From his Faith Matters column in American Interest Online:

Over the years, the leadership of the American Episcopal church has gradually lost credibility and authority in the Anglican Communion as a whole.  Episcopalians have the reputation not simply of being theologically liberal, but of not being theologically serious.  It is not just that people disagree with conclusions that we have reached; they don’t think we take these matters seriously enough. We have acquired the reputation of being flighty, feather-headed seekers after theological novelty who uncritically import the latest fads of secular culture into our religious doctrine and life.  That is not a fair description of the full life of the Episcopal church, but our bishops, theologians, seminaries and others have done a poor job of making the case that we are grave and deliberative people who don’t do things lightly.

More, it is incontestable that the American Episcopal church has been grievously inadequate for decades now, and the lack of theological and institutional gravitas that now limits our church’s ability to make the case effectively for gay rights is one of the many bitter fruits of this institutional failure.  I have blogged before about the degree to which the Episcopal church leadership in the last generation has frittered away its moral and political authority and capital, and that its inability to respond creatively to the challenges the church faces is accelerating its decline.  In this context, the loss of the link to Canterbury is going to have a greater impact than it otherwise might.  There are significant numbers of Episcopalians who don’t feel particularly Nigerian, but who are appalled and disheartened by the gap between the challenges of the church and the capacities so many of its leaders. If Canterbury offers a way for American Episcopalians to go on being Anglican without having to give up the kind of broad church tolerance that has always been part of the American Anglican tradition, a surprising number of Episcopalians might welcome the opportunity to shift over to an ecclesiastical structure that has more of the dignity and gravitas that, historically, have been among the great virtues of the Episcopal church.

Read more here

You might be correct about the appeal of such a solution, but I am not holding my breath that such a response is going to be offered by Rowan or anyone else in the Anglican Communion.

We traded theological seriousness for collegiality.  We traded faithful discipline for “pastoral response.”  We traded The Truth for “my truth.”  Now when it comes time to explain “why” we bring up David and Jonathon as homosexual lovers and wonder why the rest of the Church Catholic doesn’t take us seriously.
I pray that God does “reboot” The Episcopal Church.  I pray that the rest of the Anglican Communion - and especially its leadership - drives us to again acquire our theological seriousness, our faithful discipline and our thirst to know the Truth as revealed in Jesus Christ.

YBIC,
Phil Snyder

Actually, Phil, I think that’s barking up the wrong branch, if not the wrong tree. If you look that what is driving the crisis of the instant, it is not collegial nor relativistic; it states quite absolutely that the history of Christian teaching on homosexuality is flatly wrong, and within the church it doesn’t care about the consequences of insisting on that. It may engage in what looks like relativistic thinking to justify that, and it gathers around it other people who are relativists about other issues, but at root it is a quite absolutist position. But this position is delivered to it from a surrounding culture against which it has lost the power to argue. If ECUSA’s theological discourse reflects upper middle class thinking, that in itself isn’t necessarily bad. It seems to me that it not only reflects this thinking, but it is in fact in thrall to it, or rather to a distinctively upper middle academic subculture. The church therefore has a very hard time pushing back at this sort of thinking. And indeed what I see happening on the internet is the tendency to divide into two cultures which quite sharply reflect the political division of the American chattering classes, so that in one “conservative” Anglican blog we see constant espousal of neo-con economic politics as though all right-thinking Christians should be Reagan Republicans, while at another, liberal blog one can see the political agenda of liberal activists being faithfully recited. Anglicanism as an independent intellectual community just is not surviving. Liberals are relativists because the liberal arts faculty at prestigious American universities are relativists, not for any better or even personal reasons.

Charles,

I submit that the lack of theological rigor over the last 40 years is what has led to the place where we are today.  Instead of discipline in our theological study, we opted for collegiality and “openness” and this led to be enslaved to a secular mindset.  We espoused the “free wind of inquiry” of the secular academy and became nothing be a church tossed too and fro by every wind of doctrine. 

YBIC,
Phil Snyder

Charles,
TEC gave up a quest for truth to take up a quest for justice.

Gentlemen,
I appreciate this thread and the article that prompted it.  From my perspective there are a number of factors.

Gospel truth has been exchanged for self justification.  This Sunday here in Lima we are reading Genesis 11 - the tower of Babel - and the thrust is God’s imposition of futility on man’s arrogance.  This is the result of self importance and self justification.  Meanwhile the Gospel truth
is of our sinfulness and God’s redemption at Christ’s expense (GRACE).

The quest for power is absolute and intoxicating.  TEC leadership is grossly power hungry even in its limited orbit.  When the PB stamps her foot she expects the world to shake and it ignores her.  Most of the AC has already turned its back on TEC, if not its money.  She presides over an ever shrinking and irrelevant “empire.”  I am sure that some time in the nearer future TEC will start its own mini “communion.”  Then she and her successors can rule over that.

Meade is correct about the loss of gravitas.  There was a novella published some years ago called the March of the Morons and I cannot remember the author.  In it true intellectual study, pursuit and rigor are abandoned to the elevation of the worst and poorest - such as a degree in Spiderman studies.  Not far actually from the caricatured studies in “basket weaving” that are notionally offered to some of our college sportsmen.  I find this an apt analogy.  Its implications are not lost elsewhere in the AC.  Welcome to intellectual posturing and pretense of the worst kind.  Remember the idiotic self justifying document produced at Nottingham?  It deserved ridicule and was dismissed for what it was, simply a pleading of special interests.

Dale - I think it gave up Truth, as you say.  However I think that Justice is just an excuse.  The Justice of God is something far different from the Justice of TEC.  This is a subject that deserves another thread.  If I remember correctly there were after 2003 a few articles that developed this theme.  I seem to remember Oliver O’Donovan and Tom Wright writing on this.  What is God’s Justice?  Briefly that we are redeemed and called to holiness with all the moral and ethical implications as well as being set apart from the world as the people of God.  Grace wins out over punishment if we will but humbly receive and believe.

TEC has a new and highly intolerant religion and it masquerades as Christianity as we have received it.  The PB does not even pretend to be loyal to the doctrine of the Church as we have received it.  Again this is the subject of another thread on this forum.  Intolerance is one of the characteristics of cultism and I find that TEC has these.  Therefore for the GS folk generally is it hard if not impossible to recognize TEC as a Christian Church.  Singapore was a striking declaration of this rejection of TEC.

This is not a cause of joy to me.  This is incredibly sad.  Whatever Canterbury may or may not do, I am not sure that anything will actually change much on an institutional level.  We now move forward and seek God’s leading as we gather up the pieces of what was that are worth saving.  Institutionalism has demanded an awful price.  May we learn to worship in Spirit and in Truth.

Ian,
I agree that the Justice TEC is seeking is not God’s justice but social justice. There is a kind of here and now materialism to what TEC is involved in. The MDG’s are an example of this too. This is not to say that we are not called to minister to the temporal needs of our fellow humans but TEC does not seem to have its eyes on the pattern in the heavens. I am reminded of Ephesians 6:7 “Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men.” Mother Teresa understood this as she carried out her work.

Amen Dale.  Thanks for the clarification

I have thought a tad more about what I wrote re the intellectual gravitas of TEC.  I believe that one of the greatest disservices was when Spong dismissed any disagreements or theologians who were contra his propositions, as “fundamentalists” and or intellectual lightweights.  The dismissiveness towards traditionalist or orthodox theologians has been a huge problem.  Ephraim Radner was, from what I understand, dismissed by a number of bishops after his presentation at Kanuga some time back, without being given a proper intellectual hearing.  In other words there is no possibility of discussion or debate.  Having said that I realize that I may be subject to the same criticism because of my attitude to their “theologians.”  All this is exemplified in another current thread on this site that is asking us to read seriously Tobias Haller’s new book.  Most of us reject this book and its writer because it takes an issue, has a predetermined point of view, and then constructs its case to prove that point of view.  That certainly is how one is an advocate.  BUT it is not the stuff of true intellectual or academic thinking.  It will often twist the facts to suit the predetermined point of view.  It is the difference between exegesis and eisogesis when working with the Scriptures.  The Spong attitude has prevailed amongst the “theologians” of the “left.”  Thus discussion has become impossible.  The most recent evidence is the report of the orthodox theologians and the verbal presentation of Grant LeMarquand at the end of March to the HOB.
Alas the fruit of arrogance.

Charles Wingate,

More, it is incontestable that the American Episcopal church has been grievously inadequate for decades now, and the lack of theological and institutional gravitas that now limits our church’s ability to make the case effectively for gay rights is one of the many bitter fruits of this institutional failure.

It is not gravitas or seriousness that TEC lacks. It is intellectual honesty and rigor. TEC remains unwilling to examine its actions in light of the traditional metrics of the church (Scripture, Tradition and Reason). Additionally, the best minds in TEC have either left or are in opposition to the innovation. Individuals like Ephraim Radner and Stephen Noll would not even be employable in places like EDS.

Justice is certainly a part of what God is up to - on the near eve of Pentecost, it is notable that one way to think of Pentecost is the “undoing” of the Babel consequences. What many in TEC seems to forget is that structural sin and individual sin are inseparable (well ok, you could argue *originally* individual sin is the cause of structural sin.) But clearly God is dealing with BOTH.

I am not convinced the problem in TEC can be taken to be an absence of intellectual effort. The real problem has always seemed to me to be rooted in the hegemony of a modernistic, naturalistic world-view, especially within TEC’s seminaries.

I’ve seen a lot of mention in this (and other) threads about TEC lacking intellectual rigor.  While I do not necessarily dispute that point, I think we need to cite examples, sources, etc. to defend that.  The recent paper that came out in the HOB covering the conservative and liberal sides demonstrates that some people have been thinking deeply on the issue of homosexuality who are from both sides of the camp—or at least that is how it can be construed. 

I do think, however, collegiality plays a significant part—it is a part of our Anglican heritage that we abandoned.  If we valued unity and collegiality as much as we say we do, we would neither have rammed an innovation down the Communion’s throats by consecrating Gene & Mary, nor would we have left for the doors in the advent of such an aberrant occurrence like our fellow brothers and sisters in ACNA.  W.R. Mead is right in his diagnosis on that point.  If we had been functioning collegially, that would have forced all sides to sharpen their academic and pragmatic wits enough to come up with a solution that we can all live with.  As we isolate ourselves from differing opinions, we lose intellectual rigor.  I am grateful that my seminary, though clearly evangelical, still made us read people from different opinions and invited us to come to our own conclusions.  That seems to be missing when you peruse course descriptions at places like General and EDS, but I might be wrong.  How do you think seminaries can be strengthened so our intellectual vitality might be restored (or rather, what did we give up that brought us to our perceived miseducated leadership in TEC).

Lenny,

I read the document in question and the liberal side still assumed that same sex unions were blessed.  It assumed what it tried to prove and it ended up with a “can’t we all get along” plea.
What did we lose to bring us to this sad state where many of the Bishops and other clergy in our Church no longer believe the fundamentals of the faith and are willing to fracture the Anglican Communion in order to have their “injustice” de jure blessed?

We gave up the idea that our clergy should be formed by prayer and the study of the Holy Scriptures.  While I don’t have positive knowledge, I have heard from reliable sources that there are seminaries where a person can earn an M.Div. while taking only introductory courses in Holy Scripture.
 
We gave up the hermeneutic of faith and replaced it with the hermeneutic of suspicion. 

We bought into the idea that the authors of the Holy Scriptures were pushing a specific point of view, forgetting that the ultimate author of Holy Scripture is the Holy Spirit and we should accept His point of view.

We gave up the call the idea that bishops and priests are to lead others to faith in Jesus Christ and to strengthen that faith and prepare the congregations committed to their charges to go out and make disciples.

We replaced an vocation with a profession.
We forgot that the Church is to stand against the witness of the World and witness to the power of Jesus Christ to make all things new.

We traded The Truth (and way and life) for my truth, my way, and my life.

YBIC,
Phil Snyder

Lenny,
Here is another possible way to examine what has happened looking at things in terms of the scientific method.  Investigation begins with an hypothesis which is labeled the “Experimental Hypothesis”. It then reviews the literature (this could be called Tradition and Scripture in the case of the church). What TEC leadership has done is make the Experimental Hypothesis (innovation) the Null Hypothesis and has disregarded the literature review as flawed data. TEC has not seen their findings replicated in the WWAC or wider church. The conclusion was there before the “research” was conducted.

Phil,

Addressing the document, I agree the liberal side essentially proved an assumed point.  But the fact that 1) they embraced certain standard views on marriage (e.g. it is a means of grace for our sanctification), 2) they quoted from the Fathers, and 3) it was written as part of a “scholarly debate,” shows there is intellectual engagement going on within liberal circles—at least enough from a layman’s perspective.  Unfortunately, not many people are up to the task of parsing the the argument to see if it is a quality one, and more than likely are going to be wooed by the rhetorical skill shown in that argument, which is I believe is more polished on the liberal than the conservative side. 

I am not in disagreement with anyone about the inadequacy of liberal hermeneutics and theology to provide for the long-term spiritual needs of the Church, nor its almost wholesale embrace of cultural trends as the voice of the Holy Spirit.  I was looking to see if anyone could supply concrete examples of this, and not just generalized statements.  Because, frankly, we are the ones who need to prove our point in TEC.  Otherwise, our preaching is just to the choir.

I think we more conservative (Anglo-Catholic or evangelical) types need to be able to demonstrate that most liberalism is not as open-minded as people think it is, that a commitment to biblical truth is not the same as accepting the Bible uncritically like some “fundamentalist” (useless word that it is anymore), and we need to appeal as much to the heart as well as the head (making good use of both logic and rhetoric).  Probably above all, our witness as winsome traditional thinkers needs to be sticky-dripping with love, because anyone who believes in some sort of boundary tends to be cast a bigoted meany-pants in this day and age.

Dale,

As I said above, we need to have concrete examples.  What you propose is an abstract.  And I could not bring that to anyone in the pew, even if they would agree with it if they understood it.  Why not simply say, “The leadership of TEC assumes the veracity of what they believe and acts on it before they test it against Scripture, tradition, and reason—and that’s backwards, even from a scientific standpoint.”  And then list your examples.  The watching world doesn’t know all the details, all the poltical nitty-gritty, and has little interest beyond the sounds bite, headline, or feature story.  Our sounds bite should be, “Real love obeys!”  Our headline should be, “Conservative Episcopalians show grace; take lead in silencing rancor.”  And our stories should be about the Christlike patience we show in our interactions with those who disagree with us.  I’ve read enough about “evil liberal pagans” on a few conservative blogs, and heard enough less-than-charitable terms applied to TEC and suspicions about my allegiances from conservative friends, to know that kind of talk needs to cease (not that I’ve encountered any here). It’s time to change the way we communicate the Gospel, if we ever expect to gain a hearing.

Lenny Anderson,
A thoughtful and articulate post! Pax