Third Female "Bishop" Consecrated in GAFCON

Discussion in 'Anglican and Christian News' started by Carolinian, Sep 15, 2021.

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  1. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    None of this in any way disproves (or really even addresses) my contention that a nonbeliever is just as a capable of being a historian, and pursuing scholarship with integrity, as a believer is. A non-Christian can be just as good a weatherman, an astronaut, or a historian, as any Christian can be. I don’t think any reasonable person would argue the contrary.

    I have read a number of Ehrman’s works (though frankly the kind of detail I look for is usually more available in the works of other scholars like Wright and Sanders), and I find nothing insidious or deceptive in his overall project. He is quite transparent about his own personal journey in his writings (in ways that many scholars are not), and he goes out of his way to speak of it in positive terms while still making it clear how he ended up coming to the conclusions he did. If anything, he is a popularizer of biblical scholarship, and that’s a good thing. The content of his books doesn’t veer off the beaten path that other scholars have trod, and one can find his conclusions stated just as clearly in the works of other, less controversial scholars. I’m not sure why you picked him as an example, other than the fact that his transparency makes him something of a lightning rod to fundamentalists.

    I’m not sympathetic to any sort of retreat behind anti-intellectual fundamentalism. Burying one’s head in the sand and pretending the scholarship simply doesn’t exist is not an option for me. If there is something wrong with Ehrman’s scholarship, then produce evidence and provide arguments to demonstrate what’s wrong with it. Ehrman himself would be the first to say that no one scholar has the last word on these things, and obviously he is open to criticism or his own views would not have changed over time.
     
  2. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Your mistake lies in thinking that what goes on in universities is "intellectualism" of any kind. What goes on in universities these days is a giant gaseous load of complete nonsense for the most part, and opposition to it should be considered a sign of discernment and good sense, not "anti-intellectualism". A university education these days is a detriment to true intellectual growth (not to mention a huge waste of money). The rest of the world is finally catching onto the grift, thankfully.

    But I am derailing the thread (sorry, mods!), so I'll leave it at that.
     
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  3. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Yes of course, a nonbeliever is capable. You're raising red herrings. Obviously natural knowledge is just as available to a nonbeliever as to a Christian, and many secular scholars have done incredible work over the centuries. I'm not talking about some innate capacity, but the trends specifically in this our century.

    The point of referring to modern secular scholarship on Christianity as "heathen" is that it is heathen in intent, as well as in its scholars. Whereas someone like Aristotle was not heathen in intent, but proposed ideas very constructive to the Christian worldview, modern secular scholars consistently avow their intent to dismantle Christian claims, systematically, line by line, claim by claim. Bart Ehrman is a fantastic example which can stand for (almost) all non-Christian scholarship. In fact he can even stand in for some Christian scholarship, such as the Jesus Seminar folks (Spong and others) whose "scholarship" has revealed that Jesus hadn't actually existed.

    Treating "scholarship" as an idol, as if they in the academia are somehow more infallible or safe from original sin, is patently absurd. The secular scholars are even more prone to original sin than Christians. And in the modern polemical anti-Christian era, they are often explicitly anti-Christian in their scholarship.

    So you can trust these "heathen" scholars if you want. We can see where the last 70 years of the Episcopal Church trusting such scholars has led them. I will trust highly accredited and published orthodox Christian scholars, such as Kruger and others.
     
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  4. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    What does any of this have to do with what I've written in this thread? I didn't bring up Ehrman or cite him as a source, at all. I certainly never brought up the Jesus Seminar. I'm talking about established, mainstream scholarship that's been around for a long time and has broad recognition: E.P. Sanders, J.D.G. Dunn, Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, Paula Fredericksen, N.T. Wright, Jon Levenson, Alan Segal, Raymond Brown, etc. The only mainstream Anglican in that bunch that I can think of is Wright, and nobody accuses his scholarship of being "heathen". The obsession with "secular" scholarship is the real red herring here. Most mainstream Christian scholars accept the academic consensus regarding which NT books can claim Pauline authorship. That's got nothing to do with any idiosyncratic reliance on people like Ehrman or the Jesus Seminar, nothing at all. You can keep redirecting with ad hominem arguments if you like, but I think I stated as clearly as I know how above that questions of authorship are kind of a side issue at this point; those books are part of the canon regardless of who actually wrote them. Improved accuracy in terms of knowledge of their authorship may alter how we interpret some of those books within the broader NT context but that fact alone doesn't detract from the larger point that they are still 'canon'.
     
  5. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    It comes down to a question of authority of Scripture over individual and church practice. Orthodox Anglicanism asserts that Scripture is the supreme authority both inside and outside the church in the life of a believer (Articles VI, XIX, and XX of the 39 Articles). Particularly of note is the wording in Article XX ("Of the Authority of the Church"): "The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another." (Emphasis mine.)

    Many of us believe that WO violates these Articles of our faith, and is in contravention of Anglican Canon law (not to mention Biblical proscription). WO was imposed on the Church without due conciliar process, and the orthodox are under no obligation to accept it as valid unless and until such a conciliar process has taken place. The only way to resolve the issue is to halt the practice of WO until a conciliar consensus can be achieved while maintaining Biblical fealty.

    This problem is partly why Archbishop Beach's pastoral letter concerns me. He does not just represent ACNA in this matter, but GAFCON also (since he is also a Primate). This endless unwillingness to address WO out of fear of the inevitable fallout just makes the problem more intractable and a solution harder to reach. Clarity and firm action is needed.
     
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  6. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    Even if a council said WO was valid we can't do anything contrary to scripture so the council would be wrong
     
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  7. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    The only problem with that is that it’s not in fact contrary to Scripture. That’s precisely the point at issue. There is no “Thou shalt not…” statement in the Scriptures that says women cannot perform the simple functions required of an ordained leader in a church. You can’t cite the Mosaic covenant because the Christian Ministry is not a sacrificing priesthood, nor does Christianity have purity laws. You can’t cite the words of Christ in support of such a view because there simply aren’t any. What you have is an isolated statement in a letter - 1 Timothy - that is not a tabulation of laws (or a legal work of any kind), applied to a particular time and place, and concerning which a different apostle could have ruled differently. Reading it any other way is mixing genres and is sloppy exegesis. The consent of the community is the source of the legitimacy (or otherwise) of the practice. If the ACNA (including ACNA women) doesn’t want WO, then don’t practice it. Those of us who do approve it and practice it are not in any sense defying the Scriptures for doing so.
     
  8. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    I pointed out why this is wrong (and so have others), and yet you act as if this point has not been answered multiple times. It's not just 1 Timothy that is at issue here. This is not some one-off comment of Paul's in a single letter, nor is it Paul alone who advances it. Christ himself set the standard by choosing only men as Apostles, and giving them authority over his church once he ascended.

    The household codes expressed in Peter and Paul's epistles apply to female roles in church. How can a woman be a pastor of a church while at the same time deferring to her own husband, who would almost certainly be in the same congregation? It's ridiculous, and it takes a real effort of will to ignore these condtradictions when advocating for WO. You cannot escape the basic truth that the Bible does not teach an egalitarian message. Men and women are equal in salvation under Christ our Lord, but they have different roles to play in God's design. There is no "right" to pastoral service; it is a privilege and a calling, and is granted to males only, just as motherhood is a role granted to females only. The Bible teaches this basic lesson over and over and over again. This is not misogyny or whatever other -ist or -phobe neologism you wish to apply to it -- it is God's plan for human beings upon the earth. This renders it more than adiaphora, because it constitutes disobedience to God's will.
     
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  9. Matthew J Taylor

    Matthew J Taylor Member

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    To reduce opposition to WO to mere invocation of 1 Timothy is to argue in bad faith.
    Even if you do believe WO to be tolerable by scriptural witness, you are surely aware that the matter is not simply on how one reads a single verse but rather reflects a completely different understanding of biblical ecclesiology from the temple ramifications of Eden, through the priestly regulations of Israel, to the Incarnation of Christ, to the ministry of the Apostles to the establishment of the Church as we know it.
    To approve of WO means not only reading 1 Timothy in a different manner to the Church Catholicke but to read the totality of Scripture through a lens foreign to the Orthodox faith until a handful of decades ago.
     
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  10. Carolinian

    Carolinian Active Member Anglican

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    Welcome to the foray, Matthew!
     
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  11. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    The writings of Peter, Paul, and whoever wrote 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, are letters. They are not law codes, they are not written as law codes, they do not resemble law codes, and they were not meant to be interpreted as law codes. To treat them as though they nonetheless are law codes is mixing genres and is bad exegesis.

    What you have described with the “household codes” is a state of affairs and model of family structure that simply doesn’t fit the enlightened modern values that most of us take for granted every day in most (if not all) areas of our lives, and thus is something I personally have no interest in emulating. What the author of 1 Timothy, whoever he was, described may have been workable (if still unequal) in the first century Greco-Roman world, but it has no value in the 21st century when most households are two-income, and in many of those cases the woman is actually the primary breadwinner.

    Egalitarianism is a positive value rooted in fundamental principles of justice, to which religious practice should conform as much as possible, not something that should be curtailed for the sake of recreating a first century social situation. The Bible condones slavery but no modern Christian in the Western world that I know of condones the institution today, because we as a society decided we really meant it when we said “all men are created equal”. Some people are so convinced of it now that they even try to interpret slavery away from the Bible, even though it’s plainly there (and in the actual law codes). We’re all egalitarians now. What justifies applying a standard of basic equality to slavery but not women? I can’t think of anything, and I don’t believe that fact is something I should have to defend in the 21st century Anglophone world. But if so, whatever: you guys can do things your way, and we’ll do things our way.
     
  12. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    No “bad faith” is involved. I dealt with those other issues above and in other threads. They’re not cogent. The argument from absence in the tradition only works from our current vantage point. 10,000 years from now, people in the Church will look to what’s been done over the last century or so and say, “wow, those precedents are from the first two thousand years of Church history, and the Church is 12,000 years old now, so that’s quite early.”

    I do not understand the single-minded obsession with this issue. For mere laymen to declare on their own personal authority, without any deference to the community that desired and approved it, that an ordained bishop isn’t really a bishop is arrogant and offensive. It’s also unbalanced and is indicative of a severe loss of perspective.
     
  13. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    It's not this issue only. We have the same obsession and resistance to the embrace of sodomy that happened in the Episcopal Church. And previously (our predecessors) had the same obsession and resistance to the allowance of divorce, contraception, and abortion. You don't seem to get it: we stand for the whole, of-a-piece, coherent Christian worldview, and we oppose all things which seek to undermine that.

    Behind us stand ordained deacons, priests, and bishops, who have stood heroically for this and other issues, and resisted, to great personal suffering, threats, deprivations. For instance Rev. Matt Kennedy's congregation in Binghamton NY: the Episcopal Church stripped them of the building, personally sued him and stripped him of finances, pensions, or any means of supporting his family. The church building which they seized, they then refused to sell it to them (after they raised funds through unimaginably self-sacrifices). And then, TEC sold it to nearby muslims, who forthwith converted this church building into a mosque.

    There are countless stories of faithful and heroic clergy who stuck a stick in the wheels of TEC heresy over the last decades, and all of them have been systematically destroyed, crushed, ground down, sued to oblivion. There have been many stories in the last 10 years where when a congregation objected to a TEC policy, then the national TEC leadership sued every single member of the congregation, and tried to destroy them all personally. In Ft. Worth, when a congregation objected to national TEC policies, they came in and destroyed everything inside:

    ALL SAINTS.png

    You seem to be quite uninformed about the specifics of the last the last 30 years of battle. It wasn't a bunch of us laymen on some online forum, who have waged battle on this issue. It's been clergy, who gave up life pensions, who were sued into bankruptcy, churches wholly ransacked, congregations ground into nothing.


    Again you seem to be quite ignorant of how the issue of WO first emerged. The Philadelphia Eleven were illegally consecrated, in direct violation of church canons and the wishes of the entire Anglican Communion. Same with the similar trajectory in the Church of England: utter lies, deceit, manipulation of voter rolls, and mass criminal deception by activists hell-bent on subverting the Church.
     
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  14. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    You are using the word "enlightened" improperly. Whatever the modern culture is, it is so far from "enlightened" that it's impossible to overstate how far it really is. We live in a morally, spiritually, and ethically dead culture. Whatever heights our scientific achievements reach, they cannot touch the abysses of sin and excess we have sunk to. The worst sink-holes of pagan Babylon and Assyria cannot touch our modern world for wickedness.
     
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  15. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    That is incorrect. It recognizes slavery as a fact of life, as it did polygamy. But the Bible never condones it, and in fact instituted an ethic that in time led to its abolition in what we used to call Christendom. Polygamy, like other barbaric practices such as infanticide, was a legacy of the pagan world that the Hebrews were never able to let go of completely (and were duly punished for).
     
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  16. Phoenix

    Phoenix Moderator Staff Member Anglican

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    This thread has gone around in circles, so let's call it a day here.
     
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