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player ready...The Baptists, the Presbyterians and now the Episcopalians have all washed their political linen in the public prints, and before it`s over every sect from the Atheists to the Zoroastrians will probably get their turn.
The reverend bishops of the Episcopal Church in not entirely solemn assembly at Phoenix finally adopted a compromise on the great question that divided them-no, not the nature of God, the relation of faith and reason, the author of sin, or the way to salvation-but whether practicing homosexuals shall be ordained as priests. The scope and majesty of this question provides some indication of the quality of theology as this century dwindles/swindles to an end.
The wording of the compromise that papered over the bishops` difference was equally ennobling. It asserted that ”sexual expression is appropriate only” within marriage of the usual kind but recognized some ”discontinuity” between that preaching and common practice. The Council of Nicaea it wasn`t.
To gauge how far Progress has come, compare the Phoenix Declaration`s 20th Century English-well, limp lingo-to the words of the old Book of Common Prayer on the same subject. Marriage, reads the service: ”Is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” Not a word about lifestyles.
The church`s Standing Commission on Human Affairs (surely such a title could have been devised only in this vague time) argued that the church had ordained homosexuals for centuries. Demanding celebacy of them, the committee concluded, while allowing heterosexual priests to marry, was unjust. No, as Dave Barry would say, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. It is difficult to analyze such a permissive position without slipping into ridicule. It may be difficult to state such a proposition without slipping into ridicule.
”Explicitly opening the ordination process in this way is certainly desirable to clear the church of the taint of hypocrisy,” this Standing Commission on Human Affairs reasoned, ”since the presence of gay men and lesbians among the clergy is no secret.” Since the presence of sinners in the church is no secret, either, why not bless sin? This would simultaneously avoid any taint of both hypocrisy and reason in the church.
What the Great Debate at Phoenix demonstrated, again, is that there are worse things than hypocrisy-like vague nonsense. Hypocrisy is but the tribute that vice pays to virtue; even if hypocritical behavior violates certain standards, it does not pretend those standards do not exist.
If only there had been a Standing Commission on H.A. in biblical times, surely it would have noted that good church people kept slipping into the worship of Baal and Ashtaroth, not to mention Mammon, and suggested that these deities be incorporated into the priestly rites to avoid hypocrisy. Alas, the ancients were incapable of stating such advanced views, tempted as they might have been, because they lacked an advanced phraseology with which to disguise what they were proposing. They lacked smooth phrases like justice-love, self- esteem, lifestyle, quality of life, and the rest of the vocabulary that characterizes this whole, essentially fraudulent undertaking.
Maybe this standing commission should sit down and think-or at least translate what it is proposing into intelligible language. Then the nature of the dubious enterprise in which it is engaged might be clearer. The commission has taken time-honored concepts-like marriage and ordination, just as others use justice and love-and given them a new definition while trying to hold on to the words` old aura and essence. This can`t be done-though the mod world is full of such attempts.
In the end, as at the beginning, it comes down to the word. If words resound hollow, if they have to be stretched to present some old abomination as a new revelation, or cover some familiar old sin with sleek new lines, then suspicion will be aroused. Or at least a knowing smile.
I could take as my text a passage from Genesis:
”And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.”
These mod diggers have not chosen the same sites, and what they have come up with is scarcely the same doctrine, yet they would call it by the same name. That is what disturbs most-what is being done to the language.
Walker Percy, as usual, saw it coming. Back in 1984, he spoke of the
”serious impediments in the current historical manifestaion of Christendom. It has to do with the devaluation of the Christian vocabulary and the media inflation of its contents. The old words, God, grace, sin, redemption, which used to signify within a viable semiotic system, now tend to be either exhausted, worn slick as poker chips and signifying as little, or else are heard as the random noise of radio and TV preachers.” Note that even words like viable and semiotic have been heavily eroded since Percy used them. The result, as he pointed out, is that the believer ”feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware Party.” Or at a convention of bishops in Phoenix.
Somewhere, underneath these accumulated layers of slipperiness, the old words wait to be cleansed, burnished, and again made the hard currency of thought and belief. But for now, in obedience to a kind of Gresham`s Law of ideas, good words are driven out of the market. They are either counterfeited by being made to stand for various slippery concepts, or they are hoarded away by those trying to hold onto their meaning. Either way, they disappear.