Having issued statements on the ongoing genocide in Sudan and the ongoing discussions on human sexuality in the Anglican Communion, it was not genocide but sexuality that was the focus of the Sudanese primate’s briefing to the media.
In the press conference on Tuesday afternoon, the Primate of the Sudan (the Most Rev. Dr. Daniel Deng Bul) called for the resignation of the Bishop of New Hampshire, declaring in the statement released ahead of the press conference that he had come to the Lambeth Conference “to take the necessary steps to safeguard the precious unity of the Church.”
When asked about ministering to the gays and lesbians in his province, the archbishop declared that he did not think there were any homosexuals in the Sudan as “none had come forward.” And when queried about his position on the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate said he “believed in women priests and bishops because they were human” ”“ leaving listeners to wonder if the inference was that homosexuals were not.
Did I miss the “women are human” remark? The report that I read quoted the bishop as saying something to the effect that women had ministered with and to Jesus.
[blockquote] …when queried about his position on the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate said he “believed in women priests and bishops because they were human†– leaving listeners to wonder if the inference was that homosexuals were not.[/blockquote]
Integrity’s statement is deceptive at best and an outright lie at worst. As Cherie Wetzel noted, Bp Deng began his remarks by noting “He [Bp. Robinson] is a human being…”
The group known as Integrity has none…
Again, here is the link to Ms. Wetzel’s report:
http://tinyurl.com/6qrcy2
Please pardon me for being redundant (hopefully not pedantic) but how can anyone who read the Archbishop’s entire statement “wonder if the inference was that homosexuals were not [human]”?
“Gene Robinson should resign for the sake of the Church and the entire Anglican Communion. We are pleading with them (the others at this conference) for the Anglican World, to not throw that away.
[b] “We do not want to throw any people away, either. [/b] But we are here to determine how to remain united. That begins with forgiving one another for errors made. Gene Robinson is an error. The American church has not admitted they are wrong and we cannot forgive them until they do….[b] He is a human being and we are not throwing him away [/b] but the norms of the Anglican Communion have been violated….”
Integrity has no Integrity. It’s that simple.
This statement is at best mendacious and at worst an outright lie.
ICXC NIKA
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
[blockquote]When asked if he knows any gay people in the Sudan he replied, “They have not come to the surface. We do not have them.†The press from TEC that were in the room did not laugh out loud at this statement, but nearly.[/blockquote]
I wondered about this when I read it. Unfortunately, Ms(?) Wetzel left the questions out of her report and provided only Fr. Bul’s remarks.
I am very curious whether the question referred to “homosexuals” or to “gays”, and I wonder whether the two words have different connotations in the Sudan. I though it was odd the way Susan Russell went back and forth between the two words in her statement. Unfortunately, the homosexuality industry has earned a great deal of mistrust, and an added layer of disingenuity would be consistent with the other misrepresentations in her posting.
What is news is that a bishop in the Church of God would deny the existence of gay and lesbian members of his province despite the call for listening to the experience of homosexual people throughout the communion.
Unfortunately Susan+, this is not news. ++Akinola has made the same statement about members of his Province.
Brian …which is why we’re producing “Voices of Witness: Africa” … previewing here in Canterbury tomorrow night.
All you need is LOVE “. . . hard-line reactionaries who will stop of nothing short of compliance with their narrow, exclusionist agenda . . .” All you need is LOVE.
What a wonderful day at Lambeth.
All is well because all you need is LOVE.
Oh, well what about Lambeth 98?
I can hear it now: Narrow exclusionist!!!!!!!!
Oh no! Another Akinola. Something must be in the water. Fly him to San Fran ASAP so he can get caught up to date on the reality of things in the Communion. Did we really hear what he was saying, Brian and Susan?? I don’t think so.
ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE NOTA BENE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ==>
Episcopal Cafe is reporting here that:
“‘Gene Robinson should just go away from the Anglican world and be a normal Christian,’ said Deng.”
Is there any other confirmation of this as a direct quote of ++Deng Bul? I’ve looked through what I can find, and haven’t seen this mentioned elsewhere. If I’m blind, *please* respond with another reference for this. Thx.
#9 – since you have taken the time/trouble to read and post a comment… I think the suggestion that the Integrity statement seriously misrepresents to the point of outright dishonesty what the Archbishop said requires also a response!
The archbishop specifically stated Gene Robinson is a human being. The archbishop in no way left open the question whether he thinks GLBT persons are human. This is not opinion or interpretation – I dare say these are facts. Here in the age of the Internet we can read and compare the statements for ourselves – and there is a glaring difference between what the Archbishop actually said and how Integrity characterizes that statement. Some have described that glaring difference as a “mendacious lie”. Well?
It is one thing for me to disagree “respectfully” with revisionists. But if Susan Russell does not respond more fully… I am not sure how much I can continue to maintain any respect. I trust that is clear enough. (Even if it matters not.) Say the Archbishop is wrong if you wish. Well and fine. But do not lie. Do not misrepresent the words of others. Particularly people whose – oh what’s that word again? – [i]context[/i] is so radically different.
You/they want conservatives to listen to them? Then extend the same courtesy of [i]listening[/i] with integrity(!) to our African brothers and sisters including this archbishop.
Update: I submitted a question on Episcopal Cafe asking for a web or print source to confirm the quote I mentioned in #12 above. Posts to that blog entry are held for approval of the owner. I’ll check back to see if it gets approved for posting, and if there is a reply.
Ruth Gledhill has posted portions of the press conference on-line here at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lPnu8zVJ2k
Unfortunately, it is pretty heavily edited. Still she is to be commended for doing this service.
#12 – this quotation appears to be correct, although I have trouble hearing exactly what was said. (Nor would I read into it anything malign – it is clear we are listening to a very bright man struggling to express himself in a second language.) Also, as I noted, the video is pretty heavily edited, so we don’t know exactly what was said – it cuts off immediately after the word “Christian” and could be a cut in mid-sentence.* Cherie writes this up as “Let the Anglican world be united and be a normal, respected Christian body”
Listen to the edited clip at about the 1:22 mark and make up your own mind.
—–
*An attorney friend of mine once told me about a 60 Minutes expose of Oral Roberts (who I have no great love for, but nevertheless, this story illustrates the point). The correspondent was shown asking Oral Robert’s brother “Does Oral Roberts heal people?” To which the brother replied: “No” and he paused and smiled. Apparently, what was left on the editing room floor was the continuation of the brother’s pregnant pause: “— God does.”
Having done video depositions and seen what can be done with them, I know you’ve got to get the entire statement to really know what was being communicated.
Typical. To major-league narcissists like Miss Russell and Integrity, there is one measure of morality and only one. Nothing else matters except that the church is no longer to consider homosexual sex to be the sinful act that it quite clearly is.
Akinola ain’t there and people still oppose the reappraisers single gozpell. This clearly does not set well with reappraisers and they need to manufacture a new scapegoat overnight. shouldn’t be a problem since they’re not tied to absolute truth, anyway. It’s all relative, ain’t it? How can Susan impose her views on another culture? Thought that was supposed to be really bad, but only if it works against hers, right?
Thank you William P Sulik! My most careful transcript of the quotation in question, taken from an edited snippet at run time approx. 1:23 to 1:31 in the Ruth Gledhill YouTube posting, is:
“What we want is that Gene Robinson have to be away from the Anglican world, and be a normal Christian.”
I believe this has a different connotation than the quotation posted on Episcopal Cafe, but others might disagree. I have little experience in speaking with people from East Africa for whom English may not be their native language.
#19 – I took “normal” to mean “no longer a bishop” – a normal Christian as in one in the pews, like most of us, not one at the altar. I don’t think it was meant as a reflection on +Robinson’s homosexual behaviour, but rather on his status as a consecrated bishop in the Anglican Communion. (But I could be wrong!)
Regarding the comments that the bishop lied, I doubt it. I lived in the Middle East off and on for 12 years. First, I have personally known many persecuted Sudanese Christian refugees. Their personal strength and integrity would make most Westerners wither away. In the USA I was molested by homosexuals as a child. My wife’s brother also, as well as her father. The pain and suffering they have caused due to their sinful acts damaged many dear people I know. Now in my 60’s and attending a conservative Christian bible-believing church (I left ECUSA in 2003), I can honestly say that I personally do not know any homosexual person. There may be some, but they have the good sense to not bring it up around me. Yes, I do believe the bishop. In his part of the world, homosexual behaviour is still an abomination, as it should be everywhere.
Notice how the homosexual lobby ties itself to women’s ordination. They know what so many refuse to admit. The same theological presuppositions underpin both W/O and LGBT/O. Sudan’s Primate is a wonderful man but his argument is defeated by his support of w/o. When oh when will the orthodox awaken to this reality.
It is not enough to simply return to the wonderful world of the 1970’s. We must return all the way to the historic, traditional, apostolic Christian faith. Every compromise with modernity hurts our church – especially w/o. No one can defend w/o without sewing the seeds of his own failure against LGBT/O!
Please, listen to reason before it is too late! I am begging! There is no faithful defense of W/O! Any more than there is a faithful defense of homosexual ordination!
Is anybody listening?
[i] Let’s return to commenting on the original post, please. [/i]
Dear elves, the reasseters attack the person, not the issue, and we defend him. He is truly great and strong man of courage and personal integrity who has been called a liar. But, you are, as always, right. Pax.
Susan Russell: “What is news is that the Archbishop of the Sudan helped make the case on Tuesday that the schism facing the Anglican Communion is the direct result of hard-line reactionaries who will stop of nothing short of compliance with their narrow, exclusionist agenda as their criterion for being in communion.”
There truly is nothing new under the sun. Read Jeremiah ch. 44. The Russellites of Jeremiahs day speak in verses 15 through 19.
By the way, RazorbackPadre-I’m with you all the way.
Re 22
RazorbackPadre,
The Orthodox and the Romans have been saying this for years. reminds me of the lines from the great song Vincent (Starry Starry Night) by Don Mclean
[blockquote] Now I understand what you tried to say to me
How you suffered for you sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen they did not know how, perhaps they’ll listen now
…Now I think I know what you tried to say to me
How you suffered for you sanity How you tried to set them free
They would not listen they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will. [/blockquote]
ICXC NIKA
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
I think the bigot card is being played way too strong here. I suggest the wrong question is being asked and that underlying the Archbishop’s answer may be a very significant cultural difference. What I mean is that, is the Archbishop were to be asked if there were sinners who did such and such then you might get quite a different answer. But asking him are there gay people – may be asking him, are there people in your culture who construct their identity as does the gay community in the Western world? To which the reasonable answer may be “No, I don’t know of any.”
I know the Elves edit very swiftly and strongly when Women’s Ordination comes up, but in this case the WO question is the elephant in the room and an issue that Bishop Deng has addressed in his own statement.
Thus the problem–if indeed this is about the sole “wedge issue” of Bishop Robinson, then reasserters can rally around Bishop Deng (I saw him praised in another thread as “another Akinola!”).
But of course it isn’t that simple. As Bishop Deng put it, “The Bible changes the culture; the culture doesn’t change the Bible.”
Yet WO is a 20 year old innovation in a church that has almost 2000 years of history–and many people (including some reasserting bishops) would cite WO as a prime example of “the culture changing the Bible.”
So while it isn’t surprising that Integrity has weighed in with a rather silly condemnation, the Integrity statement’s connection of homosexuality and WO raises a point–isn’t WO the next wedge issue, temporarily swept under the rug because the homosexuality controversy seems so totalizing?
Unfortunately, instead of an intelligent explication of the connection Integrity takes the Bishop to task for failing at “the listening process.” Hey, I’m a pretty progressive guy, but the Bishop of the Sudan–the famine-cursed, civil war riven, drought-stricken, impoverished SUDAN–gets a pass from me. The man can be forgiven for not making time to listen to the unique stories of western homosexuals.
Susan Russell, color me an anti-WO, obstructionist, narrow-minded, traditionalist orthodox Anglo Catholic…..and proud of it. And I’m not a homophobe. Several relatives happen to be homosexual, yet I’m not phobic about it.
The ENS now has the Sudanese archbishop’s appearance before the media in two videos linked from [url=http://episcopalchurch.org/89878_97371_ENG_HTM.htm]this page[/url] (which itself is a long document with multiple “internal pages”).
I understood him to justify his support of WO with mention, in so many words, that the first Resurrection appearance was to a woman. (He did not mention Mary Magdalene by name.)
The problem with the good Archbishop’s defense of WO is that it has no theological substance and does not deal at all with the objections to women in holy orders that have been held for centuries. His argument is against a strawman. No opponenet of WO has ever argued against the humanity of women or been argued that the male priesthood had anything to do with to whom Jesus appeared. The harmony between the homosexualists and the pro-WO conservatives lies not just in the rejection of the normativeness of the universal Tradition of the church and in the contortions given to the simple and plain reading of Scripture, and to the imaginative hypothetical contexts to explain the “difficult” passages, but it also lies in the similarly facile and simplistic defenses offered as if the issue was no big deal and no more serious defense was required. This attitude flows from an assumption that WO is a matter of adiaphora, despite the firm beliefs of some in the church, albeit a minority, that it is most definitely not adiaphora. Such presumption is little different than the argument that homosexual ministers and marriages shouldn’t be a communion dividing issue. The argument is a political rather than theological one, and it undergirds both ++Rowan’s statement that the Communion is not now accepting of these new beliefs with regard to sexual acts AND TEC’s belief that it only needs to push the Communion a little more and a little longer until a bare majority does accept the new TEC morality, or at least the new TEC standard for what is adiaphora and what isn’t.
Benign though the Global South’s acceptance/tolerance of WO may appear, it is a hermeneutical seed that will grow up to be a weed choking off the good seed of orthodoxy planted in the same soil. It is a hermeneutic that presumes that TRUTH, the true understanding of the Gospel and Scripture, is ultimately determined by a political vote of the time. One can view all of church history through such a lens and justify creedal orthodoxy by the fact that the majority of the church has affirmed it through the Councils. But such a belief collapses completely for Anglicans when we come to the Reformation. Liberal Anglicanism defends gay ordination, et al, by appealing to nothing older than its own thinking. But the conservative Protestants of the Global South are effectually doing the same thing with regard to WO. You cannot claim on your own authority the freedom to change the church in one area without giving others the justification for fighting for a similar freedom in another area. Appeals to the universal witness of the church with regard to marriage and sex must be grounded in a broader willingness to be bound to the universal witness and practice of the church (the whole church, not just our part of it) in all areas. If not, conservative opponents of the present difficulties will have no ability of achieving anything more than a revived conservatism in a rationalistic politically organized religious body. It will only be to move us back up the slope without removing any of the grease that allowed us to slide as far as we have.
The problem with the good Archbishop’s defense of WO is that it has no theological substance and does not deal at all with the objections to women in holy orders that have been held for centuries. His argument is against a strawman. No opponenet of WO has ever argued against the humanity of women or been argued that the male priesthood had anything to do with to whom Jesus appeared. The harmony between the homosexualists and the pro-WO conservatives lies not just in the rejection of the normativeness of the universal Tradition of the church and in the contortions given to the simple and plain reading of Scripture, and to the imaginative hypothetical contexts to explain the “difficult” passages, but it also lies in the similarly facile and simplistic defenses offered as if the issue was no big deal and no more serious defense was required. This attitude flows from an assumption that WO is a matter of adiaphora, despite the firm beliefs of some in the church, albeit a minority, that it is most definitely not adiaphora. Such presumption is little different than the argument that homosexual ministers and marriages shouldn’t be a communion dividing issue. The argument is a political rather than theological one, and it undergirds both ++Rowan’s statement that the Communion is not now accepting of these new beliefs with regard to sexual acts AND TEC’s belief that it only needs to push the Communion a little more and a little longer until a bare majority does accept the new TEC morality, or at least the new TEC standard for what is adiaphora and what isn’t.
Benign though the Global South’s acceptance/tolerance of WO may appear, it is a hermeneutical seed that will grow up to be a weed choking off the good seed of orthodoxy planted in the same soil. It is a hermeneutic that presumes that TRUTH, the true understanding of the Gospel and Scripture, is ultimately determined by a political vote of the time. One can view all of church history through such a lens and justify creedal orthodoxy by the fact that the majority of the church has affirmed it through the Councils. But such a belief collapses completely for Anglicans when we come to the Reformation. Liberal Anglicanism defends gay ordination, et al, by appealing to nothing older than its own thinking. But the conservative Protestants of the Global South are effectually doing the same thing with regard to WO. You cannot claim on your own authority the freedom to change the church in one area without giving others the justification for fighting for a similar freedom in another area. Appeals to the universal witness of the church with regard to marriage and sex must be grounded in a broader willingness to be bound to the universal witness and practice of the church (the whole church, not just our part of it) in all areas. If not, conservative opponents of the present difficulties will have no ability of achieving anything more than a revived conservatism in a rationalistic politically organized religious body. It will only be to move us back up the slope without removing any of the grease that allowed us to slide as far as we have.