Y’all will not be surprised to learn that Albert the Pious has a great deal to say about this week’s meeting aimed at holding together the Anglican Communion (scroll down to the first portion of the transcript). Like most observers, he shares the view that an accommodation over homosexuality is unlikely.
Well … who knows? The African churches stand to lose a lot of money if they leave the Communion and, more than most men, preachers tend to get reasonable and broad-minded when there is money on the table. So maybe they will hold their noses and accept the financial support of their brothers a while longer.
Inexplicably, Mohler got at least one thing exactly right:
Well, if homosexuality is the bomb that detonated, the major battle is, and remains, biblical authority and the confessional and doctrinal identity of Anglicanism, not only of the Church of England, but of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and Anglicanism as it is found throughout the world.
It flabbergasts me, frankly, that a careless thinker who accepts Biblical authority could so clearly see that that is in fact the issue here, but there you go; even stopped clocks are right from time to time, et cetera, et cetera.
Does Mohler know who was the author of the Pentateuch, or even one of the four canonical gospels, or of Revelation, or of about half of the Pauline epistles? He does not. For all anybody knows, those texts might have been written by the 1st-century analog of a bunch of drunk college boys who just wanted to see what they could get away with. Does he know that virtually no Biblical scholar on earth — outside of the sectarian academy, with its contractual obligation to uphold the company line — believes that the man Moses actually existed, or Abraham, or that the Jews wandered lost in the desert for 40-years, or that the Jews were ever in captivity in Egypt? The truth is that Biblical scholarship has forever destroyed Christian claims of “Biblical authority,” and it is inconceivable to me that Mohler doesn’t know that.
Gays are gratuitously humiliated by Bible-thumping yahoos every single day in this country, and in the African states whose members now contemplate schism they are killed (along with Muslims and every variety of skeptic). We are not talking about the quibbles of stamp collectors; we are talking about something that bears on the actual lives, and deaths, of real people. As I said, Mohler is right that, ultimately, what is in contention is “Biblical authority.” I should add that, with stakes so high and scholarship so overwhelming, it takes a real failure of intelligence or character to uphold a claim so grossly dishonest and self-serving.