Rationalism teaches that I believe only what I can understand. I will seek to create a united understanding of the universe. It will either be an open universe or a closed universe. That’s just the way it is. You can take the miracle bits out and what are you left with? Nihilism: The line of despair. Everything is left to chance; we are all products of blind forces. Intellectual pride adopts that over the Bible. Spiritual truth is what you want it to be, nothing fixed.
In the 60’s theology went off, saying it was foolish to define anything. You could make it exactly what you wanted. The real world is what God created and it functions according to His purposes. Same language; Some of the same words. Completely different meaning. This is what confuses us today. In the West, we recreated theology to suit our own grasp. We used the same words, but gave them different values and meaning. So that nothing stands for what it originally was meant to be. Same words; skewed meaning. The result is deep confusion.
Theology always challenges culture. Culture doesn’t define what God does.
Doctrinal impurity leads to moral impurity. There is no guide to right or wrong, just what you think about it. This is not true when you submit yourself to what God has said.
So there is a moment of truth. People ask me why all this fuss about sexuality. It is not about sexuality. It is about what God created and ordered. God ordered them male and female. Marriage is a sign of that ordering. It is not an organizational tool or just how we choose to order our society. Marriage is Holy Matrimony. It is not just an organizational trinket but God-ordained. It is the image of our relationship with Christ. Holy matrimony is the Church in relationship to Christ: bride and bridegroom. Just because I don’t feel that way does not change it.
Read it all and take the time to read Texanglican’s report also.
For twenty years I have sought to speak to the issues presented by Archbishop Venables in this speech (theologically, phylosophically, historically, and any other way) but he has nailed the subject far better than I ever have.
Thank you, sir, for exposing our nakedness and handing us some beautiful clothes! May many, many hear and believe.
Existentialism is the voice of the enemy.
Don
PS Some of you leared might recoil at my last sentence but all that I have learned points to the truth of it. For a Christian to defend Existentialism is to say that Eve thought the right way but came to the wrong conclusion.
Amen. Nothing is left to be said. Of course some will say that he done a poor job communicating and that we need more dialogue.
You’ll never hear that from me! He did a marvellous job of it April 29th in Fresno. Of course, Bishop Jerry Lamb stuck HIS two cents’ worth in, and we know what THAT means: NOTHING!
“Bishop” Jerry Lamb? Bite yer tongue! 😉
The first paragraph in Kendall’s quotation above represents yet another tiresome example of the fallacy of the false dichotomy.
——
I was intrigued by one passage in the report of Abp. Venable’s address:
That’s an old, old, OLD nautical joke. It has nothing to do with “essential truths of the captain’s world that could not be changed,” unless the essential truth was that the captain couldn’t remember port from starboard. And somehow I doubt Abp. Venables actually knew a captain like that.
In a less-contentious environment, we could easily forgive +Venables for having exercised a certain literary license. But one wonders about his judgment for doing so in the powderkeg environment of the Diocese of Fort Worth. Some will wonder whether, in these circumstances, his exercise of literary license is symptomatic of a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts in the service of his argument.
DonGander,
I’m with you up to the last line. Maybe I just don’t know what you mean by “existentialism”, but it’s worth pointing out that it is not one thing, and if existentialism means anything, it means that it cannot be a firm doctrine. Existentialism embraces both Sartre and Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Dostoevsky. Merleau-Ponty is often in agreement with Martin Luther and with a finer edge for our times; Buber, Rosenzweig, Ortega, Frankl and others who could be considered Existentialists offer helpful medicine for a sick world. Not a cure, but helpful medicine nevertheless. The existentialists remind us, importantly, that there is a difference between believing that there is objective truth and, on the other hand, claiming to know exactly what that truth is. Relativists claim there is no truth (and shoot themselves in the logical foot – or head); tyrants and would-be tyrants claim to know exactly what the truth is, with no room for our knowledge to grow (and therefore no provision for sin). Christians must stand between these two poles, believing that the Truth is real and not dependent on our beliefs, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, that we see it only “in a glass, darkly” for now. If the Existentialists have anything in common, it is their insistence on just this point. If they sound like relativists, it is often because they are reacting to people who, in the name of (some false) Christianity or some other doctrine, have set themselves up as tyrants.
Cheers,
Laocoon
D.C.: The truth can very often be painful for those not used to hearing it. Whether or not our archbishop’s comment about the ship’s captain is original is immaterial. The meaning of his comment is germane to the message that he delivered; a message of salvation through belief in Christ.
D.C. I was there, it was obvious that the “sea captain” story was a joke. You see, not all of us are humorless, self absorbed and morose. Archbishop Venables spoke the Good News of Jesus Christ for the better part of 45 minutes. Earlier in the week I heard the Presiding Bishop of TEC hem and haw about social justice, justifying lawsuits and resting on the canons. One was distinctly hopeful, the other just a bunch of wind.
Yes, it is becoming a bit tiresome, hearing about “social justice, etc,” isn’t it? Nothing like hearing the truth from a true Man of God, is there?
Frreed [#8] writes: “One was distinctly hopeful, the other just a bunch of wind.” From what I can tell from reading +KJS and +Venables’ respective remarks, I agree with you — just not about which remarks were hopeful and which were a bunch of wind.
After hearing ++Venables on Saturday, I can’t imagine anyone not being hopeful….unless they don’t believe the Word of God written and Incarnate in His only son, Jesus.
(Well, for what it’s worth — and I’m no longer in the Episcopal Church OR the Diocese of Fort Worth — so I have nothing to lose of gain from this whole Venables thing.)
I have heard that seafaring story for years, and had always understood it to mean that the sea captain had to remind himself of something as basic as port and starboard because without it, no amount of experience at sea would guide that ship. Sort of like you can’t do trig and calculus if you don’t know addition and subtraction.
But that aside, the part that really bemused me more than anything was the introduction of “I knew a ship’s captain once.” The first thing I thought of when I read that was “He couldn’t have. Is he trying to make people think he did?” It would have been more accurate and truthful to have said, “There was one a ship’s captain” or “I knew OF a ship’s captain.” The way he said it could be quite deceptive. If I hadn’t heard the joke story from my own past, I would have believed Venables had known this ship’s captain. So, makes me a little suspect about the rest of his speech.
Existentialism is tied to Christianity at this one point: Morally, we are here alone, to do what is right or wrong as we choose. For morality to mean anything, our wills must be free; for them to be free, God cannot intervene in our choices. We cannot be puppets. And so we are alone, and our choices are whatever they are. This doesn’t mean that God is not present. Indeed He is only present. He has given us rules to live by and a son who is our model. Prayer does not lift the burden of our freedom from our shoulders. We may give our hearts to the Great Commandment, but when our neighbor’s wife invites us over to the pool, alone, and offers us a G and T, then we make up our minds and abide the consequences. Exactly as it must be. This freedom is at the very heart of existentialism and Christianity alike.
Larry
It’s obvious, Corie, that you’re not one of his supporters, and I also suspect that you may not be a reasserter. Am I correct?
D.C. and Corie: you are basing your entire argument on a transcript from someone’s notes. Archbishop Greg did not speak from a written text. If the transcriber slightly misheard his Essex accent (easy to do, believe me) and omitted the word “of” (as in ‘I knew [b]of[/b] a ship’s captain’) then your argument collapses.
Or have you heard a recording (give us the URL if you have)? Or were you, like ffreed (#8) present at the Convention?
Well, perhaps we can all agree that the difference between the theology of the PB as Primate of TEC and ++Venables as the Primate of the Southern Cone is as clear and stark as day and night, or perhaps port and starboard. That is, D.C in #10 above agrees with Frreed in #8 that one is “distinctly hopeful” and the other is “just a bunch of wind,” full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They just take opposite sides on which is which.
And my point is simply that this kind of fundamental disagreement dooms the AC as we know it. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Oil and water simply don’t mix. Neither do heaven and hell.
Needless to say, I am in emphatic agreement with ++Venables. Perhaps as an aspiring biblical scholar I’d nuance his simplified statement a little bit in terms of biblical interpretation, but he and I live on the same theological planet. The PB and I don’t. And that says it all.
Starboard is right. Port is left. Always has been. Always will be. The moral laws of God are alwo fundamentally unchangeable. They are written into creation itself. There is no room for compromise here.
That is why this New Reformation is absolutely necessary.
David Handy+
Cennydd:
I was a moderate Episcopalian in the Fort Worth suburbs who was dismayed by the Gene Robinson election, but couldn’t stand being under Bishop Iker. Sort of caught in the middle. Not liberal enough, but not conservative enough. I left and am now in a wonderful local congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
David Handy [#16] writes: “Starboard is right. Port is left. Always has been. Always will be. The moral laws of God are alwo fundamentally unchangeable. They are written into creation itself. There is no room for compromise here.”
David, you’re stretching the analogy past the breaking point. Starboard and port are labels, not laws of nature. They’re not written into creation; they’re useful to us only because we humans have pretty much universally agreed to their meaning.
It’s hard to argue that a given moral law is necessarily “of God,” at least in the absence of confirmation that is verifiably from God. The Muslims argue, sometimes homicidally, that their moral laws are laws of God, yet we reject many of their claims. The Shakers believed celibacy was a moral law of God (because Jesus was celibate). They’re practically extinct, and within a few centuries at most, both they and their moral law will almost certainly be forgotten; so much for their law being “of God.”
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not at all arguing for complete moral relativism. (To think that would be another example of the fallacy of the false dichotomy.) Many moral laws are also pragmatic ones; they seem indeed to be like laws of nature, in that over the long term, individuals and groups that follow such laws appear to have a better shot at surviving and reproducing. If we were to make a list of such laws, at the very top would be the Summary of the Law, fleshed out by the Ten Commandments, and their counterparts from other faiths.
(The pragmatism of a law, far from somehow making it less moral, should serve as evidence that the law might well indeed be “of God,” much more so than a mere human ipse dixit assertion.)
Handy, D.C.–
“Starboard is right, Port is left? Depends on whether you’re facing the bow or stern. Sail on sailors.
D.C. (#18), and Barrdu (#19),
What I was trying to say was not that “starboard” being on the right and “port” on the left was a law of nature. I guess I was too brief. Rather I was implying that the Christian moral tradition is rooted in “natural law” (as in the classic Catholic conception).
Now actually, when it comes to moral theology, in perhaps good Anglican fashion I combine the strengths of the philosophical tradition of “virtue ethics” (also known now as “character-based ethics”) that goes back to Aristotle with the “natural law” tradition of Aquinas and other Christian thinkers. That is NOT to say that I am a “foundationalist” as Aquinas was (if you are familiar with the modern debate between foundationalist and non-foundationalist approaches to theology).
But I am INSISTING that Paul was absolutely right when he roundly declared that homosexual behavior was “contrary to nature” (as in Rom. 1:24-27). That is the kind of thing I meant by asserting above that the moral laws of God are written into the universe itself. They are not merely matters of personal preference or at the whim of cultural values. Things are objectively right or wrong, regardless of our perceptions of them. And there is such a thing as divine revelation, and there are objective, universal moral principles.
David Handy+
Wow. Apparently a whole lot of people here do not sail – or they would understand that knowing how your ship is supposed to work under the winds is critical, and that knowing your starbord from your port is part of that essential knowledge.
DC: “It’s hard to argue that a given moral law is necessarily “of God,†at least in the absence of confirmation that is verifiably from God”
Venables: “It is about what God created and ordered.”
LIke I said, knowing how your ship was built to function…
The fact that the best criticism that the liberals can come up with is “That’s an old joke,” which frreed has already attested was a given in context, shows just how weak their arrguments are.
Well said David Handy…….
as a recent refugee Anglican lay person who is reaching out to minister the word of God (the truth), Archbishop Venables teachings in Fresco (Anglican TV video) was awesome, clear, on target and from a true man of God…
DC #19….its all about the word of God or THE TRUTH. You cannot win this argument with false teachings. We pray daily for you folks to someday see God’s salvation light. It will be on starboard
RE: “I agree with you — just not about which remarks were hopeful and which were a bunch of wind.”
Right — but that’s understandable, given the mutually opposing foundational worldviews of DC and frreed.
Given that both believe mutually contradictory gospels, whichever frreed deems to be a bunch of wind, DC will deem distinctly hopeful, and whichever one frred deems to be be distinctly hopeful, DC will deem a bunch of wind.
A nice demonstration — among thousands on this blog over the past four years — and completely consistent and unsurprising.
Actually, it’s port is
1) The left side of the boat from the perspective of a person at the stern of the boat, looking toward the bow. The opposite of starboard.
Coversely, starboard is
1) the right side of the boat from the perspective of a person at the stern of the boat, looking toward the bow.
So wen you are standing in the bow looking towards the stern, then starboard and port are reversed from your perspective, so if you are facing the captain who is facing the bow and he tells you to go starboard, you go to YOUR left, his right.
I think.
Then too, the legend behind the term POSH:
The much-repeated tale is that ‘Posh’ derives from the ‘port out, starboard home’ legend supposedly printed on tickets of passengers on P&O;(Peninsula and Orient) passenger vessels that travelled between UK and India in the days of the Raj. Britain and India are both in the northern hemisphere so the port (left-hand side) berths were mostly in the shade when travelling out (easterly) and the starboard ones when coming back. So the best and most expensive berths were POSH, hence the term.
(from [url=http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/port%20out%20starboard%20home.html]The Phrase Finder[/url]
Larry Morse/Laocoon:
Thanks so much for your commentary. If we could spend several evenings in a library with a cozy fireplace and comfortable furniture, we would find the conversation eternally intriguing.
I stand by my opinion, even though I might look as though I am stuck at one of the poles. Your insights, however, will allow me to communicate better. Thanks.
Don