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name: will baker blogrollin' other sites: |
is that the fire of the spirit, or just hot air?
�Steve Schuh, president of Integrity Vancouver, explains: �In asking gay Ugh, here it comes. Let the flood of tired rhetoric be unleashed. But let me just say this about that: In the Episcopal Church, we�ve heard a lot of talk about the Holy Spirit from the gay marriage/gay ordination advocates. I have a couple of problems with that. First of all, it�s a whifty theological cover for basically asserting your own rightness. Well, we all know that these folks believe themselves to be correct. Everyone thinks they�re right; but this whole conversation could use a whole lot more argumentation, and a whole lot less assertion, however prettily frosted with God-talk it may be. There is a larger and more subtle problem here, though. Liberals in the American churches have become accustomed to invoking the Holy Spirit over any agenda they seek to further. This corresponds with the current vogue for �theologies of the Spirit� in the mainline seminaries. Now, maybe I�m missing something here, but....doesn�t that sort of talk remind anyone else of the classical historical examples of Gnosticism? Is this not precisely a claim by a tiny minority to have received a special revelation of God�s will? And let as assume for a moment that the Spirit does in fact operate that way, breaking forth new truth and light through the minds of a politically engaged few; what, then, of the classical doctrines of reception? What can we make of the fact that this �new truth� has not only NOT been received by the faithful, but in fact has been explicitly rejected by the majority of them? The Spirit resides in individual Christians, yes, but is primarily the gift and sanctification of the Church as a whole. The holiness of the Church consists in nothing more or less than the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within it. That is why tradition, as well as scripture, is a reasonable point of reference in Christian thought: the traditions of the Church are not purely contingent, but shaped and tempered by the fire and breath of God through the ages. That is why innovative beliefs and ideas must not only pass scriptural �muster�, but be received by the faithful as a whole. This is a core element of Christian epistemology; this is how we distinguish new revelation from ordinary crack-pottery. The Holy Spirit has never revealed God�s will to a special interest group, and expected us to all just tag along, regardless of what scripture, tradition, and our consciences may say. God�s nomos is never wholly internal � or external � to us as individuals. It breaths through every dimension of our life as God�s people. And that is why I am somewhat underwhelmed by the sudden Pentecost among the advocates of gay marriage and ordination, who have spent almost 10 years pursuing a ruthlessly Machiavellian political strategy to push through an agenda they framed largely in secular �rights� terms. Now that this issue has gone beyond the confines of the Episcopal Church in the USA, and they can no longer simply �win� through bare majority decisions taken by our various national bodies, they�re all full of the Holy Spirit, martyrs on fire with God�s love and truth. Call me cynical, but I don�t quite buy it. And the thing is that while I�m not really an advocate of either gay marriage or the ordination of sexually active gay people to holy orders, I�m hardly some hardened traditionalist, or even particularly conservative. And, um, I�m gay. But I�ve thought for a long time now that the secular power-politics by which the advocates of these issues have forwarded their agenda were just plain wrong. What is appropriate in the deliberative politics of a secular democracy is not the same as what is appropriate in the commonwealth of God�s New Humanity. Majorities are enough for a democracy, but the church has other values besides participation and inclusion. Love, peace, and unity are also originary marks of the Holy Spirit�s presence in the Church. �Revelation� that destroys the peace and unity of the worldwide church doesn�t strike me as bearing the marks of the Holy Spirit. Does God love his GLBT children, and fill their lives with unearned grace and undeserved blessing? Of course God does, to precisely the same extent that God does so for God�s hetero children. This is the bright inverse of the truth that homosexuality is sinful; exactly as sinful as every other form of life in a fallen world is sinful, no more, no less. But this whole fight isn�t about homosexuality, though some of the African bishops, and apparently the entire media establishment, think it is. To my mind, the question is: would any truly Godly change in faith or practice so completely shatter the unity of the Church? Or at least we should ask this: even if the American church is right about these questions (and that�s a big �if�), is not St. Paul�s advice about not allowing things which are indifferent in themselves to become stumbling blocks to our brothers and sisters in faith at least worthy of our consideration? This is about the process, and about a willingness to submit to one another in humility and love. And I will say that I don�t particularly think that the so-called �Orthodox� primates have particularly exemplified those Christian virtues, either within their own churches or on the international stage. But they�re not my archbishops, and I can only speak to the common life of my own church. If the ECUSA really cared about gay people (in the �how to we reach and serve this portion of a fallen world?� sense, rather than the �what does Louie Crew want?� sense), it would realize that all this fuss about Holy Union services and gay bishops makes not a tinker�s damn to anyone outside of the ECUSA. If any of these ecclesia-nerds had been in a bar or nightclub in the past, oh, 20 years, they would know that the real pastoral needs of gay people (and most single hetero people, for that matter) are very different than they imagine. But our pastoral imagination seems to have shriveled to the point where when faced with any given issue (let�s call it �issue x�), we can only seem to either condemn �x� outright and start a charity to fight the terrible scourge of �x�, to be funded through a special offering taken on �x Sunday�, OR we create a liturgy to celebrate �x� and include it in the next edition the Book of Occasional Services (if not the next revision of the Book of Common Prayer). And neither action makes the slightest bit of difference. Because the truth is that North American gay culture is sexually profligate and fairly disordered by any objective measure. It�s a culture that chews people up and spits them out every day. I work for an HIV services organization, so I see the price of that profligacy every day. It is a price paid in the human lives: terminal illness, mental illness, substance abuse, etc. No one wants to talk about it, but it�s the truth. Now, it�s also true that North American culture in general is fairly sexually profligate. Clearly, people who think that gays are somehow extra-promiscuous clearly haven�t been to any straight nightclubs lately. In fact, I would say that given the shape of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, it would seem that there�s some heterosexual profligacy going down amongst our brethren in the Global South, who the ECUSA conservatives would have us believe are especially pure. But of course, we�re not talking about straight people. Somehow, the Church never seems to get around to the topic of heterosexual holiness of life. Because then we might have to talk about divorce, and that would make a lot generous middle and upper-class parishioners mighty uncomfortable. But I digress. As I said, that�s not really what this fight is about, and we shouldn�t let people trick us into thinking it is. This is about whether it�s more important to be right, or to be together. This is about whether or not any of us is able to swallow his or her pride. This is about whether or not love really does �bear all things�, and endure.
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