Episcopalian Crisis

In the current issue of Commonweal Magazine, an Episcopalian talks about the controversy roiling the Episcopal Church and worldwide Anglican community over the ordination of a gay bishop. It is an interesting article. I am posting this excerpt because I appreciate the approach to reading scripture that the author shares:

Given these disagreements, how can Episcopalians resolve their differences? Do we remain within an institution that appears to be falling apart, and one that each side experiences as betraying our own commitment to theological orthodoxy or fairness? As a heterosexual who does not view homosexuality as intrinsically sinful or abnormal, can I continue to value the orthodox tradition that is part of my religious identity within a polity that seems so confused about what the “Christian” church should do?

I know many Catholics ask the same questions about their church’s teachings on contraception and other disputed issues. Autobiography is crucial here. My own views are shaped in part by the Jewish tradition I lived in for most of my life, before I became a Christian sixteen years ago. As I experienced and loved it, Judaism is a tradition steeped in a text but also committed at its core to interpretation and adaptation. The structure of the key Jewish sources through which the Bible is read is inherently dialogical; rabbinic figures debate with one another over the meaning of particular biblical verses, citing alternative verses or different meanings of the same words, different analogies, or diverse human experiences. The goal is seldom theoretical understanding for its own sake, but rather practical understanding to allow the community to remain faithful to a long-standing covenant while living in very different historical circumstances. The Jewish tradition has its own liberal/conservative continuum, but the center of the tradition is one of a continually changing and creative interaction of a community with its authorizing texts. This set of experiences and my personal commitment to open intellectual discussion and debate leave me very uncomfortable with the idea that specific biblical passages are always the determining or sole source of divine guidance or inspiration.

My own journey into Christianity was not motivated by rejection of Judaism but rather by a growing appreciation-aesthetic as well as intellectual, emotional as well as doctrinal-of the Christian story, Christian symbols, and Christian worship. Much to my surprise, I found the central story of Jesus’ incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection to reflect much of what I believed about who God is and how he acts. I found the cross to be a symbol of both redemptive suffering and the interaction between human sinfulness and divine compassion. And in the language of Christian worship, I discovered a voice and an idiom that seemed to express my deepest longings for prayer.

I began to attend Episcopal services while I was engaged to a woman studying to become a priest. It was the language and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, with its soaring Elizabethan prose and its broad incorporation of both Catholic and Protestant sensibilities, that led me to the baptismal font and to confirmation in the Episcopal Church. This is not unusual, because Episcopalians are frequently more likely to define themselves in terms of the Book of Common Prayer than in terms of adherence to particular doctrinal statements.

In addition to the liturgical and symbolic power of Episcopal worship, I was drawn to the intellectual power of the tradition, as reflected particularly in the writings and continuing influence of the sixteenth-century figure Richard Hooker. His massive work, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, is a brilliant effort to define how the Church of England can protect itself from what he saw as the twin threats of Roman Catholic authoritarianism and domination on one hand, and Puritan narrow-mindedness and self-righteousness on the other. A few observations about Hooker’s approach will underscore what is both attractive yet admittedly problematic about the church that continues to be so indebted to his vision.

Hooker looked for positions and principles that could unite diverse individuals, and he tried to distinguish the essential elements that are worth fighting over from the nonessentials that are not. He was uncomfortable assuming bad motives by his opponents, in part because he recognized the gray areas of human life. He wrote that “Our end ought always to be the same, our ways and means thereunto not so.” Hooker saw in the Church of England a sign of “a course more calm and moderate,” providing a model for the other churches that were immersed in “mutual combustions bloodsheds and wastes.”

The substance of his position is reflected in the way he argued his case. The structure of the Laws proceeds by presenting long quotations from key Puritan writers, acknowledging what was reasonable in their position, and then stating the areas of disagreement and trying to indicate why the Puritan view was wrong. He tried to find a position both sides could agree on. And Hooker was not so sure of the truth of his own position that he demonized his opponents, nor did he draw the lines so firmly that those on the other side were viewed as outside the realm of redemption or the true church. Hooker went so far as to believe that Roman Catholics could go to heaven, a highly unpopular position a few decades after the reign of the Protestant-persecuting Queen Mary and around the time of the Spanish Armada.

It is partly from Hooker that Anglicans (including Episcopalians) inherit their long-standing view that Christian authority derives from the interaction of Scripture, the tradition of the church, and human reason and experience. Hooker began with the authority of Scripture, and believed that it was normative when it provided clear guidance. But the Christian tradition’s centuries of reflection on Scripture, and the reasoned consensus and consideration of the contemporary community, are essential once we recognize that the Bible does not provide an unambiguous set of answers to contemporary questions. This tripartite approach is necessary and complex, both because none of these sources is univocal or self-disclosing without extensive interpretation, and because the sources can and do conflict when applied to complex problems. (Even the seemingly unambiguous condemnations of homosexual behavior need to account for the very different meaning of the key terms in much earlier and different cultural contexts, and the difficulties of imagining how the writers may have responded to a different set of potential relationships offered in a different historical situation.)

I was drawn to this broad and somewhat ambiguous view of authority, partly because it reminded me of the exciting and playful element of interpretation that I had so loved in the Jewish tradition, but also because of a temperamental and moral distrust of certainty. My own religious experiences were not unequivocal or overpowering revelations of a Christian God who crowded out or eliminated all other options; my journey into the Christian community was not a story of sudden enlightenment or joyous salvation but rather a long process of exploration, doubt, and subtle but revealing suggestions of a God who had done amazing things and who seemed able to be revealed through mundane and mixed human lives. It was this vision, with all its ambiguity and halting movements, that was embodied in an Anglican tradition and an Episcopal Church that struggled explicitly with the tension between faith and reason, certainty and doubt, unity and diversity.