It continues to baffle me as to how Billy Graham and John Shelby Spong were both were born and raised in Charlotte, NC but represent vastly different theological opinions. Unfortunately, Spong being unable to draw throngs to the love of Christ has instead sent what few take him seriously, because of his false teachings, headlong into the abyss.

“But John’s right. The homosexual battle in the Episcopal Organization is over and the orthodox lost.”

The “orthodox” lost. So what are the choices for the “orthodox”?

(A) Leave?

(B) Stay and Reform? (But the “orthodox” say TEc is irreformable.)

(C) Stay as a “witness”? (Why can’t you witness from the outside?)

(D) Stay as a “to-be-determined” Third Wayer seeking some strategy (read excuse) for staying?

Look at what Todd Granger wrote in his recent departure letter. Here’s a keen insight:

“The cognitive dissonance of remaining Episcopalians – heirs of a catholic tradition of episcopacy – by becoming functional congregationalists has grown too great.”

In response to Todd’s point here, this is what I wrote:

While you recognize the cognitive dissonance of functional congregationalism within historic Anglican ecclesiology, the majority of remaining “conservative” Episcopalians are not only in denial of their cognitive dissonance, but they seem to extol it as being a key component of a “to-be-determined” Third Way. Sarah Hey of StandFirm champions this de facto functional congregationalism on this thread titled “Traditional Episcopalians Remaining In TEC Need A Third Way.”

In fact, Bishop Mark Lawrence whom you referenced seems to be advocating a de facto functional diocesanalism in his recent address to the DioSC clergy, which really is just super-congregationalism or rather a supersized version of congregationalism which is expanded and applied to the level of a diocese.

—–

Many “orthodox” stayers are really Institutionalist-Enablers of TEc’s soul-destroying heresy and apostasy.

Odd how people like Spong toss the word “prejudice” around so freely when describing those who are opposed to things which the Scriptures clearly define as “sins.” I, for one, see nothing at all wrong with being “prejudiced” toward sin, if you want to phrase it that way. And, equating slavery with homosexual activities, which are “intrinsically disordered and occasions for moral evil” (Benedict XVI), is absurd. Skin color is not a choice. Being kidnapped and sold into slavery is not a choice. Engaging in unnatural acts of sodomy is a choice. ‘Nuf said.

The failure to discipline Pike, and then Spong, can be viewed as the symptoms of the underlying disease, which is the replacement of the Christian religion with the religion of nice and the religion of what’s happening now. In the case of the ordination of women, theological and scriptural study was replaced by the rush to “do justice.” The same thing happened when bishops one after another began to ordain sexually active gays and lesbians. They presented the church with a fait accompli and made it hurtful and “not nice” to challenge it.

As I understand it (and I could very well be wrong), Pike asked for an eccesiastic trial to give him the forum to defend his heresy and his request was denied. Seems to me that might have been the first slip down the slippery slope…

Jon Shelby Spong-”Never met a Christian doctrine that he hasn’t contemptuously rejected”. Well said. “Fraud”; Right again, Chris. The man should have be defrocked LONG ago, and he didn’t have the cajones hinself to get the heck out of the denomination when it was clear he was a Unitarian/Universalist. I read quite a few of his books; Then I stopped torturing myself.

Michael-I think the fact that Spong was essentially a hippie and was influenced by the other Episcopal priest who said that “God didn’t tinker” was the difference. Grahame didn’t feel that he had to apologize for Christinianity.

Quite a few people do take Spong seriously. I know people who practically are part of a fan club for him. They proudly call themselves “progressive’. One woman I met (She was subsequently removed from the ministry because she endorsed chanelling of spirits-among other things-said to a group of clergy at a gathering, “Isn’t it incredible that some people still actually believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.?!!” The two other clergy and myself said at the same time, “I believe that too.” She followed Spong around to different venues to hear him speak. Uggh.

I believe it went off the rails with the ‘Reformation’, which it signed onto with Henry VIII’s schism, then died really at the ‘Enlightenment’ when agnosticism etc. KO’d English Calvinism (which is why the UCC’s a basket case too). But like a dead tree it remained standing for a couple of centuries, when it and its surrounding culture drew down its Catholic capital. Discreet unbelief was normal in the Anglo-American ruling class in 1800. Pike just brought it out in the open, hence Spong. When the surrounding culture was more conservative, Episcopalians seemed more conservative. Now that it’s not, they’re not. If/when they dump the creeds, the dead tree will come down as far as Christians are concerned: the Episcopalians then really would be unitarians with mitres.

“We regularly have spirited discussions around here about when and why the Episcopal Organization went off the rails. Some attribute it solely to the adoption of women’s ordination”

Not me. The issue of WO, just like the issue of SS (SS = Sanctified Sodomy, as Dr. Tighe says), is really and fundamentally a challenge to the Authority of Scripture.

WO is just the visible evidence that the Authority of Scripture has been overturned in TEc.

I find it incredible-and so do a number of African Americans I know-when not allowing gays to marry is comapred to slavery, aparteid and segregation. Right-gays-among the wealthiest and best educated of any single demographic were hauled from their homes in chains anf forced to lie down in a space the size of a coffin. Gays not being able to marry is just like being told to sit in the back of the bus, denied and education of voting privleges. It’s just like being herded into townships as in apratheid in South Africa; Yep, the similarities are amzing all right. (Note sarcasm).

No doubt, Spong will next be advocting for three or more person marriages-if he hasn’t already.

TUAD-

You are off topic, TUAD. WO is not the topic.

Christopher Johnson: “We regularly have spirited discussions around here about when and why the Episcopal Organization went off the rails. Some attribute it solely to the adoption of women’s ordination”

Katherine: “In the case of the ordination of women, theological and scriptural study was replaced by the rush to “do justice.”

WO is not off-topic.

Katherine did not make the sole topic of a post WO. She mentioned Pike and gays and lesbians as well; That’s the difference. However, as Chris said you have three subjects here and that’s it. She has lots more.

Good afternoon.

I mentioned the Authority of Scripture.

Well, the problem with Spong is that he lied every time he said the creeds. That sort of puts a kibosh on any credibility he ever might have had, if anyone in the media ever thought about it.

JSS enjoyed being the ‘progressive bishop’ during his tenure. I suspect he writes his little column in the WaPo to generate some attention for himself.

That’s right, Michael.

How can anyone (except for Spong devotees) talk Spong seriously when he suggested to people seeking ordination that they “Cross Theirs fingers” when giving assent to portions of the creed which they find objectionable. Spong can dress it up all he wants-but his telling people seeking ordination to lie.

I suspect too, that Spong has a high degree of narcisscism. He is also forvever wanting to be considered the new Luther.

O, boy! Another episode of the Bickersons!

But on topic:

In my opinion, Spong is the telos of a line which extends before him, and not just in radical men like Pike. I’ve told this before, but it bears repeating: Frederick Joseph Kinsman, sometime Episcopal bishop of Delaware, later a Roman Catholic layman, noted in Salve Mater that his frustration in being an Episcopal bishop was that he was not able to exercise doctrinal discipline. His priests could - and did - deny the Virgin Birth (edgy at the time) and he could not counter with the anglo-Catholicism of his personal faith. That was a century ago.

August 14, 1930, when the Anglican church began permitting artificial contraception. It’s all down the slippery slope from there. Women’s ordination would never have had legs if it weren’t for the original step away from 1900 years of custom, tradition, Tradition and doctrinal teaching. The ability to pick apart scripture began there.

But I do also agree with the Young Fogey when he says that they’ve been on a different set of tracks since Henry VIII.

It’s been truly said that Spong simply popularizes John A.T. Robinson, who was, in fact, a serious bible scholar. If memory serves, though, Bishop Robinson had the integrity to resign his bishopric and (?)formally leave the CofE.

http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/vox30995.html

As I’ve bored people before, a church that swallowed Pike and Spong was never going to strain at Righter and Robinson.

TU&D? WO by itself was never the issue. What made the Episcopalians decide to take that step was and you nailed it a few comments up.

FenelonSpoke, is the lady you are referring to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Organization? She is a big fan of Spong, having invited him to address her clergy in Nevada.

And Spong has the slavery thing exactly backwards. Wasn’t the church simply of “different minds” on this issue, and wasn’t it prepared to “live into” the tension of different viewpoints on whether a Christian could own another human being? And where is any explicit Scriptural mandate violated if a church opposes slavery?

Finally, TEO is increasingly irrelevant because you don’t need a church as a vessel to ride the “tide of history” and the waves of popular culture.

CJ: “WO by itself was never the issue. What made the Episcopalians decide to take that step was and you nailed it a few comments up.”

I assume you’re referring to this comment I made:

“WO is just the visible evidence that the Authority of Scripture has been overturned in TEc.”

Yeah, pretty much.

I believe the problem is older than Spong. The House of Bishops refused to do anything about Bishop Pike when he was busy deconstructing basis Christian doctrines and was a scandal to much of the Church. That opened the door to all sorts of mutcakes and kooks coming into the Episcopal Club and that included Spong.

My take on when things started to deviate was whenever it was that the philosophy of the Enlightenment began to be the driving force behind any theology that was done. Once you make Man the center and the measurement of your philosophy you have already rebelled against the sovereignty of the Creator.

The full measure of Man is not Man, but Jesus, the God-man who was truly human and fulfilled humanity’s destiny.

I would suspect that just as other Protestant denominations started down the slippery slope with 19th Century Biblical skepticism, the Episcopal Church was just a tad behind them because there were some bishops who were still trying to “bannish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word.”

My feeling is that once bishops started being elected by clergy and laity in place of however they had been selected before was the beginning of the end. Elections mean politics and politics means that agendas are in play. In my book, anyone who really wants to be a bishop is unworthy of the task. Being a bishop is not a career path. So whenever the priesthood started becoming a job instead of an avocation, then I would place the beginning of the demise of the Episcopal Church at that point.

By the way, the quote in my last post is from the Ordinal service found in the 1928 BCP. It is drastically different from that which is found in the abominable 1979 book of alternative services and revisionist theology.

Spong was born in Charlotte, but he did his early ministry in the Durham-Chapel Hill area, known locally as something like Berkeley East. Very liberal, and he would have fit right in. When the current bishop of North Carolina came here, I heard him say at a meeting that he “didn’t have time for Jack Spong,” because he was “doing mission.” His definition of “mission” (and I heard him say this personally in 2002) is restoring this world to the condition it was in before the Fall in the Garden of Eden. He’s an heir of Spong.

Women priests could only happen in a church that had already abandoned the Historic Faith and Practice.

The homosexual attack on catholic orders has been steady and effective because of the earlier erosion of Anglicanism by heretics such as Pike. Christopher is right.

it isn’t complicated at all to see how you get bishops like Spong, Pike, Schori, Harris, actually any of them. Listen close: The recipe is now and always was to start with a *layman* and do things with them.
Start with soiled ingredients, you get a poison result. The is *with bishops* only that if you have a hyper-clericalized view of Christendom. Start with uncatechized laity (who in more sane centuries would simply never have been laity to start with) and keep them uncatechized. A small proportion will go to seminary, still uncatechized. Most graduate and unless jailed for something get ordained. Still uncatechized. From that pool of ignorant and unbelieving clerics, have people with the same qualifications have an occasional popularity contest. Rinse, repeat.

Alice Linsley: “Women priests could only happen in a church that had already abandoned the Historic Faith and Practice.”

Thanks so much Alice for weighing in. I commend the following post by Alice titled “Telling My Story: A Priestess Comes to Repentance.”

(Soon to be Bl.) John Henry Newman saw what was coming, and swam the Tiber…

The woman I was referring to is not ever, a clergyperson in the Episcopal Church, but I wouldn’t be surprised that Spong is a favorite of PB Schori.

That’s wonderful, Alice Linsley, that you are happy in her repentance over women’s ordination. I have had and will have things to repent over. So far, my ordination isn’t one of them. Also, I don’t know any Episcopal women who calls themselves Priestesses.

I am now through discussing women’s ordination on this thread.

FenelonSpoke:

I won’t debate WO here (you know my position), but as you’re not Episcopalian, I think I have an idea of your denomination. You may be ELCA (I’ve known one or two conservative woman pastors from there), Reformed Church of America (relatively conservative with female clergy), Disciples of Christ (lots of variety there), or I could be wrong altogether…

Katharine, that stupifies me. You can’t go back to “the condition it was in before the Fall in the Garden of Eden”. We look forward to a new heaven and a new earth, but we can’t go back to what it was before. We now have the knowledge of sin, which cannot be undone. To use a Tolkien quote, Arda Renewed will not be the same as Arda Unmarred but a third and different thing.

I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that sentence is meaningless as far as I can make out. There’s no possibility of restoring the state of the first humans living harmoniously with nature and unfallen in appetite, will and reason. It’s either vaguely Gaia-worship ecological dreaming (which is a very different thing from actually working on ecological balance) or equally mushy vaguely liberal maunderings about no more war or injustice or inequality or mean things happening ever again and we’ll all be rich upper-middle class Americans (just as soon as we somehow manage to have about four or five billion of the Earth’s population vanish in a puff of smoke).

Fuinseoig -
You have identified one of the key elements of the problem. More and more TET bishops view mission in precisely just those terms. Instead of doing it God’s way, they want to do it their way, which means exalting the creature above the Creator. You will notice that they - in their infinite wisdom - are going to do this by coming up with some catchy slogans, great advertising, empowering committees, etc., etc., without consulting God or his Word about any of it. Just more homocentric thinking and planning. Besides, in their view, God must have been a bad creator to allow all this prejudice and exclusion to exist in the first place.

They have imbibed so much Kool Aid over the years, they would not recognize a cogent thought if it came and and wrote itself on their wall. They would consider such an event to be merely a superstitious imagining.

Thus they protect themselves from God’s communication.

Fuinseoig, I agree with you entirely. I left TEC for the final time (I’d been in and out, depending on where I lived) shortly after I heard it. The second of your two options, “equally mushy vaguely liberal maunderings,” is the correct one. The diocese’s motto, following the bishop, is “Living God’s Dream,” and “mission” consists of Good Works, defined in the liberal sense, since the diocese has been strongly pro-abortion for years and is strongly pro-gay agenda. However I think “mushy maunderings” is too mild for what seems to me to be a heresy. According to this, this Christian mission is to make this earth, by our own efforts, as perfect as God’s original creation. At least Pelagians focused on sin, and thought they could work their way into heaven. There’s no sin in this “God’s Dream” bit. The bishop also says that God can’t do anything in this world; humans have to do it or his Dream will fail.

Fuinseoig: You said:

It’s either vaguely Gaia-worship ecological dreaming (which is a very different thing from actually working on ecological balance) or equally mushy vaguely liberal maunderings about no more war or injustice or inequality or mean things happening ever again and we’ll all be rich upper-middle class Americans (just as soon as we somehow manage to have about four or five billion of the Earth’s population vanish in a puff of smoke).

That’s what the 1930’s decision by TEO in favor of birth control started - and what the 1973 Roe v. Wade SCOTUS decision and the subsequent TEO decisions finished. This “culture of death” (to use B16’s name for it) is really a CULT of death (specifically the demonic “gods” such as were worshipped in Canaan).

TEO is looking for the same ease (bounteous harvests, comfortable furnishings, salve to a guilty conscience) as did the priests of Ba’al under Jezebel and Ahab. The destiny of the TEO leaders and collaborators are likely to be the same as those rulers of old.

Spong’s Here I Stand has found its way into our parish library. The sermons of Charles Grafton, the Liber Usualis, Timothy Ware, even Revelations of Divine Love have found their way out. (Sigh.) A sign of the times.

HORRIBLE NEWS, Sparky!!!! To throw out the Liber Usualis really speaks about things going wrong in your parish (may I ask which denomination/branch is it?)!! Hopefully you’ll be able to save those books from the trash-dump and use them in part of your own library! [This reminds me of how the Communists, when in power, would throw Bibles and Christian books away to be destroyed in garbage dumps...]

Sasha,

It’s TEC in a formerly Anglo-Catholic diocese. The Liber Usualis was a treasure.

FenelonSpoke, are you a priest or a ordained pastor?

I was often hurt and angry when the best Anglican clergy I knew called me “priestess”. I thought that they were being ungracious, but now I understand that they were speaking truth, since a church with women priests is not the Church established by Christ and His Apostles.

I usually find it best to leave trolls such as Ding Dong Spong under their bridges.

Heh. I noticed the Liber Usualis, too. I hope that it was at least sold to someone duly appreciative at a good price, several times that of Here I Stand. On the other hand, I would not like to think what else the sale could have funded.

Fortunately, you can download both the latest (1961) and older editions. Not quite the same, though, as having a nineteen-hundred-page book in your hands.

More on topic: Yes, August 14, 1930 was when so much was laid bare, so to speak. And like any date with history, it was a long time in coming.

It is all a slippery slope with an inevitable result. Leave the teaching authority of the Church, bring so-called “Enlightment” ideas into the church, allow artificial birth control, allow women to be “ordained,” contrary to both Tradition and Scripture and Christ’s example, allow diversity to become a sacrament, endorse abortion, consecrate unrepentant sodomites as “bishops,” deny that no one comes to the Father except through the Son, deny personal salvation and descend into the lower depths. Both the Old and New Testaments are filled with warnings about following this path and examples of the consequences when this path is followed. Read Jude in the New Testament and his imagery of rainless clouds, twice dead trees and wandering stars. Baal always seems to have his followers.

“Enlightenment,” not “Enlightment.” The Devil made me do it. I can spell. Really, I kan!

I have plenty of my own sins to repent, but I’m really, REALLY glad I won’t be Spong on Judgement Day. He’s got a lot to answer for, and has led and is leading many souls to hell by his heresies.

It’s true that Spong embodied the problem. He made it visible. But, Episcopal priests were flirting with apostasy long before Spong. He’s just the guy that gave it a public face. And that, my friends, is why he never got censured. The truth is that Spong was not in the minority. Lots of priests and bishops believe(d) what he had the cojones to proclaim in public. But, it’s interesting to me that nobody so far has mentioned the disintegration of the church’s stance on marriage, culminating with the 1973 removal of the prohibition against remarriage by divorced persons whose spouse was still living and whose prior marriage was valid. (I paraphrased someone there, but can’t remember who I should give credit.) Without the slow, over decades and perhaps even centuries, deterioration of the church’s view of the sanctity of marriage how could we have possibly spawned a bishop living in fornication with his male companion? Now there’s a challenge for your sixth (or fifth or fourth) grade Sunday School teacher. Unless you have a politically correct Christian Ed curriculum that really pushes the envelope, how to you teach about that one to the kiddies? We clowns don’t even try, we just wear an even bigger red nose and hope nobody notices.

Clown Celebrant puts a big gloved finger on part of the problem. It is this idea of “pastoral care” being raised above canon law that opens up a wedge. Once you start finagling about how “a generous pastoral response” can be made in a given situation, you begin to start trying to justify rebellion against God’s standards and God’s commandments.

Sure I can understand how some young people can yield to the temptation to “shack up” before they commit to marriage, but no pastoral response worth its salt would try to claim that what they did was right or in accordance with God’s ordinances. Sure, I can understand sympathizing with a young woman who is pregnant out of wedlock, but, again, no pastoral response worth its salt would advise her to obtain an abortion. She would either be encouraged to put the child up for adoption or else she would be encouraged to marry the father of her child.

It’s this idea of “pastoral response” that doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or self esteem that allows people to ignore God’s directions for our lives. Since when do feelings ever trump God’s commands?

Every so often Spong says something outrageous to the press which dutifully quotes him and highlights alongside the article a list of all the heretical books he has authored. It’s all about Spong bumping his otherwise slumping sales. It’s just as predictable, wrong, and boring as all the bloviators flinging and re-flinging their objections to women’s ordination. Both Spong and the bloviators are doing nothing that glorifies God; Satan surely enjoys it all.

Before Spong there was Pike, and before Pike there was William Montgomery Brown (look him up on Wikipedia for starters) whose farcical heresy trial and deposition as a bishop in PECUSA in 1925 was probably one reason (among others) why the bishops in 1967 refused, despite all the incontrovertible evidence of his heresies, to have a like trial of Pike. Brown and much of the journalistic media combined to portray the trial as a “medieval farce,” and scored a number of good points by finding other respected PECUSA bishops (among them some of Brown’s presenters) who had at one time or another given utterance to views on theological issues approximating to Brown’s own, drawing from this that the real cause of the trial was Brown’s joining the Communist Party and becoming an enthusiastic apologist for the Soviet Union (which certainly was to abandon in a big way all “social proprieties”), rather than his theological opinions.

FW Ken and others whom I may have introduced to Bishop Kinsman’s *Salve Mater* might wish to get a copy of his last book, *Reveries of a Hermit* (1936) — there are a couple of copies available at Amazon.com, but otherwise it is almost impossible to find — which, although a mixed bag indeed, contains an interesting chapter on “Anglicanism” in which he clearly refers to and discusses the case of Bishop Brown, although without naming him, and gives other examples of how liberal Protestant ministers even in the 1890s were attracted to the Episcopal Church because, provided one maintained social decencies and conventional proprieties, one could believe just about whatever one pleased on all matters of religious controversy.

Perhaps by now it’s clear that to survive, the Anglican Communion must develop some process of discerning when a constituent body has gone off the rails, then exercising godly discipline, and, if needed, expulsion. I suspect such a process will look more like conciliar Orthodoxy than a Catholic magesterium, but there better be something, or Anglicanism will go the way of a hundred sects before them.

Ah yes, right as usual captin. Where were all the voice of outrage,
both inside and outside the church when this clown prince of heresy
was smearing the gospel?

omar, There were many voices of outrage as I recall–much akin to the orthodox writings of today’s +Howe, the ACI, etc. The many voices, however, didn’t amount to any significant action.

I agree that there has been a trajectory of replacing the authority of Scripture and Tradition (and Reason too, to some extent), with ego-centric gods of experience and the spirit of the age.

Regarding the mileposts of this trajectory, it should be mentioned that the Episcopal seminaries bought into enlightenment innovations a long, long time ago. I defer to Dr. Tighe for more informed data, but it seems that entering the 1800’s there was some hope of collective discipline against heresies and there were occasional awakenings, but none of note since the Oxford movement. It has only been downhill the past 150 years. Even the 1928BCP, with its strengths, got a bit “softer” on sin.

The impulses toward self-gods has always been with us, but the true Church has been able to prevail against such hellish gates. TEC has chosen to be something other than the Church, and has excelled in that choice.

impulse

Alice Linsley: “I was often hurt and angry when the best Anglican clergy I knew called me “priestess”. I thought that they were being ungracious, but now I understand that they were speaking truth, since a church with women priests is not the Church established by Christ and His Apostles.”

Dear Alice, much deep thanks for relaying the growth in your spiritual maturity by realizing that speaking truth-in-love occasionally stings and hurts. Awakening from self-deception is a growth process, oftentimes causing, as it did you (and other priestesses and pastorettes), fits of anger.

Allen Lewis: “It’s this idea of “pastoral response” that doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or self esteem that allows people to ignore God’s directions for our lives. Since when do feelings ever trump God’s commands?”

Quite right, Allen, quite right.

As regards to your last question, WO and SS are fairly obvious examples of TEc and other liberal mainline denominations letting feelings trump God’s commands.

And so we see that they reap what they sow with feelings of WO.

And, equating slavery with homosexual activities, which are “intrinsically disordered and occasions for moral evil” (Benedict XVI), is absurd. Skin color is not a choice. Being kidnapped and sold into slavery is not a choice. Engaging in unnatural acts of sodomy is a choice. ‘Nuf said.

This reminds me of a remark I recently read…I’m afraid I cannot give attribution because I do not recall its provenance, but I’m pretty sure its author was African-American. This person, like you, Dan, objected to the gay activists’ claim that their agenda parallels the black civil rights movement: “Gays were never slaves,” this person noted, “except maybe in response to a Craig’s List ad.”

Sorry, I know it’s baaaad, but I couldn’t help guffawing.

Chris, if I could refer back to your statement that conservatives had no trouble belonging to the same church as heretics until the issue of homosexuality became prominent, it is obviously true. I–along with most other orthodox–have done this for varying lengths of time. I can only say that I was aware of the contradiction involved, and justified it to myself by saying that even clergymen such as Pike and Spong could repent and be converted. The liturgy of the Church (1928) was certainly orthodox even if some clergy and laypeople were not. Also, there is the matter that the orthodox Anglicans have never been in agreement with each other, but have emphasized tolerance and diversity as Anglican characteristics. It wasn’t until the issue became sex that substantial agreement appeared among the orthodox. These are just rationalizations, of course. If we had known in advance what was futher down the road, we may have acted differently. No one was really expecting a total gay and lesbian takeover of the Church. At least in my part of the country–South Texas–we weren’t.

I expect Sponge is still smarting from the ABC’s demolition of his ‘Theses’.

GB, how were Pike and Spong to repent when they held teaching offices in the church and none of their peers would definitively call them to it?

Individually holding to heresy is one thing, but these were heresiarchs who declaimed it from their thrones. It’s a pity that teachers cannot reliably be counted on to accept correction from the taught, but it’s so: and these guys were teachers whose colleagues declined to call them on their BS.

Ed, of course that is correct. We’re not to make bishops out of people hoping they will become Christians afterwards. Nevertheless, some people have experienced genuine conversions through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and this is the only hope we have for individuals such as Bishop Pike. There are quite a few bishops and other clergy out there today who fall into the same category. Those people who have them for leaders know who they are. I would not mention their names.

Thanks, Sparky!! That it’s TEO (an organization but no more a church - in fact, it’s now in all totality a synagogue of Satan!!!!), I suppose, is OK. [After all, that organization is a complete writeoff!!!] I was fearing it was a Catholic or Orthodox parish (the Commies are omnipresent), or some other possibly-conservative Protestant place… [May sound paranoid, but we know how terrible the Devil's fruits can be (and if this was already infecting TEO in the 1890s, horrors - no wonder it has come to its current state!!!)... Otherwise, I dare say that Mr. Spong (together with his followers) is going almost certainly to the Lake of Fire, with a terrible burning-up in Purgatory beforehand (which for him will be Hell because he'll presumably irredeemable, alas...)!!!]

We regularly have spirited discussions around about when and why the Episcopal Organization went off the rails

I can’t help but blame the theological colleges, and in turn the values that make them what they are. Specifically: how they choose professors and how they choose students.

At some point (does anyone know when?) the colleges decided that they wanted to be respected by their academic peers in the secular universities. So they started behaving more like academics. Thus they started to hire people based on scholarship rather than faithfulness. A prime marker of scholarship is publishing, and a prime criterion for publishing is novelty, so effectively the people being hired were people who were saying something novel about the Christian faith. So the theological colleges were hiring people who rejected the old thinking and had novel ideas about theology. Theological liberals.

Theological colleges were, for a long time, much more open about who was accepted as a student than the churches were about who was accepted as clergy (not true now - anyone can be clergy). So we had the situation where people with alternative lifestyles were being accepted into the theological colleges, but then years later turned down as clergy. The only career route for those people was to go into academia - to become professors at theological colleges. Net result: theological colleges were preferentially recruiting liberal thinkers with alternative lifestyles.

The churches, of course, insisted that all young people called to ministry go and spend 3 or 4 years being mentored by these liberal thinkers with alternative lifestyles. Inevitably, one generation later the ranks of priests were dominated by liberal thinkers. As these priests became bishops, the church lost its ability to depose Spong and started welcoming people with alternative lifestyles into ordained ministry. Another generation went by, and liberal thinkers with alternative lifestyles were disproportionately represented in the ranks of priests. Finally, half a generation later, that same demographic has demanded and won the right to be bishops.

The authority of scripture was denied quite clearly when the Anglicans “sanctified” remarriage (after divorce).

Once you violate scripture with that, anything goes … eventually.

Spong has just taken scripture-rejection-via-interpretation to its natural conclusion. I think he’s more honest and self-consistent than most Anglican traditionalists for that reason.

What’s the ‘Liber Usualis’ - the Usual Liberal Suspects List?

The authority of scripture was denied quite clearly when the Anglicans “sanctified” remarriage (after divorce).

Once you violate scripture with that, anything goes … eventually.

Agree 100%. Thanks.

[...] Tempora and So-Forth, Swimming the Tiber, The Home Fires The Bovina Bloviator links over to the Midwest Conservative Journal’s ponderings on when exactly the Episcopal Church began its current (and, IMHO, fatal) [...]