Tuesday, November 14, 2006
(4:26 PM) | Anonymous:
Question for all the real theologians out there.
Why the hell would you want to have debates like this? To all the throw back Anglicans, is not your church going the way of the buffalo? And don't you think it a bit convenient for you, the true believers, to have the "priestess" as scapegoat? Fuck that noise. I'll take paganism over this sexist and vaguely racist bullshit any day. I wonder what hope there is for any kind of catholic and orthodox Christianity today to escape from this kind of reactionary bullshit.Update: Now with an ‘argument’!
Thought I should add some more in case some friends from Vanderbilt drop by. What bothers me about this kind of discourse, which can be summed up as "Kill the witch!", is that it doesn't take seriously our historical situation. As a fellow traveller with Christian orthodoxy I understand why you want your leaders to affirm the fundamental creeds. Even on a PR level it just looks better if your leader says in public, "We have the truth, they don't." I understand that. Really, I do. What I don't understand is why intelligent people refuse to take seriously problems of truth and difference in our inter-faith world, and one could argue the most intelligent philosophical theologians of our age fall into this category. John Milbank and David Bentley Hart leap most immediately to mind, the former has even been very explicit in his affirmation of a certain kind of British (and thus Christian) imperialism in a move that out-Zizeks Zizek and the latter may fall pray to a certain kind of exoticism I've seen in many converts to Eastern Orthodoxy (an exoticism I'm not above!). Now Milbank's views on this are honest if not a little insipid. But I can't help but wonder what amount of bad faith is present here. How much such arguments really matter in the world we live in. It seems to me that the blog I linked to is pretty insular, able to constitute themselves as the remnant saved from destruction.
Now, this seems to be the problem in the Episcopalian church. Everyone is a goddamn martyr. Every aspect of this debate sets themselves up as the victim, the one standing up for God, the future of the church, etc. So the discussion never leaves a kind of fairytale land. We never get to either the absolute or the singular, but skewed versions of them. The homosexual priest. Our orthodoxy vs. their heresy.
Now, from the few interviews I've read with Bishop Jefferts Schori she doesn't appear all that unorthodox. In the interview alluded to by Albion she comes across like a wishy-washy liberal and she probably is! But to declare that she is not a Christian is show one's own lack of Christian humility and charity. (Ah, but DBH wants us at war! I'd provide a link but the website I'm alluding to is down.) In other interviews she's discussed issues of holding people to their baptismal vows and I'm willing to guess she affirms the Nicene creed during the liturgy (assuming her church does the liturgy, though the fact that the low-church evangelical protestant contingent in the Episcopalian church is more likely to agree with Albion should give him pause), which seems to me more important than what she was saying on NPR to a secular audience. That is to say, regardless of how badly she went about it, I read that interview as an attempt to navigate the current situation within her piety. Perhaps the theologians job, whether they be lay or academic, is to enter into the conversation as fellow Christians. To get off of their island and engage the Bishop instead of wishing the Anglican Communion had an Office of the Inquisition.
