Turner on ECUSA

Philip Turner, currently Vice President of the Anglican Communion Institute and former Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, has a very incisive article on the current crisis in ECUSA in this month's edition of First Things. A few quotations:

First, he refers to ECUSA's effort to fashion itself into a "bridge church" that avoided the rigidity of both American Catholicism and American (fundamentalist) Protestantism. One sign of this was the 1966 decision concerning Bishop James Pike's claim that the doctrine of the Trinity was not essential to the Christian faith: "The Presiding Bishop of ECUSA, despite pressures to the contrary, wished to avoid a heresy trial and so managed to have the matter referred to an ad hoc committee rather than to a panel of judges. The committee concluded that a heresy trial would be widely viewed as a 'throwback' to a previous century in which both church and state sought to penalize 'unacceptable opinion.' A trial would thus give ECUSA an 'oppressive image.' The members of the committee did say, however, that they rejected the 'tone and manner' of the Bishop's statements, and that they wished to dissociate themselves from many of his comments. Pike's utterances were 'irresponsible' for one holding episcopal office. The bishops then censured Bishop Pike; but, despite the fact that he did not renounce his heresy, they also did nothing to inhibit him in the exercise of his office. It would appear, then, that the Bishop's fault was a certain degree of irresponsibility and a lack of tact rather than false doctrine." Even this was too strong for some bishops, who challenged ECUSA to keep step with the times: it is more important to be "a sympathetic and self-conscious part of God's action in the secular world than it is to defend the positions of the past, which is a past that is altered by each new discovery of truth."

Second, Turner forcefully argues that ECUSA has become little more than a mirror of the surrounding culture. Citing P.T. Forsythe's claim that "If within us we have nothing above us we soon succumb to what is around us," Turner points out that the theology of ECUSA is a "theological projection of a society built upon preference -- on in which the inclusion of preference within common life is the be-all and end-all of the social system. ECUSA's God has become the image of this society. GOne is the notion of divine judgment (save upon those who may wish to exclude someone), gone is the notion of radical conversion, gone is the notion of a way of life that requires dying to self and rising to newness of life in conformity with God's will. In place of the complex God revealed in Christ Jesus, a God of both judgment and mercy, a God whose law is meant to govern human life, we know have a God who is love and inclusion without remainder. The projected God of the liberal tradition is, in the end, no more than an affirmer of preferences."

This indictment is all the more effective and powerful coming, as it does, from a life-long Episcopalian.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 23, 2003 at 02:06 PM

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