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The Bible and Prop. Eight by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy It started innocently enough. A congenial lunch with a lay leader affiliated with a distinctly American, post-Protestant church at which we were discussing how our two faith traditions differed on questions of authority. I had tediously explained that for Anglicans and Episcopalians, we sought to live out of a tradition articulated by Richard Hooker, perhaps the greatest philosophical theologian in Anglican Church history. In reaction to the battle cry of England's brand of radical protestants (the Puritans): "sola scriptura" (scripture alone), Hooker in 1534 described a diffuse source of authority which he visualized as a "three legged stool." The three legs of that stool are scripture, tradition (teaching) and reason (including experience). He argued that each source of truth balanced the other two and just as a stool missing one of its three legs could not support a person, so truth needed to be seen as a dialogue between these three. My companion asked, wisely, if the three legs had "equal weight" and I admitted, as Hooker had, that scripture was primary, but always interpreted in the light of critical scholarship and human experience (reason) and church teaching, beginning with the apostles and continuing down to the pronouncements of the church's councils of today (e.g. General Convention). My companion, undaunted, replied: "Well, if scripture is central, how do the Episcopal bishops in California justify defying the bible on Prop. 8?" (Proposition 8 on the November ballot, if approved, would rescind the right of same sex couples to marry here in the State of California.) For conservative Christians, the bible clearly and unambiguously condemns homosexuality (in a handful of debatable proof texts) and therefore, our Bishops are guilty of heresy. Now, without rehashing tired arguments about the meaning of ancient texts here in "Ebb and Flow", I was amazed that my rather concise but detailed description of Anglican comprehensiveness had absolutely no impact on my lunchtime partner. I was quite willing to arrive at a draw. To say, in effect, that because of our very different histories as denominations, we simply read scripture differently. "I am quite willing to allow you to believe as you do, just so long as I am allowed to believe as I do." But he would have none of it. I was reminded of the conversation which was the topic for the men's fellowship earlier that week. The question was asked by our facilitator about whether or not some people need to take the Bible literally. He was mystified about how he had observed, in his career as an educator, that people are quite willing and able to read literature metaphorically but could not read the Bible in the same way. The LA Times had published an article some days previous in which it was suggested that some people are pre-wired to be conservatives and some liberals. Were people "wired" to be biblical literalists? Why is it that some people cannot, it seems, read the Bible as literature? Provocative questions to be sure. Those who take a more conservative viewpoint would immediately respond that the Bible is a book but that it is in no way literature, if what we mean by literature is a text written by human agency. For literalist Christians, the Bible is a text written by God and revealed through human beings (e.g. the four evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). If the Bible is not the revealed "Word of God," it loses its moral power. For this reason, the Bible needs to be read differently from other books. Perhaps. But if the framework by which you approach the Bible is by definition different because the Bible is different and inerrant, how does one deal with inconsistencies and outright contradictions? The easiest way is with "slipping cogs." Our speaker told a story of a discussion he had with a fundamentalist about the inconsistencies between the two Genesis creation stories only to be amazed that this man never realized that there are two (see Genesis 1:1-2:4 vs. Genesis 2:5 -25). How could a well-educated college student not realize that there are two creation stories? Easily enough if you blend the two into one. Kurt Vonnegut once argued that people deal with dissonance by the use of mental cogs - as the wheels turn, the teeth mesh effortlessly into each other but that those things which don't fit into the mental pattern are like one wheel missing a tooth - the wheels hesitate momentarily and then grind on as if there was no inconsistency. Any generic children's Christmas pageant in any congregation whatsoever easily blends two very different Nativity stories into one: shepherds from Luke and Wise Men from Matthew. The cogs slip and the wheels keeps turning. Christmas plays are harmless enough but what do we do with "slaves be obedient to the men who are your masters in this world" (Colossians 3:22) and "there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28)? If you were a slave-holding Christian in the Old South, you preached the first and ignored the second. And the cogs of antebellum industry kept moving. It is not a stretch to suggest that how one reads the Bible - or rather, makes use of the scriptures they read - is predetermined by one's worldview. The religious right - including my meal companion - is hyper sensitive about sexuality issues: abortion and homosexuality; although the Bible is silent on the first and obscure on the second. And yet the Gospels are very explicit about prohibiting divorce and clear about the need to care for the poor, and the religious right has been, in the main, silent on both. But if we, due to our legacy as Anglicans, don't feel compelled to take scripture literally, do we sublimate our human need for literalness someplace else? I believe so. I would suggest that that place is worship: we tend to be "liturgy literalists." I grew up in an Anglo- catholic parish with a long and proud history in worship. As an acolyte and M.C. (Master of Ceremonies) I learned that the two dozen candles on the altar had to be lit in a certain order and extinguished in reverse order and that Sanctus bells had to be rung at certain times in relation to certain words said and certain physical actions executed (e.g. genuflections). To miss a cue was tragic. To flub an action threatened the legitimacy of the Eucharist itself (would God show up?) Such repetitive and predictable ceremonial actions provided a firm foundation in a changing world. When the liturgies were revised in the late 1970's, not a few Episcopalians were deeply alarmed by the introduction of "novelty" (exchanging the peace, the revival of an ancient practice but experienced as new, comes to mind). Metaphorical and symbolic in our rendering of scripture, we Episcopalians would brook no innovation in our corporate worship and not a few people spoke of the Church as "abandoning" them. Changes in liturgy and music, to this day, remain a challenge. Does it help to place this all in historic perspective if I share with you a conversation I had back in the 1980's with an elderly lifelong Episcopalian who recalled vividly the conflict which surrounded the introduction of the "new" Book of Common Prayer - in 1928 - replacing the 1790? Perhaps at our worse, we too are "people of the book" who have simply chosen to focus on a different book (the Book of Common Prayer rather than the Bible). My friend Mark Hollingsworth, the Bishop of Ohio, once pointed out that God is a God of the future; one that calls to us and beckons us to follow. The vows of baptism and confirmation, of marriage and ordination do not reference the past - e.g. have you been faithful in loving your spouse to be? - but looks to the future: will you be faithful, will you forsake all others? -and the response, typically, is: "I will, with God's help." The bible tells the story of the struggle of two peoples - the Hebrew people and later the Christian communities - to understand God in their historical context as we must strive to understand God in ours. As Delwin Brown observes in his book "What Does a Progressive Christian Believe", for us as progressive Christians the Bible is "formative rather than normative." Our classical liturgies speak to us still with power and majesty but were themselves once considered to be suspect and novel and so for ourselves and for our children's sake, we seek to be patient in listening to new voices in our own day. How do our Bishops dare "defy the Bible" on Prop 8? Well, perhaps it is in realizing the limitations of a sacred text which was written in a time and a culture which understood homosexuality as a pagan behavior which threatened the survival of vulnerable nomadic tribes or as a form of decadent Temple prostitution in ancient Rome but which knew nothing of constitutional homosexuality as sexual identity. Perhaps it is in understanding that God can do a new thing in which women no longer are silent in their pews (I Timothy 2:12) but are standing in the assembly as priests and as chief pastors as well. Our opportunity to reject Proposition 8 is our opportunity to say "Amen" to a God who calls us forth from the past to be a new future. It is not an issue of being "politically correct" but is rather a case of being "morally appropriate."
On Election Day, a clear majority of those who voted, voted to rescind the right of gay persons to be married in this state. In a democracy, we live under majority rule. That being said, in a constitutional republic, our laws seek to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Appropriately so, lawsuits have been filed and the struggle for equality under the law continues as before. Yet at the same time, for many people there is a pervasive sadness and for gay people, a sense of being rejected and scorned. But for we who are Christians, we believe in the God of the Resurrection and thus we know that God will yet bring good out of bad, wholeness out of brokenness and pain. Fear often initially wins over love but in the end, love will triumph. St. Augustine's will continue, as it has for more than a generation, to be a place in which the love of committed couples - straight and gay - will be blessed at God's Altar. And so we live as people of hope and not as people of despair.
Copyright © 2008 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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