{"id":1361,"date":"2003-11-21T12:59:15","date_gmt":"2003-11-21T16:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2003\/11\/21\/its-about-power\/"},"modified":"2003-11-21T12:59:15","modified_gmt":"2003-11-21T16:59:15","slug":"its-about-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2003\/11\/21\/its-about-power\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s about power"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

“The diocese of Fort Worth, the whole diocese, has voted to bar any
\nparticipant in the Robinson consecration from any church activity in
\nFort Worth.”  -from an article recently in The American Spectator<\/span><\/p>\n

Which includes me.  Because I may not have laid hands on Gene
\nRobinson,but I assented to his ordination, along with 4000 other
\nEpiscopalians. I may not like these people, but I would be willing to
\ncommune with them, I think.  But Bishop Iker doesn’t want me to do
\nthis.  He and his diocese would prefer that I don’t commune with
\nthem at all.  <\/p>\n

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

When I was at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2000,
\nwe had a daily Eucharist, presided over each day by a different
\nbishop.  Many days, the delegation from the diocese of Fort Worth
\nwould not come to the common Eucharist service, especially when the
\npresider was a woman.  They simply stayed in their hotel, had
\nEucharist there, and then came to the sessions to participate in the
\npolitical aspects of the convention.<\/p>\n

But since they wouldn’t observe the most basic sacrament of our life
\ntogether, I think it’s fair to question whether they are really part of
\nour understanding of the Christian faith.  If one can’t come to
\nthe Eucharistic table, the basic source of Christian unity, then what
\nbusiness does one have in participating in the rest of the life of a
\nchurch?<\/p>\n

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

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

Maybe their motives are good (I’m not going to attempt to read minds),
\nbut their tactics don’t seem any different than any other political
\nlobby practicing a scorched earth policy.  Their theology, ecclesiology,
\nand social stances really appear much more at ease in the Roman
\nCatholic tradition.  Why not join that tradition? <\/p>\n

Again, the power explanation is pretty persuasive to me — becoming RC
\nwould mean a concomitant loss of power for the leaders of this
\nmovement.  Some of their ideas (not just the big social ones that
\nare getting all the coverage) would also be much more at home in a Baptist
\nor Calvinist (presbyterian governance) setting.  But again, the
\nmove to that piece of the Christian tradition would engender a loss of
\npower.  Staying close to the ECUSA maximizes their future power,
\nwhatever the eventual theological and dogmatic ramifications. <\/p>\n

(Again, I’m not conducting a theological analysis here, but a power
\npolitics analysis.  And the path that the AAC has taken is exactly
\nthe one that will maximize its future power, no matter what its
\nrelationship to the ECUSA eventually ends up being.)<\/p>\n

And nothing that this group is doing is particularly unexpected. 
\nThe human desire toward the will to power is particularly common, and
\nwhat we see on this side of the debate (and later, I’ll try to address
\nthe will to power on the “liberal” side of the whole debate) shouldn’t
\nbe surprising.  Any basic background in social theory (read some
\nPaine, Burke, Marx, and Weber, if you want more info) makes this
\nentirely predictable.<\/p>\n

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

Isn’t Christianity (and other religions, but I speak less
\nknowledgeably about many of them) supposed to help us find the way to
\nour full
\nhumanity?  As the mystic Johannes Metz noted, sin and the will to
\npower are
\ncompromises in the battle against death that God has already
\ndone.  The essence of Christianity is poverty of spirit, an
\nemptying of ourselves, a full submission to God.  Only then can we
\nbecome fully human.  That’s why Christ was even more human than we
\nare — in refusing to sin, he became the most poor of all, never making
\nthe compromise with death that the rest of us do.  Sin strikes a
\ncompromise, wherein we take the easy way rather than the hard way that
\nleads to God.<\/p>\n

“We must forget ourselves in order to let the other person
\napproach us. We must be able to open up to him to let his distinctive
\npersonality unfold even though it frightens and repels us. We often
\nkeep the other person down, and only see what we want to see; then we
\nnever really encounter the mysterious secret of his being only
\nourselves. Failing to risk the poverty of encounter, we indulge in a
\nnew form of self-assertion and pay the price for it : loneliness.
\nBecause we did not risk the poverty of openness, our lives are not
\ngraced with the warm fullness of human existence. We are left with only
\na shadow of our real self.”<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rayleejun"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-lX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}