The Questioning Christian

Choosing a congregation: Whom do I want to bury me?

Rodney Clapp writes in The Christian Century: “A while ago someone suggested to me that the best way to choose a congregation is to ask oneself: Are these the people I want to bury me?”  Blessed be the ties that bind, The Christian Century, May 5, 2009, p.61.

Clapp goes on to compare what he calls the ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ attitudes toward church membership and commitment.

It’s worth a read.

More Dennis-Canon arguments pro and con

[EDITED 12/12/08] Commenters at the TitusOneNine blog, including your correspondent, are going back and forth with more arguments about the Dennis Canon, about which I posted yesterday. They're worth reading.  Here are three arguments that I particularly like (not all of which are my own <g>):

1. The archival records are missing for a relevant legislative day at General Convention, at which a version of the Dennis Canon, amended by the House of Bishops, was approved by the House of Deputies. (I reviewed the evidence summarized in an affidavit by Fr. George Conger.)  Some argued that there's a sinister reason these records are missing; TitusOneNine commenter Ross responded pithily:

Oh William of Occam, I invoke thee:

Theory 1:  The “Denis” Canon was indeed passed by both houses of General Convention, as required, but various pieces of internal documentation have gone missing in the nearly thirty years since then.

Theory 2:  The “Denis” Canon did not pass both houses, but a conspiracy of officials destroyed the evidence that it did not pass, inserted it into the body of canons as though it had passed, and in nearly thirty years, out of all the hundreds of people who were present at that convention and would have remembered it not passing not one single person noticed this and publicly objected.

Yeah, Bill doesn’t think much of that second theory either.

2. The Episcopal News Service's 1979 post-convention wrapup article, cited by A.S. Haley, didn't mention the Dennis Canon’s adoption. That might well give a court pause.

3. In the end, however, I think a court will rely on the following to conclude that the Dennis Canon should be deemed part of the canons of the Episcopal Church:

• the fact that both houses did indeed approve the substance of the Dennis Canon;
• a summary sheet listing items sent to the print shop for reproduction: One such item was a report by the House of Deputies that (what appears to be) an amendment by the House of Bishops — amending the original resolution D-24 approved by the deputies — was itself approved by the deputies, and that message #204 to that effect was sent to the bishops. The report and message were not in the file, according to Fr. Conger. The mention of a specific message number, 204, lends some verisimilitude to the report;
• the absence of any significant, non-circumstantial evidence that the House of Deputies did not take that later vote approving the bishops' amendment — for example, the Dennis-Canon materials are far from the only papers missing from the archive, according to Fr. Conger, so it's not like the people keeping the records did a first-rate job on everything except the Dennis Canon;
• a presumption of administrative regularity on the part of the Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons in carrying out its assigned duty, under Canon I.1.2(n)(3)(iv), of overseeing the publication of the ‘authorized version’ of TEC’s constitution and canons — which since the 1979 General Convention has included the Dennis Canon; and
• the acquiescence of nine successive General Conventions — without known objection — in the inclusion of the Dennis Canon as part of the official published version of the canons.

Was the Dennis Canon in fact never duly adopted? Here's why a court might not care.

In a property lawsuit between the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York and one of its secessionist groups, evidently the secessionists are claiming that the Dennis Canon — which provides that all parish property is held in trust for the diocese and the national church (see Canon I.7.4-5) — was never duly adopted by General Convention, and therefore isn't controlling. In opposing a motion for summary judgment by the diocese, the secessionists have filed an affidavit by someone who examined the church archives and did not find proof positive one way or another. Some commentators are saying that as a result, the court cannot render summary judgment in favor of the diocese because there are disputed issues of fact that must be tried.

In deciding the Dennis-Canon issue, there's a Gordian-knot approach that the court could easily use to rule summarily in favor of the diocese without a trial:

     • There can be no dispute that for years, the Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons, acting pursuant to Canon I.1.2(n)(3)(iv), has at least implicitly approved inclusion of the Dennis Canon, putatively adopted in 1979, in successive triennial official publications of TEC's constitution and canons. 

     • Since that time, various GCs have approved many other amendments to the church's constitution and canons; perhaps most notable for our purpose, because of its controversial nature, was the 1994 amendment prohibiting discrimination in ordination on the basis of sexual orientation, among other things. 

Why do these facts matter? Because, even when the canons were amended in ways that surely triggered talk of possible secession and property disputes, at no time did any GC deputy or group of deputies ever propose overruling the standing commission (so far as I know, without researching the question) to make it clear that the Dennis Canon was not 'the law' in the Episcopal Church.

Here's an analogy from secular cases: Suppose that: • certain language in a federal statute were susceptible to different interpretations; • for years, the courts have adopted a particular interpretation of the statutory language; and • during that time, Congress has otherwise amended the statute, but has never changed the particular language in question.

In cases like that, the courts will very often reason thusly: If Congress had disapproved of the interpretation adopted by the courts, presumably it would have overruled that interpretation legislatively, while they were enacting other amendments to the statute. Congress has not done so; it follows, therefore, that Congress has implicitly approved the courts' interpretation.

Thus the analogy: Successive General Conventions have amended the constitution and canons in many respects, but have never amended the canons to repudiate the official publication of the Dennis Canon as part of the constitution and canons. This suggests that the Dennis Canon is indeed part of 'the law' of the Episcopal Church.

What if Starbucks marketed like the church?

From Beyond Relevance (hat tip:  Think Christian via The Lead):

Pittsburgh's separatists should be laughed out of court

HYPOTHETICAL: Suppose that: (1) The board of directors of General Motors approves the business plan of the Chevy division to experiment with other technologies such as the Volt hybrid. (2) Many of the workers of the Cadillac division get upset by this decision. They claim GM's board has abandoned The Automotive Faith Once Delivered that automobiles burn gasoline, damnit! (3) These dissidents proclaim that Cadillac is withdrawing from General Motors and temporarily joining the Indian car manufacturer Hindustan Motors [an actual company], under the auspices of the International Association of Automobile Manufacturers [there's no such thing, so far as I know], so that they can continue to build luxury cars the way they're meant to be built.

QUESTION: Who owns the Cadillac factory, the brand rights, the dealership contracts, the buildings and fixtures, the office supplies, etc. — is it the Cadillac dissidents, or General Motors? 

ANSWER: General Motors, of course.  The Cadillac dissidents would be horse-laughed out of court if they claimed Cadillac had ‘seceded’ from GM.  We can stipulate that the Cadillac factories, office buildings, etc. were built largely through the efforts of generations of Cadillac workers and execs. Even so, at best the dissidents would be treated as having constructively resigned en masse. And as with any other resignation, the courts wouldn't let them take so much as a desk stapler with them.

(What the courts would do, and what should happen, are not necessarily the same thing.  See my post from last year, Property ought to go where it can be best used.)

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I adapted the above from my comments in a discussion thread at TitusOneNine. Another commenter, 'Jeffersonian,' claimed that my hypothetical was inapt because, (supposedly) unlike Pittsburgh, ”GM created Cadillac, owns Cadillac and runs Cadillac.  At no time was there an organization called “Cadillac” that had to petition to join GM.  It never was, is not, and never will be an independent entity.”

Historically, it appears Jeffersonian is wrong: According to Wikipedia, Cadillac was originally founded as an independent company in 1902; it was acquired by General Motors in 1909. 

Even so, Jeffersonian's response nicely supports my hypothetical:  It seems that at no time was there ever an organization called ‘the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh' until it was created by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. According to the separatists' Web site, until 1865, western Pennsylvania was simply part of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania: 

The first known Episcopal clergy resident in this western third of what was then Diocese of Pennsylvania included . . . . [¶¶] For a decade after 1810, Joseph Doddridge, pioneer missionary in our region, wrote letter after letter to the eastern bishops pleading with them to convince General Convention to establish a western diocese. But conservative forces continued to guard oversight of entire states.  The first division finally was set up in 1838 in western New York, but no further divisions took place until the western third of Pennsylvania with its 24 counties became the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 1865. [Bold-faced emphasis added.]

So, contrary to Jeffersonian's argument, the Diocese of Pittsburgh was not a standalone entity that elected to join the Episcopal Church. No, the diocese was a creature of the Episcopal Church from its very beginning.

(Related post:  It matters how an Episcopal diocese came into being.)

It matters how an Episcopal diocese came into being

The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh's diocesan convention voted yesterday to secede from the Episcopal Church. Many conservative Episcopalians take the view (erroneous, in my judgment) that any Episcopal diocese can secede  According to these folks, a diocese voluntarily 'joins' TEC and can voluntarily withdraw at will.

This view, however, seems to presuppose that a given diocese was formerly an independent, free-standing association or entity that existed outside TEC, and which mutually agreed with TEC to change that status. Think of the Republic of Texas joining the Union in 1845 following nine years as an independent state. (Or as was half-seriously proposed a number of years ago, Canada's Western provinces deciding to become the 51st etc. states of the United States.) 

A handful of Episcopal dioceses may have originated in this way. My guess, however, is that for most dioceses the reality is otherwise. Many Episcopal dioceses originated, not as free-standing churches like the Republic of Texas, but because Episcopalians 'colonized' mission territory as an extension of the existing Episcopal Church, eventually petitioning for full diocesan status in the church.  This would be comparable to, say, the states of Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska: If memory serves, each of those states was colonized by Americans as an extension of the United States (I'm not going to get into the rights-of-indigenous-peoples argument here), and later sought and received full statehood status from the Congress.

Ironically, two of the present cases involve the Episcopal dioceses of San Jose and, in all likelihood, Fort Worth.  Each began when it was carved out of an existing diocese by authority of the General Convention. In that regard, these dioceses are like the state of Maine, which was carved out of the existing state of Massachusetts by Congress as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In the coming months, it will be useful to keep  in mind these distinctions of origin, I think.

Resolved: Most of the church is not Christian

In a discussion at TitusOneNine, I'm being politely asked, between the lines:  If I don't believe the church's teachings about the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, etc., why am I intruding into the private club of those who do?  In response, I posed this proposition for debate, Oxford Union-style (I've edited it slightly here): 

RESOLVED:  No one may call himself a Christian if he demands more, as a condition of church membership, than doing one’s best to follow the Summary of the Law — Jesus (reportedly) said in Luke 10.25-37, do this and you will live, so to presume to require more than this would be to set one’s self above the Lord.

Another commenter responded: 

Disputed. ... Christianity is based on accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior and belonging to the community of faith—which includes belief in certain key precepts ....

Those who have come to believe those "key precepts" cannot be faulted for where their faculties and their consciences have led them. But I would disavow membership in any “community of faith” that went beyond this, insisting that its answers are the final ones and that those who don’t agree with the party line must either assent anyway or leave. Folks like that are like idolators, pridefully setting up their own conceptions above the reality that God has wrought.  (Hard experience has taught us that we don’t know everything about that reality, and that what we do “know” is necessarily provisional.) Fortunately, most of the Episcopal Church isn’t like that.

Over-exalting Scripture is a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit

Thoughtful Christians must reject teachings by some in the church that exalt Scripture to the point of making an idol of its various writings. That goes, for example, for the scriptural writings about sexuality, which are in the limelight again with the opening of the Lambeth Conference.

The various scriptural writings might indeed have been God-inspired.* They can indeed be useful for teaching, correction, etc. (see 1 Tim. 3.16).   And for the sake of argument, let's assume that those writings were a complete and totally-undistorted presentation of what God had to say to us at the time.

We can't rule out that God might have something different to say to us now, at a later stage in our development as a species. When my son was younger, he would sometimes ask if he could have a glass of wine with dinner. My response was no. Now that he’s an adult, when he's home from college I’m the one who offers him a glass. 

For all we know, God might well be doing something similar. Anyone who presumes to claim otherwise with (false) certainty would seem to be setting himself above God.

Time and change were created by God as much as anything else.  Given the dramatic changes of the past 2,000 years, it's certainly conceivable that God might have different instructions for us now than he did back then.

It's breathtaking that some traditionalists seem to think otherwise — that God had exactly one chance to say everything he was ever going to have to say to us, and therefore what he caused to be said in Scripture was “it,” once and for all. 

They blaspheme against the Holy Spirit who deny even the possibility that God might say something different to us now.  It might happen to be true that God would never change what he putatively said before. But categorically declaring that to be the case is way, WAY above our pay grade.

Paul had the right advice in 1 Thess. 5.20-21:  Don’t despise those who claim to be inspired by the Spirit — test everything, and keep that which proves to be good.

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* There's no reason reason to assume Scripture was any more God-inspired than, say, Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s special- and general-relativity papers. If anything, Newton's and Einstein's writings arguably had an additional divine credential: they weren't merely creatures of their authors' creativity, they were testable against the actual reality that God wrought (cf. Deut. 18.20-22).

The faith once delivered never actually existed

Go read "Rescuing the faith once delivered to all the saints," written by an unnamed friend of Katie Sherrod (a leader of the loyalist faction in the secessionist Diocese of Fort Worth) and posted on her blog. The piece marvelously demonstrates how, when traditionalists bemoan the abandonment of the faith "believed by all people in all places at all times," they're indulging in wishful thinking and even in willful self-delusion.

The piece sketches the main theological parties of the early church, whose various doctrines were often mutually exclusive:

• Primitive Jerusalem Christianity:  "... the final age has begun ... history will close upon [Jesus'] imminent return; ... Jesus seen more as messiah than divine being ...."

• Primitive gentile Christianity: "the concept of messiah means nothing; ... Jesus the son of God came to earth, died, was resurrected and restored, is now Lord and present to his worshippers ...."

• Pauline Christianity: "... life in Christ produces what the law cannot but with few hard and fast ethical rules; love, not law: little interest in Jesus’ life, emphasis on him as Second Adam ...."

• Johannine Christianity: "Jesus’ life [was] secondary to his relation to the Father and the divine nature of Christ ...."

• Jewish Christianity: "... a continuation of Judaism, Jesus is messiah in succession to the prophets, not divine, not virgin born, will be Messiah/Son of Man at return; ... an ethnic religion; they loathed Paul."

• Gnostic Christianity: "gnosticism antedates Christianity, has roots all over the place and a vast literature ...."

The piece also recaps how, around 300 years after Jesus' death, the Emperor Constantine knocked heads in the church leadership, provoking the production of the Nicene Creed as a brokered compromise:

[Constantine] gave the various church parties an ultimatum: clean up your act and give me a church that knows what it believes, an instrument of unity and centralization instead of the morass of claim and counter-claim and diversity and uncertainty I see now.

So the church did what it always does: it held conventions—or councils or synods as they called them—meetings where people met and argued and voted. [Extra paragraphing added.]

Read it all.

What the Presiding Bishop ought to be saying about the constructive resignation of San Joaquin's (former) standing committee

This weekend the Diocese of San Joaquin held a reorganization meeting in the wake of the departure of its former bishop, John-David Schofield. Some conservatives have protested that the meeting was supposedly illegal. Their argument is that a majority of the San Joaquin standing-committee members did not resign, nor did they leave the Episcopal Church; therefore, the protestors claim, the standing committee continues to be the Ecclesiastical Authority in the diocese, meaning that the national church has no authority to replace the elected standing committee nor otherwise to interfere in diocesan affairs.

In trying to justify the national church's action, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori goofed: She relied (1) on the supposed deposition of Bishop Schofield from ordained ministry, and (2) on the argument that the former standing committee members took action inconsistent with their fiduciary responsibilities.

That was a mistake as to the first point because the deposition of Bishop Schofield never happened (the deposition motion having failed to achieve the canonically-required number of votes). 

And it was a mistake as to the second point because "group guilt" is unacceptable. The national church should not be tarring the DSJ standing committee members with the brush of breach of fiduciary responsibilities until, for each individual member, the church makes a determination (involving at least some sort of notice and opportunity to be heard), that the member's personal conduct warranted such action.

What the PB should have done was to take a simpler approach, namely declaring that:

• Bishop Schofield had indisputably resigned;
• the standing-committee members had constructively resigned by failing to dissent publicly from the San Joaquin diocese's purported secession;
• the canons do not contain an express procedure for dealing with such an extraordinary situation; and
• the Presiding Bishop and Executive Council, acting under their general canonical authority, are going to do what needs to be done to deal with these situations.

Specifically, the PB should have gotten the Executive Council, and also the House of Bishops, to approve the following resolution: 

1. It's beyond peradventure that Bishop Schofield has resigned his see in TEC. He walked off the job, publicly announced his intention not to return, and submitted a letter of resignation from the House of Bishops.

The fact of his resignation was not altered by the House of Bishop's failure to muster the required votes to impose a particular consequence, namely complete deposition from ordained ministry.

Nor was the fact of the resignation altered by absence of approval by the House of Bishops. The approval requirement is not a prerequisite to the effectiveness of a resignation (in legal terms, a condition precedent). Bishop Schofield's resignation was unauthorized, and therefore constituted a breach of the canons, but it was effective even without authorization.

Bishop Schofield is thus still technically an ordained bishop, because the motion in the House of Bishops to depose him from ordained ministry did not achieve the required number of votes. But, by virtue of his actions, he is no longer bishop of TEC's diocese of San Joaquin. 

2. Few if any members of the San Joaquin standing committee timely dissented publicly from the ultra vires action of the diocesan convention on December 8 last, which purported to secede from the Episcopal Church. (I don't know whether this statement is true; anyone know otherwise? Link, please?)

3. Every member of the San Joaquin standing committee who did not timely dissent to secession, publicly and on the record, is deemed to have constructively resigned, even if individual members later professed their desire to remain in the Episcopal Church.  In the extraordinary circumstances presented by the December meeting of the diocesan convention, the burden was on each individual standing-committee member to make a clear, timely statement of his dissent. This borrows from corporate- and securities law, in which each individual member of a board of directors is deemed liable for certain corporate actions, regardless whether she personally favored it, unless she timely stated her dissent on the record.

4. As a result, the San Joaquin standing committee can no longer muster a quorum and is legally incapable of taking any action whatsoever. (I have no idea whether this statement is true under the diocesan canons.)

5. The extraordinary situation described above is not expressly addressed by TEC's constitution and canons.  The Presiding Bishop and Executive Committee will therefore take such action as is necessary to replace the DSJ's former leadership, proceeding under their general canonical responsibility "for leadership in initiating and developing the policy and strategy in the Church ..." (Canon I.2.4(a)((1), concerning the Presiding Bishop) and "[to] have charge of the coordination, development, and implementation of the ministry and mission of the Church ...." (Canon I.4.1(a), concerning the Executive Council).