The Word & the Words
Conservative Christians often say that the brutal conflicts in their churches over sexual and doctrinal issues reflect the fundamental division over the authority of Scripture, but I don’t think this is true any more. The notorious Bishop John Spong gamely—and in a way, rather pathetically—keeps old-fashioned skepticism alive, but few of his allies join him in rejecting Scripture so thoroughly.
Almost everyone believes in the authority of Scripture these days. Almost everyone believes in the Resurrection and other doctrines Spong dismisses as primitive myths and outdated metaphors. The gap between liberal and conservative is, or seems, smaller than it was, and many conservatives have seen this as a sign of the death of liberalism and the beginning of a revival.
The gap seems smaller because the real division is now subtler than it was: the Churches are divided between those who believe that “the Word” is separable from the words of Scripture and those who believe that the words of the Word are inspired and binding. At times, the two will sound very much alike—which is to say, that men committed to the most radical doctrinal and moral innovations will speak, especially when among more orthodox men, as do Pope John Paul II and Billy Graham.
Episcopal Sincerity & Subjectivity
I have before me an interview, a typical one, in which the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold, says simply that “our salvation is in Jesus Christ, our risen Lord.” Speaking of his prayer life, he says that “at heart I always remain a praying Christian dependent absolutely on the grace and mercy of God.”
I think he is sincere in this, and yet he helped require that everyone in the Episcopal Church accept women’s ordination, against the plain meaning of Scripture; he promotes the use of feminist language for God, effectively marginalizing and relativizing the revealed Names; and he advocates in word and deed a moral innovation in direct contradiction to Romans 1. He can do these things while declaring his absolute dependence on the grace of God because he rejects the authority of the words of the Word.
He told the Philadelphia Inquirer last year that
Broadly speaking, the Episcopal Church is in conflict with Scripture. The only way to justify it is to say, well, Jesus talks about the Spirit guiding the church and guiding believers and bringing to their awareness things they cannot deal with yet. So one would have to say that the mind of Christ operative in the church over time . . . has led the church to in effect contradict the words of the Gospel.
Charles Bennison, the new bishop of Pennsylvania, told one of his Evangelical parishes a few months ago that he believed the Episcopal Church should celebrate homosexual marriages, and he was asked how he could say that when the Bible clearly forbade it.
Bennison—who before his election a year ago taught pastoral theology at the Episcopal Divinity School, perhaps the Episcopal Church’s most exotic institution, in which covens of witches flourish and professors write books suggesting sado-masochistic sexual acts as a way of arousing the god within—responded by saying, “Because we wrote the Bible and we can rewrite it. We have rewritten the Bible many times.”
“The text of the Bible is a conveyance of the word of God but is not itself the word of God,” he continued. Therefore we read the Scriptures “for evidence of how our forebears in the faith have struggled with some of the same issues,” but our context is so different that we cannot simply accept their answers.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
Victimhood Culture Scapegoats Its Very Source by Michael P. Foley
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
The Critical History Before, During & After Martin Luther by James Hitchcock
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