Here's Why, Dr. Zahl

Dean Paul Zahl of Trinity Episcopal School of Ministry is a very nice and very smart man.  I had the pleasure of meeting him and hearing him speak at our parish last year.  Writing last week, he asks the question:  "Why are the theological traditionalists in our church being treated so badly?"  In a faintly self-pitying tone, he wonders:

... My question takes the form of a continuing reflection concerning the oft treated theme of "otherness." ... Why is there almost no embrace of the traditionalist "other" on the part of the great majority of the official leadership of the Episcopal Church?

No one has yet to answer this question; and I don't know why. Do you?

It is not as if we, the traditionalists or Bible people in the church, are a threat in human terms.  Far from it.  We are a small minority, a fractured minority, and a beleaguered minority. 

Our seminaries are generally embargoed, our ordinands have a hard time getting through the overwhelming majority of ministry commissions, and deployment is a huge problem. ...

I am always trying to get the numerical majority to provide some kind of answer to the question, "Why are you not giving us space?"   They appear – and I have always hoped this was just the appearance but not the reality – to want us out of the church. It is as if they would like to shed us.

Dr. Zahl, you know good and well what the answer is.  By far the majority of us don't want traditionalists out of the church.  We're happy to share the table with people who have different views than we do, because we always know in the back of our minds that we don't know everything, and for all we know the trads might be right.  Sure, unfortunately there are some liberals who brook no dissent from their own orthodoxies.  By and large, however, the Episcopal Church has bent over backwards, to a fault, to accommodate traditionalists.  If that weren't the case, the Windsor Report wouldn't be the focal point of the entire General Convention; it probably wouldn't even be on the agenda. 

But you're right, Dean:  There are indeed some trads who are not given the kind of "space" in the church that you want for them.  They're the ones, for example:

• who insist that a select group of ancient authors knew everything we'll ever need to know about the mind of God — sort of like Ed McMahon in the old Johnny Carson comedy bit, except that Ed McMahon was joking;
• who demand (among other things) that the church truckle to those ancient authors' views about sexuality by denying ordination to godly men and women who don't meet their arbitrary criteria;
• who claim, blasphemously, that it's impossible that the Holy Spirit might have been at work in Minneapolis three years ago;
• who ostentatiously refuse to share the eucharistic table with other, God-fearing, followers of Jesus who hold non-traditionalist views;
• who, when the church thoughtfully and prayerfully takes a major decision with which they disagree, encourage their fellows to withhold financial support.

The rest of us are happy to give such traditionalists "space" in the church.  But we're not willing to let them have the kind of space in which they can work to enforce their bibliolatries upon the rest of us.

Dr. Zahl, with tongue in cheek (and apologies to Avril Lavigne), allow me to riff on your pop-culture predilection:  Can I make it any more obvious?  What more can I say? 

Comments

[Greg Jackson]

Trying to get a handle on general convention, I ran across this article. It is just another example of the stereotyping of more "traditional" Anglicans, that while being true in some instances, is in general false. It is based on reading news articles and not on actual conversation.

The sad thing is that most "traditiona:" Anglicans are very much full of questions and very much wanting to interact with people of other positions. I know this from having been in such a church in New Haven, CT. Now, attending a more mainstream liberal church, I find the prejudices against dissenting views much greater and the willingness to ask questions far less.

The fact is that if after careful study and wrestling with the issues, some of us come to very tentative theological positions about the mind of God that do not agree with the current majority in ECUSA, we are accused of being "unconcerned about social justice", "resisting the spirit of God", "homophobic", and "fundamentalist". I could write more names. I and so many of my other friends are mostly saddened by these names. We do not bother to take offense.

I urge the author of this article to take more time participating in real dialogue instead of promoting stereotypes based on data points that appear to be derived from web site news articles.

[D. C.]

Thanks for posting the comment, Greg.

1. Unfortunately, you're right that some liberals brook no dissent from their own orthodoxies (as I said in the main posting) and can be rude, sometimes extremely so, to those who do dissent. But most aren't like that. The email list for the GC deputies was full of postings this week about how much Deputy X admired Deputy Y from the opposite camp after finally getting to meet him (or her) face-to-face in Columbus.

2. My personal experience with traditionalists includes far more than just Web postings: I'm one of the few non-traditionalists in my very-orthodox parish. Unfortunately, however, Web postings represent a large portion of the "data points" that the public sees about us these days.

3. My biggest beef with the traditionalists is that they are simply unable to provide satisfying justifications for their key assumption. (The same is true for some liberals.) Traditionalists' views seem to rest entirely on their premise that Scripture is the supreme, unchallengeable authority concerning moral and spiritual matters. If we take away that premise, their whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

You would think the trads would be ready, nay eager, to justify their reliance on Scripture. Yet to a person, they seem utterly incapable of mounting an intellectually-coherent defense of this their most fundamental premise. So far as I know, no traditionalist has ever done even a minimally-competent job of explaining why we should assume that the human proclivities for error in perception, memory, and story-telling somehow don't apply to the Bible. (The much-lauded N.T. Wright makes a weak attempt to mount an argument; if a lawyer were to make a similar argument in a trial, he would be horse-laughed out of court.)

About the best the trads can do is to make the ipse dixit claim that the Holy Spirit somehow protected the Bible's authors, copyists, canonizers, and translators from material error. Sorry, that's not good enough: it assumes facts that are so not in evidence, and it fails to explain why we shouldn't accord the same deference to other holy books, e.g., the Qur'an or the Book of Mormon.

In any case, your comments were thoughtful. I'm sorry you sometimes run into grief from liberals. Thanks for stopping by.