals. The Episcopal Church, like many mainline churches, filled an important spot in Christianity in America. We were always a church that went rather light on the sinners, on the doubters and on the less-than-devout. We’ve paid for that posture in many ways, but we’ve also included in the Gospel’s reach some rather recalcitrant, or should I say reticent Christians. I’m thinking of the W.H. Audens, the Barry Goldwaters, the actors and the tycoons and the shy. We could do this as well as we did because we were, as a church, a placeholder church, awaiting God’s purifying fire. While we waited, we took in lots of sinners plagued with their recalcitrant sins to wait along with us. Our ecclesial humility could sometimes inspire genuine humility, often enough among the rich and talented who had no earthly reason to be humble at all. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep” was our opening line and our organizing motto. Zealous and earnest saints found us too lazy. Humble saints recognized us as friends of Jesus.
The Episcopal Church has always been a good place for the half-converted to hear the Word of God, to receive the Sacraments of God's gracious favor, and to band together to give a Judeo-Christian flavor to the surrounding culture. Our Achilles’ heel–and not something that’s only happened recently–is that we sometimes put the half-converted into positions of real power and doctrinal authority. Half-converted people working in the food pantry are a blessing to the church and the world. Half-converted people raised to the office of bishop are heretics. Maybe we are nearing some crisis in world history. Those fearful words of Jesus, so long ignored by tasteful Episcopalians, seem to be coming true: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16)
These words are spoken by the Lord in Revelation to the church at Laodicea, the last church Jesus addresses. These are among the words that “he who has an ear” needs to hear what the Spirit says to the churches. It might be salutary to listen to the whole message to the Laodiceans as a message to the Episcopal Church:
“For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev. 3:17-22)
I said earlier that Anglicanism left many doctrines unsettled not because they were unimportant, but because we hadn’t, in ourselves, the authority to settle them. The liberals, however, have overturned our humility. Our church now confidently asserts its new doctrines and bases them on some special revelation delivered directly to us, the wondrous, forward-thinking Episcopal Church. Women’s ordination is not a humble trial, made with trepidation and due deference to the tradition; instead, it is the sign of our special election, a font of Gospel authenticity. A church that has long welcomed gay and lesbian believers into various kinds of ministry now has received new and definitive truth about sexual morality that only the most bigoted, darkened soul could disagree with. The liberals have left behind the idea that some of the unsettled things in Anglicanism are important, thus necessitating our deepest humility. Instead, they now declare that anything that is unsettled is, by that very fact, unimportant, a matter of indifference, adiaphora. Forget about nothing necessary for salvation being found outside Scripture. That formulation still allowed for the discovery of lots of matter necessary for salvation. Today, however, nothing outside the Episcopal General Convention is necessary for salvation. We–the Episcopal Church–have it all.
You might be confused here. You might be thinking: But homosexuality was not a matter unsettled in the church. It was settled. You are right. Only recently as folks arose in the Church claiming that the question should be reopened might it be termed unsettled. It is, of course, blatantly manipulative if, by raising a question about anything at all, a small group of heretical activists can turn a settled matter of theology into an unsettled matter simply by questioning it. But how is a Protestant church to avoid such manipulation? We have no magisterium that can simply declare some matters beyond dispute (although we’ve tried—and failed—to use the Creeds or the 39 Articles in such a way.) There is another way to avoid being manipulated, however. We can allow that a disputed matter may nevertheless be relevant to salvation. I think that the truest Anglican response to the homosexuality dispute was to say:
Yes, the immorality of homosexual acts, though universally affirmed in historic Christianity, is now being contested in our church. The church may, as a consequence, soon find itself unable to speak a clear word on this matter. That is regrettable, but it results from the brokenness of the church. Anglicanism does not solve the brokenness of the church; it witnesses to it. The question itself may indeed be of the highest importance, that is, it may be relevant to our salvation. It is, after all, addressed in such ways in the Bible. We must read the whole Bible with humility, recognizing that all we need to know for our salvation is found therein. We can tolerate the fact that a certain percentage of our membership finds nothing immoral about homosexual behavior. They are urged not to harden their hearts to the Word of God as found in Scripture and they are warned not to presume upon the mercy of God, but we can endure their sincere doubts and questions.
This is essentially the church we had before 2003. Barely. I for one was willing to live in that sort of a church. I did not and do not think it acceptable simply to insist that there is no other way to interpret the Scriptures on homosexuality than the one classically employed. I am convinced that the classical interpretation is far and away the most reasonable, but I do not need to expel from my church those who think differently. The marriage rite in the Book of Common Prayer sufficiently expresses the church’s teaching on sexuality. Those who find a way to interpret the Scripture so as to allow themselves certain degrees of homosexual practice still find themselves tacitly encouraged to tack as closely as possible to the practices of marriage. I know that this may seem insufferably weak to some of today’s conservatives—a sellout, really—but it is no longer viable in any case. I am simply trying to recall for all of us the sort of church that we used to have. It was, as I have said, humble.
No more. Now, what we have heard from “the Spirit” supersedes and even judges Scripture. I heard this expressed best by a priest testifying for Gene Robinson at the 2003 Convention. “We,” he cried out, “are the only catholic church left!” His definition of catholic was based on the amalgamation of different lifestyles that could be crammed into ordained ministry. It is not our sexual immorality which first strikes me about today’s Episcopal church. It is our enormous pride.
Let me conclude with my original theme. The present dispute is about sex. It is about sex because it is about Jesus. Incarnation is not an idea, still less a goal, though that’s how it’s often talked about by the liberals. Incarnation is a fact. He was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made Man. There might be a spectral idea of incarnation that hovers round the fact, but the Church is based on the fact, not on the idea. Thus we are not idealists, but realists. Realism speaks of sex.
It is sometimes said that the conservatives are obsessed with sex. We are no more obsessed with sex than we are obsessed with death. They stand at opposite ends of every person’s life, and their meaning is crucial to Christian faith. Sex means division, specifically our division as one race into two kinds, male and female. By that division, God has chosen to bestow history upon us in the form of children. Sexuality (again, I mean not the desires associated with the sex act, but the fact of being male and female) reminds us of our death. We are equipped with sexual organs because we will all die. That the primary activity signifying our death is also adorned with intense longing for interpersonal union and calls forth from us declarations of undying love certainly speaks volumes about the meaning God has implanted in our species. Procreation is how the human race will endure beyond our deaths until Christ comes again in glory. Must sex be associated with procreation and, thus, with the male-female division that enables it? Absolutely. By becoming incarnate in a male body, Jesus affirms this division of the race into male and female. He shares in our death and in so doing issues a declarations of undying love. He bears in his body the sign of our mortality. In overcoming death in his own person, Jesus does not immediately bring history to a close. He doesn’t shuck off mortality as something unworthy of himself; He clothes it with immortality. Thus he reinvigorates our created natures to take up, with renewed hope, the labor of history, knowing, as the Apostle puts it, that in the Lord our labor is not in vain. (1 Cor. 15:58)
If we make sex a matter of indifference in theology, we walk away from Jesus himself.
It is sad to think that we have failed to serve our part as a placeholder church, that we foolishly tried to take on the mantle of the True Church, even of the Kingdom of God, and in so doing lost our small but significant calling. We were to wait until Christianity found its unity again, or until Christ came back, whichever happened first, but we failed.
Now, how can we tie all this together? I said earlier that the liberals have stolen our church away. Let’s now take a little more responsibility for this and say that we have let them steal our church away. When the New Testament refers to Jesus’ Second Coming, it says this: If the householder had known at what time the thief was coming he would not have let his house be broken into. (Matt. 24:43; Luke 12:39) Alright, then, why is one of the apostolic church’s favorite images for the Day of the Lord an image of deprivation and loss: Jesus comes as a thief in the night? (1 Thess. 5:2; 2 Pet. 3:10; Rev. 3:3; 16:15) Is it just an arresting image, or does it refer obliquely to the reality that his coming is a purifying fire that will wipe away all we hold dear, as in Malachi’s Who can endure the Day of his coming and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap, (Mal. 3:2) or Isaiah’s I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye, (Isaiah 1:25) or John the Baptist’s He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Luke 3:16)? When St. Paul says I am already being offered up and poured out (2 Tim. 4:6) is that his way of saying, with John, that those who belong to Jesus have already passed over from death to life(John 5:24) and, with Peter, that the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God? (1 Pet. 4:17)
When we are driven by the present disputes to point to the male body of Jesus are we not, in a sense, once again stripping him for his crucifixion, exposing him to shame once again? This reminder of the death that he shares with us reminds us also of his weakness, his humility, his submission to the constraints of human suffering and his refusal to come down from the cross to save himself and us. Do we not fall under the sentence of Hebrews 6:6 recrucifying the Son of God all over again?
So what has become of our church becomes now a reminder of what became of Jesus. We are ruined. We are left in the position of Just as I am without one plea. Think of Anglicanism as a church dangling over an abyss of god-forsakenness, of Hell, hanging by three fingers: Bible, church order and sacraments. Now the enemy comes along and the Bible loses its power among us, becomes a field of contention rather than a source of unity. That finger is peeled away. Then comes the proliferation of schismatic arrangements, of multiple and competing bishops, lawsuits and all that. The finger of church order is peeled away. Now along comes the new liturgies and practices that make of Christ’s sacraments pagan rituals and destroy apostolic disciplines like the requirement of baptism before communion. Finally the last finger is peeled away. What then? We fall into Hell. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Are we to hurry off our cross before all this takes place, to save ourselves and others? That is the enemy’s temptation. Turn these stones into bread. Pretend that the failure of the Episcopal Church is actually a great advance. Both temptations, coming as bookends to Jesus’ ministry, are prefaced with this: If you are the Son of God. That’s what we want to show the world. We are strong, we are not defeated, we are the niftiest, the best-dressed, the most via media church around. That, of course, is just what we must not do.
Instead of that, we allow Christ to be formed in us. This is the truth within the liberals’ idea that Christ is in us. Not that Jesus has somehow been left behind, but rather that Jesus is seeking to be glorified in us as he has been glorified in the martyrs and witnesses of the past. Those whom he loves, he reproves and disciplines. If we hear his voice and open the door, he will come in with us and eat with us and we with him. To be emptied; to be numbered with the transgressors; to be unable to come down from our cross is thus to sup with him. This is the pressure that the Holy Spirit exerts on the church; it is what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
We have nothing to show for all our efforts. We are stripped and naked. We have fallen into the pit we have dug. Just as we are without one plea but that his blood was shed for us. Or, as St. Paul puts it, Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes thorough faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3:7-10)
[1] We need to notice what’s being removed in liturgical changes. There is nothing wrong with “Hear what the Spirit says to the churches” except that it supersedes “The Word of the Lord.” Likewise, the new versions of the Great Thanksgiving written for feminist sensibilities are often not objectionable in what they say but in what they don’t—and won’t—say. A prayer specifically promulgated because it avoids calling God “Father” ought to be immediately suspicious to a Christian.
[2] I also detect an avoidance of the word “Holy” when liberals name the third person of the Trinity. We might here recognize that what the Spirit does with Scripture is apply it to our hearts that we might become holy. That, and not mere conceptual clarity, is the primary purpose of the Spirit speaking through the Scriptures. The NT term “Spirit of holiness” (Rom. 1:4) gets at this better.
[3] The reasons they believe this vary. For some, it is because forbidding anyone the fulfillment of their deep-seated desires is not “loving.” For others, God simply cannot speak specifically about anything; all commands are seen as our childish attempt to nail down God’s true message which is something ethereal like “sense of dependence” or “infinite demand.”
[4] It is possible to reverse the method and argue that since there would logically be no sexuality (sex-differentiation) in the resurrection body, therefore the risen Jesus is no longer male. This would seem still to allow the text to be governed by the resurrection of Jesus. But in fact, it would mean allowing the text to be governed by an idea of resurrection. One of the most distinguishing features of the stories about the risen Jesus is that he confounds such ideas. Sex is not directly addressed, but the risen Jesus does eat after his resurrection. While he is on separate occasions mistaken for another man, he is never mistaken for a woman, or an angel or an astral being. He doesn’t glow. His wounds are visible and tangible. Many ideas we or his contemporaries might associate with resurrection bodies turn out not to be reliable. Furthermore, the disciples do not cry, “Ah, now we can look forward to going to heaven when we die!” What is so strikingly affirmed by Jesus’ resurrection is the importance of this mortal life in all its created goodness.
[5] How ironical it is, then, that the Pope and his detestable minions have suddenly found religion. The Catholic Catechism is a compilation of Scripture texts that any Protestant would be proud of.
[6] No one can argue with the claim “God is doing a new thing.”
