Episcopalians, the American variant of Anglicans, are no longer the decorous flock known as “God’s frozen people.” Their meltdown accelerated last Sunday with the consecration of Gene Robinson, a noncelibate gay man, as New Hampshire’s bishop. Many Anglican bishops from the Eastern and Southern hemispheres, representing the vast majority of Anglicans, and many conservative Episcopalians say the liberals’ worship of “inclusiveness” has at last produced intolerable incoherence. The Episcopalians’ intramural argument illuminates the limits of tolerance as an organizing principle for any institution.
In London in 1998, at the decennial meeting of Anglican primates, the mostly liberal American bishops arrived in a Kiplingesque mood, eager to tutor the “lesser breeds without the law” in advanced thinking about sexuality. But the bishops from Africa, Asia and Latin America–where, unlike in America, the Anglican Communion is growing–were having none of it.
They led a majority in passing a resolution declaring homosexual behavior “incompatible with Scripture.” An American liberal, the Right Rev. John Spong of Newark, sniffily said of the conservatives, “They’ve moved out of animism… into a very superstitious kind of Christianity.” They could have responded to Spong by saying, as a conservative Anglican bishop once said of a liberal colleague, “He’d believe anything provided it’s not in Holy Scripture.”
Conservative Episcopalians say the church must be governed by Scripture as illuminated by tradition and reason. They say consecration of a noncelibate gay bishop contravenes Scripture and 2,000 years of church teaching.
Liberals defending Robinson’s elevation say society and churches have come to modern conclusions about such things as usury, slavery and the subordination of women which are incongruent with what is said in Scripture. And liberals say, as Robinson did two Sundays ago on ABC’s “This Week”: “God did not stop revealing God’s self when Scripture was closed. God continues to reveal himself to us.”
Well. Suppose revelation did not end in Palestine 2,000 years ago, in the events recorded in Scripture. Does not the Protestant principle of “the priesthood of all believers”–every person making up his or her own mind about what Scripture means and what is a new revelation–portend doctrinal anarchy? It must mean perpetual civil war within Protestantism, with dueling epiphanies. Who will decide what are the real rather than the spurious understandings of continuing revelation?
Roman Catholics must be saying: “We told you so.” For almost five centuries they have been warning that Protestantism has an incurable problem of doctrinal instability. They say Protestantism lacks an authoritative, final voice on arguments about faith and morals. In 1927 Ronald Knox, son of an Anglican divine but an influential convert to Catholicism, dryly wrote that “if Christianity is still in process of formulation after twenty centuries, it must be an uncommonly elusive affair.” And he asked: “Why should a divine structure send in continual bills for alterations and repairs?”
Liberal Episcopalians say the church’s General Convention voted for Robinson, and they note that each of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion is autonomous. They say each province should be allowed to go its own way on such matters as homosexual bishops and rites for same-sex couples.
Conservatives can respond that this laconic “live and let live” doctrine is akin to the 1850s doctrine of “popular sovereignty in the territories” by which Stephen Doug-las and others sought to defuse the controversy about the expansion of slavery and stave off secession. They said: Let each territory vote slavery up or down, as each pleases. What matters most, they said, is the process by which conclusions are reached, not the conclusions.
To which Abraham Lincoln responded: It is unworthy and ultimately untenable to have the most basic questions settled–and unsettled–by votes. The nation needs a foundation more durable than the sand of opinion that can be easily shifted in each election. And he warned: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
This is not to say that homosexual behavior is inherently wrong, let alone that it is a great intrinsic evil like slavery. The analogy with the popular-sovereignty argument is intended to underscore the fact that although tolerance is often a virtue, it is never sufficient as a nation’s, or institution’s, animating principle. If a nation or institution is limitlessly inclusive, then citizenship or membership is meaningless.
The popular-sovereignty “solution” to 19th-century divisions failed because the nation refused to have its meaning made infinitely elastic. Now Episcopalians are facing a similar moment.
