We are grateful that the Presiding Bishop has sought to ground her appeal to diversity and new truth in a public message available for the Church\u2019s evaluation and testing. It explains what kind of vision for the Episcopal Church she is seeking to defend. On the one hand, she believes the Holy Spirit has spoken in truthful and special (timely) ways to those who share this view in TEC. On the other hand, she believes diversity on this matter is equally a gifting warranted by the pentecostal event, explaining why the majority of the Anglican Communion and the vast preponderance of Christians worldwide (including the saints numbered on another shore) attended and attend to different Holy Spirit guidance and a different confession of God the Holy Spirit, \u201cwho spake by the prophets\u201d\u00a6who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.\u201d\u009d Her remarks help frame the matter in clear ways, which we can only pray is itself a gift of God the Holy Spirit, whose vocation is to glorify Christ and convict the world in respect of him. St Paul reveals that appeals to the Spirit and the Spirit\u2019s manifestation required testing in the earliest Christian Churches, especially those with large gentile numbers. Discerning the work and person of God the Holy Spirit was necessary and was an evangelical challenge.<\/p>\n
John and Acts provide the record given to the church so that the Holy Spirit\u2019s work might be recognised, adjudicated, and confessed. The Holy Spirit\u2019s deliverances are those of the Risen and Ascended Christ, in agreement with the providential will of the Father as expressed in the Law and the Prophets, whose subject matter is Christ, latent and now patent (St Augustine). The Presiding Bishop\u2019s account of the Spirit as bringing a truth without prior testimony or dominical warrant, which at the same time gives rise to diversity as a pentecostal gift, diverges in extreme ways from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles. It is a teaching lacking continuity and agreement with the witness of Christians in our present day, in the worldwide body, and because without biblical warrant, it is also nowhere attested in the history of the church\u2019s teaching.<\/p>\n
We conclude this teaching comes from a conviction already held, independently of what is customarily sought in respect of a warrant of God the Holy Spirit (see the Catechism of the BCP), because of cultural assumptions about the intentions of sexual activity in our age and because TEC has already acted on these.<\/p>\n