Recently in Protestantism/Evangelicalism Category

News from the Vatican today makes it easier for fed-up Anglicans to convert to Catholicism without leaving everything behind. Excerpt:

A new canonical entity will allow Anglicans "to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony," Cardinal William Levada, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at a news conference here on Tuesday.

The move creates a formal structure to oversee conversions that had previously been evaluated on a case-by-case basis, including those of married Anglican priests, who are permitted to remain married after they convert to Catholicism. Called Personal Ordinariates, the structure will consist of local Catholic faithful overseen by Anglican prelates who will provide guidance to Anglicans seeking to convert.

Under the new regime, former Anglicans who become Catholic can preserve some liturgical elements of the Anglican Mass.

Here's the oddest part to me:

In a joint statement, the Vatican's archbishop of Westminster and Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church, said that the new structure "brings to an end a period of uncertainty for such groups who have nurtured hopes of new ways of embracing unity with the Catholic Church."

The Vatican's decision, they said in a statement of unity between the two churches, was "further recognition of the substantial overlap in faith, doctrine and spirituality between the Catholic Church and the Anglican tradition."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks for all the world like a face-saving compromise for Canterbury, and a way for Rome to deal with what Roman ecumenists see as an unwanted source of diplomatic anxiety. Anyway, I'm glad to see this development, even if it leaves me with more questions over how it will work than answers. Like: how does this differ from the Anglican Use provision? Help me out here, readers.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the nation's largest Lutheran body, has voted to accept the ordination and ministry of partnered homosexuals. What next for the ELCA? I see three possibilities:

1. A significant number of conservatives will depart, accelerating the steady membership decline of the mainline Protestant denomination -- which, according to its own record-keeping, has lost 10 percent of its membership since 1987. This is a dying church, not a growing church, and this departure from Scripture and tradition will only make things worse.

2. Many conservatives may depart, making the short term situation worse, but the ELCA is on the right side of history. Younger people are dramatically more accepting than their elders of same-sex marriage. As these people age, start families, and go looking for a church, they're going to want to affiliate with a church that accepts gays fully. There will the ELCA be. Long-term, these Lutherans will benefit from their decision.

3. Many conservatives will depart, further weakening the declining denomination. But those who remain and who anticipate a rebound because of demographic eventualities will be disappointed, but not because conservatives will post absolute gains in membership. Rather, overall church attendance will continue to decline slowly as more Americans identify as secular. America will track the European model somewhat: conservative churches/denominations will prosper relative to liberal ones, because they offer a clear alternative to mainstream culture. In other words, the Christians who stay active in churches will tend to be those who are more highly motivated to affiliate with churches that offer a clear alternative -- but overall, secularization will continue steadily, with fewer Americans interested in church at all, and the gay-clergy decision won't have proved to have mattered much in the overall scheme of things.

Can you think of any other clear alternatives? What's the case?

My guess is that the answer is No. 3. As you think about this, consider how much your prediction depends on what you want to happen, as opposed to what you think actually will happen. I would prefer to believe that the traditionalists will flourish because of their stance, but given the way American society is changing, I don't think that's going to happen.

Once again, let me exhort readers to commit themselves to discussing this as dispassionately as possible. I'm going to delete name-calling, inflammatory language and suchlike from the thread.

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.

I'm going to step away from the blog for most of today to devote myself to finishing my Templeton project. Erin's going to pinch hit for most of today. Before I go, though, I want to call your attention to a striking quote from David Virtue, the indefatigable orthodox Anglican journalist, which appeared in this morning's NYTimes, in a story announcing that the Episcopal Church's General Convention has now removed all barriers to consecrating sexually active homosexuals to the episcopate. Virtue, who has been covering TEC forever, characterized yesterday's vote thus:

"It's a clean sweep for the liberal agenda in the Episcopal Church," said David Virtue, editor of VirtueOnline.org, a conservative Web site. "The orthodox are finished."

You really should read Virtue Online to get a sense of what's going on at this GC. Here's a piece by the (conservative) bishop of Central Florida. Excerpt:

This is a remarkably different General Convention than any of the previous six I have attended as a Bishop. I would characterize all the previous Conventions as highly contentious. This one is not. We still have the same recurrent issues ahead of us, but the "conservative" wing is so greatly diminished that its voice is almost irrelevant.

I made that comment to one person who questioned whether I really meant it, "Irrelevant? Don't you mean "hated?" No, there is no sense of animosity here. The conservatives state their position(s) respectfully and they are treated with respect in return. It is just that they are so hugely outnumbered that it doesn't matter.

Game over. Now what?

The Episcopal Church, now in its General Convention, is moving closer to full approval of sexually active homosexuals as bishops. From the NYT report:

The debates at the convention in Anaheim over the last few days have made it clear that the liberals increasingly have the upper hand within the Episcopal Church. At a debate over whether to develop formal rites for same-sex blessings, 50 people testified in favor and 6 against.

A committee on Monday overwhelmingly approved a measure that would permit same-sex blessings, and the House of Bishops will take that up later this week.

The debate before the House of Deputies voted on Sunday to overturn the moratorium on gay bishops sometimes grew emotional. Sally Johnson, a lay delegate from Minnesota, who had supported the moratorium [on ordaining gay bishops] three years ago, proclaimed that she had decided now to support D025, the measure to overturn the moratorium, because it is a more accurate reflection of where the Episcopal Church stands.

"I stand before you now asking us to give D025 to the church and the communion as a gift, reflecting our messiness in our church but an authentic, truthful statement about who we are as the Episcopal Church," she said.

But speaking in opposition, the Rev. Ralph Stanwise, from the diocese of Quincy, said, "If we overturn the B033 moratorium we will in effect be urging many remaining conservatives and moderates among us and in our home dioceses, especially our most fragile ones, to search for the exit signs."

Those are remarkable quotes. Sally Johnson doesn't appear to believe TEC is theologically correct to give full approval to gay bishops, but is giving up because she believes (no doubt correctly) that her side has lost this war. What a remarkable thing to say that it's more important to be on the side of Episcopalians than on the side of God. Father Stanwise's quote is significant because it is yet another example of Episcopal conservatives who say, "If they do one more thing, I'm out of here." Really? Do you mean it this time?

It is hard for me to see that the conservatives/traditionalists have been anything but routed. All these General Conventions do is bounce the rubble, and all that remains to be negotiated is the terms of the trads is the terms of their surrender. TEC is not a church that has any interest in adhering to Scripture or Christian tradition on sexual morality. And Neuhaus' Law ("Where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.") proceeds inexorably. This is not, I underscore, an occasion for pleasure for the rest of us, especially we who have friends who are struggling to be faithful Episcopalians within a church that is unfaithful to Christian truth. Watching the trads struggle to remain in this church is like observing a battered wife, wondering when she will finally have had enough, and get out of this broken marriage.

Terry Mattingly has some pointed questions for the media in its coverage of the Frank Lombard child molestation scandal. Excerpt: The sins and alleged crimes of one gay parent say as much about the motivations and beliefs of those who...

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Oh man, does Joe Carter ever burrow down into the crevices of Your Working Boy's weird psyche, writing about how those freaky-fundie Jack Chick comics used to scare the hell out of him. If you never were into Chick comics,...

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Fascinating stuff from Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker (read on: there's a Benedict Option angle here). Excerpt: During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin's pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to...

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The New York Times pays a visit to Sarah Palin's church, the Wasilla Bible Church. I'm sure there will be more to come, but for the life of me I can't see what the big deal is. She believes the...

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That's the claim made at the Lambeth Conference by Bishop Catherine Roskam, a suffragan Episcopal bishop of New York. Excerpt: She said: "We have 700 men here. Do you think any of them beat their wives? Chances are they do....

Gledhill reports on an address a Roman Catholic cardinal gave to the Lambeth conference, in which he chastised certain sections of the Communion for having "spiritual Alzheimer's." Excerpt from the cardinal's speech: '"Much is spoken today of diseases like Alzheimer's...

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