What Goes Around, the Sequel

In a July 16th entry, "What Goes Around," I did my best to fathom the Anglican Communion's dilemma around human sexuality. At the Lambeth Conference, the decennial meeting of the world's Anglican bishops, the subject was gummed to death, without much success. The Conference has since adjourned.

Under the theory that it is a good thing to balance a "rant" with some good common sense, I include Giles Frazer's reflections on the Lambeth Conference. Giles provided sanctuary to Bishop Gene Robinson who was the sole bishop to be "locked out" of the meeting. He says what I wish I might have said in a saner moment. I have Tom Lippart to thank. It was he who forwarded Giles' articles to me. I hope they will illumine the events of the Lambeth Conference, now history.

Here's to you, Mr Robinson

The irony missed by Christian homophobes is that the gay US bishop is sustained by a faith you could call fundamentalist

The emails have been coming in all day. My favourite begins: "Dear sodomite supporter, you are nothing but a dirty sodomite-loving ugly stain of a man who is a disgrace to humanity." It ends "Burn in hell, Mr K." Well, thank you for that, Mr K. I have had a fair number of letters and emails from people who think like you. One suggested that I ought to be executed at Tyburn. Another graphically described the details of fisting.

My crime had been to offer the Bishop of New Hampshire a pulpit to preach the word of God. I usually have the emotional hide of a rhino, but even I was upset by the unpleasantness of the reaction, hiding my hurt in a few too many vodkas at lunchtime. How on earth does Gene Robinson cope with the disgusting abuse to which he is subjected most days – the protester who interrupted his sermon in my church on Sunday being a pretty mild example? Day after day, buckets of spiritual shit are thrown at him, sometimes by fellow bishops, and he just keeps going.

Spending some time with him over the last few days, I have discovered how he does it. He is the real deal. He is a believer. Responding to attacks that he had a "homosexual agenda", he insisted: "Here and now, in St Mary's Church, Putney, I want to reveal to you the homosexual agenda. The homosexual agenda is: Jesus." He went on to preach a fiery, almost revivalist, sermon, calling on Anglicans to take Jesus into their heart and to allow Him to cast out their fear.

What makes this person so interesting is that he has lost any sense that he is able to support himself spiritually through his own effort alone. His recognition of his "failure" to cope is precisely his strength. The theology is pure Luther: only when you recognise that you are unable to make yourself acceptable to God under your own steam can you collapse back upon God as the sole source of salvation. Later in the sermon, he described going from a meeting of the US House of Bishops to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and being relieved that, at this second meeting, he could at last speak about God.

Forget what you think you know about Gene Robinson – his is Gospel Christianity of a very traditional kind. This is what Christianity looks like once it has got over its obsession with respectability.

Beware of the morality of legalism

When Christian crosses the Slough of Despond, he encounters the first temptation of John Bunyan’s spiritual classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian meets the smooth and persuasive Mr Worldly Wiseman, who directs him towards a village called Morality: “there shalt thou live by honest neighbours, in credit and in good fashion.” It seems an odd sort of temptation, and perhaps it is unsurprising that Christian leaves the straight and narrow path, and settles down in Morality.

One of the most vigorous exponents of the view that morality has little to do with Christianity is the poetic genius and eccentric theologian William Blake. According to Blake, the problem with the way most people read the Bible is that they understand it as a manual for moral uprightness.

By contrast, in the Gospels, the moral law is associated with those religious teachers who first want to judge and accuse one another. Blake notes that Satan is the great accuser. For Blake: “If morality was Christianity, Socrates was the Saviour. The Gospel is Forgiveness of Sins & has no moral precepts — these belong to Plato & Seneca & Nero.”

In a remarkable new book by Christopher Rowland and Jonathan Roberts, The Bible for Sinners (SPCK, 2008), the authors take this understanding of the gospel message, and apply it to the current crisis over homosexuality. Conservatives insist that this row is all about the Bible — and they are right.

Yet too many conservatives have become so narrow in their reading of the scriptures that they miss the remarkably creative ways in which Jesus and Paul themselves read their own scriptures. Jesus and Paul did not read the scriptures literally: you could almost say that they took hermeneutic liberties in the name of the Spirit. Thus, for example, in Galatians, Paul defends the new idea of open table fellowship, of Jews and pagans eating together, even though such a practice was evidently “unscriptural”.

The Bible for Sinners argues that the Windsor report and the idea of a Covenant seek to unite Anglicans by closing down the possibilities of biblical hermeneutics, and turning gospel faith into moral uprightness. What is at stake here is so much larger than what gay people do in bedrooms: it is all about the creation of a set of rules that will systematically make gospel faith all-but-impossible for Anglicans in the 21st century.

Blake would have seen the Windsor report and its children as a form of tyranny, in which legalistic religion (the “stony law”, as he called it) triumphs over the creative religion of the Spirit. And so do I.

The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, in south London.

What Goes Around

As I write the Bishops of the Anglican Communion gather for their decenniel Lambeth conference. These are the leaders of the world's 78 million Anglicans, of which the Episcopal Church is the U. S. representative. Folks have been deeply divided over the ordination of the Bishop of New Hampshire, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a homosexual living in a partnered relationship. The howl that has come particularly from former missionary territories in Africa, the Carribbean and to some degree, South America has been as deafening as it is deafened. I want to remind folks that these intolerant and, to some degree, mean, responses may well be the fruit of a missionary strategy of the past two centuries. Two elements of that strategy are coming back to bite us. First, we were imperialists. The church went along with the methods and attitudes of the British and American empires. This led us to a faulty strategy which told the world's poorer nations, "come and be like us." Rather than listening to these worlds, we "told" them. Worse than that, we sent our second string team into the fray. The first string got all of the prestigious cures in the first world. So, we got theologies that resemble some of the worst of our own worlds thinking. So now, we have breakaway provinces who are busy exhibiting some of the most unanglican theology who hold sway in parts of the communion.

Listening is a first step for the first world. What are these folks trying to tell us? How can we hear an ecclesiology that is steeped in hierarchy and conformity? These are the same challenging questions we face in our nation with the evangelical and fundamental community. It might be good to start listening here, even as we set our sights on hearing our own brothers and sisters from across the globe. But listening is not abandonment of our own identity. It is finding common ground from which a church can be renewed. Like the exasperated grandmother said to parents of the errant child, "That kid needs a good listening to!"

I think that rebelling bishops will tell us about the failures of our world missionary strategy. Then perhaps, we might begin to make a new start. I have in mind a chapter in Ivan Illich's book, The Church Change and Development, entitled "Letter to an American Missionary." There Illich develops a missionary stance based on affirming the good sense and integrity of native forms, that seeks to live into a different way of life without constant one upping, talking too much rather than "hearing" with the deepest ear. I am not surprised that third world Anglicans cannot listen when we say that God is doing a new thing with us. Listening is not what we taught when we communicated the faith.

Think about it.