Sarx

T THE Opening Eucharist for Lambeth, the preacher, Bishop de Chickera of Colombo included in his hymn a chant. This caused some serious problems especially with Bob Duncan and other conservative sorts.

Yesterday, over on his blog, Bishop Alan (no rampant Spongian!) revealed the words to this demonic invocation.

I take refuge in God the Father
I take refuge in God the Son
I take refuge in God the Holy Spirit
I take refuge in the One Triune God.

One trembles lest the demons take over one’s computer for publishing such horrors: unless one remembers to invocations of our fathers in the Carmina Gadelica.

My former rector, Brent Norris, whose hospitality I’m currently blessed to enjoy, pointed out to us in a class last year that this thing is not, so much, about sex, as it is the unravelling of the Elizabethan Settlement. The only other choice is rampant racism: something not in English, spoken by one of those Asian people, must be horrendously evil. I don’t wish to accuse good Bishop of Pittsburgh of racism and so it’s the Protestant-Catholic thing that’s left. This is even more evident when one reads the statement recently out from GAFCON speaking of the “Plain Sense” of scripture, etc, as if there was such a thing ontologically present in that magical book.

The Church is filled with examples of using non-Christian material, rewoven into the Church’s salvific garments. The saint’s called Plato and Socrates prophets and Christians: so also the Buddah, Lao Tzu, and whosoever in whose words we find prophetic intimations of God’s actions in Jesus. That is the Catholic (means “whole”) understanding of the world in which we live. If Jesus is who we say he is, then it involves everyone, not just “the people of the book.”

This is not a battle for scriptural “authority” as over liberalism - as some writers point out over and over - with the current wedge being sex. This is a division over the authority of the scriptures vrs the authority of the church to interpret theme and the assumption that there is only one right meaning in them. This is a division between a catholic understanding of the Bible and a Protestant understanding of it.

If you look at the photos from GAFCON, what you see is a lot of happy clappy, hands in the air, guitar worship sorts of pictures. This isn’t Cramner’s Church: this is the Book of Common Prayer of Jabez and they want to call it Anglicanism. (It is, but that’s the topic of another post.)

This is a split over which end of the egg to crack first.

I take refuge in God the Father
I take refuge in God the Son
I take refuge in God the Holy Spirit
I take refuge in the One Triune God.

(As soon as I can isolate some audio, I will! I think we should all be chanting this!)

Yes, there are issues of sex here, but those are only the presenting issues. And yes, there is a conservative, catholic argument against the inclusion of gays. I know that. Do I agree or not? That’s another issue. But that’s not the problem in Anglicanism, right now. Gays are being used as a weapon against the church in the same way that a fundy preacher in the 1920s and 30s might have used blacks. In both cases, the theological issues are covered up by the political-pushbutton slam, “our enemies like to eat with those people.”

That’s what they said about Jesus, too.

Tags: chant, gafcon, split