Rilstone on Gay Bishops

[nameandnature]

I do like the essays of Andrew Rilstone, so it's good to see a new one. The Ballad of Reading Diocsese is about the last but one gay bishop controversy. You have to like a piece in which the phrase "Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Druid" has a footnote saying "Contravening, it seems to me, the rules about multi-classed characters in the player's handbook."

Ivan Gelical: Men can't touch each other's willies!

Archdruid: Don't be silly. Grown men can do whatever they like.

Ivan: Men who touch each other's willies can't be bishops!

Archdruid: Really, I think you ought to bring your views up to date.

Ivan: God says so! Jesus says so! The Bible says so!

Archdruid: (annoyed) I don't care what the Bible says! I don't care what Jesus says! I don't care what God says!

Ivan: Ha-ha! So then, you are not a Christian at all!

Archdruid: Drat and double drat, you have caught me out. Truly, you are too clever for us syncretic people. I suppose I will have to let you run the Church from now on.

Ivan: Don't mind if I do. (Aside) My plan worked. Heretics always make at least one foolish mistake. Would you be interested in coming to my Alpha course? We serve rice salad.

In a good bit of exegesis, Rilstone shows that the fuss made about all this is unwarranted, even if you do follow a fairly evangelical line on the Bible (as well as pointing out that evangelicals aren't really the literalists or bigots the media make them out to be). He says that, while disapproval of homosexuality has always prevailed among evangelicals (as I recall, Mark Ashton tended to drop references to homosexuality into unrelated sermons as one of the canonical examples of sinful behaviour), similar issues, such as divorce or women priests, have not threatened to divide the church. (Although my cynical side would say that the evangelicals have chosen their ground carefully in picking a sin to which most people are not tempted).

But, he says, the issue has become a sign of a deeper conflict in the Church of England (note for Americans and other aliens: the C of E has an official status in the UK as the established church, involvement in state occasions and so on). On the one side are those who want the church to be a sort of National God Service, providing social programmes and appropriate words and ceremonies in times of national and personal need, using the idea of God to help them in this mission. On the other are those (including the evangelicals) who want it to be a supernatural religion: "Christians say 'Religion is about contact between Man and the Divine - and by the way, this has lots of implications about how we should behave towards each other'. The National Church says 'Religion is about how we behave towards each other (justice, tolerance, love) - and, by the way, God can be enormously helpful in getting this right.'"

Rilstone thinks, as do I, that the National Church has watered down Christianity to leave something like Deism. The difference between us is that I can't believe in what he calls capital-C Christianity. A preacher at StAG once compared the watered down religion of school assemblies (and presumably your standard of C of E church) to an innoculation in childhood which prevents you from getting full blown Christianity as an adult. I imagine the parallel to the ideas of Richard Dawkins was unintentional ("Evangelicalism is a plague, Mister Andurrson. And I am the cure"). I have the opposite experience: I've had the full blown version and my immune system rejected it, so nothing else now seems likely to stick.

Rilstone seems a little despondent at the end of the article, facing a choice between the Deism of the National Church and the prejudice of the evangelicals. I hope he works it out somehow.

Comments

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

And I am here because livredor solicited additional viewpoints. I don't have a great deal to add to her summary of Jewish opinions on the Law except to observe that there's always been discussion (with a certain element of controversy) about how God's commandments can be understood in relation to one another, so that they form a kind of unified plan for holiness instead of a checklist for achieving God's favor. Another flashpoint is how to understand commandments which are not merely irrelevant but impossible to perform -- those dealing with the Tabernacle, for instance -- and whether they are likely to be reinstated or abrogated in the event of a Third Temple. Legal details pertaining to these commandments were gradually dropped from the late antique commentaries and then the medieval law codes; Reform Judaism is actually following a fairly well-established trajectory in stating that they don't exactly matter, and yet... well, a lot of that Temple stuff still winds up in the liturgy somehow or other. So it depends on what you consider a legitimate source for theological data-collecting. ;)

I'd also like to point out that the lack of eschatological orientation in most liberal Jewish movements is not at all echoed in Second Temple Judaism. (There is, after all, a reason why Paul was able to convince the Pharisees to help him out in Acts 23 -- "of the hope and the resurrection of the dead I am called in question," as the KJV rather grandly says. The same issue is highlighted among the shibboleths of Rabbinic Judaism listed in Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1.) There are strands in contemporary Judaism, especially not-so-Modern Orthodoxy, which do indeed continue to focus on the World To Come and how one's actions here affect one's fate there, but there is surprisingly little mainstream Jewish discussion, much less consensus, about it. I have a fair amount of experience teaching Christians about Judaism, and this is usually the one point that drives them batty: "No, really, what do you believe about heaven?"

I, personally, side with Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed III.26ff -- that is, that there is room for legitimate disagreement about whether each element of God's Teaching follows from wisdom and thus has a clear purpose, or whether some of them follow from God's will alone and so are bound to be incomprehensible. "It is, however, the doctrine of all of us -- both of the multitude and of the elite -- that all the Laws have a cause, though we ignore the causes for some of them and we do not know the manner in which they conform to wisdom."

My first problem with considering Judaism to be "Pelagian" is that you are letting Augustine dictate your category terms. If we must be doctrinaire about it, I prefer to assert that any given flavor of rabbinic Judaism is not warmed-over Manichaeanism with a Platonic glaze. But we are not Pelagians, either; we are -- leaving aside the vexed question of universal salvation -- ideological third cousins to Western Christianity, since we both emerged from Second Temple Judaism with a strong Pharisaic emphasis. We agree with normative Western Christianity that God's Teaching, or Way, or Law (those are my translations for "torah" in order of preference) is extremely important; we differ on the issues of (1) a new covenant touched off by Jesus which somehow affects the original one(s) God made with Abraham et al., (2) the eschatological/Messianic implications of said Jesus and his involvement in the Godhead, and (3) the Augustinian doctrine of "original sin" with all its implications.

[nameandnature]

I'd like to, somewhat belatedly, thank you for your reply. I'm not sure I have anything to add, except perhaps to say that it wasn't my intention to compare Judiasm to Pelagianism, but I'm guessing the first "you are" in your last paragraph means "one is" (I wish English had an equivalent to that which did not sound pompuous).

Other than that, thanks for turning up and elaborating :-)