As the Anglican empire crumbles around him, Rowan Williams wants to “work together” with Rome to assist in its further dismemberment; the good news is that efforts towards “ecumenism” and “ARCIC” can continue unabated – not that anyone really cares.

Hats off to Rowan, though, for being able to say that this move by the Vatican should not “in any sense be seen as a commentary on Anglican problems”; not many could pull that off with a straight face.

TEC has issued a characteristically vague statement in response to the Vatican’s recent overtures to disaffected Anglicans.

The last sentence struck me as particularly revealing since it unwittingly portrays the confusion of TEC’s view of its mission:

The Episcopal Church is a member of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and works together with other Provinces and with our ecumenical and interfaith partners to promote God’s reign on earth.

God does reign on earth, with or without promotion from TEC. What Jesus asks of TEC is in the Great Commission:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

TEC is too busy promoting its own reign on earth to bother with this.

From Ruth Gledhill’s blog; apparently Spong has written a new book whose theme is “I will not listen”:

‘I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.”

….

‘I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement.

….

‘The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t.’

….

‘I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives.’

…

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude.

I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan.

…

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church.

…

I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church.

…

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the “Flat Earth Society” either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union.

I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church’s participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of colour, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.

…

This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.’

He sounds a bit like Richard Dawkins giving his reasons why he won’t debate Creationists.

And, apparently, since I attend a church that is a member of the ACNA, I am a “pathetic human being” (without the saving grace of Christ, very true) who is “deeply locked into a world that no longer exists” (if only) in order to “continue to hate gay people” (I actually rather like the gay people I know), and “continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives.” (poor tortured me).

I suspect Spong’s pension fund must have been hit by the recession and this is a publicity stunt to sell books.

Just what we need, another anti-God apologist: retired Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong. Move over Dawkins:

There is no God, there is no heaven and there is no afterlife. At least, not in the way we have traditionally thought of such things.

These days, with atheist arguments topping bestseller lists, such statements might not seem all that contentious.

But when a retired bishop says it, it’s worth noting.

“The institution of the church is more about seeking security than finding the truth,” he says. “It’s tough to be a human being. We seek security, and religion is a coping mechanism.”

But such notions, he says, cannot survive the insights of astronomer Galileo, physicist Isaac Newton and evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. Through them, says Spong, we discovered that the Earth is not the centre of the universe and that there’s space (not heaven) above us, that the workings of the world are due to basic physics (not Godly intervention) and that humans evolved from other creatures.

In his reasons for discarding 2000 years of Christian thinking Spong exhibits a theological naivety that makes the most fervent of fundamentalist atheists look like Thomas Aquinas. Only in Spong’s demented little pataphysical universe do Christians believe that heaven is contained in the material or that there are no physical laws to which the universe conforms. How did this nutter become a bishop?

One presumes that when Spong eventually finds himself in hell – or heaven – he will continue to stoutly maintain that he does not believe in the afterlife; just like the damned Anglican cleric in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce who didn’t believe in hell even though he inhabited it.

The Anglican Church is obsessed with justice: we have social justice, eco-justice, justice camps, justice networks and justice missions. What we don’t have is any recognition of what justice is, or of the distinction between injustice and unfairness, or of the concept that, from the point of view of the state – which is where the church applies pressure – justice is properly concerned with the punishment of crime. Of course, the notion of punishing crime is anathema to Western Anglicanism, probably because it reminds apostate Anglican bishops of the essence of Christianity: we deserve to be punished, Christ was punished instead, we , if we accept it, go free – much too redolent of fundamentalism.

In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov murders an odious pawnbroker, ostensibly to steal her money and use it for good. Raskolnikov reasons that conventional morality is for ordinary people; the extraordinary make their own rules and become their own “god” – the downfall of Satan and now the foundation of the ACoC and TEC.

Although Raskolnikov has convinced himself that he is extraordinary and therefore above conventional morality, the act of murder plays on his conscience so he gives himself up. He eventually realises that he needs redemption and rebirth; submitting to temporal justice is a necessary part of this rebirth. Because justice is part of the order of the universe, for redemption, the criminal needs justice as much as the victim.

Regrettably, the thinking of the modern criminal is not quite as subtle as Raskolnikov’s; neither is that of the average justice obsessed cleric. For him justice has little to do with rewarding the virtuous and punishing the guilty: it is, instead, a levelling exercise where the successful – even the successful criminal – must be flattened or rehabilitated to the level of mediocrity, perhaps then to pursue a career as an Anglican priest.