Captain Yips Secret Journal

Lookee There

The Bishop of Durham, collaborating with ACI and Fulcrum, has commented upon ++Rowan's comments, and on first glance quite accurately.  Busy day, but look at it. This is the first time I've seen any CoE leader openly discuss the plight of individual Anglicans in blighted American deserts.  More later.

Angel Moroni on Line 1

The possessors of The Episcopal Thing occasionally say things so downright perplexity inducing that teams of professional ironists, semioticians and cryptographers must be deployed to interpret them.  Thus it is with Ian Douglas’s remark

"local leadings of the Holy Spirit bump up against received tradition in the church.”

Does Professor Douglas mean what he said?  Was he indulging in irony?  Does he believe that the United States, or North America, or The Episcopal Thing, are in possession of some special revelation not provided elsewhere?  Is this revelation of purely local application, or should it be spread widely (That’ll go over well in a post-colonial world)?  Does he rejected the notion of any sort of catholic Christianity at all?  There must be more to his comments than this excerpt. Is this some sort of new Gnosticism?  A new Illuminati?

++Rowan Speaks

At some length, here.  I decline, at this early stage, to parse or comment, and I certainly wish he were a little more clear.  I will suggest some apparatus for reading, though.

1) He knows he is not an executive.  The Anglican Communion does not have an executive (aka, a Pope).  He seems to see his role as advisory, maybe even pastoral. He is not going to anathematize +KJS, and I am not sure he should. He has great concern for those remaining in TEO who wish to remain Anglican, and so he should.

2) His point #10 is unusually strong, for Rowan. 

10. This is not a matter that can be wholly determined by what society at large considers usual or acceptable or determines to be legal. Prejudice and violence against LGBT people are sinful and disgraceful when society at large is intolerant of such people; if the Church has echoed the harshness of the law and of popular bigotry – as it so often has done – and justified itself by pointing to what society took for granted, it has been wrong to do so. But on the same basis, if society changes its attitudes, that change does not of itself count as a reason for the Church to change its discipline.

This won't satisfy those who want a bright line, but it's positively incandescent for ++Rowan.  

3) He makes no mention at all of ACNA.  Fascinating, irritating, and wholly perplexing.

4) There seems to be an underlying ecclesiology in which the Church can by some strong consensus adopt new doctrine or morals; now, certainly +++Rowan is too good a historian to believe that Christian doctrine emerged from the 1st century AD whole and intact, and has never changed since.  And so it can't be said that the Church never changes its mind.  Maybe he is right to emphasize the lack of consensus on the hot button issue, as the only common ground for the two sides.  It's certainly true that the heterodox modernists who are running TET (my latest, The Episcopal Thing, for surely "Church" is inappropriate for an organization that cannot report from committee a resolution on Christ's uniqueness and has 86'd its 'evangelization' program) and their opponents do not agree on how the Bible is to be read, and the heterodox modernists are mostly too ignorant of Patristic thought to find a common ground their, so about the only ground ++Rowan has left is church processes.  And that frustrates most of his North American critics.

5) For ++Rowan, "consensus" seems to mean "unanimity."  I hate to imagine him presiding at any of the early Councils.  You never get to unanimity.

Given ++Rowan's rather havering personality, a stronger statement than I imagined, but one that will satisfy or please no one.  And there's this:  the tasks for those choosing the ACNA escape pod remain the same.  ++Rowan won't and can't take action about ACNA at this time.  The problem of Anglicans within TET remains difficult.  TET itself is, I think, clearly an ambulatory corpse.  Nothing ++Rowan can do will change that.  But ACNA doesn't reach everywhere, nor are all parts of TET equally dead.  Time will dispose of part of the problem, but in the meantime the problem of the healthier parts of this diseased body remains. 

Duh. Saw That One Coming

The Living Church reports that, to no one's surprise, that Northwestern University will acquire the assets of Seabury Western Theological Seminary.  I'm not sure that TLC has all the details right:  as the NU press release points out, some of the land has always been owned by NU and was under long term lease to SWTS.  Mostly, the land along Sheridan Road and the main seminary buildings have been on NU land while other parts of the property were owned by SWTS.  to the best of my knowledge, NU has always owned the land.  NU does not have have a "theological library:" The libraries of Seabury and of Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, across Sheridan Road from Seabury on Northwestern's campus, have been combined for years.  Garrett's lease on its land runs out in a few years, and there's a long term campus use plan that envisions reaquring the Garrett land.  I guessed a while back that NU would engineer a switch. 

It was Chicago Bishop George Craig Stewart, Northwestern alumnus and member of the Board of Trustees, who engineered the arrival of Garrett and Seabury on the NU campus.  He envisioned an academic theological powerhouse growing up along Sheridan Road, but it never quite worked out.

Update:  Northwestern has put up a FAQ page that adds some information.  Here' s the Google map of the area.  When Seabury announced the ending of the residential M.Div. program ("we are not closing"), accumulated debt was at least $3 million.  I doubt that NU's purchase price was much higher.  In this market, and already owning much of the land, NU was in the catbird seat.  If from the map linked above, you'll scroll up a little to the north and west you should find a large empty space between Orrington and Sherman:  this is the former site of Kendall College.  Kendall changed its focus some years ago and moved to Chicago.  The Kendall site was to be used for residential building, but a little financial crisis got in the way and the land is for sale again.  Relations between Northwestern and the City of Evanston are such that Northwestern did not even consider bidding on the Kendall land, which the City wanted returned to the tax rolls.  Of course, that didn't work out too well for Evanston, since the land is still vacant and not providing the tax revenue the city sought.  I digress.

On the same map, Garrett-Evangelical is the unmarked cluster of buildings across Sheridan Road to the east, south of Dearborn Observatory.  This land is far more central to Northwestern's plans than the Seabury land.  NU owns most of the land on the west side of Sheridan, but has never developed it extensively except for the residential quads on the south.  My bet is that Northwestern will find a way to finance Garrett's move across the street in the next twenty years or so. 

Perfection

In a world too often filled with cry-babies, egoists, and cheaters (no, no, not the House of Bishops, professional sports), Mark Buehrle put the crown on his career with a perfect game against Tampa Bay.  Buehrle, never spectacular, just a guy who throws strikes for a couple of hundred innings year in, year out, now has a perfect game to go with his no hitter a couple of years ago.  And, typically Buehrle, he spent the post game thanking everyone.  Tip of the hat, tug of the forelock, to one of the best.

Terminology

Below, I used the term "heterodox modernism" to refer to the ruling ideology in TEC.  While I'd like to hope that this phrase would catch on, I doubt that it will.  I've been daily more unhappy over descriptors such as "liberal," "progressive," "conservative," or "traditional." Conservative is too relative:  a Russian conservative is wholly other than an American conservative.  "Liberal" has an honorable meaning that has been lost, and, like "progressive," has been appropriated to give a glossy veneer to a cranky, angry, radicalism.  I don't like ceding to that side of the argument words that, in themselves, lend themselves to ceding the argument itself.  Who can be against progress?    And so, "heterodox" to denote an embrace of almost any expression that is at odds with - what shall we say?  Nicene Christianity? - and "modernism" to denote the desire to be cut loose entirely from any historical roots, to be forever changing as the world forever changes.  Heterodox modernism can never be narrowly defined because it is restless and rootless, forever changing, forever exquisitely sensitive to the slightest change in the breath of fashion, always contemptuous of the past, always embracing change. 

Paraphrasing

The Battle for The Episcopal Church is over; I expect that the Battle for North American Anglicanism is about to begin.  As with the aftermath of the fall of France in 1940, we are left with a messy situation for which there’s no tidy solution.  The fall of France left not only Occupied France, but Vichy France and the Free French resistance.  Not everyone who lived in Occupied or Vichy France was a collaborator, and not everyone serving General De Gaulle was a hero.  The Western Powers and the Soviet Union both sponsored resistance cells in Occupied and Vichy France, and they sometimes worked together and sometimes were at odds.  Nothing was simple then.  Nothing is simple now.

The governance of The Episcopal Church is, for now, completely in the hands of heterodox modernists, but scattered throughout that body are dioceses, parishes, and individuals who remain faithful to the life giving Word.  As this conflict moves into its next phase (and a conflict it is, of no trivial importance), no solution, no provision, which does not take these brothers and sisters into loving consideration can hope to prosper.

As we look ahead to the next stages in this conflict, it will be essential to not be too fine-grained in our plans.  Often enough, God will show us the next step to take, but not the step after that.  Whatever the Archbishop of Canterbury says, and whenever he chooses to say it, in response to the General Convention now ended, the tasks before us will remain the same: building new and healthier Anglican Christian communities, worshiping the Lord, witnessing to His saving actions.  We can use the handy reference table in Galatians  5:16-26 as a guide for assessing our actions. 

At one and the same time, this is a bitter defeat and an exciting opportunity.  We have the chance to rediscover what is strong in Anglican Christianity, while also putting aside some of its pathologies.  We shall certainly develop pathologies of our own.

I’ve lived most of my life in the transition zone where, of old, the Prairie met the Eastern Hardwood Forest.  Here, the prairie was dotted with clumps of oak trees.  Prairie grass fires would sweep through from time to time, very hot, very savage, very fast.  The oak trees with their thick bark withstood such fires, and in the aftermath of the fire, new grasses and prairie flowers took root.  We must hope that those who remain in TEC are our oak trees, and that the new communities are the seedling grasses and flowers.  We’ll need all to build a healthy Anglican ecosystem.

Portrait of Episcopal Church, 2009

Waiting for Rowan

It's always been possible to interpret Rowan Williams' policy since 2003 as one of waiting for the Episcopal Church to define itself.  I've had the opinion myself once or twice, before I gave up any attempt to understand his policy at all.  But if that has been his intention, the organization formerly known as The Episcopal Church has now done so as clearly as it can do anything at all.  Over to you. 

Anglican Fear and Self Loathing

Ruth Gledhill writes today, about the possibility of Anglican schism,

Arguably, this is a schism that's been waiting to happen for 400 years. A denomination or communion founded on divorce, both of a king and of a church, is hardly one that's predicated for infinite unity. The right for the freedom not to be bound by archaic and arcane doctrine tradition was what the reformers fought for, and is what liberals in TEC would argue is their right today.

We’ll ignore her view of the Reformation - I think that the Reformers would argue that they were returning to the ancient and original Christian faith, rejecting the innovations of the later Middle Ages - and concentrate on her repetition of the notion that the whole thing got started because Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and couldn’t get one.  Anglicans like to tell that one on themselves, as do some Roman Catholics.  It in one of those wisecracks that’s just barely true enough to remain current. 

But in fact, a desire for reform had been abroad in England for a long time before Henry’s dynastic problems uncorked the bottle.  Writing before 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer complained of the state of the clergy:

For if the priest be foul, in whom we trust,
What wonder if a layman yield to lust?
And shame it is, if priest take thought for keep,
A shitty shepherd, shepherding clean sheep.
Well ought a priest example good to give,
By his own cleanness, how his flock should live.
He never let his benefice for hire,
Leaving his flock to flounder in the mire
(General Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ll. 502-508)

At about the same time, the long poem The Dream of Piers Plowman also deals with reform.  A desire for reform in doctrine, organization, and practice was also manifest in the wide popularity of the “Lollard” movement, which was repressed but didn’t quite disappear.  It’s easy to exaggerate the extent of dissent at this time, and to romanticize the importance of Lollardry and related reform movements, but they did exist, were broadly based, and they were repressed.  All that really happened when Henry VIII’s dynastic problems took center stage was that the desire for reform that had been long pent, was released.  Henry himself had little wish to reform the Church, nor was he the first western monarch to find himself in need of a divorce.  It was a unique concatenation of events that made the Pope unable to oblige Henry, and to lead Henry to declare himself secular head of the Church.