A Gay Episcopal Bishop

The recent New Yorker has a long and interesting article about Bishop Gene Robinson, covering his personal story and the way the ordination is playing out in the worldwide Anglican church. It is a fascinating story of how a gay ordination is playing out in a denomination that is now dominated by adherents from Africa, South America, and Asia, where the Anglican Church has grown rapidly:

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church affirmed Robinson’s election as the Bishop of New Hampshire on the evening of August 5, 2003. Earlier, Robinson had addressed a church committee, offering a theological context for his sixteen-year relationship with his gay partner. Sexuality is a gift from God, he said, a means of experiencing, in physical, human terms, God’s own love. “What I can tell you is that in my relationship with my partner I am able to express the deep love that’s in my heart, and in his unfailing and unquestioning love of me I experience just a little bit of the kind of never-ending, never-failing love that God has for me. So it’s sacramental for me.”

To several of the bishops at the gathering, the Church’s endorsement of this logic, through Robinson’s elevation to the episcopacy, pushed the Anglican notion of comprehensiveness beyond its historically implied limits. What the Church had affirmed, in the view of these traditionalists, was not just a different expression of Christianity but a different religion altogether.

When Robinson’s affirmation was announced, twenty bishops, led by Robert Duncan, of Pittsburgh, rose in protest. “I will stand against the actions of this Convention with everything I have and everything I am,” Duncan said. “I have not left, and will not leave, the Episcopal Church or my apostolic role as Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh. It is this Seventy-fourth General Convention that has left us, betrayed us, undone us. May our merciful Lord Jesus have pity on us, His broken bride.” With that, Duncan and the others walked out.

...

The traditionalist Episcopal rebellion over the elevation of Gene Robinson would not on its face seem likely to have much effect on the national church; Duncan and the bishops who joined him in protest represent only a small percentage of the episcopacy. Their purpose, however, is not to persuade the Episcopal Church but to replace it.

The conservative strategy turns on an audacious twist on the old concept of religious schism: forcing a divide within the Episcopal Church that would render the main church, rather than the dissidents, the schismatic party. This depends on convincing the worldwide Anglican Communion that the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, or ECUSA, as the national body of the church is called, has already departed from the faith, and that an alternative body of orthodox Episcopalians should be recognized as the true church in America. The old Episcopal Church, it is envisioned, would drift away into irrelevance, a shrinking sect of aging white liberals.

The issue may be decided by global demographics. As Professor Philip Jenkins, of Penn State, noted, in “The Next Christendom,” even as Christianity is diminishing in the developed West the faith is experiencing an explosive growth worldwide. The center of gravity of the faith is now squarely in the Global South. If the new Christendom had a world capital based on the location of its believers, it would be somewhere south of the Sahara.

While the spiritual leader of Anglicanism is still the Archbishop of Canterbury, the political power has shifted south to leaders like Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria. Akinola has been an outspoken critic of the ordination of a gay bishop:

He is, of course, subject to the prejudices of his own culture, in which homosexuality is taboo. Akinola has been quoted as saying that he cannot fathom the sexual union of two men, and that “even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don’t hear of such things.” There is also a practical aspect informing the views of churchmen like ...Akinola, whose churches are in competition with Islam. In the Islamic areas of Nigeria, for example, homosexuality is punishable by death, and Anglicanism’s countenancing of gays complicates their evangelical mission. “Instead of proclaiming the grace of God, you have to justify that which God says should not be done,” Akinola says. “Instead of putting your energy into the work of mission, you’re spending your time defending the indefensible. It makes things much more difficult.”

The traditionalist American Episcopalians have allied themselves with leaders like Akinola and have used them as leverage in the American dispute. Anglican provinces representing most of the world's population of adherents have declared their relationship with the American church broken or impaired, and have forced the Archbishop of Canterbury to respond with an inquiry. The American church responded with a statement of regret for causing conflict, but did not back apologize for its actions. Bishop Robinson's response:

Gene Robinson watches these developments with a mixture of sadness and alarm. “The reason that I have trouble with Bob Duncan and that bunch is that they are seeking to align our church with Peter Akinola, who says that homosexuals are lower than the dogs,” he recently told me. “That is very close to saying ‘inhuman,’ which is very reminiscent of what Germans said about Jews and so allowed them to devalue Jews, that it was O.K. to exterminate them. Bob Duncan wants to ally our church with the church of Kenya, where the primate there said that, when I was consecrated, Satan entered the church. What most people don’t realize is that homosexuality is something that I am, it’s not something that I do. It’s at the very core of who I am. We’re not talking about taking a liberal or conservative stance on a particular issue; we’re talking about who I am.”

This issue, the article notes, is part of a larger struggle that is going on within Anglicanism and all of Christianity:

In the current Anglican conflict, echoes can be heard of a larger struggle within Christianity that has been happening for more than a century. With the advance of science and the growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, key theologians and churchmen concluded by the early twentieth century that the old faith had been essentially disproved. They began to imagine a more reasonable Christianity—one less insistent on miracles, resurrections, and a transcendent God who directed human history from a heavenly remove. Higher Criticism informed a new understanding of the historical Jesus; the Hegelian dialectic shaped a new image of an immanent and impersonal God, an unknowable force whose will was worked through human progress.

The new theology met stout resistance within the churches. The “modernist-fundamentalist controversy” of the nineteen-twenties split some of the mainline Protestant denominations, and eventually gave rise to the modern evangelical movement. The Episcopal Church, because of its liturgical unity and comprehensiveness—Elizabeth’s notion: Believe what you want, just use this book—was better able to absorb the new thinking, or, at least, to mask it. “Under the guise of Anglican comprehensiveness, and under the cover of Anglo-Catholic worship and liturgy, this alien religion took root in the Western Anglican world,” says Leslie Fairfield, a professor of church history at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a Pennsylvania seminary with an evangelical orientation. “The idea was ‘Keep all the same words, change all the meanings, but don’t tell the laypeople.’ ”

It was an Anglican scholar and bishop, John A. T. Robinson, who inspired the “God Is Dead” vogue of the nineteen-sixties, with the publication of his best-selling “Honest to God,” which posed the question: “Now that we have rejected the ancients’ view of God living in a material heaven above the actual sky, what does God’s existence mean?” His theological heir, Bishop Spong, of Newark, published a provocation that he called his “Twelve Theses”—a call to a new Christianity that rejected the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, and most of the rest of traditional Christian doctrine. The central belief of Christian orthodoxy—the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the Cross—Spong, now retired, pronounced “a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God.”

With biblical and theological differences as a backdrop, conflict erupted over issues of sexuality. How it will all play out remains to be seen. A California diocese is set to elect a new bishop next month and 3 of the candidates are openly gay. We will stay tuned. For Robinson's personal story, which is quite interesting, read the article.