[Dialogue] Spong's take on the Anglican "crisis"

[Marge Philbrook]

KroegerD at aol.com wrote:

>December 8, 2004
>International Anglicanism's Flirtation with Ignorance! 
>
>The commission set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to 
>determine how the Anglican Communion can maintain its unity while recognizing 
>wide diversity of opinion about homosexuality has, with great fanfare, released 
>its report. It is long, convoluted and about what one would expect from a 
>frightened leadership that thinks that the problem is one of maintaining unity 
>rather than seeking to discern the truth. Those who called for this study do not 
>appear to understand that a church unified in ignorant devotion to its 
>continuing homophobia is hardly a church worthy of much attention by anyone. This 
>report is, therefore, nothing more than a pathetic ecclesiastical attempt at 
>damage control. It will fail in its stated purpose today. It will, I fear, be 
>nothing but an enormous source of embarrassment in the future.
>The deficiency in this report begins in its inability to distinguish between 
>the problem and the symptoms. The crisis confronting our church was not caused 
>either by the ordination of the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, to 
>be the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, or by the authorization in the 
>Anglican Church of Canada of blessings for same sex unions. The real damage 
>needing to be addressed was the blatant prejudice and hostility toward homosexual 
>persons that occurred at the Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican Bishops 
>in 1998. This once every 10 years event, convened at the invitation of the 
>Archbishop of Canterbury, was overwhelmed by a homophobic combination of first 
>world Anglican evangelicals with third world Bible quoting Anglican 
>fundamentalists, both being orchestrated by the inept leadership of the then Archbishop of 
>Canterbury, George Carey. That particular alliance possessed more zeal than 
>wisdom. The ensuing debate at that gathering reached a level of rudeness that I 
>have never witnessed before in church circles. It was punctuated by hisses 
>and catcalls made when those, who opposed the prejudice present in that 
>gathering, tried to speak. George Carey violated every protocal. He sat on the stage 
>in full view of his supporters gleefully leading the vote with his raised hand, 
>as the amendments grew more and more severe. He then went to a microphone to 
>say how pleased he was "that scripture had been upheld" in the vote, only to 
>be reminded that the vote had not yet been taken! This was the first time in 
>the three of these conferences I attended where bishops were actively lobbied in 
>an effort fueled with American dollars, primarily from Texas. The progressive 
>voices of the Church were so battered by their conservative opponents that 
>for all practical purposes they withdrew from the fight. This conference ripped 
>apart a report, adopted with much struggle and compromise in its own section 
>assigned to deal with issues of homosexuality. That section had worked out a 
>tenuous consensus with which no one was satisfied, but all sides were on board, 
>only to see its work gutted in the plenary sessions by a series of hostile 
>amendments until the final resolution was overtly hostile, mean-spirited and 
>deeply divisive. It was a Conference in which none of the persons who had both the 
>office and the ability to offer effective leadership said a word. That 
>included the primates of the United States, Frank Griswold and of Canada, Michael 
>Peers, as well as the leading Welsh bishop, Rowan Williams, who even then was 
>being talked about as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. He chose to play it 
>safe not putting the capital he had been building in his quest for Anglicanism's 
>top post at risk. That should have been a tip off to those who supported him, 
>as to what sort of Archbishop he would be.
>When the voice of one of these recognized leaders might have made a 
>difference all were strangely silent. Others like the Archbishop of Capetown, 
>Njongokullu Ndungane and the Primus of Scotland, Richard Holloway tried to fill that 
>vacuum, but were shouted down. Finally, it was a Conference in which the 
>majority of the world's Anglican bishops spoke about the Bible in a way that 
>indicated an unawareness of the biblical scholarship that has emerged in Germany, the 
>U.K. and the United States over the last 200 years.
>Archbishop Carey, in a perfect example of the 'Peter Principle,' sought to 
>impose his narrow evangelical worldview on the whole Communion, not seeming to 
>recognize that this international church is made up of wide cultural diversity. 
>Some branches of the Anglican Communion, for example, live in cultures where 
>women occupy top positions in law, politics, business and education; while 
>other branches of this worldwide communion live in nations that practice polygamy 
>and female circumcision and where education is not provided for female 
>children. No church anywhere can survive an attempted imposition of cultural 
>uniformity on so wide a gap. Attitudes toward homosexuality run a similar gamut. In 
>the United States gay males from both political parties are elected to the 
>Congress and serve as ambassadors. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia an openly 
>homosexual person runs the risk of being murdered.
>At an earlier at Lambeth Conference in 1988 the issue of women bishops 
>threatened to tear this Communion apart, but the skillful leadership of the then 
>Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, steered the bishops through these choppy 
>seas with a grace that was transforming. Runcie, who did not himself support 
>the ordination of women, nonetheless lived in a very large world and knew how 
>to use the power of his office to help the Communion live creatively inside 
>the inevitable tensions of an idea that could not be stopped.
>George Carey had an opportunity to emulate that example, but his narrow 
>evangelical mind wanted a vote to affirm his own negativity about homosexuality. He 
>got it, but that vote was a hollow victory and its bigotry made our present 
>divisions inevitable. He did not understand that rising consciousness can never 
>be deterred by majority vote. Furthermore he wanted every province of the 
>Communion to agree not to pursue any steps aimed at including homosexual people 
>in the full life of the church until a worldwide consensus had formed and all 
>provinces could move together. It was a familiar delaying tactic and an 
>impossible demand. Anglicanism's most backward dioceses, whether in Sydney or Chad, 
>can never bind the consensus on this subject now growing in Western countries. 
>Only one who imagines that he possesses the truth of God, could have thought 
>that a proper tactic. That is the fatal evangelical flaw. 
>This Commission decided mistakenly that they were dealing with an issue of 
>disunity when they were in fact dealing with the evil of prejudice. That was 
>clear when their solution was to invite those churches that have banished their 
>homophobic prejudices to consider apologizing to those parts of the church that 
>were offended by their inclusiveness. That would be like asking those nations 
>that have thrown off the evil of segregation to apologize for hurting the 
>consciences of the segregationists. It was an inconceivable request. Whenever 
>growth occurs there is always conflict and dislocation. The world would still be 
>practicing slavery, child labor and second class status for women had not a 
>new consciousness confronted our prejudices in a movement that always destroys 
>the unity of the old consensus.
>In an effort to appear evenhanded, this report also sought to speak a 
>critical word to those Third World bishops now seeking to destabilize Anglican Church 
>life in countries open to gay and lesbian people. This was also a meaningless 
>gesture since the very nature of the Anglican Communion affirms the 
>independence of each national body. This means that this Commission has no power to 
>order anything, and because of this no one will pay much attention to it anyway.
>Finally this Commission in an attempt to force this Communion into a sense of 
>unity, called upon the 38 national branches of the Anglican Communion to sign 
>a covenant expressing their support for something called, 'current Anglican 
>teaching.' That remarkable request was surely designed to bring gales of 
>laughter to anyone familiar with Anglican history! In a Church that has never 
>recognized an infallible pope or an inerrant Bible, where is current Anglican 
>teaching enshrined? Is it in the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference that has no 
>authority and in which only bishops vote? Would those Anglicans who have 
>engaged critical biblical scholarship be asked to subscribe to the pre-modern 
>mindset of some third world countries that oppose evolution, interpret the Virgin 
>Birth as literal biology or view the Resurrection as a physical resuscitation? 
>Would we destroy the tradition of the great Anglican scholars of the past and 
>try to place 21st century minds once again into the pre-modern straitjacket of 
>the 39 Articles of Religion that formed the Elizabethan Settlement? Would we 
>institute an Anglican version of the Inquisition in order to restrain our 
>scholars? Would we want to become a Church that no longer produced Ian Ramsey, 
>William Temple, John Elbridge Hines, James Pike or John A.T. Robinson? These ideas 
>are too ludicrous to contemplate. Robin Eames, the Anglican Primate of 
>Ireland who chaired this Commission, knows these facts better than most. Yet this 
>idea was included which means this report was never intended to be more than a 
>public confession that its purpose was not to address the crisis but to use 
>rhetoric as a smokescreen to soothe hurt feelings. As such the report is a 
>dishonest effort to achieve cheap unity by sacrificing reality and truth.
>The Anglican Communion had a relatively minor crisis as it watched a new 
>consciousness about homosexuality struggling to be born in the face of ancient 
>ignorance and prejudice. This Commission and the leadership that requested its 
>formation has turned this minor crisis into a full scale disaster that if heeded 
>will move Anglicanism toward the literal mindedness that now threatens not 
>just Christianity, but religious systems all over the world. Death comes in many 
>forms. The inability to embrace new reality is one of them.
>-- John Shelby Spong
>Question and Answer
>With John Shelby Spong
>Jyank15 via the Internet writes: 
>I have followed your thread from Romans 1:4 the "designation" passage. I had 
>missed its importance until you pointed it out in Michigan. Then I read in 
>Colossians chapter 1 that Paul says Christ Jesus created everything. What led 
>Paul to make this comment in Colossians? At first glance it seems at odds with 
>his statement about designation. If this is a further discovery of an ongoing 
>revelation then would not that displace the weight of the designation statement? 
>Had it been two different writers, this would not bug me so much. 
>Dear Bill, 
>You raise a good question. There are, however, two things that need to be 
>settled before proceeding:
>1) Did Paul write Colossians? I would say that among New Testament scholars, 
>the Pauline authorship of Colossians is no better than about 50/50, and is 
>declining rapidly.
>2) I do not think that Paul supported the idea of a preexistent Jesus. The 
>Christ concept was preexistent but Jesus only fulfilled that concept. That is a 
>crucial distinction that I do not believe was embraced by the early Christian 
>from the time the New testament was written to the day in the 4th and 5th 
>centuries when creeds were adopted and the doctrinal and dogmatic phases of 
>Christianity were put into place.
>This pre-existent theme is present in Philippians, which Paul did write. It 
>is also present in Hebrews and in the 4th Gospel. The subtle distinction 
>between a pre-existent Christ concept, which was used to interpret the Jesus of 
>history in developing creedal theology, and the meaning of the human Jesus has 
>been badly blurred. The best treatment I have ever read on this question is "The 
>Human Face of God" by John A. T. Robinson
>I commend that book to you.
>-- John Shelby Spong
>
>Dick Kroeger
>65 Stubbs Bay Road
>Maple Plain, MN 55359
>952-476-6126
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