Test the spirits

The ECUSA is holding its general convention. On the front burner is the ordination of homosexuals. Those in favor went on Larry King Live last week to make their case.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/17/lkl.01.html

Although the immediate debate concerns the fate of the ECUSA in particular and the Anglican Communion in general, it’s a subset of a larger debate between the religious left and the religious right, as well as the political left and the political right.

Those who support the ordination of homosexuals as well as civil rights for homosexuals resort to certain stock arguments and rhetorical strategies. Since the average Christian doesn’t necessarily have ready-made replies to these arguments, I’ll excerpt some of the answers, and reply to them myself.

One further note: Robert Gagnon’s website has a lot of very useful material on the hermeneutical, exegetical, and even legal issues:

http://www.robgagnon.net/

“BISHOP GENE ROBINSON: Because the Episcopal Church is an amazing institution, because it so much wants to be a vehicle for God's love in the world. We've struggled with lots of issues before and we have come to know of God's expansive love. We've changed our minds about people of color and women and their places in the church. And we are now in a family struggle to express God's love for all of God's children, include God's gay and lesbian children.”

i) When people talk about God in this way, it’s important to ask them what God they are talking about. Are they talking about the God of the Bible? Are they talking about Yahweh? Are they talking about God in his role as the Final Judge?

Much of the time they use the name of Christ as a synonym for Krishna or Santa Claus. God the Father becomes our Fairy Godmother—with emphasis, by turns, on fairy and mother—while the Holy Spirit becomes the Zeitgeist.

ii) Notice Robinson’s repeated use of “God” as a possessive. I assume he does this to avoid the use of that sexist masculine pronoun.

iii) Have “we” changed our minds about people of color and women in the church?

One problem with this statement is that it plays upon a slithery equivocation or palpable personification. It treats the church as if she were a “person.” So when the church changes her mind, then this must mean that Christians have change their minds.

Don’t get carried away with an abstraction. The present Christian generation was not alive a 100 years ago, or a 1000 years ago. Even if contemporary Christians were to change the church’s traditional policy on some particular of Christian ethics, this doesn’t mean that “we” have changed our minds.

Actually, it’s more likely that we would be changing the policy because we never agreed with the policy in the first place. It’s not as if those who enacted the original policy decided to reverse themselves.

So it’s a fallacy to infer that since “we” have changed our minds in the past, then “we” are at liberty to change our minds in the current situation.

iv) The church has always been a multiethnic institution. There has never been a general or official policy of racial discrimination.

At most, what you had was a regional policy, at a certain place and time, as an ex post facto justification of the local economy.

v) As for women in ministry:

a) Women have always had a role to play in Christian ministry. The only issue is to whom should they minister and in what capacity.

b) Many Christians have not changed their minds about the ordination of women. Many continue to oppose it, while most of those who support it never believed in male headship in the first place.

“ROBINSON: Actually, at first, I didn't want to be a bishop. God had to chase me for quite a long time before I would say yes. I knew this would be controversial and yet sometimes God asks us to do things that are hard. And in my prayer life, what I discovered was that God was promising to be faithful to me as God had always been faithful to me in my life and would stand by me during this very difficult time if I would just struggle and strive to listen to and for his voice.”

i) This assumes that God is speaking to Robinson. That Robinson is a recipient of private revelation or spiritual impressions which justify his action.

ii) Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant a charismatic view of ongoing revelation, when someone says that God is speaking to him, that is not at all the same thing as God speaking to the Church. His individual claim has no claim on the conscience of the church.

iii) I never heard this message from God. And I have no evidence that Robinson ever heard it from God.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that God would never approve of ordaining homosexuals, or even allowing them to join the church.

Robinson and others apparently have an invisible hotline to heaven to justify their immorality. It’s not even red.

“ROBINSON: No. I wouldn't say I lived a lie. I had a wonderful relationship with the woman that I was married to. I had told her within a month of meeting her that I had struggled with this issue before. I had gotten to therapy to try to change. I had done all the things that gay and lesbian people try to do to fit in, to deny who they are and to change themselves, and I had prayed about it. And yet, this is not something that one does. This is something that one is. And that's what's so important for people to understand. God made me this way and declared me good. And that's, that's something that I have laid claim to.”

i) How can a homosexual have a wonderful marriage and father two children?

ii) Actually, a homosexual condition is both something one “is” and something one “does.”

I’d add that identity and activity are separable. For example, a heterosexual is attracted to women. Not just to one woman, but to any pretty woman.

Does this mean that it would be ethical for him to have sex with any pretty woman he finds appealing?

iii) The allusion to Gen 1 is self-refuting. In Gen 1, God created male and female, and he created them for one another. That’s what God declared to be “good.”

“ROBINSON: Well, I would say that none of us are able to conform our lives to scriptural standards. In the gospel of Luke, for instance, Jesus said if you want to be a follower of mine you must give up all your possessions. I don't see many of us doing that. We all fall short in one way or another. The miracle, the good news, is that we're not worthy, but we're made worthy by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's the good news we have to give to the world and God has said to me and to all of God's children what God said to Jesus at his baptism, you are my beloved. In you, I am well pleased. The world is desperate to know a God like that.”

i) To say that we are too sinful to measure up to Scripture doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards. A good standard is not any less good because we are not good enough to measure up. It’s still something to aim for.

ii) Jesus did not enjoin poverty as a general injunction. Robinson is lifting this verse out of context.

But assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is a general injunction, then should all Christians be bound by whatever Christ commands? Does Robinson really believe that?

iii) Of course, God does not say to everyone what he said to his Son at the baptism of Christ.

There is a distinction between Christ and a Christian. And there’s another distinction between a Christian and a non-Christian.

Notice Robinson’s tactic of ripping verses out of context and stretching them beyond recognition.

“ROBINSON: We will, in fact, be taking votes on various sorts of resolutions. But the real question before us right now, which is in our great Anglican and Episcopal tradition, is can we all stay at the table and talk about this while we disagree? Talk of unity is not necessarily talk of unanimity. And the great thing that the Episcopal Church has to offer the world is this great umbrella under which we disagree about lots of things and yet we find our unity when we go to the alter rail and receive the body and blood of Christ as humbly as we possibly can, find our unity there in Jesus Christ and then we go back to the pews and fight about all sorts of things, but we remain a community. We remain a communion and that's what God wants for us.”

i) What the ECUSA has to offer the world is a big leaky umbrella. Unfortunately, a leaky umbrella won’t keep you dry when it rains.

ii) One wonders if Robison really espouses such a high sacramentology.

iii) In any event, we are only a Christian community if we are Christians.

“ROBINSON: Yes, Larry, I think it's really important to understand that being certain about something does not necessarily -- even if you're certain about it for 2,000 years doesn't make it right.”

What does this mean? That the NT church was wrong?

“The church was pretty certain that scripture justified slavery and that only changed about 150 years ago.”

i) Did the church, up until 150 years ago, have an official position in favor of slavery?

ii) And what kind of slavery are we talking about? POWs? Believers? Unbelievers? Greeks? Indentured servants?

“We were pretty certain for 2,000 years that women had no place in the leadership of the church.”

Many Christians are still pretty certain that women don’t belong in the hierarchy.

“But we worship a God who is not locked up in scripture 2,000 years ago, but continues to reveal God's self to us. It's not God that's changing. It's our understanding. We're being led by the Holy Spirit to understand in a new way what God was intending. The question before us right now is, might God be intending something different in our welcome of gay and lesbian people that's not been true for the last 2,000 years? And would that not be God's will for us?”

i) Notice how he oscillates between the interpretation of Scripture and the authority of Scripture.

ii) If spiritual discernment varies from one generation to the next, then why assume that our generation is right, but the last generation was wrong? And if yesterday’s morality is today’s immorality, then today’s morality may just as well be tomorrow’s immorality.

iii) The religious left generally takes its cue from the political left. These shifting currents of opinion do not begin in the church. The church is chasing the parade.

iv) Quite clearly, Robinson wants to “lock in” a particular understanding—an understanding which just so happens to coincide with his own understanding, and a very self-serving coincidence at that.

v) All he’s done is to slap the label of the “Holy Spirit” onto the latest radical fad.

vi) If this is God’s will for today, then why isn’t God guiding every Christian to the same conclusion? Why is it that the Holy Spirit only seems to speak to the religious left, and never the religious right?

Why couldn’t a conservative opponent of the homosexual lobby lay claim to divine guidance as well? If conservative churches oppose homosexual rights, does this mean the Holy Spirit is telling them to oppose homosexual rights?

Robinson’s pneumatic appeal is a wash since both sides could play this game.

“ROBINSON: Absolutely. Let's be very clear and Canon Anderson knows this, in fact, Jesus violated his scriptures quite often. That's why he got into such trouble. He was always associating with those who had been pushed to the margins of his society, looked down upon as being sinful and unclean. He spent time with them. And he drove the religious authorities of his day crazy because he was not following scripture as he had learned it as a child, but, in fact, was reinterpreting it through the lens of God's love. And, we follow a person who was always reinterpreting scripture and letting people know that it's the spirit of what's going on in one's heart that is the real key and when he said love one another as I have loved you, it means that we need to be moving to the margins, doing justice work, working against racism. All kinds of things that Jesus would be doing in this day and time. I have no question in my mind that Jesus considers me beloved. Just as I am.”

i) Notice, once again, the oscillation between the interpretation of Scripture and the authority of Scripture. Is Scripture authoritative, but it’s just a matter of correctly construing the Bible—or is Scripture something we should feel free to disobey?

It’s clear that Robinson doesn’t believe in the authority of Scripture, but for tactical reasons he prefers to cloak his denial in a hermeneutical smoke screen.

ii) Did Jesus “violate” the Bible? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that what he did was, indeed, at variance with the Law of Moses. Let’s also remember who Jesus was (and is). Jesus was not an ordinary Jew, living under the Mosaic Law. Jesus is the mediator of a New Covenant.

This is not a case of violating the Mosaic Law. Rather, certain provisions of the Old Covenant lapse in light of the New Covenant. We’d expect some degree of discontinuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. That’s what makes the old old and the new new.

In transitioning from one covenant to another, there will be certain dislocations. You cannot violate a covenant which is no longer in force. To the extent that certain provisions are null-and-void, there is nothing to violate.

iii) Let’s also remember that Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. He’s the divine lawgiver. As such, he is not subject to the law in the way a creature is. Although the law was framed by God, it wasn’t framed for God.

iv) When Jesus does make an exception to OT law, he justifies his action by appealing to the OT itself (Mt 12:1-12; Lk 13:10-17). So Jesus upheld the authority of the OT.

v) There’s a means-ends structure to many OT injunctions. And there are times when the means may thwart the ends. In that case, a higher obligation supervenes.

vi) The image of Jesus as somebody who always takes the side of the social outcast is the hippy-Marxist version of Jesus. It recasts the gospels in the paradigm of liberation theology, class warfare, and the Counterculture. This is not real exegesis. The truth, rather, is that:

a) Jesus criticized the religious establishment, not because it was overly faithful to OT ethics, but because it was either evaded OT injunctions (Mt 15:1-9) or proved to be tone-deaf to moral priorities within the OT itself (Mt 23:23).

b) Jesus did, indeed, minister to sinners. He did not, however, condone their sin. Rather, he offered God’s forgiveness to penitent sinners.

“ROBINSON: You bet I do. Larry, you're right. I don't have the option of marrying my partner, but, you know, Jesus said that good fruit can't come from a bad tree. What we're saying is, look at our relationships. Look at the good that comes from them. If you look closely, you'll see God showing up in them. Look at what gay and lesbian people contribute to this culture. Contribute to their own children and to other people's children. Look at the fruits of what we're doing, and then decide in us, can you see the face of Christ? And if you can, then welcome us into the church as god would have us welcomed.”

i) A conservative would agree with his premise, but draw a contrary conclusion. Is the attempt of the homosexual lobby to lower or abolish the age of consent so as to facilitate the seduction of minors a positive contribution to the culture?

Is the attempt of the homosexual community to criminalized Christian expression as hate-speech a positive contribution to the culture?

Are homosexual STDs a positive contribution to the culture?

Is domestic violence within the homosexual subculture a positive contribution to the general culture?

ii) We also need to guard against a redefinition of the family. When he talks about the “children” of homosexuals, what’s he talking about? Natural children? Foster children? Adopted children?

Homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to adopt children. And foster children should not be placed in their care.

As to their own kids, that’s a more complicated proposition. A natural parent can be an unfit parent.

Still, for better or worse, there is an emotional bond, indeed, an unbreakable bond, between parent and child. Some allowance must be made for that fact.

In a case of divorce, if not custody—then visitation.

There should also be legal restrictions on the artificial insemination of lesbians.

“HUDSON: Absolutely. And the thinking behind that is where the spirit of God is, where the risen Christ is. Then the people of God can determine what is best and listen for how God would have them be in the world.”

i) Another appeal to continuous revelation. But if you deny the authority of Scripture, then the logical consequence is not to expand the Christian ministry to include unscriptural candidates, but to disband the Christian ministry altogether. The church is only as good as the divine institution of the church, which is only as good as the divine revelation of the church.

ii) Hudson is using and abusing traditional categories (“God,” “Christ,” the “Spirit”) which lose their meaning when uprooted from their native soil and transplanted to foreign soil.

“HUDSON: I never was -- well, they say that, you know, they say that women shouldn't preach in church, too. I have had to wrestle with the scriptures but the reality is is that I have found a relationship with God that I discovered in the church and want to be a part of a community of faith that brings that love to other people.”

Did she find a relationship with God? Or did she find a relationship with other likeminded liberals and lesbians which she chooses to deify with vacuous theological label?

“HUDSON: I wrestle with it, but the reality is, that's part of a Levitical holiness code that few people actually adhere to today and follow every point of and so I think it's important to take it within the context in which it was written.”

i) True, context is important, and she oversimplifies the context. Read Gagnon.

ii) One of the funny things about the religious left is the way it acts as if Jews are extinct. Would the Ultra-Orthodox share her dismissive view of the Holiness Code? Or even Orthodox Jews?

“HUDSON: I think ultimately it will happen. Actually, the reality is, that gay and lesbian people have been standing in holy places for centuries with priests present, surrounded by family and friends, being blessed in their covenant relationships. What is at work here, it's not about marriage, it is about taxpayers who are being denied their civil rights.”

i) Why is it important to a homosexual to say that homosexuals live in “covenanted” relationships? From a liberal perspective, isn’t that terribly quaint and outmoded?

ii) If we’re going to frame the debate over same-sex marriage under the rubric of civil rights, then civil rights are conferred by the state, with the consent of the governed, viz. ratification of the Constitution, amending the Constitution, acts of Congress. Suppose, then, the majority opposes same-sex marriage? Where does that leave her argument?

iii) There’s no more logical connection between taxation and same-sex marriage than there is between taxation and pedophilia. After all, pedophiles pay taxes too.

“HUDSON: Actually, I think it's important to note that over time, if you look at the development of scripture and if you look at how people have interpreted it and how, and you can go back and look, over time, the different translations from the original texts, you will see that the word homosexual actually comes into the scripture much later. That the original Greek has to do with an act of abuse of younger people for sexual purposes. And that the word homosexual is gradually brought into scripture, that condemns a whole group of people, and you can trace that very clearly through time as we move up into present day and how that word is finally introduced into scripture.”

This is false from start to finish. Read Gagnon. Read the standard commentators on Leviticus (e.g. Currid, Hartley, Ross, Wenham). Read Wright and Schreiner on Romans. Read Thiselton on 1 Corinthians. Read Mounce on 1 Timothy.

“HUDSON: How is he defining natural, natural relationship? My relationship is wholly and completely natural to me. It is exactly who I believe God has created me to be. And I have a wonderful, living, dynamic relationship with God. And I know, in the core of my being, that the most natural way for me to be, is exactly who I am.”

i) What God are we talking about? Juno? The Tooth Fairy?

ii) Observe the retreat into existential fideism.

iii) Just to judge by physiology of the reproductive system alone, nothing could be more obvious than the completely unnatural character of sodomy or lesbianism.

iv) I’ve never been convinced that lesbians are actually attracted to other women. It’s an anti-male statement. A political statement. Or an emotional statement on the part of women who are mad at the men in their lives.

“ANDREW SULLIVAN, TIME COLUMNIST: I am a Catholic and people often ask me, how can you be openly gay and be a Catholic? And my response is always I'm openly gay, because I'm a Catholic, because God taught me not to bear false witness to who I am and my faith is something that I really have no choice over. I've tried. I've had a terrible struggle with my own faith, but God wouldn't let me go and he keeps bringing me back and he keeps saying to me, in the Eucharist and in the church I love you and you belong here. And I want you to have a loving relationship and I feel that my own relationship is a gift from God. I cannot alone in my conscience before God believe otherwise. So I can do no other. I'm here because I have no choice.”

i) Once again, we have unverifiable ascriptions of divine agency to justify their lifestyle.

ii) Homosexual attraction may or may not be a choice, but the lifestyle is a choice.

iii) Homosexual attraction may also be an acquired taste or compulsive-addictive behavior.

iv) Homosexual identity is ambiguous. A homosexual man is not a homosexual in the same sense that he’s a man. And many homosexuals are able to reorient themselves to a heterosexual lifestyle.

v) The appeal to the 9th commandment is silly. To truly identify his homosexual condition or conduct affords no more moral justification for that condition or conduct than if I identify myself as a compulsive gambler or junkie or alcoholic and act accordingly.

vi) The promises in the Eucharist are promises to believers, not renegades.

vii) It may well be that Sullivan is unable to get religion out of his system. That’s a reason to abandon the sin of sodomy.

“SULLIVAN: Larry, may I say the scripture is clear and scripture says that I should be put to death. The very verse that says that shalt not lie with another man as one does with a woman, says that I should face the death penalty. That's clear. Is that the policy of Reverend Mohler and the other gentlemen? Why is that not taken seriously?”

i) This is a bluff. And there are different ways of calling his bluff.

ii) A theonomist (or Ultra-orthodox Jew) would answer in the affirmative. Yes, homosexual offenders should be put to death.

iii) Conversely, an Anabaptist would answer in the negative, but he could still reject the homosexual lifestyle by appealing to NT prohibitions.

So a Christian can occupy opposite ends of the theological spectrum, vis-à-vis OT ethics, but consistently reject the homosexual lifestyle.

And if either extreme can find common ground in rejecting the homosexual lifestyle, then the various mediating positions can do so as well.

iv) No one was executed under the Mosaic law for being homosexual. The crime lay in the conduct, not the condition.

v) It’s also simplistic to assume that if a certain penalty attaches to a certain crime, the punishment was mandatory.

Even the OT distinguishes between penitent sinners (e.g. Lev 6:1-7) and impenitent sinners (e.g. Num 15:30-31). And case law is illustrative rather than exhaustive. It doesn’t cover every conceivable contingency.

So we shouldn’t assume, without further ado, that every capital offense mandated the death penalty despite contrition or restitution. As a couple of commentators explain:

“[Milgrom] argues that any intentional sin could be reduced to a sin of ignorance by genuine repentance. Whenever a guilty person too this path, he lowered his sin to the level of an unintentional sin and gained the possibility of expiating his wrongdoing through presenting a reparation sacrifice,” J. Hartley, Leviticus (Word 1992), 85.

This may be a bit of an overstatement since it’s hard to believe that every crime, however heinous, was subject to commutation. Nevertheless, it is fair to suggest that Lev 6:1-7 presents a special case of a larger principle.

“SULLIVAN: So you pick and choose? You pick and choose the parts of the Bible you agree with? Clearly.”

i) It’s true that every Christian has not worked out a consistent position on the exact degree of continuity between OT ethics and NT ethics.

However, the fact that a Christian may be inconsistent in one respect doesn’t mean that he can’t be consistent in another respect—much less that he should abandon consistency in one respect for lack of consistency in another respect.

ii) We also know that there is at least some degree of carryover between OT ethics and NT ethics on the subject of sodomy. Whether or not it’s still a crime, or a even a capitol offense, it is still a sin.

iii) It is also invidious to say that every Christian picks and chooses what he’s prepared to believe.

In a debate such as Five Views on Law & Gospel, W. Strickland, ed. (Zondervan 1996), each contributor made a good-faith effort to draw principled distinctions. We may judge some of their efforts to be less successful than others, but they were not being arbitrary in where they drew the lines.

“SULLIVAN: I have in the past to be perfectly honest with you, of course. When you're told as a child that what you know to be yourself is somehow evil and wrong, it's a terrible wound that the church places in the souls of so many young people and it continues to torment those souls and one of the things that one can do as a believing person of faith, who is also gay, is to tell those kids out there, do not despair. God does loves you. Do not believe some of the things that are taught to you. Know in your heart who you are and that God loves you and don't listen to this.”

i) Children are entitled to our love, but it’s less than loving to rubberstamp whatever a child wants or does.

Suppose a child likes to torture animals to death. There are child who do, you know. Isn’t there something seriously twisted about such a child? Isn’t that a cause for alarm? Shouldn’t we try to intervene?

ii) About the best way to torment a man is to deprive him of his masculine self-fulfillment by denying to him the emotional companionship of a wife and child.

If an adolescent boy suffers from a sexual identity crisis, the most loving thing, and, indeed, the only loving thing, to do is to redirect and reinforce his natural orientation so that he will not lose out on the love of a wife and child—not to mention the other detrimental effects of the homosexual life style (higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, domestic abuse, STDs and medical complications thereof).

“One thing I want to say is that being gay is not about sex as such, although that's part of it. It's a tiny part of it.”

Methinks he protests too much. Although it’s nothing I’m going to do, if one were to go to Sullivan’s blog and follow the links, how many clicks would it take to get to some homosexual porn sites and other suchlike?

“What it's about, my relationship is about love and friendship and commitment and fidelity and all the virtues that we're called for and called to in our tradition.”

i) Is the homosexual lifestyle about commitment and fidelity? Or is it about multiple partners, open affairs, one-night stands, and broken relationships?

ii) I’d add that even if what he said were true, commitment to sin and fidelity to evil are hardly numbered among the theological virtues.

“SULLIVAN: And we're trying to bear witness to that truth. And we are doing so with our lives and with our souls and we're opening them up to tell the world who we are, and if we're rejected, then so be it, but God won't reject us and we have a duty to tell the truth. There is no commandment that says thou shalt not be gay, but there is a commandment that says that shalt not bear false witness and I will not bear falls witness to who I am.“

Actually, men like Sullivan conceal the truth of the homosexual lifestyle. They like to speak in soft, pillowy phrases about love and commitment, but they don’t like to talk about anal sex and fisting and scat and catamites and colostomies and STDs and suicide and substance abuse and domestic abuse and the seduction of minors and so on and so forth.

All they really want to talk about for public consumption, as opposed to what they talk about in their own publications, is the fresh-faced, handholding, all-American boy-meets-boy-next-door.

“And I will not as a Catholic be thrown out of my home and my church and my faith and my communion because of who I am. Because of how God made me and that's the bottom line, father, and I understand there is diversity and I respect that. And I understand your faith. But we're not leaving and we exist and we're here and we're human.”

You know, the “God-made-me-this-way” defense is quite ironic. Bertrand Russell used to rail against ministers who opposed the use of a local anesthetic in childbirth on the grounds that birth-pangs were a divine judgment.

And Albert Camus wrote a novel in which a priest opposes sanitation measures to prevent an epidemic since the bubonic plague represented the judgment of God.

Now, however, homosexual apologetes like Sullivan are using the very same argument to justify their “orientation.”

Well, by the same logic we could say that God made AIDS, Alzheimer’s, asthma, cancer, cystic fibrosis, diphtheria, dysentery, gangrene, glaucoma, gonorrhea, hemophilia, hepatitis, herpes, influenza, leprosy, malaria, meningitis, MS, Parkinson’s, rabies, scarlet fever, small pox, syphilis, TB, Tay-Sachs, tetanus, and typhoid.

Therefore, we should do nothing to combat these illnesses. And one could deploy the same argument against pesticides.

Yet the Mosaic law has provision for the treatment of infectious diseases—within the limits of a prescientific age.

So Sullivan’s defense either proves too much or too little. If sodomy is natural, so is AIDS. If it’s wrong to treat homosexual attraction as a psychological disorder, then it’s equally wrong to treat AIDS as a physiological disorder.

“GRISWOLD: I think the important thing to be aware of is that the Episcopal Church has always been a church that has been able to contain diverse opinions on any number of topics, and I think that the whole question of the ordination of gay and lesbian people is one of those topics upon which we as a church have, again, a variety of opinions. I think it is inevitable...”

i) This is Griswold in his relativist mode.

BTW, the fact that the ECUSA has been so latitudinarian is hardly a compliment.

“GRISWOLD: Well, I think -- certainly I gave my consent to the ordination of the bishop of New Hampshire and presided his ordination, which I hardly would have done if I felt that it was intrinsically wrong.”

And this is Griswold in his absolutist mode.

Griswold is a moral relativist where opponents of homosexual ordination are concerned, but an absolutist where proponents of homosexual ordination are concerned.

If you oppose it, well…that’s just your opinion. But if you support it, then that should be the official policy of the whole denomination.

“GRISWOLD: And one of the points he [Sen. Danforth] made was, we're a church that's always been able to contain multiple points of view, and he said in this world where we're so polarized, politically and religiously, where language is so divisive, it's so important that a church such as ours manifest and witness to the fact that we can stay together and respect the fact that we have different points of view and be one in mission to a broken world. That is the point that I think is so important. The broken world needs our attention. And sexuality, as important as it may be, is not the dominating concern. Life and death issues, poverty, disease, all these things that really threaten human life are where we need to place our attention.”

i) Sexuality will always be a dominating concern, for it’s the very thread of the social fabric. Sexuality is either a unitive force or a divisive force.

ii) Does Griswold have a cure for death? A cure for poverty? A cure for disease?

“GRISWOLD: I think congregations vary tremendously, and you will find that there are congregations in which gay and lesbian people feel much more at home than other congregations. I think, since I travel the United States, I can see all kinds of regional variations as well. And I think one of the important things to be aware of is that the gospel is always interpreted in particular contexts. Our social influences, our historical influences all have something to do with how we read the gospel and interpret it and apply it to our lives. “

Back to his relativist mode. But he’s only a relativist where the opposition is concerned. Where he himself is concerned, his own interpretation is exempt from social conditioning.

“GRISWOLD: ... and the overwhelming reality of the Episcopal Church is what I call the diverse center. People who have all kinds of opinions, but have an overriding sense of being churched together, not just to be cozy and familiar, but in order to serve Christ in the world. I think that larger sense of mission is what really galvanizes Episcopalians.”

The “diverse center.” Isn’t that a lovely oxymoron?

“GRISWOLD: Let me make a comment here. Jesus says I have many more things to tell you but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of truth comes he will draw from what is mine or reveal it to you. Truth is unfolding. Isn't it interesting that we learn more about truth in medical areas, truth about the world around us, but we can't learn anything new about sexuality? Isn't that strange?”

i) A wonderful specimen of acontextual prooftexting. Jesus was addressing the disciples. This is a promise to the disciples, not to the church. Not to Griswold or Robinson or Spong.

ii) There’s an obvious difference between “new” truth or “unfolding” truth and contradictory truths, where yesterday’s truth is today’s falsehood, and today’s truth is yesterday’s falsehood.