Moral Relativism and the Episcopal Church

The Washington Post runs this morning with a lavish puff piece this morning on Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schiori. This reportorial wet kiss starts out innocently enough:

On June 18, the Episcopal Church's General Convention elected Jefferts Schori to a nine-year term as the denomination's presiding bishop, making her the first woman to head any branch of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide family of churches descended from the Church of England.

However, we next get the "but" sentence, first perfected by the Wall Street Journal, upon which the controversy in this article turns.

Although she will not take up her new role until November, six U.S. dioceses already have rejected her authority, and that number is rising.

Schiori (we won't go with the double last name which is, 90% of the time, a badge of proclamation, denoting that the female is a leftie), it turns out, is a former Catholic, who apparently woke up one day and discovered that the situation-ethics theologians who long ago took over the Episcopal church in this country were much more lovable than stodgy Catholic neanderthals who stubbornly refuse to cut their dogmatic cloth to fit today's fashions. She is obviously brilliant, of course, as all lefties are, particularly when they're academics—which ain't tough as no conservative can be hired today to teach college.

Trained as a scientist as well as a theologian, she entered the priesthood relatively late in life, 12 years ago, after an initial career as an oceanographer specializing in octopuses and squids. Her husband is a retired professor of theoretical mathematics, and they have a daughter serving in the Air Force.

Clever daughter. She saw it coming and got out early. But back to the towering intellect:

The Rev. Ian T. Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said Jefferts Schori edged out six other candidates for presiding bishop because she is not only "whip smart" but also "very methodical, clear and measured" in her thinking.

Apparently, "methodical, clear and measured" thinking is Professor Douglas' euphemism for heresy. As regards the Bishop's commitment to Christian theology, check out the following if you doubt our word:

To those who accuse her of heresy for referring to a female Jesus, she responds with a typically learned disquisition on medieval mystics and saints who used similar language, including Julian of Norwich and St. Teresa of Avila. "I was trying to say that the work of the cross was in some ways like giving birth to a new creation," she said. "That is straight-down-the-middle orthodox theology."

Right. Declaring Jesus is a female is "straight-down-the-middle orthodox theology." Ask the Pope. Better yet, ask the Archbishop of Canterbury. Is this sort of like trying to discover what the definition of "is" is?

Yet she acknowledged that she likes to shake people up a bit.

Oh, okay. But maybe she likes to do more than shake things up. Maybe we'd have more converts to Episcopalianism today if the American church made explicit its implicit support for moral relativism:"All language is metaphorical, and if we insist that particular words have only one meaning and the way we understand those words is the only possible interpretation, we have elevated that text to an idol," she said in a telephone interview. "I'm encouraging people to look beyond their favorite understandings."So let's see. As a Roman Catholic, I believe that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin May, suffered, died and was buried and arose on the third day according to the scriptures. (I trust that my snippet of the Nicene Creed is mostly correct here.) So what I just stated, is this my "favorite understanding?" Or is it part of the bedrock of the Catholic Church? One assumes that when one recites one's creed that that creed is, in fact, the position of his or her religion and therefore the position of faith, correct? But are we now to understand that this is merely our "favorite understanding?" Maybe I should change my understanding and worship the Jesus that we see on "South Park." Maybe that would be a little more hip, do you think? The old Jesus was kind of boring anyway.

That seems to be what the Bishop is saying. For it is only in wrapping the Bible and the language of faith into a relativistic document that could possibly allow us to imagine that Jesus was a girl. But say, shouldn't we be broad minded enough (no pun intended) to imagine that? After all, maybe our belief that Jesus was a guy is also merely another of our "favorite understandings." And, perhaps worse, maybe now that "favorite understanding" has "elevated that text to an idol." And we know what good Jews and Christians do to idols, don't we?

The "idol" comment deserves at least a sentence or two as well, as it's a clever adaptation of the classic Stalinist tactic of implied (or explicit) slander and name-calling in order to discredit the opposition.

One of the worst things you can kid a fundamentalist Christian about is the notion of "idols" or idolatry which is one of the reasons why a great many Protestant sects broke with the Catholic church centuries ago. These early fundamentalists regarded the increasingly elaborate church structures, statues, and stained glass windows as verging on idolatry, and detested what they saw as a clearly secular tendency. Thus, by citing this important concept, the Bishop appears to side with the fundamentalists. But this itself is a false idol. For by employing this fighting word, she is doing what lefty politicoes always do to conservatives when cornered by their own illogic. They call their opponents "racists" and "imperialists" which therefore makes them so and terminates further argument since it now transforms your antagonist into the topic of the discussion rather than your own false Marxist dogma, thus getting you off the hook. The Bishop here effectively declares traditional church dogma as an "idol" thus transforming all who believe in it into idolators. When, in fact, it is she who clearly worships the false idol of Marxism, having anointed herself with the Sacrament of Moral Relativism. A nice trick but we spotted it here, Bish.

Fortunately, not all of the Episcopal faith are subscribing to the same kind of moral relativism that drove the majority of the church's bishops to carry through the dispicable act of electing as New Hampshire bishop a gay man who'd divorced his wife after generating a family and living a lie for years. Gayness aside, this is some qualification for being a bishop, eh? Schori's phony theology is just another version of the same flavor. This is all about politics. It has nothing to do with religion, except for the fact that, by subverting and eviscerating religion, the leftists who control the Episcopal Church are closely observing the tenets of Marxism as preached by Antonio Gramsci, who instructed the left to subvert and destroy, one by one, all the religious, political, and cultural structures that supported capitalism. It is clearly this particular article of faith that is most important to Schori and others of her ilk.

In any event, here's a succinct rebuttal from a real Episcopal clergyman which doesn't really need much elaboration:

Jefferts Schori's "all language is metaphorical" approach is a giant red flag to traditionalists at home and abroad who believe that the Episcopal Church is heading toward schism because it has departed from the plain words of the Bible.

"The incoming presiding bishop has made her positions very clear -- that she is committed to the new agenda, committed to same-sex blessings, committed to having same-sex partners in the leadership in the church -- which means she is also not committed to the faith as delivered to the saints," said Bishop Robert W. Duncan of Pittsburgh.

Read the rest of the article here.

The Post gives a smug Schiori the last word, and it's telling:

The message of her election, she said, is not that Episcopalians don't care what other Anglicans think, but "that we're more interested in feeding hungry people and relieving suffering than we are in arguing about what gender someone is or what sexual orientation someone has."

Translation: "We don't care what those fuddy-duddies in the real Anglican Church confess and believe. We'll do what we please because we're leftists and smarter than a whip. Let's feed the hungry and relieve suffering so we can proclaim our lefty sainthood on earth. And to hell with the religion we're supposed to be preaching. Who needs it when all the articles of that faith as well as its foundational documents are metaphors?" Schori here is enthusiastically playing the Pharisee to us Republicans, I guess.

We at HazZzMat could write quite a lot on the Bishop's fallacious theological reasoning here, but the blogosphere doesn't like long pieces and this one is already stretching it. But it's clear that this increasing habit in the Episcopal Church hierarchy of putting church assets in service to Marxist ideology, where organized religion is regarded as bad and where everything else is relative, has effectively eviscerated that Church in this country. We are witnessing here something that is almost beyond comprehension: a true schism that is being led not by a small band of disaffected wackos but by the hierarchy of an organized religion. In this case, it is precisely those disgruntled followers who are standing at one with their religion, even as the majority of its leaders in this country have abandoned it in favor of cynical, feel-good politics.

Those professing the true faith, who desire communion and unity with their fellow Anglican throughout the world, will continue to effectively secede from the established Episcopal Church which is even now arguably the most swiftly shrinking of all Christian denominations in the US. Perhaps that's because the majority of the American Episcopal hierarchy has abandoned their longstanding faith only to replace it with a flabby secular humanism that embodies not tradition and dogma based on a belief in Christ the King (not Queen), but merely the "favorite understandings" of Karl Marx.