Christianity Caught in a Timewarp

by Jack S. Spong

"As you know it is my desire that there should be no attempt at the Conference to force the assembled bishops to vote in such a way that we are polarized."
That is a quotation from the Archbishop of Canterbury in a personal letter to me dated 7 May 1998. Perhaps George Carey forgot he wrote it. Perhaps he changed his mind. Perhaps he intended to be deliberately misleading. Perhaps, when he saw the weight of conservative and evangelical support, he decided he no longer had to pretend to be a diplomat. Perhaps he judged defeating the "liberals and revisionists" as more important than keeping the Anglican Communion open to new possibilities, broad in its view of Christianity and constantly engaging the vibrant, emerging world. In any event he threw his weight verbally and visually behind resolutions that have in fact left this church polarized. Once more in the name of the God of love the church has managed to insult gay and lesbian people and to suggest to women everywhere that they are still a "problem" in the body of Christ.

For many Christians the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops was a tense, difficult and negative experience. It proved to be an arena in which conflict was inescapable. We listened to calls to respect the cultures of emerging nations, but no attempt was ever made to respect the culture of the West. No one seemed to recognize that the church in the West had engaged our modern world with its challenging scientific and secular insights far more significantly than has any other part of the communion.

We lived at Lambeth with perceptions of reality so vastly different that the same words simply did not mean the same thing. We became aware that difficult local circumstances so deeply colored one's frame of reference that those outside those circumstances could never understand the words that were being spoken. So we dealt with charges and counter charges, with various attempts to claim in debate the high moral ground of identifying local operative truths with God's unchanging Truth. We dealt with Christians who had escaped genocide and with Christians who had participated in it.

We even endured the lecture of an official representative from the Vatican, Cardinal Edward Cassidy, who warned the Anglican Communion about how dangerous it would be to ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church if we moved to consider issues on which the mind of that church was quite closed. We have heard similar themes at previous Lambeth Conferences from our Roman Catholic friends. The Cardinal and those he represents seem not to realize that Rome's attitude toward women and homosexual people present barriers that make ecumenical union on our part both undesirable and impossible.

There were also moments of wonder and joy. There were new friends to be made like Dr. Stephen Laird and Dr. Stephen Shakespeare, young English scholars who offer hope to a coming generation-many of whom we had met on previous travels around this communion. There were thrilling stories of heroic Christian activity to be heard. Some parts of this Communion live under extreme circumstances: the life and death struggle with Islam in some parts of the world; famine and sickness in others. In South Africa the whole society has moved through a kind of inner purging that accompanied the death of apartheid and the activities of their Truth and Reconciliation Commission bringing them to a remarkably new place in their history. Their bishops revealed a compassion and openness that heralds a new camaraderie in that nation's racial diversity. Archbishop Njongokulu, who has replaced the unforgettable Desmond Tutu in the primate's chair of that province, gives every evidence that he is a worthy successor. Younger bishops behind him, both black and white, are ready to step up when the next generation assumes the mantle of leadership.

Memories of past Lambeth gatherings seemed so poignant in retrospect. I thought about the Bishop of London, now retired and no longer an Anglican, who stated in 1978 that there would "never be women priests in the Church of England." "Never" turned out to be a rather finite period of time as England now has thousands of priests who are women and Lambeth 1998 welcomed 11 Anglican Bishops who are female. I recalled a speech made by a Ugandan bishop in 1988 in which he stated that "AIDS is a white man's disease. It does not exist in Africa." But in 1998 the Lambeth Conference heard of whole African villages so ravaged by AIDS that its only citizens are children and some very old people, and of one African nation where 35% of its adult population is now HIV positive.

Homosexuality, barely mentioned in 1988, ten years later was destined to take the emotional main seat. We had to unload the stated misperception that it was the United States and Canada which were forcing this debate on the agenda. The fact is that it was the homophobic fears of the Third World seeking to condemn the very mention of homosexuality that made this topic the major item. Even American conservatives could not tolerate certain Third World statements made on this subject. A group of African bishops voted to expel from the Communion, for example, any bishop who had signed the Koinonia Statement. Other Ugandan bishops likened homosexuality to wife beating, pedophilia and bestiality. African bishops joined evangelicals from England, Australia, Canada and New Zealand as well as American conservatives to pronounce homosexuality a sin for which repentance was required and without repentance they promised eternal punishment to anyone who was homosexual.

Buttressing every debate on every issue was an appeal to "Holy Scripture." Yet it was clear that those who employed this phrase meant something quite different from what most of us would mean. Many appeared to be oblivious to the last 150 years of biblical scholarship that has shaped Western Christianity. They still appeal to a literalized reading of this ancient biblical text to solve in a definitive way contemporary, complex moral issues. There seemed to be no acknowledgment of the fact that this attitude toward the Bible has been employed to condemn Galileo, Darwin and Freud. Time has demonstrated in each case that this view of the Bible did not prevail. The Bible has also been used to justify slavery, segregation and apartheid. Once again history's judgement has been that the Bible was wrong. This sacred book has been used to oppress women, to reject left- handed people, to bless the church's refusal to bury a victim of suicide and to oppose birth control. Both church and society have moved so far away from these antiquated ideas that Christians are today embarrassed to recall this history. At this Lambeth Conference, however, the Bible was being used in a similar manner to uphold negativity and violence against gay and lesbian people. A literalized Bible claiming inerrancy for its words has historically been a source of death far more often than it has been a source of life. Yet this kind of fundamentalism was clearly once again alive and well in this communion, making it all but impossible to build in our time a modern and relevant Christianity.

This conference caused me to feel that I was living in a time warp. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a talk on his vision for the church of the future. It revealed rather, how far in the past his own life was rooted. I suspect that to the leaders of some of the undeveloped nations his words sounded visionary, but to me they were at least thirty years out of date. He and I simply do not live in the same world.

The most regrettable characteristic observed at this gathering of church leaders was the lack of honesty in communication. Making points rather than seeking truth seemed to be the agenda of far too many. Christians, no more and I gather no less than any one else, will attack the character of their opponents rather than stating the way they differ from their opponents' ideas. It would be difficult to apply to what I saw at the Lambeth Conference the biblical standard that Christians "will be known by their love." I saw rather pettiness, dishonesty, spinelessness, spin doctors, and absolute distortions of truth as the behavior of those who claimed to be disciples of Jesus. Those who called themselves evangelical journalists were the worst offenders.
The leadership qualities of our primates left much to be desired. The effective leaders were clearly the representatives of the evangelical wing of the church. Western leadership was disorganized, inept, incapable of working strategically and without a common purpose. Their overt refusal to draft a minority statement when it was clear that their point of view had no chance of prevailing and in fact was almost certainly going to be overwhelmed meant that liberal bishops were reduced to making individual responses when the various hostile resolutions were passed. These individual statements lacked both power and persuasiveness and did not provide an effective place behind which opponents of the majority point of view could rally.

In those majority resolutions homosexuality was condemned as "non-scriptural," the cause of women priests and bishops was set back by a vote to be "fair to traditionalists," and evangelical fundamentalism was empowered time after time. In many forums we heard the church in our nation and America itself insulted as decadent, demonic and no longer Christian.

I need to say that if this expression of evangelical Christianity is to define the Anglican Communion of the future, I do not want to be part of it. I regard this expression of the religious right as an irrational, hysterical stage in the death throes of Christianity. If we cannot reassert the Anglican genius that reason must be an equal factor with scripture and tradition in shaping the Christian message in every generation, then Christianity as we know it is doomed. The Lambeth Conference convinced me completely that my call for a new reformation in the church is right on target and it showed me exactly why it is that Christianity must change or die.

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