Civil Commotion

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 1^st-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.

It may be objected that the New Testament is less gory that the Old. But Christ no more forbad slavery, rape, torture and genocide than did the Ten Commandments. Christians in power engaged in orgies of persecution of one another, of non-believers, of witches and of Jews. Indeed, the true Judaeo-Christian tradition was the 1,600-year tradition of Christians murdering Jews. What civilisation Judaism and Christianity possess came from the outside. They did not reform themselves, which is why calls for a Muslim reformation so spectacularly miss the point. Civilisation came from the battering that religion took from the Enlightenment, from sceptics, scientists, mockers and philosophers, who destroyed their myths and exposed the immorality of their taboos.

Nick Cohen

Precisely so. Left to its own devices, Christianity in the West would be indistinguishable from Islam in the Middle East.

Which is why we will want to be careful what we say during the public mourning that follows this week’s likely schism of the Anglican Communion, the global federation of state churches founded by England in its colonies during its great age of exploration. It will indeed be a sad day, the end of an indispensable part of the construction of the West.

But let’s be clear: The Anglican Communion’s role was that of a vector, not a primary actor. It is true that England brought the Christian religion, but England brought also the ideals of the Magna Carta — and it is those which have prevailed, not the Church of England.

India, for instance, remains primarily Hindu — but it has a Western-style legal system, and it is a commonplace for its lawyers to take their education in England. It was the Enlightenment that tamed religion, not religion that tamed mankind.

Incredible how fundamentalists still will trust these “men of God” and follow their teachings and be so blind and silent on the abuse these devils are inflicting on the most vulnerable, trusting people. It makes me sick! And it should make YOU sick too. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this article “about” God’s man offends you more then Gothard’s actions. If so, YOU make me sick too. Peace.

Tom Rich, on Bill Gothard

I have nothing to add.

Everybody knows by now of the Wheaton faculty member who is being fired for her belief that Muslims and Christians worship the same god, and everybody who is interested in these sorts of matters has volunteered an opinion whether she is right or wrong. As it happens, because this is a theological dispute and not susceptible of objective resolution, there are well-known names on both sides of the question.

What nobody has remarked, so far as I know, is how this matter highlights the innate dishonesty of the sectarian academy. Lecturers at sectarian schools are (almost) universally obliged to sign a statement of faith upholding the school’s position on all manner of theological minutia, and their continued employment by the school is contingent upon not deviating from the prescribed positions; if they do, out they go.

The academics in the sectarian academy are forbidden to think, to revise their beliefs on receipt of new evidence, to be persuaded by reasoned argument. They work in an environment in which the Eternal Truth is known, all settled, and unchanging; their only job is to transmit it without modification.

They are lecturers; they are not scholars, and they are certainly not professors.

Now, it is probably the case that at least some of the faculty do indeed believe the prescribed beliefs to the n^th-detail; it is quite certain that many do not — but they can’t say that to their students without finding themselves unemployed. Just how, in that case, is a student to have confidence that a faculty member is responding sincerely to a question and giving him the benefit of his best thinking?

No less importantly, how is a student to consider a theological question in its entirety, from all perspectives, when some points of view are simply, literally, unspeakable?

The sectarian academy is dishonest all the way down to the roots.