His defection will come as a further blow to an Anglican province already reeling from the plans of up to five dioceses to seek leadership from a conservative province outside the US. Insiders say that the small but wealthy Episcopal Church, with about one million Sunday worshippers, is losing hundreds of people every year.
The row is ostensibly over the 2003 consecration of the openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson to New Hampshire, but in reality it is about the wider issue of Biblical interpretation and the place of tradition in a modern church in the secular world. The Church is about to be riven by litigation as many of the departing Episcopalians attempt to take their church buildings with them.
The Right Rev Steenson indicated that those who want to go should go quietly.
He said: “I hope my decision will encourage others who believe they can no longer remain in the Episcopal Church, to respect its laws and to withdraw as courteously as possible for the sake of the Christian witness.”
Referring to another meeting of the Church’s bishops this year, he said: “I was more than a little surprised when such a substantial majority declared the polity of the Episcopal Church to be primarily that of an autonomous and independent local church relating to the wider Anglican Communion by voluntary association. This is not the Anglicanism in which I was formed, inspired by the Oxford movement and the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. Perhaps something was defective in my education for ministry in the Episcopal Church, but, honestly, I did not recognise the church that this House described on that occasion.”
As +Steenson rightly notes, concepts like “autonomy” have taken on a very different life in the twenty-first century than they did in the nineteenth. They were used, for example, to emphasize that restrictions on ritualist practice that prevailed in the Church of England set no precedent for the American Church (which was more tolerant of catholic practices anyway). Now the same language (drawn more from the American constitutional tradition) is being employed in defense of decisions that our nineteenth century forbears would unquestionably have considered doctrinal (whether you consider the principal issue sexuality or authority). These issues were never under scrutiny in the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel being unquestionably adiaphora. The only issue to make waves on both sides of the Atlantic was Bishop Colenso and, has been previously noted on this site, it was the American bishops who pressed most firmly for united action at that time.
He’s right. we aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
The British press has a way with headlines don’t they?
Going “quietly”, as the reporter concluded, is not what Bp Steenson said. He said, “If you are going to go, do it the way I am doing it: do it canonically, and do it “courteously.””
The fact that the LondonTimes is posting an article on the bishop’s resignation from Anglicanism is evidence in fact that this is not “quiet.”
In fact, again, it is the “courteousness” of Bp Steenson himself in this action that makes it quite the opposite of a quiet move. It is loud, and deserves and demands a wide hearing.
RGEaton