THE BISHOP'S VOICE
HERESY! THIS CHURCH IS ON TRIAL!

Heresy! This fascinating word is tinged with high levels of emotion. It harks back to a time in human history when conformity to certain beliefs was required and debate that would challenge the authority of the church was not allowed. The word "heresy" brings to mind the trial of Galileo, the flames of the Inquisition and the Tennessee conviction of John T. Scopes. Yet strange and anachronistic as it seems, this word is today being used in Episcopal circles by right-wing members of our Church.

What does heresy mean? It means that there is disagreement in the church over a major issue, and one side now wants the debate to cease so that they can force their convictions on everyone. It also means that there is enormous fear among religious people that the Christian faith to which they cling appears to be changing, even breaking apart. It is a sign that institutional religion is dying, and in its death throes, it is becoming self- destructive.

The issue, they say, is homosexuality. But that is more the symptom than the issue. Surely no one doubts that the church has had homosexual priests serving it since the birth of Christianity. That fact has been fully documented historically. There is no office in the Christian Church from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury to cardinals, bishops, priests and deacons that has not been filled at one time or another by a homosexual person.

So when we press that issue, it fades into the issue of honesty which has been sacrificed on the altar of institutional success. The Church knows that homosexual persons have always served among its ordained clergy, but does not want the world to know it. The Church's ability to command respect, manipulate life, and fill its coffers would be threatened by such an admission, so dishonesty has been chosen instead. The policy of the ecclesiastical world on sexuality has always been a version of "don't ask, don't tell." If a homosexual person lives in secrecy, then the service of that person to the Church is both celebrated and honored. But if the person is revealed or outed, then removal, usually public removal, is quick and certain. This became so obvious when I heard a Southern bishop say recently, "If one of my priests came out of the closet, he would be removed at once." However that same bishop hastened to add "but I do not intend to start a witch hunt!" So survival in the priesthood has been accomplished over the centuries by encouraging clandestine, dishonest and dehumanizing behavior. It has demanded the sacrifice of truth. It has installed lying as a virtue. That is hardly the stuff of integrity.

In this conflict, however, there is something even deeper going on, for heresy also means false teaching. But how does one determine that a teaching is false? That requires the arrogant assumption that the ultimate truth of God from which heresy deviates is both known and possessed. To possess ultimate truth is to allow for no possibility of change and therefore it can entertain no challenge and no growth. That is why conservative religious traditions have always asserted that "the faith" was not the product of human inquiry. It was rather revealed by God in some dramatic and complete way and has been understood and transmitted infallibly by Church leaders since its reception. There can be no such thing as heresy without this definition being operative. That is why the charge itself is so absurd and the people who hurl this charge are so naive and pitiful.

To anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the intellectual revolution of the past 500 to 600 years such a claim reveals ignorance and idolatry. Even the debate on issues of human sexuality today results from vastly new insights into gender identification, brain development and the relationship of the Y chromosome and the male hormone testosterone to human development. If a willingness to engage this new data and to begin to act on the basis of a different and more enlightened understanding is to be condemned as heresy, then the church is publicly announcing that its mind is no longer able to entertain truth.

But issues around changing understandings of sexuality are not the only items in the expanding universe of knowledge that today challenges what the Church once called "The Truth of God." Even the Vatican has now declared that Galileo was correct and the Church was wrong in that 17th century dispute. But if Galileo was correct, then the whole world view of the Bible is wrong! Recall that upon pain of his life Galileo was forced to recant from his stated convictions that the earth was not the center of the universe and the sun did not rotate around the earth. The passage of scripture used to condemn Galileo was the story of Joshua, who stopped the sun on its journey through the sky to allow more daylight in which the victorious Jews could continue the slaughter of their enemies. Aside from the questionable morality of such a divine action, the Bible also assumed that God would and could manipulate the natural order to favor the chosen people.

Isaac Newton built on Galileo's insights and placed the final nails into the coffin of the view of reality espoused by the Bible. If the inability to believe in this pre-modern world of miracle and magic constitutes heresy, then everyone who has completed a fourth grade science textbook is either guilty or in denial. However, even that is not the only place where the implications of the Bible have been successfully challenged.

The biblical view of sickness as punishment for sin or as a sign of God's retribution has also died with the discovery of viruses, tumors and surgery.

The biblical view of the virgin birth died with the discovery of the egg cell in the 18th century. At that moment the recognition was born that every female, including Mary, is an equal partner with the male in providing the genetic content necessary for the formation of a new life. The virgin birth was based upon the ancient theory that all the woman did was to incubate and nurture the man's seed to maturity. If you wanted to talk of Jesus' divine origin in the first century, you only needed to remove the male from the birth process and substitute the Holy Spirit. The virgin mother could remain for she contributed nothing to the new life save the nurturing power of her womb. So anyone who still asserts the literal biological nature of Jesus' virgin birth stands in violation of all we know about genetics. Thus, the perpetuation of this ignorance becomes the prerequisite for avoiding heresy, unless of course one hides again in dishonesty.

The biblical view of human beings as fallen creatures, driven from their state of perfection by something called original sin has also died, the victim of the work of Charles Darwin. One cannot fall from perfection if there is no finished creation. Darwin asserted that the created world is still expanding and human life is still evolving. If that is so, as the world of science today universally asserts, then neither the world nor any human life ever possessed a perfection from which to fall. This would mean that the assumption behind the traditional understanding of Jesus as God's divine rescuer becomes inoperative. So also does the sacrificial theology that the first Jewish Christians linked to Jesus of Nazareth in the primitive attempt to understand him as the paschal lamb or as the lamb of the day of atonement. Is it heresy for members of the church to face that bit of our intellectual revolution?

These and many other insights of an expanding knowledge have rendered great portions of the traditional literalized Christian understanding of the past to be nonsensical. A literal creed, an inerrant Bible and an infallible pope are today naive religious ideas. If facing these realities is the definition of heresy, then it is easy to understand why thinking people have abandoned the Church in droves, leaving it to the fearful and dependent who scream heresy whenever their security systems are threatened. This is also why certain religious leaders like to control the flow of information to their people. They do not want the natives to get restless. They do not want people to raise questions they cannot answer. The more conservative a religious system is, the more its leaders will try to "protect the faithful" from challenging and threatening ideas, or challenging and threatening people. It is ultimately a hopeless and a losing task.

A Christianity that cannot engage the knowledge of the world in which it lives, that shouts its creedal affirmations defiantly as if they are self-evidently true, that believes the articulations of its faith convictions to be unchanging and infallible, is a Christianity that will surely die. Yet that is the mentality that still uses the word "heresy," and that mentality today seeks to purge the Church of those who are willing to grapple with the issues of the modern world. If this mentality is allowed to prevail, then there is no future for the Christian religion.

The Anglican Communion of which the Episcopal Church is a part, came out of the authoritarian religious systems of the past and stated its dedication to "scripture, tradition and reason" as the sources of its authority. Reason certainly implied an openness to new truth, insight and learning. If this Church now decides that the category of reason must be subverted to a view of the Bible that undergirds only yesterday's religious convictions or to ancient Christian traditions that exclude new understandings, then the grand experiment called Anglicanism will have come to an end.

I cannot worship God without my brain participating in that worship. I cannot say the creeds with my fingers crossed. I will not be part of a Christian community that demands conformity to unbelievable understandings of yesterday's world. The ability to live inside that dynamic tension is what I once thought was the mark of the Episcopal Church. But that definition is exactly what is on trial today. If this trial reveals that this community of faith is no longer able to be this kind of church, then I shall no longer be willing to be an Anglican.

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