Eclectic Amateur

… in a manner of speaking:

…A 157-year-old Episcopal church is nearly empty on Sundays now that its conservative members have broken off to form a new congregation. Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Versailles, Kentucky, drew only 60 people to its three services this past Sunday. Most of its members left after diocesan leaders fired the church’s entire governing board, which had denounced Bishop Stacy Sauls’ support for the consecration of the openly homosexual Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Days after the firings, conservative members of St. John’s voted to form a new church and contributed $40,000 in seed money. They met informally in a supporter’s living room for three weeks and had their first formal worship service Sunday with a new pastor. [AP]

Welcome to “support for diversity” and “continuing to dialogue on this divisive issue”, Episcopalian-style.

Remember: Diversity will only be achieved when all think alike.

(via Mark Shea)

It is a solemn duty to fisk Bp. Barbara Harris and her “white boys” comments:

Domenico Bettinelli reports that Bishop Barbara Harris thinks the Freedom Rides are back in town:

“This is a power struggle as to who is going to run the church, the white boys who have always run it, or some different kinds of people. White men see their church being changed and they don’t like it.”

(reported in the Guardian)

Let’s reality check this:

Barbara Harris (Assisting Bishop of Washington)

Nope, definately not a white boy.

Let’s see about those “different kinds of people” challenging the “white boys”:

Vicki Gene Robinson (new Bishop of New Hampshire)

Not a white boy:

Frank Griswold (Presiding Bishop of the ECUSA)

Not a white boy:

Douglas Theuner (retiring bishop of New Hampshire)

Not a white boy:

Um, whatever … now that we’ve taken a look at those challenging the dread grip of White Boys™ on the life of the Anglican communion, let’s take a look at those who “see their church being changed and they don’t like it.”

Peter Akinola (Archbishop and Primate of Nigeria)

White boy:

Drexel Gomez (Lord Archbishop of the West Indies, Primate and Metropolitan)

White boy:

Moses Tay (Primate of South East Asia, Bishop of Singapore)

White boy:

Does anyone know a good opthamologist in the Washington, D.C. area? It would appear that Bishop Harris needs to have her eyes examined. She’s clearly not color-blind, but suffering from some odd inversion of color perception.

Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.

— Colossians 3:11 (RSV)

But never mind what that old homophobe St. Paul had to say. According to Barbara Harris, we can still have white and non-white. You go, sister! Don’t let those white boys in America push your brothers in Africa and the rest of the Third World around! “Different kinds of people” Power!

Chris Johnson points out that the Rev. Harry Cook is not amused that Some Counter-Revolutionary Agents™ are failing to properly celebrate the elevation of Vicki Gene Robinson as Bishop. But in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable Spongian screed (“613 so-called commandments” [Leviticus] … “homophobic” [Paul] … “Jesus’ silence” [guess Matthew 19:4 is one of those “discarded concepts”] … yadda yadda yawn), Rev. Harry lets on more than he perhaps meant to:

…my private anger at Episcopalian fundamentalists…

Somebody should clue in Rev. Harry that he’s departing from the script.

It’s the “fundamentalists” who are supposed to be angry. The revisionists — sorry, those who are “learning to live the mystery of communion at a deeper level” — are supposed to be merely saddened and mystified at such irrational displays.

He also let slip the following —

… the church decided to stop discussing, take a stand and make a statement.

No more dialogue for you Neanderthal fundamentalists! We’ve been patient with you, and you didn’t even have the decency to shut up. “Now I shall have to be vewy angwy.”

Shouldn’t the presiding bishop remind Rev. Cook about all his statements that GC2003 didn’t end the discussion about human sexuality in the ECUSA? Who to believe, who to believe?

Welcome to everyone following Mark Shea’s link to my little screed on “tolerance” and “respect for diversity.” Oh, and on behalf of the citizens of the great State of Michigan (and my mortally offended wife), I’d like to offer an apology to the delegate from Holy Cross who was so “tolerated” by the delegates from Michigan. (Really! Not everyone from Michigan is rude!)

Also, thanks to Dale Price and CaNN for their links.

I don’t have much more to offer today. While I am glad that the Bishops have put off their final vote on the election of Gene Robinson, the allegations
against Gene Robinson are extremely troubling. My semi-random thoughts:

• Of course, this will be chalked up to a “smear campaign.”
• I fully expect that hagiographies of “Gene Robinson, Slandered
  Saint” are already in the writing.
• I almost hope this is a smear, because the alternative is
  too awful.
• I almost hope this is not a smear, because if it is, no voice
  for sexual orthodoxy and sanity will get a hearing in the ECUSA for as
  long as it continues to exist (or until 2008, whichever comes first).
• The pathetic thing is that it would take this to make the
  bishops reconsider confirming this man as a successor to the
  Apostles. Apparantly, breaking your vows before God to be faithful to
  your “marriage partner” (or can we stills say “wife”?) and claiming
  that God called him to do this is not enough to disqualify him
  utterly.

David Mills has a fine essay: Be
Fair to the Liberals: How Worldview Affects Communion It’s not
written specifically about the current General Convention, but it’s (sadly) still quite relevant. (Linked from Episcopalian.org.)

“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

–Gideon J. Tucker

“To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in
the making.”

–Otto von Bismarck

The Episcopal Church of the United States of America’s General Convention is in session. Even more so than usual, it’s impossible to watch if I want to retain respect.

Apparantly, some Michigan
delegates decides to share some “tolerance for diversity” with a South
Carolina delegate on the way. God bless us all, isn’t it great
how we’re honoring the dignity of every man, woman, and transgendered
muddle, as long as they’re not “intolerant”?

This goes, for me, into the category of those who natter about racism (and make the claim that anyone who believes that Jesus means what He said might as well be a cross-burning sheet wearer), yet entirely disrespect the opinions of real, live Africans as “ignorant” and “superstitious”. (You listening, Bishop Spong?)

Terry Mattingly hits it perfectly regarding liberal Anglican
hypocrisy toward allegedly-respected Third World voices:

“The liberals basically spent the last 40 years saying, ‘Let’s hear
the voice of the Third World,’ ” said historian Philip Jenkins of
Pennsylvania State University, addressing a recent Anglican Mission in
America conference. “And now they’ve heard it and they’d like the
Third World to shut up for several decades.”

(Link via
Midwest Conservative Journal.)

Following a link from Doug’s blog, I find RazorMouth and the essay Victory by Infiltration or Isolation? (“Why the impulse to split is wrong and why staying the course is right”) by P. Andrew Sandlin. I would normally take this as encouragement to stay and fight the good fight within the Episcopal church regarding our current struggles with the “human sexuality” question and (even more profoundly) the wholesale abandonment of the faith in any recognizable form in exchange for Spongian/Jesus Seminar secularist mushiness.

On the other hand, I’m also reading Steve Ray’s book, Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church. And it occurs to me: Sandlin’s essay is practically a Catholic apologetic tract. I mean, if it’s a Bad Thing™ to leave and start a new church rather than stay and fight for reform, shouldn’t we apply that same logic to the efforts of Martin Luther and John Calvin?

“Philothea” nails it in an email to the Heart, Mind, and Strength blog:

[T]he wonderful thing about the crisis in the Catholic church (as opposed to the Episcopal church) is that you are simply dealing with sin while we are dealing with heresy.

How true (see Borg, Marcus and Spong, John Shelby). I’m still utterly shocked, appalled, flabbergasted, and yes, scandalized to see Jesus Seminar tripe handed out for consumption by new confirmands:

The purpose of the group is to support and encourage one another as they try to live out their Baptismal Covenant, to explore and challenge their understanding of Christian faith by reading appropriate books, to deepen and strengthen their faith that they might more effectively demonstrate their faith in daily life…

I guess I must be one of those right-brained, analytical types, no doubt caught up in hidebound tradition, because I just can’t get my head around how denying the content of the Creeds (contained within the Baptismal Covenant) can deepen one’s faith.

Borg barely makes it to page 3 before tipping his hand that he plans on some serious deconstruction:

Just as the first image of Jesus leads to a fideistic image of the Christian life, so this image leads to a moralistic image of the Christian life. Both images, it seems to me, are inadequate.

Wow, and here I always thought the Christian life had something to do with Faith and Morals.

Not only are they inaccurate as images of the historical Jesus, …

… a debatable assertion among scholars outside of the Jesus Seminar …

… but they lead to incomplete images of the Christian life.

You mean, there’s more than belief and trust in Jesus as Son of God and Savior of the world, and in following His moral teachings as a disciple? Preach it, Brother Borg!

That life is ultimately not about believing or about being good. Rather, as I shall claim, it is about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation.

Er, transformation into what?

Someone (perhaps his wife, who is an Episcopalian priestess) should inform Prof. Borg that countless Christians throughout the ages have known perfectly well that belief in Christ involves “a journey of transformation”:

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

— Romans 12:2 (RSV)

Welcome to “False Dichotomies ‘R’ Us”!

I never thought I’d read Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time again, but my church is using it as a study guide for new adult confirmands(!).

So I guess it’s time to read it again, and prepare to defend the apparantly controversial view that Jesus Seminar material is probably not what we want to use to strengthen the faith of the newly confirmed …

While they say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, sometime all you should need to know are the reviews on the inside front page:

“He … invites us to look with fresh eyes at the Jesus that the church has distorted in the service of its doctrine and its creeds… I loved this book.
— Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark

What more should one need to know?