In an AP news story about Colorado Springs’s Grace Episcopal Church and St. Stephen’s Parish voting to leave the Episcopal church and join the Anglican Church of Nigeria, the Colorado church’s senior warden is quoted as saying that the parish had fought for a “return to orthodoxy within the denomination” but had lost hope.
“It’s clear that The Episcopal Church no longer believes in the historic, orthodox Christian faith common to all believers. It’s also clear that purported Episcopal values of ‘inclusion’ do not apply to orthodox believers,” Wroblewski said in the statement.
The warden’s statement contains two rhetorical commomplaces that have now become so familiar to Episcopalians that they may seem to merit no comment, but as one who is new to making these particular arguments, I observe that these commonplaces are entirely gratuitous. The Episcopal church is as orthodox as it has ever been and as heterodox as it has ever been. Mr. Wroblewski and his colleagues at Grace Church are embracing not orthodoxy but a retrograde variety of Christianity whose theology belongs in the seventeenth century, if it belongs anywhere. Some further discussion can be found at Fr. Jones’s Anglican Centrist blog.
The second commonplace, that the Episcopal church’s inclusivity does “not apply to orthodox believers,” is equally gratuitous. Nobody is forcing Mr. Wroblewski to leave the Episcopal Church against his will. Mr. Wroblewski wills to leave the church because he finds certain of the church’s present practices unacceptable. Mr. Wroblewski and the Anglican Communion Institute appeal to some notion of an excluded middle–“If my church formally includes persons of whom I do not approve (Bishop Robinson and other gay and lesbian clergy, gay and lesbian couples legitimated by a liturgy of blessing) then my church automatically excludes me.” But there is no excluded middle, only a company of those of whom the Lord said, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” (I’ve quoted the KJV by design).
Ruth Gledhill today, speaks of Archbishop Akinola and other interesting matters. I’ve been reading after the good Archbishop for only a short time, but it seems clear that at the heart of his postcolonial gospel is a claim of African exceptionalism with respect to gay and lesbian issues (and I suspect any other issues about which he might disagree with his western colleagues). As he has written, “Homosexuality or lesbianism or bestiality is to us a form of slavery. . . .” And the following passages are widely quoted as well:
The Europeans who knew nothing about African origin and background had been trying to impose things on us. . . .
We have been through physical slavery, we have been through economic slavery, political slavery and now spiritual slavery. . . . (titusonenine)
Thus, one avoids argument about justice by claiming that alleged western attempts to impose western ethical standards upon Nigeria are racist.
As Fr. Jones puts it, Archbishop Akinola’s views are neither Anglican, nor Catholic, nor Orthodox. They more nearly resemble the views of the extreme Calvinists who have taken over the Southern Baptist Convention in recent years. To argue that Archbishop Akinola’s views represent “the historic, orthodox Christian faith common to all believers” boggles the mind.