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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\u2019s edition of First Things <\/i> . A few quotations: <\/p>\n
First, he refers to ECUSA\u2019s effort to fashion itself into a \u201cbridge church\u201d that avoided the rigidity of both American Catholicism and American (fundamentalist) Protestantism. One sign of this was the 1966 decision concerning Bishop James Pike\u2019s claim that the doctrine of the Trinity was not essential to the Christian faith: \u201cThe 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 \u2018throwback\u2019 to a previous century in which both church and state sought to penalize \u2018unacceptable opinion.\u2019 A trial would thus give ECUSA an \u2018oppressive image.\u2019 The members of the committee did say, however, that they rejected the \u2018tone and manner\u2019 of the Bishop\u2019s statements, and that they wished to dissociate themselves from many of his comments. Pike\u2019s utterances were \u2018irresponsible\u2019 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\u2019s fault was a certain degree of irresponsibility and a lack of tact rather than false doctrine.\u201d Even this was too strong for some bishops, who challenged ECUSA to keep step with the times: it is more important to be \u201ca sympathetic and self-conscious part of God\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
Second, Turner forcefully argues that ECUSA has become little more than a mirror of the surrounding culture. Citing P.T. Forsythe\u2019s claim that \u201cIf within us we have nothing above us we soon succumb to what is around us,\u201d Turner points out that the theology of ECUSA is a \u201ctheological projection of a society built upon preference \u2014 on in which the inclusion of preference within common life is the be-all and end-all of the social system. ECUSA\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
This indictment is all the more effective and powerful coming, as it does, from a life-long Episcopalian. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s edition of First Things . A few quotations: First, he refers to ECUSA\u2019s effort to fashion itself into a \u201cbridge church\u201d that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-religion"],"yoast_head":"\n