The Future of Homosexual Leadership
This entry was posted on Aug 17 2009
O.k. i’ve been posting about some of these issues for while. I came across this quote by
V. Gene Robinson, the openly-gay bishop of New Hampshire. He remarks, “Just simply to say that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and Scripture does not necessarily make it wrong,” he said. “We worship a living God, and that living God leads us into truth.”
Is this a model of leadership that you would feel comfortable following? Would love to hear your thoughts. Is this future of leadership in the Anglican church.
If going against the teaching of the Church and the tradition does not characterize something as wrong, then what does?
Thoughts?
The New Covenant is compatible with, and a progression from, the Old Covenant. This seems a reasonable model.
Going against God would make something wrong. God is not identical with a group of people, so in theory isn’t it possible to go against said group of people, but still not be going against God?
Thanks for your thoughts Dwayne,
I guess it depends what you think about Revelation. I think Christianity has, from it’s inception, articulated that God had decided to reveal himself to a people who in turn are his representatives. I think of Israel, Jesus and lastly the Church.
Can you say more about the New Covenant vs the Old Covenant. I’m not sure i follow.
Thanks Dwayne.
How can one be lead by God to know the truth without the Scriptures and the church tradition? Why is it that imperative to scrap the essence of Christendom and claim our own wishful directions and desires to be God’s revelation to truth?
Perhaps 2 Timothy 4:1-5 should be taken seriously.
Good thoughts John. So nice to have you following along. One of the arguments i’ve heard is that since the Spirit is alive and moving today he can guide us through new challenges. Personally, i think it’s a deep fallacy of what the Role of the Spirit is. He comes to reveal Jesus, that’s it in the simplest way.
Hi John B,
Of course the Bible is important. My comment was actually a reply to Dom’s question, which does not mention the Bible, but only says that there is a problem with going against “the church and the tradition”.
That being said, I do think the spirit also guides us into truth (John 13-17). And, by spirit, I assume we are talking about the third person of the trinity, who is divine, can be worshipped, helped to create the universe, and is immaterial (the catholic church has none of these properties).
I also think that we are made in the image of God, so proper reflection on the copy may be able to give us a glimpse of the original: “as Paul says, ‘We see now through a glass, in an enigma, but then face to face.” If we ask what and of what sort is this “glass,” this assuredly occurs to our minds, that in a glass nothing is discerned but an image. We have endeavored, then, so to do; in order that we might see in some way or other by this image which we are, Him by whom we are made”.
Hey Dom,
I think very highly of revelation, and I agree that God reveals himself to people. We agree! The problem seems to be that you think God wants to reveal himself to certain people (religious elites perhaps) and then they pass the message along. I think God wants to reveal himself to all people. I come to my conclusion because I believe in human equality, and that God wants to know all of his children, not only some, and he does not want child B to know of him because child A tells him about him. Rather, God wants child B and child A to both know him very deeply and intimately (and dare I say, personally).
Of course, I have intentionally shifted the grammar: you say God reveals himself to a people, I say God reveals himself to people. However, I would argue that if you put ten people in a room, you have ten people, not one people.
Thoughts?
The Bishop says, and I assume in defending homosexuality as “right” in God’s eyes: ““Just simply to say that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and Scripture does not necessarily make it wrong… We worship a living God, and that living God leads us into truth.”
Have we, the church, then been lead falsely for 2000 years only to, in the last 100ish years, be suddenly redirected? And how can one path of discovering God’s truth, mainly experience, be powerful enough to usurp 2000 years of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience combined.
The argument seems to be a definite appeal to the sensitivities, and may I say pride, of our generation. I say pride because arguments as such appeal to an individuals experience and feelings, assuming that such provide a more valid and true argument than tradition, revelation and reason.
Ultimately, it is important to look at all debates through the perspective of the milieu that they inhabit–the implications of the contemporary consciousness on the current debates regarding God’s truth are unfathomable.
As one historian said, “The past is a foreign country.” Unfortunately, our generation seems to have so much pride as to believe they are the arbiters of truth, and that those that came before were merely floundering in their own inconceivable ignorance. A logical and disappointing consequence, ultimately, of the enlightenment.
God reveals Himself to people through A People. The transition from the Former to the New Covenant in Christ’s blood was necessarily and primarily a redefinition of the boundaries of who constituted God’s People, not just a new way of being God. It’s called Redemption. He didn’t just change the channel and give up His old mode of revelation. He invited more people to be joined to Him in His body.
The challenge is to ascertain who is and who leads the Church, not to wander aimlessly hoping that God will show all ten people in the room something similar.
Ask Jesus, and make sure His Wife agrees or you heard wrong.
Hi Joey,
Pardon my perplexity, but could you please render coherent the term ‘A people’ for me. ‘People’ is plural, ‘A’ is singular. You seem to identify a singularity with a plurality, which is incoherent. We do not say ‘A many’, nor do we say ‘the six coke bottles are a coke bottle’. If you could clarify what you mean, I would appreciate it.
I agree with you about the New Covenant. My point on that matter is simple. God gave a fuller revelation of himself in the New Covenant. Some things were, as Paul says, hidden in the older years. The New Covenant is consistent with the Old Covenant, but it is also a fuller revelation of God and his plan. There is both progressive revelation, and the same overall message. Don’t catholics believe that certain creeds, or papal decrees, are authoritative, though they speak on ‘new’ matters. They affirm something old, but at the same time they say something new. Consider the progress evident in the creeds on the discussions on the Trinity, or many other matters of faith.
Why is it a challenge to ascertain who leads the Church? It seems evident that Christ leads the church. Do you disagree?
Those who believe God speaks to people have only two voices to discern between, themselves and God. Those who believe God speaks through pastors or priests have millions of voices to discern between. The aimless wandering seems to begin when you assume God can speak to other people, but not to yourself (though you are a person as well).
Hi Matty,
As one who has a somewhat more favourable view of the enlightenment than you, I still don’t think I am the arbiter of truth. Rather, I think God decides what is true and moral. This is why I am so perplexed at Christian churches who feel they need to pass judgment on the homosexuality debate, when God clearly knows the answer, and God clearly has the right to decide on the matter, and God will clearly pass judgment on the matter. From my perspective, it is those who people who would render a verdict on this matter who mistakenly consider themselves the arbiters of truth. To them I would simply say ‘Good luck with that’, because we all know God will make up his own mind.
Hello Dwayne,
“People” can be singular, both in and out of the Bible (cf. 1Pet. 2:9). My point was that the New Covenant expanded the boundaries of the People (sing.) of God. God has always had a people to whom He refers as a collective singular. “Beloved”, “Bride”, and “Body” are terms which spell out this collective singularity. Perhaps a more 21st century word for this would be “population”. God speaks to persons through a population.
A challenge does remain in discerning who belongs to that population and who leads it. The answer to those questions is a source of great peace if one submits to it. Christ does lead the Church, but until He starts appearing on the BBC each night, we need someone to collect and promulgate the Truth.
Can I ask a couple of questions?
1. Are you sure that Robinson said this? I can’t find a source for it other than an apparently off-hand remark during an informal interview in the Washington Post (an article which is apparently no longer available). The ONLY place I can see the quote cited is on websites that are vehimently, radically and usually hatefully opposed to TEC, the PB and Robinson’s ordination. Are you certain this is an accurate quote? Robinson is a very highly public figure and is very thoroughly documented. Has Robinson re-affirmed this quote since then (August 2003)? Or has he said things that would tend to contradict or ameliorate/clarify this rather informal statement. What I’ve read of Robinson’s statements makes me suspect that he is a relatively conservative, mainlne biblical theologian (in so far as he is a theologian – remember, he is PRIMARILY a pastor, not a theologian).
2. I think there is a distinction to be made between a tradition of interpretation (one of many streams of such interpretation of scripture) and what I would consider “core” tradition (the creeds and such). Is it not possible that Robinson is refering to “a” tradition of interpretation and not the “core” tradition of the church’s teaching. After all, the church’s teaching has changed very substantially on a number of traditions (from the date of Chirstmas, to the status of slavery, to the position of women, to the nature of divorce, to the nature of scientific theories such as evolution and the helocentric view of the solar system)? Isn’t it possible that what Robinson was refering to was not the core teachings of the church as set forth in the only seven councils that are ecumenical and more along the lines of the church’s deeply flawed and unscriptural teachings on long term loving homosexual relationships?
Hi Joey,
Perhaps. But I think the problem still remains. Let me explain, using your term ‘Beloved’. We have a couple of options. If God says that Israel is his beloved, then what does God mean? Does he mean a) the group of people Israel is his beloved b) the people of the group Israel are his beloved c) the group is the people, so they are the same. I have argued that c) is incoherent, since a singularity is not identical to a plurality. Assuming God is logos, we would not want to charge him with being illogical. Thus, he must have either (a) or (b) in mind.
So, now we ask, when God says Israel is his beloved, does that mean that God loves the people who constitute Israel, or that God loves Israel which is constituted by many people. I would argue God loves the people of Israel. If we argue that God loves the group Israel which is constituted by people then we run into the following problem: God doesn’t love the people of the group, he only loves the group. Thus, God doesn’t really love David, and Solomon, and Jeremiah, etc…, rather he only loves the group Israel (which is not identical to these individual people). Perhaps he loves the idea of the nation, or the governmental structure, or something I know not what.
We need to get clear about our metaphysics here. God is a collective singularity as well, but this does not mean that God is formally identical to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, otherwise there would be no distinction between the three, and there would be no tri in trinity.
We do need to be clear about our metaphysics. God is a plural singularity, as you acknowledge, and that is precisely the starting point for me.
God refers to entire genealogical lines by the name of a prominent patriarch or matriarch in that line. Even the name of the nation of Israel and it’s nickname Jacob are personal patriarchal names. The prominent place of “lineage” as a theological category in Scripture (not to mention the basis of Paul’s spiritual heritage arguments in Gal 4 and Rom 11) suggests that God views persons as a part of a collective singularity at the same time as he supernaturally knows and grants intimate individual identity. Your option (c) is not incoherent, except in the hellenistic context in which we westerners tend to see things. To everyone familiar with english, the group is the people, and to God, the persons constitute the group and collectively ARE the group.
Metaphysics and divine epistemology aside, it is clear that the “People” of God (i.e. the nation, population, remnant, priesthood, Body, Bride, elect, Church) is a very important, even crucial, distinction to be made. Where and who is this people? Who leads it?
The Catechism says: The unity of the … Church is a sacred mystery.
I remain concerned that the citation is only available at web sites that have a long and un-distingushed history of quoting both scripture and members of TEC drastically out of context. What I remember of the actual source of the citation, a Washington Post article from 2003, was that it was somewhat informal and not necessarily an academically rigourous discussion.
That said, it seems very clear that his remarks were intended as an honest acknowledgment that his consecration marks a change of direction — not as a way of rejecting Tradition and Scripture, but as an examination of some portion of that non-core Tradition, and a discernment of where the Spirit can leads us in our responses to the legitimate pastoral needs of our fellow christians.
Just to say that something diverges from the practice, instruction, or a previous interpretation of scripture by the church even if that interpretation has been used through much of its history does not mean that the change is so contrary to Scripture and Tradition that it must be rejected out-of-hand. To do so would be to ignore the fact that even the Church’s teaching and interpretation of Scripture can be, and frequently has been, influenced by extra-Biblical and fundamentally non-theological contingencies and cultural accidents. The changes in the church’s interpretation of scripture in regard to divorce, interracal marriage, slavery, and even such cultural trivia as the date of chrstmas and some of the pagan traditions that have been brought into our celebration of that date.
More than that, to limit the church’s ability to change in addressing these legitimate pastoral needs implicitly limits the power of the Spirit to shine new light on our reasoned understanding of the teaching of our forbears in faith and on our faithful interpretation of the scriptures.
It seems to me that the Church is forever caught in a tension between the deep value of Tradition and the power of the Spirit, acting through human reason, to understand difficult things in new ways. To err too much in the former condemns us to a rigid literalism that implicitly limits the power of God. To err too much in the latter leads us to discard all too lightly traditions which momentarily seem quaint or inconvenient, or to accept half-baked heresies as “new revelations.” Neither error, it seems to me, is very palatable.
Interestingly enough, I’ve been reading what Bishop Robinson has to say with some attenton, and I notice that he seems to recognize this file line very well and generally hews to a veryl very conservative and orthodox line.
Look at the citation closely: “Just simply to say@@@ that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and Scripture does not necessarily make it wrong…”
Robinson isn’t claiming that his consecration goes against the core of catholic and orthodox scripture and tradition (that Reason is on his side is a given!), he is only disputing “those who say” otherwise.
As I said at the beginning of my discussion, I remain concerned that the lack of good faith in the way this citation has been used by Bishop Robinson’s opponents amounts to a form of bearing false witness. They seem to be deliberately taking the Bishop’s words out of their context and very carefully and deliberately twisting them to mean something contrary to what the body of the rest of Robinson’s documented opinions might actually suggest.
Do you have this quote from within a larger
context that you can pass on?
Book Guy –
What a fabulous point. Thank you for raising it. I am deeply challenged by this. Mind you, it only underscores the need for definitive authority on this issue if you are quoting Bp. Robinson the way he meant to be understood. Someone needs to be able to determine whether or not his consecration and the values that support it violate the Tradition of the Church.
BTW, Book guy, to speak to another good point your last post raised:
“The Tradition IS the life of the Spirit in the Church”.
Help me out – that might be Basil (or even Cyril), but I know it was made famous by Lossky in the Eastern Church. Sorry – no time for good research right at the moment.
We don’t have to look far to find the core traditions of the church. They are clear in the first seven ecumenical councils and the creeds that proceeded therefrom. Everything else is a secondary tradition and is subject to change in response to specific pastoral needs.
@JG – “Someone needs to be able to determine whether or not his consecration and the values that support it violate the Tradition of the Church.”
Isn’t that what the church is doing in it’s legeslative process? For Epsicopalians, the local/national church, is the ultimate authority on pastoral responses to specific national and local pastoral needs. After all, the Anglican branch of catholicism was absolutely founded on the notion that it is absurd for a foreign bishop to try to claim let alone excersize authority over local pastoral concerns. We certainly disagree with the notion that the church is or in any way should be seperated or exempt from civil concerns and laws. For Anglicans, the national church has always been the authority on such subjects of pastoral concern and that is as it should always continue. We Anglicans have always maintained that for a foreign, authoritarian centralized magisterum to claim control over the pastoral responses of a local church is absurd and utterly repugnant (and quite possibly heretical). The legeslative process in TEC ginds VERY slowly, but it grinds pretty surely.
Hi Joey,
I think we may be talking past each other. You once again mentioned language, but my concern is with metaphysics. We can refer to many things by using a singular term, but that doesn’t mean that there is only one thing there. My question is ‘How many things are there really’. And the answer, I submit, leads towards plurality.
I still think (c) is incoherent. Let us say that Dom and Joey are a people. They are singular, so there really is only one people there. There is one thing, so there are not two things (Dom and Joey). This makes Dom identical to Joey, which would involve some form of psychic transfusion or something. I don’t think you want to endorse that. Same thing with the Trinity. The Son is not formally identical with the Spirit (ie, the Spirit did not die on the cross). We need to keep the individuality and distinctness in tact, and endorsing (c) does not do this. I think I am asking you to flesh out your doctrine of ‘plural singularity’.
I agree that “the persons constitute the group”, but then you add “and collectively ARE the group”. The relation of constitution and identity are very very different. The statue of David is constituted by the clay, but is not identical to the clay. It cannot be identical to the clay because if the clay falls to the ground and breaks then the clay still remains (scattered on the floor), but the statue of David does not. And, self-identical substances cannot have differing persistence conditions (ie, it is not possible that I am both alive and not alive at the same time). The same goes for the church. The church is constituted of people, but the church cannot be identical to the people. Why? Because the people of the church come and go. Someone rejects Christ, someone else comes towards Christ, but the church remains throughout this. If the church were identical to the people Dom and Joey, then Dom left the church, and Sam joined the church, then the church perished. Why? Because the church literally is Dom and Joey, but we no longer have Dom and Joey, we have Joey and Sam, and Dom and Joey are not identical to Joey and Sam. This leads us to conclude that a singularity is not identical with a plurality, so we need to decide who God loves. Does God love the people of the group, or the group of the people?
Hi Book Guy,
It is a real treat to be corresponding with you on this. Not just stimulating, but also challenging in a personally formative way. Thank you for this.
Isn’t the nationalization of Christianity the very thing which has crippled the Church since the very beginning? Pastoral concerns belong to the whole Church inasmuch as they belong to Christ, the bishop of our souls. The episodes I imagine include the Gentile conversion controversy / Jerusalem Council, the edict of Milan, the Byzantine estrangement(s), the Great East/West Schism, The (un)Holy Roman Empire, the post-medieval Reformations, and the rise of the nation-state in the enlightenment period. Nationalization has resulted in everything from syncretism to schism, from heresy and confusion to violence. Pragmatism is the only defense for these phenomena, and pragmatism is not godly.
Hi Dwayne,
I guess I am showing my flagrant Kantianism. The pieces of the whole may disappear without negating the existence of the noumenal whole, even if the whole has been transubstantiated.
This is the mysterium sacrum of the unity of the Church across time and space.
Christ and His body are One and consubstantial. If someone leaves the Church, they potentially demonstrate their lack (or lapse), not loss, of Christian identity. But even if the Church does experience schism and dysfunction, She does not cease to be the Church, as Michaelangelo’s opus would cease to exist (at least in the phenomenal sense) were it to fall apart. But bear in mind that both can be phenomenally reconstructed in theory. The latter would require the unlikely perfect reproduction of all the conditions present in the first five years of the sixteenth century. The former would also require a miracle, and that is exactly what the Passion of Jesus continues to accomplish.
The imagery of being grafted in the vine illustrates this reality, and brings me back to my original point, which is that salvation history is the history of the definition and formation of the “People” or “Population” that is God’s. Therefore, as we consider the validities of various contested divine revelations pointed to above, we must attribute primary authority to those who can clearly be seen to be leading this “Population” or “Peculiar People” called the Church. Hence my point in my first post, namely that God reveals Himself to people (persons) through A People (a population). If the semantic play lacked clarity, I apologize.
Hi Joey,
I’m impressed, a catholic Kantian. Being a flagrant Kantian, I wish and hope you would agree with certain other Kantian positions as well. I.e., autonomous ethical individuals, the impossibility of accessing the noumenal world which leads to an endorsement of subjective phenomenal experience, and most importantly, the turn inward to the innate structure of the mind as an aid in discerning transcendent realities.
That said, I think the problem still stands. If the pieces of the whole disappear in the fusion then this renders myself identical with you, in virtue of being the same united body. Does this mean that I get to spend your money, since it is my money? Does this mean that wherever I am, you are as well. And, as Aquinas notes in his fight against Averroes who tried to suggest something similar, does this mean that if you sin I go to hell, or if I am good, you go to heaven?
I am pressing this point because you say that God is a singular plurality, and the church is a singular plurality, but it sounds like you are making no room for the plurality. If God is a singular plurality, then there really is an eternal distinction between Son and Spirit, though they are united as well. If the church is a singular plurality, then there really are individual members. Consider the universe, or the university, which are both a unity and diversity. There is one universe, but many planets and stars. Mars is not identical to Earth just because they are parts of one system. Math is not identical to geography just because they are parts of one Truth. Or, to use your examples, a vine is a single object, but the branch is not identical to the leaf. Or, to use the body example, there is one body, but the heart is not identical to the nose. In all of these examples we have unity and diversity. If God (and the church) is both a singularity and plurality, then should you not emphasize both the unity and diversity of God and the church?
@ JG.
I (and the rest of Anglicanism and most of orthodox catholic christians) would say you have the national church history backwards.
After all, church history shows that there have been national churches with local pastoral variations since the beginning. That’s why Paul (and the other Apostles) address letters to specific national/local churches. There have been specific local churches meeting local pastoral needs in various ways from the beginning of Christianity.
And, of course, there are a host of benefits that have come from the pastoral autonomy of local and national churches. Just a scattering of thoughts from the top of my head, I can suggest any number of wonderful, vitally important parts of Christianity that have arisen from pastoral responses by local and national churches: the hymnal and, indeed, the use of music in the liturgy at all, mass said in the vernacular, the rise of monasticism, the increase in religious orders, and local creativity expressed in a host of beautiful and reverent liturgical variations. Even the mass used as a basis for modern masses by Anglicans (and, it’s my understanding, also Romans who speak English) was based in the mass developed locally in Salisbury.
Your suggestion that “Pastoral concerns belong to the whole Church” would suggest that Christianity should never have adapted to local conditions at all. If that were the case, Christianity would still be a sect of Judaism, with a select membership based on female decent, and a liturgy spoken only in Aramaic (the language Jesus used himself).
It is untrue that “Christ is the Bishop of our souls.” Jesus is divine: our lord and savior. I am concerned that your metaphor claims too much for Bishops, who are, after all, human. I worry that it borders on donatism.
Far from crippling Christianity, local national responses to particular local pastoral concerns has been an essential part of Christianities success. Pastoral responses are by their very nature local and most certainly do not belong to the whole church; only the central core truths are set by the whole church in the first seven ecumenical councils. You will note that the parameters of the outcome from those councils were set by the entirety of catholic Christianity. Nothing less has authority for the entire church. Within the parameters outlined by those councils, local churches have always had ground for generous pastoral responses at the local level.
The violence and trouble started (and continues) ONLY when a single local bishop or state tried to go super-national and began to interfere or even try to control the pastoral response of a local community or Nation. The issue of Rome during the renaissance is one example of a local church trying to impose it’s own local traditions on other local and national churches. Naturally and inevitably this was resisted as it is not part of the core christian traditions, was and is unwarranted and is clearly not scriptural nor is it part of the church’s core traditions.
It’s interesting that you end your argument by castigating pragmatism. Your argument seems to be made up entirely of pragmatic justifications. Most orthodox Christians would note that it has been the appeal to a false “pragmatism” that has been at the center of claims for Roman supremacy (for example). As you say, pragmatism (of this sort) is clearly not godly. But a pragmatic adaptation to local conditions in pastoral response to local and national needs is actually the basis of Christianity’s success as an evangelical faith.
Hi Book Guy,
The Bishop of Our Souls comment was a reference to 1Peter 2:24-25, where the writer expresses relief that because Christ bore our sin in His body on the cross (body not being an accidental analogy in this case), we, who have injured Christ by turning to our own way like sheep (reminiscent of Isaiah 53), have now returned to the “Shepherd and Bishop of our souls” (ton poimena kai EPISKOPON ton psychon humon). It is the Apostle’s metaphor, not mine, and the charge of donatism is what is backward, since I don’t press for a super-holy expression of the human Church, but a faithful submission to the Church of God.
My point above was that pastoral concerns are necessarily Christ’s, and therefore are necessarily the whole Church’s. I do not disagree that local and contextualized appropriations of the Gospel and of Church governance have been a blessing to the Family of God over the last two millennia, and in fact, I insist that such local contextualization is what illustrates the universality of the Church, which universality is as diverse and colourful as is humanity created in the fully beautiful image of God.
This diversity does not equal pastoral autonomy (which, for the record, is the error of the donatists, who surreptitiously consecrated an idealogically compatible bishop in defiance of the true Church). The reason that the Scriptures and the Tradition and the Magisterium exist is precisely to prevent pastoral autonomy.
The English Reformation and the Great East-West Schism are two cases where, yes, the various concerned Bishops of Rome sadly overstepped their divinely-granted authority, but where the national or regional backlash was, while politically justified, deeply injurious to the one holy apostolic and universal Church. It is cause for great sorrow and efforts at reconciliation, not an entrenchment of a belief in pastoral autonomy. Those things on which there must be universal agreement are not restricted to the seven ecumenical councils (or whatever number of councils various branches deign to accept). Precisely BECAUSE times and cultures and contexts differ around the world, there must be some central authority to appropriate the timeless Truth of the Gospel so that its local expression is not perverted. This happily renders the front-line evangelical mission of the Church a “first generation” mandate, rather than an endlessly re-interpreted one throughout the generations. If evangelism is painting a contextually meaningful picture of the Gospel mysteries, I don’t want to scrape paint from my father’s canvas to colour my own – I want to dip my brush in the original well.
Furthermore, the violence we both cite is unjustified and deplorable regardless of its basis or trigger, but we are both caught in the trap of a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. The violence began after a regional or national authority ENFORCED (not reached for) a super-national authority, and was rejected. Before the rise of the nation-state, this would not have been a religious problem, but only a political one (speaking now of the English reformation). In the case of the Great Schism, you are right that the fault lies primarily with the one un-conciliar sister patriarchate of Rome claiming temporal authority over temporally unrelated patriarchates, but that does not change the fact that all the major patriarchates recognized the necessity (or appointment) of a supreme religious authority supported by a college of fraternal rulers. My biggest point above is that the national/regional/cultural/linguistic redefinition of the boundaries of any church is heartbreaking and unfaithful. Paul does address letters to regional assemblies, but in no way does that imply that his authority over their specific pastoral concerns is any less than APOSTOLIC. Though his responses to specific pastoral issues (judaizers, gnostics, false teachers, licentious behaviour, etc.) was nuanced differently in his letters to the several churches based on the specific congregation’s age or relationship to him (ie he spanks Corinth, pleads with Galatia, and relates to the congregation meeting in Philemon’s house), he clearly does not prescribe one solution for a problem in one church and a completely different one for another church. Paul obviously had layered ethics, but the ideal was always the “more excellent way”, and he got to determine how to live it out because, well….he was the apostle. NATIONAL concerns don’t appear to have entered his mind, and I guarantee that he never conceived of the Church as having or recognizing national boundaries. Peter certainly did not when he envisioned the Church as a royal priesthood and a peculiar people.
One point you make challenges me and I have to think about it a bit – namely, pragmatism as the basis for Roman supremacy. You’re right. Not entirely, but enough for me to retreat to form a better argument (or just to pray). However, I reject the charge that my argument is chiefly pragmatic as presented above. Note that I have not actually argued for Roman supremacy but for central ecumenical leadership in general (I have been careful not to reveal my actual present tradition).
OK now I am going to bed. God bless you, brother.
Dwayne – I didn’t say I was Catholic (big C). I have to retire to bed but I will get back to your stimulating rebuttal tomorrow if I am able.