Nate Knows Nada

“The diocese of Fort Worth, the whole diocese, has voted to bar any
participant in the Robinson consecration from any church activity in
Fort Worth.”  -from an article recently in The American Spectator

Which includes me.  Because I may not have laid hands on Gene
Robinson,but I assented to his ordination, along with 4000 other
Episcopalians. I may not like these people, but I would be willing to
commune with them, I think.  But Bishop Iker doesn’t want me to do
this.  He and his diocese would prefer that I don’t commune with
them at all.  

But in reality, that state of affairs is nothing new.  Here’s the dirty
secret that many conservatives in the Episcopal Church does not want
you to know.  Many of them have been “out of communion” or
whatever phrase you want to use to describe it these days for years now.

When I was at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2000,
we had a daily Eucharist, presided over each day by a different
bishop.  Many days, the delegation from the diocese of Fort Worth
would not come to the common Eucharist service, especially when the
presider was a woman.  They simply stayed in their hotel, had
Eucharist there, and then came to the sessions to participate in the
political aspects of the convention.

But since they wouldn’t observe the most basic sacrament of our life
together, I think it’s fair to question whether they are really part of
our understanding of the Christian faith.  If one can’t come to
the Eucharistic table, the basic source of Christian unity, then what
business does one have in participating in the rest of the life of a
church?

The recent gay debacle in the ECUSA really only provides a legitimating
cover for a group of people who have been pissed off since the 1970s
about a perceived loss of power.  The theological and the
political are nearly synonymous here.  Finally there’s an issue that can polarize
people in and out of the church.  It’s hard to portray the
revision of the Book of Common Prayer as a pressing moral issue. It’s
hard to argue that ordaining women really cuts to the heart of a
“timeless moral code.”  But firing salvos at the faggots wins
votes from the peanut gallery in a way that liturgical renewal and
non-gender discriminating ordination does not.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again.  The political and
the religious cannot be disentangled here, and the group of churches
led by the American Anglican Council appear more interested in power
and property than anything else.  They declare “war” on their
fellow Christians, they refuse to be “tainted” by them, they declare
that they are the only true remnant of the real Anglican faith
left.  They won’t accept or read the message of the Presiding
Bishop of the ECUSA at their secret meetings, but they will read with
approbation messages from Roman Catholic Cardinal Ratzinger (who’s the Vatican’s head theologian).

Maybe their motives are good (I’m not going to attempt to read minds),
but their tactics don’t seem any different than any other political
lobby practicing a scorched earth policy.  Their theology, ecclesiology,
and social stances really appear much more at ease in the Roman
Catholic tradition.  Why not join that tradition?

Again, the power explanation is pretty persuasive to me — becoming RC
would mean a concomitant loss of power for the leaders of this
movement.  Some of their ideas (not just the big social ones that
are getting all the coverage) would also be much more at home in a Baptist
or Calvinist (presbyterian governance) setting.  But again, the
move to that piece of the Christian tradition would engender a loss of
power.  Staying close to the ECUSA maximizes their future power,
whatever the eventual theological and dogmatic ramifications.

(Again, I’m not conducting a theological analysis here, but a power
politics analysis.  And the path that the AAC has taken is exactly
the one that will maximize its future power, no matter what its
relationship to the ECUSA eventually ends up being.)

And nothing that this group is doing is particularly unexpected. 
The human desire toward the will to power is particularly common, and
what we see on this side of the debate (and later, I’ll try to address
the will to power on the “liberal” side of the whole debate) shouldn’t
be surprising.  Any basic background in social theory (read some
Paine, Burke, Marx, and Weber, if you want more info) makes this
entirely predictable.

This “battle” is as much about power as it is about faith, perhaps even
more about power than faith.  And this is entirely human. 
But the stunning arrogance on both sides of this debate is
discouraging.  The Christian New Testament has much more to say
(by orders of magnitude) about money and living in community than it
does about sex.  And the debate, after we peel away the sex-talk
on both sides, often revolves more around money and living together than anything else.

Isn’t Christianity (and other religions, but I speak less
knowledgeably about many of them) supposed to help us find the way to
our full
humanity?  As the mystic Johannes Metz noted, sin and the will to
power are
compromises in the battle against death that God has already
done.  The essence of Christianity is poverty of spirit, an
emptying of ourselves, a full submission to God.  Only then can we
become fully human.  That’s why Christ was even more human than we
are — in refusing to sin, he became the most poor of all, never making
the compromise with death that the rest of us do.  Sin strikes a
compromise, wherein we take the easy way rather than the hard way that
leads to God.