A Letter to the Church at Springfield

Whether we wish to believe it or not, these are serious, nay critical, times in the Episcopal Church. The proceedings from our 74th General Convention in 2003 have stirred debate and dissension that are not going to go away, no matter how fervently we may wish for it. We have seen already extraordinary responses from the other prelates of our Anglican Communion, the sad spectacle of American and Canadian bishops read the Riot Act because of their stand on the issues of same-sex marriages and homosexuals in the Episcopate. Many in our denomination continue to be perplexed by these issues. And yet here at Redeemer, they have gone largely unaddressed, as if it were someone else’s business, someone else’s problem. I believe it is high time—indeed, beyond high time—that these issues be openly considered. That is the rationale behind this letter.

To begin, it is my belief that the election of the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson to the Episcopate and the approval of a motion to bless same-sex marriages are not, as their defenders claim, manifestations of the Holy Spirit, calling us to greater honesty, openness and tolerance. Nor, as their critics insist, are they last straw in what must become the eventual dissolution of the Anglican Communion. What they are is little more than the logical and inevitable results of a way of thinking among the Church’s hierarchy, lay and clerical, that has been going on for some four decades, and which, in and of itself, has brought the Episcopal Church to the pretty pass at which it now finds itself.

Forty Years of Good Intentions. The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, founded in 1789, achieved the largest membership in its history—just over 3.4 million souls—in 1965. 1965. Some of you surely will remember that church: a mix of “high,” “low” and “broad” parishes, where Holy Communion was a once-a-month phenomenon; an authoritarian church with a strong moral code; demanding doctrines (try getting a divorce in that church); dignified if aloof ministers. It is, obviously, not the Church we attend now, yet it was not without its attractions: between 1955 and 1965, the number of Episcopalians grew 22 per cent.

The politically charged 1960s were not kind to that church. The Episcopalians did not have a “good” Viet Nam War. Like the Church of England in World War I, the Episcopal Church did not distinguish itself ministering to the troops in the field (I know, I was there). Rather, back on the home front, high-profile Episcopalians, most notably New York bishop Paul Moore, were instead turning out in the streets to support the protestors. It made wonderful newspaper copy: “Anglican Bishop Sides with Hippies and Freaks” was the original “man bites dog” story, but it was clearly dangerous and mistaken conduct on two significant counts. And, forgive me, but they bear explanation.

First off, there was nothing morally superior about church-led or church-influenced opposition to the Viet Nam War, whether it was Quakers counseling draft evaders, Catholic priests, such as the Berrigan brothers, committing their rosary of felonies, or the Episcopal bishop of New York haranguing student protestors through a bullhorn. If anyone, it was the Johnson Administration who had better claim to the moral high ground in Indochina; it wasn’t Lyndon’s GI’s or the indolent army of Cambodia’s Lon Nol, or even the troops of Generals Khanh, Minh, Ky and Thieu who were rounding up people and putting bullets in the back of their necks just because they were teachers, or small landowners, or union activists or members of any other arbitrary list of “class enemies”; it was the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese who did that. Was the opposition then politically superior? Perhaps. In the end, it proved to be. But it was, first and foremost and forever, political. And therein lies the second mistake.

The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, had labored mightily to build a wall between Church and State. The 1960s proved how miserably they had failed, for there was no wall. It was more of a dike, and it was leaky. The Negro civil-rights movement (essentially a phenomenon of the 1950s, but still a headline-making force in the Johnson years) washed right over the dike. Church-led and speaking the language of religion in ways no other mass political movement in America had done since Abolutionism, the civil-rights movement was perceived as morally superior (which it was). But in splashing over the dike, and slopping around on the Church’s side of things, the civil-rights movement caused irreparable harm. Every “good” cause that followed in its wake, beginning with Viet Nam, but well after Viet Nam had run its sorry course, quickly found its clerical champions. In the 1970s, the Deeply Committed at every Church House in the Republic would be speaking out prayerfully for or against—well, what you got? Everything from abortion & apartheid to welfare rights & women’s lib—found its champions in the Episcopalian pulpits.

All of them worthy causes? Sure, if you say so. But all of them of a pattern. All of them with the same premise: white men had been and continue to be bad by denying us our basic liberties. All of them with the same lesson to teach: you can get anything you want out of the white men who run this country, if…you can portray yourself as an oppressed minority; you organize; you make sure you get a lot of publicity; and you have absolutely no scruples.

The womyn were first. And we all know how that’s turned out. The Indians had a nice run there in the ‘70s and wound up with the casinos. The handicapped forced local governments to spend a king’s ransom on new sidewalks. Illegal aliens (oh, sorry, “undocumented” aliens) got the right to a free public-paid-for education. Even other species had their moments—remember the snail darter? Best and last of these rights movements (at least so far) is that of the homosexuals.

But it is important to keep in mind that all of these “rights” movements are and have been secular movements. On the surface, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the practice of Christianity. Civil rights was relatively easy for a practicing Christian to advocate. The Bible does not endorse racism. Indeed, it has nothing whatsoever to say on the subject. [The so-called “Curse of Ham” (Gen. 9.20-27) has been used by some as an apology for Negro slavery because Cush, one of Ham’s sons, is supposedly the founder of the black race; and because another of Ham’s sons, Canaan, was cursed by Ham’s father, Noah, and pronounced a slave to his brothers, it is hence assumed that the Bible condones Negro slavery. In fact, the curse is directed neither at Ham nor Cush, but at Canaan, and can be seen most simply as an ex post facto, allegorical explanation for and defense of Israel’s subsequent subjugation of the Holy Land. Any reference to Cush or black people is totally extra-Biblical.]

But I digress. The question we must ask ourselves is: What Does Any of This Have to Do with the Practice of Anglican Christianity? In 1973, the Gallup Organization reported that church attendance in the U.S., which it had been surveying since 1955, had hit an all-time low. In 1955, 49 per cent of church members attended in an average week. By ’73, only 40 per cent were actually in the pews. Episcopalian attendance was right on the average, but the number of Episcopalians on the rolls had shrunk to 3.1 million, a drop-off of nearly 10 per cent in less than a decade. The next year, 1974, came the crisis over women priests.

The decision to acquiesce in the ordination of women is particularly illustrative of the political and secular impulses that had taken control, not just among Episcopalians, but among all the Mainline Protestants. A little background: Women had been admitted to the Episcopal diaconate in 1970. In July 1974, right here in Philadelphia, four Episcopalian bishops not affiliated with the Bishop of Pennsylvania officiated at a ceremony in which 11 women were ordained priests—an action that was promptly condemned by the General Convention at the time assembled. The next General Convention, just two years later in 1976, raised only token objection and the ordination of women promptly carried the day.

An Idea Whose Time Had Come. Despite its more outrageous demands (or perhaps because of them, the “right kind” of orgasms, for instance), the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s was ineffably the decade’s the good cause. Forget the fact that its basic premise was to repeal Nature by an Act of Congress. No well-meaning person could dispute the second-class status of women in the workplace, the schools, the professions. (And though Baby’s come a long way since 1974, the glass ceilings and unequal-pay complaints continue to ring true.) The question to be considered here is not was it politically correct to admit women to the priesthood, but was it necessary?

There is nothing in Scripture that says you can’t ordain women. The Old Testament tells of Deborah, who is both a judge (i.e., a war leader) and a prophet. Acts and Paul both testify to women in leadership positions in the Apostolic Church, and women seem to have been (in some of the more remote areas of the Empire) administering sacraments in the Byzantine Church until as late as the 8th century. The arguments against ordaining women spring entirely from tradition. The evidence of the early Fathers is that women held positions of authority in many of the Gnostic churches and were certainly serving as priests in the most popular of the 4th-century heterodox sects, Montanism. Indeed, from the time of the Council of Nicaea onwards, women priests are synonymous with heterodoxy and heresy. Church doctrine, and hence tradition, from then on held that, as Jesus was a man, so should His senior clergy be men.

So why change now? Well, the Bible is specific that, in times of crisis, when the whole community is in peril, women can and have come to the fore (viz. Deborah). The 1970s, though, were hardly a time of crisis—fecklessness, selfishness and defeatism, surely—but hardly crisis. It is notable that in times of genuine crisis, during the Civil War and the Great Depression, the Episcopal Church did not ordain women. It only ordained them when the political pressure for women’s equality became something the church felt it could no longer ignore. [If further proof is required about the absence of crisis, let me add this: If you are going to throw away 1600-plus years of Apostolic tradition, shouldn’t the women you ordain at least be of singular saintliness? Especially deserving of the honor? I can’t tell you who any of these pioneer priests was, or is; and I have to wonder why eleven of them were singled out. That just seems like a very large number. There were only 13 people at the Last Supper…]

To a disinterested observer, it would seem that tradition having been overthrown in the matter of the women priests, tradition itself had become the enemy (although Goodness knows to what). How else to explain the divisive—and totally unnecessary—decision to revise The Book of Common Prayer? The 1928 revision had been done with an airbrush to take out only the most obscure of Cranmer’s Tudorisms; the new book sticks us with one of the sillier liturgies and some of the most mundane language anywhere. Or how else to explain the two most recent revisions of the Hymnal? Now we have songs that sound as if Joan Baez at her most maudlin had been run through a Mr. Coffee machine, while Healey Willan, Ralph Vaughan Williams and “Jerusalem” are consigned to the dustbin of musical history.

Ah, but what did you expect? Remember: in February 1975, a man named Vaughan Booker had been ordained a deacon in this church. At the time of his ordination, Booker just happened to be in Greaterford Prison serving a life sentence for murdering his wife. Which, although it may not seem like it, brings us at last back to V. Gene Robinson.

“We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” The so-called Gay Rights Movement began, in especially tawdry circumstances, with a riot outside a Greenwich Village, New York City, bar called the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. The NYPD had raided the place (again), because it was a public nuisance. But on this occasion, proceedings quickly degenerated: an angry mob of cross-dressers began to throw rocks, bottles—and a single high-heeled pump—at the policemen, who barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall, which the rioters then tried to burn down before order was restored. The (remarkably) unforeseen upshot of this was a sudden swelling in gay pride, and—although it took more than 30 years—a marvelously well-crafted agit-prop campaign that, for better or worse, has now led to the repeal of every anti-sodomy law in America. Pari passu, it has also led to increased toleration among most Americans for homosexuals and homosexual behavior. The downside of this homosexual social progress—the careers of Robert Mapplethorpe, Liza Minnelli and Village People, the AIDS plague, the epidemic use of Quaaludes among American teen-agers, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy—will pass here without comment.

The issue before us now is two-fold: the ratification of same-sex marriage and the ordination of avowed homosexuals. And here there is Scriptural guidance. The Bible is specific about sodomy. Leviticus 20.13: [The Lord said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel…] If a man lies with a male, as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”

And this is in conjunction with commandments condemning giving one’s children to Moloch (20.1-5); turning to mediums and wizards; cursing your parents; and sleeping with another man’s wife. It comes in the sequence right after the incest taboo, and right before commandments against sleeping with (a) your mother-in-law and (b) animals.
OK, it’s just the Old Testament, right? The same place where it says we shouldn’t eat shellfish. Well, The Articles of Religion are pretty plain on the teachings in the Old Testament: “No Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called moral.”

The New Testament doesn’t cut homosexuality any breaks, either. “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals…” [1 Corinthians 6.9-10] 1 Timothy 1.10 echoes similar thoughts, and Romans 1.24-32 elaborates on both. In no case does Paul endorse sodomy. Even between (among?) consenting adults.

Everywhere it mentions the subject, and there aren’t many places, since there seems to have been little homosexuality in the culture of the Bible, the practice is nevertheless condemned in the most rigorous language. It’s an abomination. I think it is, therefore, safe to say that Scriptural authority proscribes same-sex marriages. According to the Bible, homosexuality is not an “alternate lifestyle.” Nor is it—as the American Psychiatric Association maintained until the 1980s—a mental illness. It is an abomination.

Now I have no intention of making ad hominem attacks on Canon Robinson except to point out what is in the public record, that 13 years ago, while a priest, he left his wife and two children to live openly with another man. I suggest to you that if he had left his family to live with another woman, he would have been (justifiably) defrocked. And not so long ago, whether he was living openly with a woman, a man or a St. Bernard, this church would have characterized Robinson as a “notorious evil-liver” and made him ex-Communicate. How it ever ordained this man is a curiosity: his pre-ordination counseling should have caught him out. How it elevated such a person to the Episcopacy is stupefying (rather like George Bernard Shaw’s description of the Socialist bishop, William Temple—“a realized impossibility.”) No doubt, Mr. Robinson has a great many saintly qualities; but I’ve always followed George Orwell’s advice in this matter: “All saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent.”

In the case of the women priests, the Episcopal Church showed how it can repudiate its own creeds when key segments of it sense that the political winds are blowing strongly enough. The sad thing about the Robinson affair is that there’s no reason why anyone should be amazed that the same influential segments will just as quickly repudiate Scripture. But let’s call things the way they are: For the last 40 years, this church has been shifting its reverence toward worldly things; it has turned from worshipping God to worshipping the secular. And there is a name for that: idolatry. And it is a sin. And in case you’ve forgotten, “sin” is the word we use in English to translate the Greek word άμαρτια (hamartia), which means “offense against God.” It’s the state people find themselves in when they despise God and His commandments, when they rebel against God and violate His laws, and when they injure others (or themselves), both of whom are objects of Divine providence and protection. Hamartia is also the power that separates people from God. The personification of that separation has a name, too: Poneros ( Ό Πονεροσ), the “evil one”—Satan.

What Is to Be Done? Whatever your feelings about the screed you’ve just endured, we all need to educate ourselves more. I believe first off that every concerned Anglican should read the Windsor Report. In its entirety. Yes, it’s tough slogging in places, but its central recommendations, while veiled in irenic rhetoric, are pretty precise. [Check it out, with commentaries, at http://www.anglicancommunion.org/windsor2004/index.cfm ].
Seconding them,
I call upon the Episcopal Church in the United States to cease ordaining unrepentant, practicing homosexuals; to cease and desist from the blessings of same-sex marriages; and to express the regret called for by the Report; specifically:

I call upon Canon Robinson to resign any and all offices, lay or clerical, which he holds in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America;

I call upon the Rt. Rev. Frank Griswold to resign as Presiding Bishop;

I call upon every bishop who voted to approve Robinson’s election, including Charles Bennison, to resign;

And I call upon the Archbishop of Canterbury to proclaim a Day of National Prayer and Mortification for this entire province.

Simply put: Put this matter and put this man behind us. And from there, I humbly propose that we build anew. I believe that it should be the overwhelming priority of the national church and each and every parish to devote ourselves over the next few years to a comprehensive program of prayer, study and renewal. If I had all the details of this, I would be on television or something. But I know there are some things, many things, that we should be doing and doing now. Therefore, I call on the national church and the parishes…

To institute education programs on the history of the Anglican tradition;

To take back that tradition through the occasional use of historically accurate liturgies and church music;

To call the whole church back to a moral code that condemns sin rather than celebrates it;

To preach the True Gospel. Not the Gospel According to the United Way or the Springfield Republican Party. But the Gospel of Christ, “who will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead.”

And all that would be very, very nice. But let’s be realistic. The Powers That Be in this church, in this Diocese, are totally inimical to the solution I propose. None of them is going to resign, because none believes he has offended anyone, because all believe they have received some epiphany, some assurance from God that everything Christians have always believed and been taught are—wrong, overturned, somehow usurped. All of my opponents are men and women of good conscience, who truly believe that what they are recommending as regards tolerance for homosexuality and the consecration of same-sex marriages is God’s Will. (At least I assume that’s so.) They are, however, in error.

And error (or perhaps, Error, capital E) is, in the end, what this letter is all about. In the 19th century, it was Roman Catholic Error that agitated so much of Anglican belief. The entire career of John Henry Newman can be read as a gloss on one single question: Where is the Roman Church truly in error? And I will confess, for Episcopalians like me—former Roman Catholics who have converted—there is, in a crisis such as this, the unconscious pull back to Rome. Newman finally took that route himself, but … But I, despite having been raised a Roman Catholic and become a Communicant in the Catholic Church, have nevertheless accepted the principles that compelled the separation of Church and State in England in 1558, and I cannot go back. [Full Disclosure: I am in many ways a Mel Gibson-type Catholic. I’m an ex-altar boy (duh!) and the last Catholic liturgies I regularly attended were Latin-language Masses celebrated (illicitly and for a very select congregation) by an U.S. Army chaplain in Viet Nam.]

All of that said—and none of this is about me, it’s about you—what are we to do? First. I would pray that you would think about what I’ve been writing about. You’re more than encouraged to disagree, but please! Give what I’ve brought up some thought. This letter has taken me months: to work out, to write, to get the courage to share… This hasn’t been easy, for many, many reasons. I am, for instance, a great believer in Authority. It especially pains me to challenge the authority of my own bishop. I think many of you may feel the same scruples. ……

Robinson is not a litmus test—this church is not doing Jesus’ business if it presumes not to minister to someone because of his or her sexual preference, but—still, these issues cannot be ignored in our search.

I would urge all of us to return to that Reformation staple, Plain reading of the Bible.

I hope many of you will underwrite—subscribe—to the positions I’ve advocated in this letter by forwarding it and the blogsite to other concerned Episcopalians.

I hate meetings, but it may be time for them, enlisting persons of our denomination who have expertise in Deanery and Diocesan procedures. We cannot be sheep; we must act. We must refine and define our positions, and be persuasive….

We’ve come too far in the wrong direction, erred & strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep.
And we need to pray to the Holy Ghost that He will be among us.

All Christians, even Episcopalians, know full well that these are the Last Days. We live in the End Time. The current Dispensation certainly is the Last One. There is not, nor shall there ever be, a Third Testament. It is time to purify this church, to drive the idolators from their palaces and pulpits, and to put on the armor of the righteous. A gay bishop is not the end of the world nor the end of the church. Both will be judged in due time, as shall we all. Let us pray that it is not we who are found wanting.


Art Durbano
January 2004—September 2005