Andrew Doyle, Episcopal Bishop of Texas 
Peace be with you. And also with you. Unless you're gay.
Last year, after the Episcopal Church installed its first openly homosexual bishop, a group of dissenters, led in part by conservative Texas clergymen, vowed to put up a fight. And did they ever. Will their new alliance destroy the 215-year-old denomination?
zoe says: Changing the rules of a 215 year old doctrine for worshiping God is wrong, as it would be in any cercomstance. To ask perishes’ to ignore the teachings of generation after generation about the Episcopal Doctrine is wrong. If openly Gay and proud of it persons want to worship God, let them create their own church and their own beliefs instead of trying to change our doctrine. We are who we are because of our beliefs and changeing those beliefs means to change who we are. And I proudly follow the commandments and teachings of our lord Jesus Christ. False Proffits’ are here so be very sure who you follow because it could quite litteraly mean your very soul. (October 24th, 2011 at 8:33am)
(Page 2 of 3)
Waller's status as an outsider in his diocese is underscored by his willingness to bless same-sex unions, against both traditional church policy and the wishes of his bishop. "I have spoken to the bishop on several occasions about this issue," says Waller. "Last year, after our diocesan convention, it was decided officially that we would not bless same-sex relationships. I had done some. I drove to his office and told him that I do them but that I would not do it if he did not want it done. I told him he is still my bishop. We agreed to disagree. He was graceful enough. I said I was deeply saddened." (The General Convention last August gave local bishops the authority to approve same-sex unions for the first time; before that, it was against the rules of the church.)
Though Robinson's consecration brought such tensions into a new and sharper focus, they have long existed inside the church. Starting in the early seventies, variations of this theological debate about homosexuality kept breaking out at Episcopal diocesan and national conventions. As always, the subtext was how the church interpreted Scripture. Homosexuality was just one area in which conservatives thought the church increasingly weak and more reflective of American pop culture than the Bible. There were also growing numbers of liberals who challenged the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, and the Holy Trinity and who believed the Bible to be more of a loose metaphorical guideline than divinely inspired truth. Powerful conservative groups such as Episcopalians United and the American Anglican Communion sprang up to push back. The breaking point—and one of the most significant events in church history—came in the heresy trial of Bishop Walter Righter, in 1996. At issue was the 1990 ordination of a gay deacon in the diocese of Newark, New Jersey, home of the articulate, iconoclastic leader of the church's liberal wing, the Right Reverend John S. Spong, who was then its bishop. Righter was Spong's assistant.
Spong had ordained a gay priest in late 1989 and had deliberately publicized it. The church's bishops voted to censure him—but by a tepid majority of 8076. Attitudes in the church were changing; liberals were gaining ground. Gay ordinations continued in the diocese of Newark, and in 1996 conservatives in the church decided to take a stand by trying Righter on two charges stemming from his 1990 ordination of an avowedly gay deacon, both of which involved a violation of ordination laws. The result was a decision by the bishops in the trial court that sent shock waves through the Anglican world. They ruled that the church had no "core doctrine" on sexuality that prohibited the ordination of a gay priest. Just how far to the left of the rest of the Anglican world this put the American church became clear in 1998, at the Anglican Church's Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade meeting of church leaders in England. Bishops voted 56270 for a resolution declaring that while gays were "loved by God," homosexual activity was "incompatible with Scripture" and advising against the ordination of non-celibate gays. Most of the 70 dissenters, of course, came from the increasingly isolated American church.
Still, until last summer's vote, the Episcopal Church had seemed to weather the controversy, just as it had previous disputes over the ordination of women (1976) and prayer book reform (1979)—both of which passed with relatively small net effect on church membership. Its factions were still deeply divided, but the church had not changed its official policy—disapproval—on homosexual clergy. The 2003 General Convention vote changed that irrevocably. In spite of his own ability to come to a somewhat wary accommodation with Bishop Stanton, Stephen Waller is among many priests who believe that the larger church is unlikely to remain whole. "For anyone in the Episcopal Church who has half a heart," he says, "it is very difficult to watch as we chew each other up. I think the church is headed for a split, and that causes me enormous sadness. The question is how we keep the others aboard the ship."
CONSIDERING THE FACT THAT MANY Episcopal churches have long made gays feel welcome, just what is it that conservatives can't abide about homosexuals? And in a church that has knowingly ordained homosexual priests at least since the seventies, what was it about the consecration of a bishop in the tiny diocese of New Hampshire in 2003 that touched off such a global storm in the Anglican Church? The church's conservative wing says that the dispute is about two, and only two, issues: the church's adherence to Scripture and the church's adherence to its own historical teachings. They argue, with little credible opposition, that the Bible consistently condemns gay sex. It is, as they like to say, "univocal" on the subject, from Genesis to Leviticus to Paul's letters to the Corinthians. In all, the subject is mentioned only eight times and never by Jesus himself. "What we believe is based on Scripture and also on the unbroken practice of the Christian church and our Jewish forefathers for five millennia," says Fort Worth's Jack Iker, one of the most conservative bishops in the church and one of three who still refuse to ordain women to the priesthood. "The church has always been unanimous in its condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle. The cultures that the Christian church came into—Roman and Greek—were very firmly accepting of homosexuality, and men having sexual relationships with young boys was common and acceptable, especially for the upper classes. But the church, coming out of its Jewish heritage, was very much countercultural that way."
It is a common misconception that conservatives like Iker, Stanton, and Roseberry want to exclude gays from the church altogether. This is not what they say, and there is no evidence that it is true. (They are even agreeable to being part of a church that ordains homosexuals, as they have proven for more than two decades.) Their position is that Scripture holds homosexual acts to be unnatural, ungodly, and therefore sinful. The foundation of that belief—necessarily—is that homosexuality is a behavioral choice. Like any behavioral choice, it can be resisted. Like any temptation to sin, it needs to be resisted. And like other sinners, conservatives say, gays are welcomed into the church to worship and receive God's love and forgiveness. "As an individual, you should know that if you are an active member of a gay lifestyle, that is outside of God's will," says Roseberry. "It is an unnatural, broken love, and it is not God's best for you. It is God's call in your life to bring every aspect of your life under his lordship. And so if there is divorce, repentance; if there is homosexual attraction, celibacy; if there is homosexual sin, repentance; if there is heterosexual sin or attraction to someone outside of your marriage, repentance." Still, it was one thing to have gay priests, whom conservatives do not approve of but consider to be aberrations, products of ecclesiastical lawlessness, and quite another to have an avowedly gay bishop, which represented a doctrinal change. A gay bishop meant that the church no longer believed that homosexual behavior was sinful.
Liberals make several basic counterarguments. The most basic is that the sexual preference of gays is not a "behavior" that they choose and therefore cannot be a sin like other chosen behaviors, such as adultery. (Both sides say that science upholds their claims.) Perhaps the most common argument is that committed, monogamous homosexual relationships did not exist in biblical times and therefore were never addressed. Most of the Bible's depictions of homosexuality are indeed either predatory or exploitative in some way. "If you take what Paul's letters and Leviticus and Genesis say about homosexuality, it is like comparing pornography or XXX video places to committed heterosexual relationships," says Barbi Click, a lesbian church member who helped organize a group called Fort Worth Via Media, which believes there should be room in the church for gay bishops. "You just can't compare them."
Liberals also point out that though Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, he did condemn divorce. They wonder why, since the church found a way to change its teaching on divorce, it can't do the same with homosexuality. Conservatives counter that the Bible is far from univocal on divorce. Mark (10:512) and Luke (16:1618) say no exceptions, but Matthew (19:19 and 5:3132) and Paul (1 Corinthians 7:1016) do allow for circumstances where divorce is permissible, leaving the church enough scriptural wiggle room to change its position. Liberals point to biblical condemnations of everything from a man speaking against his father to sex during menstruation, eating bloody meat, tattooing, and wearing clothes of blended fabric. Why arbitrarily insist on a literal interpretation of a handful of Scripture passages in a church that is proudly and conspicuously non-fundamentalist? Conservative Episcopalians answer that this line of reasoning confuses civil and ritual law with moral law. Such prohibitions represent Old Testament civil law and are therefore not in force, says the conservative side; the Ten Commandments are in force, as are other moral pronouncements, such as those on homosexuality. And many liberals simply contend that because Jesus was loving and inclusive and forgiving and taught his followers to love one another, singling out gays as a special class of sinners is contrary to that love. Conservatives would say that homosexuals are not a special class of sinners. They are sinners, period, like everyone else. Conservatives also point out that Jesus did not welcome everyone unconditionally; he upheld the moral law of the Old Testament and could be a tough, demanding master. He would have loved and forgiven gays, they say. He also would have insisted that they repent of their sin.
My Library
