I think, while the accuser now seems pretty darn silly, he didn’t mean for his email to be made public. It’s the people who leaked it that should have egg on their faces about this.
Congrats to Robinson and to the Church in general. In the end, can it be anything but good for its more central messages, its profile, and even for membership? Especially when it seems that there could well be a gay exodus from Catholicism over the recent documents.
Have you forgotten every single post I have ever submitted on this board on that topic, or are you half-raising an issue that neither answers the original questions nor contributes anything worthwhile to the discussion?
Just posting to say that as a Methodist, and a moderate American Christian, I am very proud of the Episcopalians. To do the right thing even when it’s hard and painful is the definition of integrity. I feel deeply for those who opposed his ratification because I know they love their church and believe it has taken a profoundly wrong turn. But I happen to disagree, and I rejoice at a step taken in furtherance of tolerance and justice. I hope they are an example to other Christian churches, including the United Methodist Church, which is also struggling with the issue of how to embrace homosexuals while condemning homosexuality, or if that can be done at all. (Short answer IMO: No.)
Well, done, you crazy 'Piscipals!
'Piscipals… hmmm… They worship Joe Piscopo, right? 
Skammer, there’s a bit of irony here. We are members of the same diocese. My membership is at the Cathedral.
We’ve survived changes that were potentially more devisive than this – including adopting an updated version of The Book of Common Prayer and gender issues. The funny thing is that if there were more women bishops, I doubt that there would be much talk of a walkout.
If the conservative members of the Episcopal Church just accepted the decision of the bishops and did not fight further, would you be willing to accept it too? I guess what I am asking is if you are bothered more by the devisiveness or by having a homosexual bishop.
Well, howdy neighbor. Did you see the interview on TV I was talking about?
I wasn’t around for the BOCP update nor for the introduction of women clergy, and I can imagine the issues were devisive. I have a hard time believing that those issues carried as much impact as this one, but we probably won’t have to wait a long time to find out.
Would I be able to accept a bishop who had no problem with homosexuality? (I changed your question a little, I hope you don’t mind). Let me think that out, because I haven’t asked myself that question yet.
First, I believe that any individual who is consecrated Bishop is there by the will and sovereignty of God. That doesn’t mean the person will be a good or bad Bishop, but I recognize that God is in control. (It wouldn’t be the first time God did something I didn’t like.) So as for me, personally, I would “accept” the Bishop in the sense that I would recognize his authority within the church and within the diocese. I would not accept his teaching and direction inasmuch as I felt it conflicted with Scripture or church doctrine in the area of human sexuality.
I guess it also depends on what a split would look like if there was one, and what happens (if anything) between the EC and the Anglican Worldwide Communion. If we became forced to choose between the two, I think our parish would choose the AWC. I think that’s an unlikely worst-case scenario, however.
I should say I feel fortunate in Tennessee to have Bertram Herlong as our Bishop at this time. I have tremendous respect for him and the comments he has made regarding this issue.
Actually, I saw an interview with a priest on CNN who was looking very down in the mouth and I thought she was going to be in the “no” column. That wasn’t so. She said something along the lines of: “I personally support the decision, and I can take joy with my brothers and sisters who feel this decision welcomes them to the church. But I am concerned that so many of my other brothers and sisters in the church feel that they cannot support the decision. That is something that we as a church now must address.”
Can’t say I’ve got it word-for-word, but it seemed to me to strike the right note.
When the Diocese of New Westminster in B.C. voted recently to establish a rite of blessing for same-sex unions, the parishes who opposed it petitioned the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to appoint a visiting bishop take over confirmations and pastoral care. As far as I know, Archbishop Peers has not done so. I think the parishes in disagreement also petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury, but it’s completely outside his jurisdiction, obviously.
I guess we’d disagree on what the ‘right thing’ is, here. And it sounds like the Archbishop of Canterbury has his doubts, too:
To say that Rowan Williams is gay-friendly is like saying Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday. But it sounds like he’s got deep concerns about whether this action has been done in a way that will be good for the Anglican Communion as a whole.
Polycarp, I was wondering if you could flesh this out a little more. I’m trying to understand what appears to be the prevailing Episcopal view on homosexuality.
From your posts on this thread and this article by John Shelby Spong that homosexuality in not a sin in the bible because:
Please add, correct, clarify anything that I am missing. I am sincerely trying to understand this view and I believe it is important for ecumenical work to have clear communication on these controversial topics. This issue also has many implications of how to interpret scripture.
I come from the protestant background that homosexuals are to be lovingly accepted into the body of Christ but the homosexual act is still considered a sin like greed, adultery, lying and is sin that can be struggled with but not encouraged.
I don’t see how anyone could be proud with this ham handed method of forcing acceptance of homosexuality on the churchmembers. Surely the only intelligent route would have been to sanctify gay marriage first, get all those “living in sin” priests married and then push a openly gay man/women for higher office. This is what I believe RTFirefly was meanng in his point#4.
I’m not going to wade in on the textual justification one way or the other(don’t know/care) but politically this was done poorly.
First, neither John Shelby Spong nor I speak officially for my church – Spong, as a bishop (now retired from diocesan ministry but still teaching with a bishop’s authority) more than I do, but I think every bishop, priest, and member would find some aspect of Spong’s theology not to be accurate from their own POV.
One major point that needs to be made going into this discussion is the difference between “sin” (concept) and “sins” (specific acts). Whenever we get into these discussions we tend to buy into a perspective, a mindset, that looks at sins from a penal-law point of view, where “shwonking” is a sin, those who decide to “shwonk” are sinners, and if you don’t shwonk, you haven’t committed the sin of shwonking.
That’s not how we look at it. A sin is anything that separates you from God. We’re all sinners, redeemed by His grace and restored to our relationship with Him through the Atonement of Christ. Every one of us is, to some degree, self-centered and inclined to focus on self over and above God and other people. That’s sin. Every one of us commits acts in our daily lives that are not in accord with the Two Great Commandments of Christ, and fails to do what would be. We recognize this, and we repent of it, and strive to do better, helped by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The general confession and absolution, from the Eucharistic liturgy:
But we don’t emphasize this so much as we do the positives of what God does for us and, more especially, what we are supposed to be doing as His followers. “Accentuate the positive,” if you will.
And it’s in this context that you need to see the whole homosexuality discussion. Your five points are on target – from the perspective of homosexuality as*** “a sin”***. But gay people are sinners no more and no less than any of the rest of us. How we all live their lives is key, not a particular act or abstaining from it.
That’s why I’ve said that a sex act done for selfish gratification of lust is sinful – you are not treating the other person as a person but as a means of slaking your own desires. But the specifics of who does what with what organs and to whom are not the defining qualities of sin; it’s the attitude within. Sex has its place as a bonding agent within a loving, committed relationship, and sexual desire brings people to such relationships. Neither is sinful in that context in and of itself. The loving and committed relationship between Bishop Robinson and his partner, between gobear or Mr. Visible and their partners, between a man and his wife, is not a sin, nor is how they express it sexually. And the sexual attraction which brings a man and a woman together, or which Aslan of Narnia described in his “Ask the Bisexual Male Teen” thread and which has been a part of numerous flirtation threads in MPSIMS, is something that God intended. One of the biggest frustrations I have with some presentations of evangelical doctrine is the underlying tacit assumption that God made a big mistake in making humans as sexual beings. We can misuse sex, to be sure. But it’s a gift He gave us, in which we are to take joy.
So Gene Robinson’s relationship does not make him a “notorious sinner” – he’s in a committed quasi-marital relationship, blessed by God, which happens not to be one recognized by the state as “marriage.” The conservative wing of the Episcopal Church will disagree with this, and considers that God ordained marriage as between one man and one woman. However, IMHO they have not come to terms with the reality of the fact that the gay orientation is effectively unchangeable, and that their full acceptance as a part of the church means that gay people, no differently than any of the rest of us, are entitled to pursue happiness and celebrate it when they find it, in a principled, responsible, mutually supportive relationship.
There are, of course, a lot of loose ends to be dealt with in all of this. But I think the theology I’m presenting is representative of what our church understands and how we seek to practice it.
RTFirefly adds a sobering note. There is a lot of discomfort about this from decent people like Skammer describes, who are concerned about the difference between this and the traditional understanding of Biblical morality. And other national churches in our communion do not all agree with what the Episcopal Church has done. Your prayers are fervently requested that this does not drive a wedge that splits people apart.
Disclaimer: this is MHO and almost purely speculation.
I think that there is going to be something of a schism in the Church involved (big C Church meaning the body of worshippers, not the building or particular parish). Some folk are clearly uncomfortable with the ideas etc. that are being promulgated, and some are fine with them. I think it’s more telling and easier to do to get a gay bishop in place and see where things go from there than to try and force gay marriage upon people who would probably be a lot more against that than they would be/were against Bishop Robinson.
And it’s a natural thing for a group as geographically and (sometimes) religiously separated and diverse as the Anglican/Episcopal Church is to have some serious difference … hell, not all Catholics (for example) believe the same things about all matters of theology (they/we are just too lazy to formally schism, so we/they just blast the Pope whenever he says something stupid;)).
Santifying gay marriage is not, IMHO, something that will happen with the current population of folk who aren’t as tickled pink(;)) with gay folk (as SDMB Episcopals such as Siege and Poly) as others are. I think it can be seen as a sort of feeler-type thing … “Let’s see how the more conservative members feel about this, wait a year or tw, and try something else. Or, not, depending on how this is received.”
It may well result in a schism, and one on which I am not even remotely qualified to comment since I know almost nothing about the situation here in toto.
Hmmmm. Completely aside from the question of homosexuality, I must note that the various branches of the Church have historically regarded both premarital and extramarital sexual intercourse as sinful, in accordance with Scripture. (Maybe someone could fill us in on where the Episcopal Church stands on this, these days.) Those who accept this as true (and I am among them) are in effect saying that there are some situations in which sex is sinful, period, regardless of the attitude within. Any thoughts, Poly?
I agree that this is the way it should be seen. The problem is, the Episcopal Church, AFAICT, has not officially recognized marriage as being anything other than between a man and a woman, and AFAIK still officially regards homosexual relationships and desires as sinful. Choosing an openly gay person to be a bishop before (a) taking care of that piece of business, and (b) giving the laity a decent interval to come to an acceptance of that change in worldview, is (a’) doing a bit of an end-around, rather than wrestling with the issue straightforwardly (I think iampunha is right to say this route has been chosen because it’s easier), and (b’) kinda shoving what should be the downstream effects of full acceptance of gay unions down people’s throats right upfront, IMHO.
I’ve always thought that these are weak and uncessary links. Either homosexual relationships are okay or they are not, whether or not they are a choice is utterly beside the point. If the implication is that God would not create you with genetically linked desires or identities that are wrong in God’s eyes, we have countless of other examples where it appears that this is exactly the case (indeed, our very propensity to desire sinful things in the first place). The “it’s not a choice” part is irrelevant to whether it is moral or not, and seems like a very weak theological cop-out argument in claiming that we can infer that God would approve of homosexuality.
I drove up to Mpls last Thursday to see my son, who attends university there, and to attend General Convention. FWIW, I am a deacon in the Diocese of West Missouri.
On arrival to the convention hall on Friday morning (I was wearing a dog collar), the Fred Phelps people accosted me, screaming, and called me a “sodomite preacher”. A Sister I know (there are lots of monks and nuns in the Episcopal Church) from New York was accosted by a Phelpsian and called a “dyke nun”. On arrival to the hall Saturday morning (again in collar) I was called a “fag loving preacher” who was “going to go to Hell”. On the way to lunch we passed by a small group and gays and lebians carrying signs about God loving everyone. They got hugs all around from the group I was with.
Friday evening I (along with about 500 others) attended a hearing on the blessing of same sex unions. My experience with anti-gay sentiment for just a few seconds (being shouted at by the Branch Phelpsians) gave me a whole new understanding about the courage it must take to be an out of the closet g/l person in the US today. One of my ministries is with AIDS patients. Here are a group of people that have been rejected by ther families, their friends, their coworkers, their society and, sadly their church. The last place that rejects them (the church) should be the place where they can receive unconditional love and acceptance, especially when they are sick or dying.
I am just a simple nonstipendary deacon who tries doing his best to minister to a troubled world. Saint John of the Cross said (paraphrasing now) that in the twilight of our lives we will be judged by how much we love. My ministry is to show all God’s people what the love of Christ is like. That’s good enough for me. As Francis of Assisi said, we should preach the Gospel at all times, using words only when necessary.
My church has done an amazing thing. Like Polycarp I am proud of her. This Sunday, though, will be interesting as my parishioners, I’m sure, may have tough questions. In the greater church some will probably leave…but they will be replaced by many more, who will see the Episcopal Church for what it is: a place where they can worship God in a safe, loving, supportive environment and not have to worry about checking their minds at the door before they come in.
I do find it interesting that some people who “aren’t sure” of the ruling are more or less blaming the more liberal branch of the Church for setting off a schism. Who would you blame if the more liberal branch had merely done what the conservative branch is threatening to do, and gone off to form their own Episcopal Church rather than remain in a Creed that would continue to use (to them) spurious Biblical reasoning to oppress their own believers?
I reserve the acerbic conclusion I was intending to append until there are some actual answers to this. Never think that I’m not willing to hear the fossilized troglodytes out on this issue…
My apologies. I forgot we were in GD. I take back “fossilized troglodytes”. You’re welcome.
Eggerhaus, thanks for sharing your experiences. I too am proud of my church and the steps it has taken. I think it is a bold and courageous move that will have an enormous affect on not only the church, but society as well.
I also agree with you that these times will be trying, but hopefully our blessings will see us through them.
I totally agree with you.
It sounds like you have a terrific ministry. I wish the ECUSA would get a bunch of press for caring for the sick, the destitute, and the needy, instead of fighting over sex.
I strongly disagree with the implication, however, that those who uphold the historic views of the church in this matter are somehow less loving than those who consider themselves more enlightened. Compassion is in no shortage on either side (despite your experiences on a Minneaopolis sidewalk).