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:
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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;
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who ostentatiously refuse to share the eucharistic table with other, God-fearing, followers of Jesus who hold non-traditionalist views;
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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?
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