The Episcopalian Preference

In FIRST THINGS (November 2003), there is a good essay by Philip Turner entitled, “The Episcopalian Preference.” It attempts to identify the background to the choice and consecration of a “gay” man as the Bishop of New Hampshire by the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. There are some very important insights in this essay and there are a couple of major omissions.

Insights

1. The Episcopal Church from the 1960s presented itself as an enlightened alternative to the moral and theological rigidities of Rome and the enthusiasm of evangelical Protestantism. It embraced an enlightened religion tuned into the latest trends within secular, liberal culture. So, it is not surprising that the notorious & heretical Bishop James Pike of California was neither prosecuted nor disciplined in the late 1960s by the House of Bishops or by the General Convention of the Church. Gone by the 1960s was the notion of this Church as the Bridge between Rome and Geneva, Rome and Wittenberg.

2. The office of Bishop began to be used from around 1970 as a prophetic lever or instrument to pry or to shake people free from the incrusted and outdated doctrines and positions of the past. The illegal ordination of women in 1974 and then the illegal ordination of “gay” women and men from 1977 onwards were examples of actions by bishops claiming to act prophetically to relieve the oppressed and downtrodden. In fact, the ordination of women and then of sexually-active homosexual persons became a “justice” issue to be taken up and furthered by a “prophetic” episcopate.

3. The Episcopal Church has absorbed a new kind of innovative, western morality where each human being is seen as an individual, who is wholly unique, as a self that has a particular history and needs, and as a person who has particular rights that allow him/her to express his/her individuality and to pursue well being. And for human being as moral agents who see themselves as individuals, selves and persons, sexuality becomes, along with money, both a marker of identity and a primary way of expressing the preferences that define identity. Therefore, what is called “sexual orientation” and its expression are seen as very important in the new moral order.

4. The sirens of modern sound so sweet to the Episcopal Church because it has lost a full sense of the transcendence God and has majored on the immanence of God, so that its theology is either pantheism (the mind or essence of the world is God) or possibly panentheism (the world is included within the being of God). Thus the standard type of sermon is as follows: “God is love; God’s love is inclusive; God acts in justice to ensure that everyone (all types) are included; we should work with God as co-actors and co-creators in this great drama in making the world what She/He desires it to be.”

5. The God of the Episcopal Church is the Image of the ideal society that the new moral order points to – the inclusion of preference. God is the all inclusive one. She/He is loving inclusion, the affirming of preferences, and that is all – no hatred of sin and loving of holiness and righteousness! The God of this Church is simply an idol, the projection of the new moral and social order, worshipped by the members.

Omissions

The adoption of a new Liturgy in the 1970s and the calling of it by the name reserved in history and within the Anglican family for a unique type of prayer book. Instead of calling its production of a collection of new services by a title that was true to the contents – A Book of New Services, or A Book of Alternative Services – the Episcopal Church committed an act of piracy and used the name of the very Book that it ceased to authorize and use, The Book of Common Prayer. Here was a defiant act against the moral order of truth and against the Anglican way of sacred tradition and usage. This act of piracy had repercussions which still affect negatively the Episcopal Church for it has strengthened the commitment to enlightenment and rebellion against the God of “our fathers”.

The symbolic power of the ordination of women, at first illegal and then legal from 1976, to show that received divine order was being overthrown and a new order, that of autonomy to choose this or that innovation and to prefer this or that scheme, had arrived. Had the ordination of women not occurred as it did then there would not have been, hard on its heels, the ordination of active, homosexual persons. Neither would the cry for non-excluding or inclusive language for humanity and then for God had reached the pitch that it did in the 1990s.

I do recommend this Essay for serious reading by those who are trying to understand what has happened to the Episcopal Church which had 4.5 million members in 1965 and now has short of 2 million, when the population of the USA has gown by 25 per cent or more.


The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.),
Christ Church, Biddulph Moor & St Anne's, Brown Edge