Anglican schism time

Ruth Gledhill writes that the Episcopal Church's gay bishop vote this week really does look like the last straw for the Anglican Communion. Excerpt:

Like many Anglicans, perhaps, I've always in my heart greeted talk of schism with an inner response of 'yeah yeah'. Steve Bates, of The Guardian, was always confident it was inevitable. I was equally confident it would never happen, however much it was threatened. Even with Gafcon, ACNA, FCA and all the other acronyms of new life springing forth from the primordial chaos of the Anglican alphabet soup, it still seemed safe to assume the Church would somehow muddle through as usual. But it hasn't. What is so significant about the Bishop of Durham's intervention, and especially I would argue in a paper such as The Times, is that he has come to be associated with the 'open' or moderate evangelical group Fulcrum, the stayers not the splitters, the ones who we all secretly suspect are liberal at heart. He is close to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the picture above is of him and Dr Williams' theologian wife Jane, another Fulcrum-style evangelical, at a Fulcrum event that was promoted on the London diocese website. You don't get much closer to the evangelical centre than Dr Tom Wright. If he thinks the decisions taken by TEC in Anaheim this week mark 'a clear break' with the rest of the Anglican Communion, then we can assume they do.

She's talking about this column from yesterday's Times of London by the influential Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright. Here is an excerpt:

Granted, the TEC resolution indicates a strong willingness to remain within the Anglican Communion. But saying "we want to stay in, but we insist on rewriting the rules" is cynical double-think. We should not be fooled.

Of course, matters didn't begin with the consecration of Gene Robinson. The floodgates opened several years before, particularly in 1996 when a church court acquitted a bishop who had ordained active homosexuals. Many in TEC have long embraced a theology in which chastity, as universally understood by the wider Christian tradition, has been optional.

That wider tradition always was counter-cultural as well as counter-intuitive. Our supposedly selfish genes crave a variety of sexual possibilities. But Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachers have always insisted that lifelong man-plus-woman marriage is the proper context for sexual intercourse. This is not (as is frequently suggested) an arbitrary rule, dualistic in overtone and killjoy in intention. It is a deep structural reflection of the belief in a creator God who has entered into covenant both with his creation and with his people (who carry forward his purposes for that creation).

Paganism ancient and modern has always found this ethic, and this belief, ridiculous and incredible. But the biblical witness is scarcely confined, as the shrill leader in yesterday's Times suggests, to a few verses in St Paul. Jesus's own stern denunciation of sexual immorality would certainly have carried, to his hearers, a clear implied rejection of all sexual behaviour outside heterosexual monogamy. This isn't a matter of "private response to Scripture" but of the uniform teaching of the whole Bible, of Jesus himself, and of the entire Christian tradition.

The appeal to justice as a way of cutting the ethical knot in favour of including active homosexuals in Christian ministry simply begs the question. Nobody has a right to be ordained: it is always a gift of sheer and unmerited grace. The appeal also seriously misrepresents the notion of justice itself, not just in the Christian tradition of Augustine, Aquinas and others, but in the wider philosophical discussion from Aristotle to John Rawls. Justice never means "treating everybody the same way", but "treating people appropriately", which involves making distinctions between different people and situations. Justice has never meant "the right to give active expression to any and every sexual desire".

Gledhill's report for the Times is pretty grim, from the point of view of those wishing to keep TEC in worldwide Anglicanism. Excerpt:

The General Convention in 2006 agreed a resolution that pledged The Episcopal Church to abide by two moratoria on same-sex blessings and gay consecrations as requested by Dr Williams and the other 38 primates. The new resolutions will be seen in the conservative-dominated evangelical churches of the Global South as an open declaration of war.

It ends years of tense and costly ecclesiastical polity and finally kills the hopes of the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams who has sacrificed his own liberal principles on the altar of church unity to no avail.

Dozens of meetings of bishops, archbishops, canon lawyers, clergy and lay theologians in Britain, Ireland, Jamaica and elsewhere, pages of dense reports and hours of prayer have been rendered redundant by this week's meeting of the General Convention of The Episcopal Church of the US in Anaheim, California.

Church leaders led by Dr Williams have strived to balance the scales of justice and tradition and maintain unity in the face of the Western embrace of liberal secularism and equal rights for gays.

They now face the unenviable task of managing the disintegration of a 70-million strong Communion of 38 provinces that can no longer maintain the facade of unity.

To me, the second-most astonishing quote to come out of this (the first being David Virtue's flat-out declaration that "the orthodox are finished") was the following, reported in the Los Angeles Times, from a liberal clergywoman:

"I am afraid we are becoming a church of a fundamentalist left," said the Rev. Kate Moorehead of St. James Episcopal Church in Wichita, Kan.

Suicide, as TEC will now discover, isn't painless.