With some regret we write to tell you that we have discerned that it is time for us to leave The Episcopal Church, which means that we must leave the Church of the Holy Family, our church home for the past twenty years.
As most of you will know, this decision is not undertaken lightly. It follows on several years of prayer, thought and discussion, of searching the Scriptures under the guidance of catholic tradition, all as we watched The Episcopal Church as a whole move toward what we and many in The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion and the wider Church Catholic believe to be an unfaithful representation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There has been what Bishop Mark Lawrence of South Carolina recently described as “a common pattern in how the core doctrines of our faith are being systematically deconstructed”, those core doctrines concerning the nature of God and the liturgical use of the trinitarian Name, the uniqueness of Christ and of the necessity of salvation through him, the authority of Holy Scripture, the theology of baptism, and the right understanding of the nature of our humanity (of which human sexuality, the presenting issue in the current crisis in the Anglican Communion, is a part). The Episcopal Church has consistently and repeatedly acted in a manner that has defied the wider discernment of both the Churches of the Anglican Communion and of the Church Catholic, and the actions of our General Convention and of our bishops over the past six years have fractured the bonds of affection throughout the Anglican Communion.
Rumor has it, my parish is about to lose two families due to the actions of TEC.
TEC’s leadership’s actions will be a millstone in the next life, dragging them to the deepest depths of hell.
May God bless this family.
Yes, a marvelous letter. A model of how to leave well.
David Handy+
What a wise daughter this family has – her price is “far above rubies.”
[Comment deleted by Elf]
stabill …. IMHO Bishop Lawrences’ quote is not an exaggeration at all but an accurate statement and he addressed it to his diocesan clergy. If it has carried further it is because it resounds and speaks to many of us. An no the “presenting isue” is no essentiall the entire issue. Read the words prior to the ().
[Comment deleted by Elf]
My thanks for the gracious comments. One of our concerns was to leave well a place that had been our church home for twenty years, so David Handy’s comment is appreciated.
stabill, since my letter occasioned your comments, let me defend my use of Bishop Lawrence’s list of “deconstructed doctrines”.
First, this refers only in part to the liturgical use of ersatz “substitutes” for the trinitarian Name. But then, even occasional heresy is still heresy, isn’t it?
Second, the confession of the uniqueness of Christ has nothing to do with whether non-christians are “doomed to Hell”. It is has to do with making the apostolic and catholic confession that Jesus Christ is himself God, and that salvation is obtained through him only. That Jesus is the only Lord and Savior is not a denial that non-christians might in some way mysterious to us be saved through him in God’s economy, but it is a denial that one is saved by one’s own lights, or by following the tenets and practices of any of the many religions practiced by humankind.
Third, the imprisonment of Galileo is a red herring in a discussion of scriptural authority. Galileo’s heliocentric cosmology was a threat not to the Scriptures [i]per se[/i] (no, I’m not ignoring the passage from Joshua) but to the extrabiblical Ptolemaic cosmology that the medieval Church had adopted, more for philosophical than theological or purely scriptural reasons. One of the problems with people who make the sorts of assertions that you do is that you fail to understand the broad scope of a catholic hermeneutical tradition that is faithful to the primacy of the Holy Scriptures as authoritative witness to Jesus Christ. You essentially insist that everyone be shoehorned either into your parody of fundamentalism or into your own relativistic hermeneutics.
Fourth, the “theology of baptism” doesn’t refer to the “understanding of ministry associated with the 1979 BCP liturgy”, unless by that you think that understanding is summed up in the mind-numbing refrain of “no sacraments withheld from any of the baptized” – which neglects the dimension of discipleship and self-denial that is implicit in the sacrament of baptism. While I’m on the topic, the theology of baptism has also been distorted by the practice of communing the unbaptized.
But let’s dispense with these items, let us say that my own assertions are of no account. We’re not led after these four to “the sin that dare not speak its name”, unless that sin be a misconstrual of biblical anthropology, of the doctrine of humanity. What in fact permits the notion of the holiness of non-marital sexual relationships is a distorted understanding of our humanity as both created and fallen and in need of redemption, not merely of affirmation.
But then, perhaps it’s just easier to try to paint your opponents as homophobic bigots, and in that way “win” the argument without actually engaging anyone intellectually.
Todd Granger (#7):
[blockquote]
Third, the imprisonment of Galileo is a red herring in a discussion of scriptural authority. Galileo’s heliocentric cosmology was a threat not to the Scriptures per se (no, I’m not ignoring the passage from Joshua) but to the extrabiblical Ptolemaic cosmology that the medieval Church had adopted, more for philosophical than theological or purely scriptural reasons.
[/blockquote]
I think the Biblical understanding of cosmology is mostly found in Genesis 1:1-18.
[blockquote]
One of the problems with people who make the sorts of assertions that you do is that you fail to understand the broad scope of a catholic hermeneutical tradition that is faithful to the primacy of the Holy Scriptures as authoritative witness to Jesus Christ. You essentially insist that everyone be shoehorned either into your parody of fundamentalism or into your own relativistic hermeneutics.
[/blockquote]
This is [i]ad hominem[/i]. The commenter has no basis for these allegations.
The Holy Scriptures do indeed provide the primary and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ. As to “relativistic hermeneutics”, the Anglican theological method of Scripture, reason, and tradition, which we generally date back to Richard Hooker in the mid 1600’s, has in recent times found justification in the Papal encyclical [i]Fides et Ratio[/i] ([i]Faith and Reason[/i]), the Roman Catholic document where the Church’s error with Galileo was acknowledged.