Thinking about ethics and current events (Began 1 April 2008)
Dr. Alice C. Linsley
It can be argued that the crisis of authority in the Anglican world is evident in the shift from the biblical understanding of divinely appointed clergy to a corporate model of business. Divine appointment took the form of a calling on the man's life to serve God in the Church. The "call" was to be confirmed by his home congregation, discerned by a diocesan committee, and tested through seminary training, liturgical studies, prayer, the moral quality of the candidate, and Ember Day communications with his bishop.
The shift began well before the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church decision to restructure in July 2012. It began at the peak of the Episcopal Church's cultural influence in the 1950s. Episcopal Church bishops perceived of their body as an entity resembling the "Established Church" of the USA. Bishop Paul Hewitt notes in his book The Day-spring from on High that "The Episcopal Church was a de-facto state church until the 1960s." (p. 29)
The bishops worked hard to build a perception of prestige, and they took measures to secure it. The college of bishops resembled an elite club in which the members were expected to guard the club's reputation.
This is one reason Bishop James Pike was never held accountable for his apostasy. Pike wrote that the Church was no longer relevant in an essay published in Look magazine in December 1960. He was a growing embarrassment to the bishops who were glad to see him depart the Episcopal Church in April 1969. His parting shot was to describe the Episcopal Church "a sick - even dying- institution."
As the Episcopal Church lost ground to the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it sought to create and deliver a revision of itself that would capture the public's attention. This required a business model for strategic decision-making and business operations. The new model sought to make the headlines by claiming to be the first at every turn. The Episcopal Church would be the first church to have women priests. It would be the first to consecrate a woman bishop. (And even better if that first female bishop be an African American!) The Episcopal Church would be the first to have a female Archbishop in Katharine J. Schori. In 1977, Bishop Paul Moore (NY) ordained the lesbian Ellen Marie Barrett to the priesthood. She served as Integrity's first co-president along with the late gay activist Louie Crew. Not surprisingly, the Episcopal Church was the first to elevate a partnered homosexual to the episcopacy. All these made for dramatic, attention-getting headlines.
Dr. Alice C. Linsley
The First Amendment of the US Constitution prevents the government from creating or establishing a religion, and thereby guarantees religious freedom to all US citizens. The First Amendment protects the right of the individual to worship or to not worship. However, the separation of church from state does not require a separation of religious conversation, signs, signals or language from politics.
Dr. Alice C. Linsley
The shrinking Episcopal Church welcomes all. It prides itself on diversity and inclusion. In 1976 the General Convention of ECUSA affirmed homosexual behavior when it passed the “we are children of God” resolution.Celebrant: Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People: I will, with God's help.
"People who have the time and inclination to read my little tracts and books will have noticed that consistently over the years I have referred to the official Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church, USA, as “the 1979 Prayer Book.” This is a reasonable title to use and it is used by me for one basic reason -- in order to avoid using the official title as given to it by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Minneapolis 1979 which was “The Book of Common Prayer….”
Why do I seek to avoid calling this Book by its official title? The answer is simple. I cannot in conscience or historical judgment see it as “The Book of Common Prayer.” It is most certainly a Prayer Book, but to my eyes it is not “The BCP.” If we actually take note only of its internal contents which are characterized by variety and choice, we see very clearly and quickly that they belong to the new class of Prayer Books which were produced from the early 1970s onwards in the western/northern parts of the Anglican Communion, after the Lambeth Conference gave its moral backing to this enterprise. These new Books were intended to provide experimental, alternative forms of public services alongside the received, historical, Book of Common Prayer. Thus they usually contained the word “alternative” in their titles – e.g., An Alternative Service Book (England 1980).Therefore, as a historian of doctrine and of forms of Anglican worship, I see that the 1979 book was given the wrong title. It should have been something like, An American Prayer Book (1979) or A Book of Alternative Services (1979). When I enquire why it has the wrong title, I find a long and involved story about the ecclesiastical politics operative in the Episcopal Church from the 1960s into the 1970s and it is not necessary to tell that story here.
However, looking back over the history of the Episcopal Church from the new millennium back to the 1960s, I can see clearly how so often the General Convention is driven not by a commitment to biblical truth and historical orthodoxy, but by the desire to innovate to be relevant to a fast changing society and culture. So, it seems to me, the title of the new Prayer Book was a major innovation, a novel way of using an hallowed and distinctive title in order to make easy the speedy entrance of innovation and change of doctrine. And as such it worked as bishops took up the cause and pressed its use upon all dioceses of the Church."
"In 1976, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church made two fatal departures from the faith embraced in 1789. The first was the claim to legalize the “ordination” of women, contrary to the Scriptures and nineteen centuries of Christian formularies. The second was to introduce a replacement for the Book of Common Prayer, which it illegitimately called by that name, to be finally adopted in 1979. In hearings at the General Convention of 1997, in Philadelphia, Frank Griswold, then chairman of the Standing Liturgical Committee and soon to be elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, freely admitted that the American Church had replaced the traditional Prayer Book and that it was the only Anglican church in the world to have done so.
While this admission surprised some people, it should not have. As early as 1976, in a review article in The Anglican Theological Review, Aidan Kavanagh, a Roman Catholic scholar, had noted: First, the Book as a whole is clearly not a mere updated revision of its predecessors since 1549 [the date of the first English Prayer Book]. It is nothing if not a new formulary that contains some structural and phraseological traces of what has gone before but which goes quite beyond it (LVIII, No. 3, 362).
For this new formulary to be Anglican, it must be consistent with other Anglican formularies. It contains, however, merely “traces of what has gone before.” For this new formulary to serve as an adequate basis for the Episcopal Church in the United States to claim that it remains a true local church within the one Church of Jesus Christ, it must be consistent with the forms and formulas of the undivided Church. It fails in this regard as well, since its Trinitarian language, liturgical formulas, mistranslation of the Scriptures (especially in the “Psalter”), confused or false teaching (especially in the “An Outline of the Faith”), and unisex “Ordinal” all fall short of the requirements of the formularies of the undivided Church.
Furthermore, the adoption of this book and the approval of the “ordination” of women are clearly outside the authority of any national church to legislate for its people or to impose its will on the rest of the Church of Christ. These actions are null and void, and they cannot bind the conscience of any Christian. The real effect of these actions was to render the Episcopal Church, stripped of its proper formularies, tohuw bohuw (formless and void) as a national church of any description."
Dr. Alice C. Linsley
Cultural anthropology and paleoanthropology focus on humans, both modern and archaic (before 300,000 years ago). Interpretations of anthropological data vary depending on one's ideological inclinations and personal experiences. Field studies throughout the discipline's history often reveal the attitudes of the investigators.
Ruth Benedict (1887 – 1948) viewed a culture as having a cohesive construct of intellectual, religious, and aesthetic elements. She understood that "No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking." She believed that science and the humanities were equally valuable in understanding human diversity which she valued. She wrote, "The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences."
