"Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori on July 27 notified the standing committee of the Diocese of Northern Michigan that the necessary consents to the ordination and consecration of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester as bishop were not received within the prescribed time period and therefore his election was 'null and void.'"For those of you not following the story, the objections to Rev. Forrester's consecration went along three lines:
1. He practiced Zen Buddhist meditation techniques.
I wrote on this one here. This was not a real deal killer. The recovery of the Christian Contemplative Prayer tradition through Thomas Keating owes a lot to Zen technique. However, beyond technique, there is Buddhist theology, which led to..
2. His Christology was in question
Many critics, including bishops on the moderate left and even extending into the liberal camp questioned whether Forrester had appropriated too much Buddhist theology, seeing sin as an illusion and Jesus as one who simply taught us to remove the blinders from our eyes. This left no room for Atonement theory, which comes in an astonishingly wide range of flavors, but all insists that Jesus has a unique role in salvation from sin. This was held to be apparent in his..
3. Unauthorized alteration of the Baptismal Covenant
Where in the course of his pastoral ministry, he revised the Baptismal Covenant to remove references to Satan as well as Christ's salvific work. This is probably the big one, as alteration of Prayer Book liturgy can not be authorized by a priest and called into question his understanding of what "Common Prayer" means.
The denial of consents to a bishop-elect is never a good thing. It causes pain and embarrassment to the diocese in question, not to mention the expense of requiring a new electing convention. The last time this happened (other than the South Carolina situation a year ago that had to do with procedure and with questions about the bishop-elect's willingness to stay in the Episcopal Church) was 1934.
We denied consecration of a bishop-elect on theological grounds. So why was this not news-worthy? Considering all that goes on in our church, why did it not get much mention? The reason, in my opinion, is that the special-interest groups on both the right and the left were disappointed with the decision. Why so?
For some of those on the left, any perceived attack on autonomy or anything that smacks of a "litmus test" is unacceptable. A kind of "Meta-Doctrine" of radical inclusion means that no one should be denied anything on any basis (Other than misconduct). But there is already a litmus test inherent in the vows a bishop makes that they will defend and teach the doctrine of the church, which (according to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral and the results of the Righter Trial) includes Nicene Orthodoxy. We ARE radically inclusive, but we are radically inclusive Christians of the orthodox strain.
For those on the right, it is convenient to ignore this decision. As I have written before, the schismatics are stuck in a myopia of what the church looked like in the 1970s when Bishops Pike and Spong attempted to pull the church away from orthodox teaching. They have not raised their heads since then to look at what the church is actually teaching and doing, other than to point at aberrations and pretend they are normal or to quote people (usually the Presiding Bishop) out of context. The Church that Bps Duncan and Iker describe as a "New Religion" is one that may have been a threat when they were in seminary, but it does not look like reality on the ground in the present Episcopal Church. They need a good theological cover to deal with the reality of their own misogyny and homophobia. No, it is easier just to hold to their carefully-constructed narrative that serves their own ends rather than pay attention to this decision. They needed to move when they did, because with each graduating seminary class, their argument sounds weaker and less relevant.
And what does this decision mean? It means that there are indeed limits on what can be taught as the doctrine of the church. Members or clergy may hold personal views, but the official teaching has to adhere to certain standards of (hopefully generous) orthodoxy. Many bishops who hold otherwise liberal views voted "No" on consent. It is inconceivable that Rev. Forrester would have been denied consent had he been elected in the same era as Pike and Spong, yet he was denied consent in our supposedly "everything goes" and "gnostic" church of today. The logical conclusion, then, is that creedal orthodoxy in The Episcopal Church is not waning, but is actually growing in strength, even among those classified as "liberals" by the right. (As a side note, unitarianism has ALWAYS been a minority opinion in the Episcopal Church. See here. To classify it as something new is a revisionist view of church history.)
Although the battle rages on over parsing the words from General Convention, it may prove in history that the Forrester election is actually more of a watershed moment in Episcopal history, when the church finally gets over its deconstructive phase and remembers its traditional strength of an inclusive, generous orthodoxy.
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