David Virtue Interviews the Rev'd Dr Ephraim Radner, ACI Senior Fellow.
The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is Rector Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado. He holds a Ph.D. in theology from Yale University and is an accomplished violinist and scholar. He was interviewed by VIRTUOSITY on the crisis in the Episcopal Church.
By David W. Virtue
VIRTUOSITY: First of all thank you Dr. Radner for agreeing to being interviewed. I realize this cannot be an easy time for you. You have taken quite a few hits from clergy and a couple from two well-respected Primates and an ECUSA bishop. I suspect you are still reeling. So let me begin by asking, has anything been written in response to what you have written that has caused you to change your mind about why conservatives should not leave the ECUSA?
RADNER: Well, David, there has certainly been a good deal of – to keep with your boxing metaphor, but to Paulinize it a bit – “beating the air” going on. What we could all do with a little more is some “pummeling” of our “own body and subduing it, lest after preaching to others we ourselves should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:26f.).
If anything, the past few months since General Convention -- with all their internet, email, conferences, and journalistic interchanges – have solidified my sense that what we are being called to is a renewed “discipline” in the face of our church’s (and many other churches’ and our larger culture’s) stubborn assault upon and demanded dismantling of the Gospel tradition. But discipline here is for all of us: for those within the church who are undermining the evangelical witness and teaching for which we are responsible, for those within the church who are trying to resist this and offer an alternative witness, and for those within the larger communion, in Anglican and ecumenical terms, who are charged with constraining by and in counsel, the actions and witness of the rest of us.
Discipline represents the formative act of grace by a loving God – it upholds, it nourishes, it prunes, it humbles, it transfigures. To this degree, it is part and parcel of the reality of “communion” about which so many of us talk. Our failure within the church to discipline each other, and our failure to discipline ourselves, are both contributors to the disintegration of communion. Within the thing we call “the Anglican Communion”, we are seeing the fruit of such failures propagating themselves before our eyes.
We are not without hope, however. One of the foremost practical goals I would encourage us to pursue in the present moment is to help the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission to understand this reality, and to take hold of the calling to discipline: disciplining ECUSA as an ecclesial structure and within the legitimate framework of our relationships within the Anglican Communion; and holding each of us accountable to the glorious duties of communion in Christ that permit such discipline to be edifying in the first place rather than merely punitive. If we shirk this goal – considering it beneath us or too hard or too relationally demanding – we have also skirted one of the critical means by which the Church of Christ is renewed and transfigured.
VIRTUOSITY: You wrote in, "Why we will not leave: A conservative reflection," that amidst the recent turmoil within the Episcopal Church is the fact that the vast majority of "conservative" and intentionally "orthodox" Episcopalians are remaining in the Episcopal Church." Are you concluding from this that numbers matter and that the majority is, by definition right?
RADNER: The issue is not numbers, obviously; it is the integrity of our witness before the eyes of the world (and of each other!). There has been a good deal of disdain cast in the direction of purportedly “conservative” Episcopalians who have committed themselves, in some fashion, to remaining in the church: they have been charged with venal concerns like “keeping property” and the rest. In fact, however, many people intuit rightly that the fragmenting of this church – ECUSA – does little to promote the Gospel’s compelling witness even if done for the sake of a clear truth, in large measure because the Christian Church’s history of division has already so sullied the image of Christian commitment and solidarity that further fragmentation does less to instill than it does to disgust people with a notion of the truth’s integrity.
By contrast, a responsible, accountable, and steady defense of the truth within a context of engaged dispute and straight-forward testimony, aiming at discipline rather than schism according to the forms of our Lord’s own teaching and example, is a critical gift to offer not only a divided Church as a whole, but a horrendously fractured world. The world does not trust the Christian Church for a host of reasons – Jesus himself tells us this over and over. He also tells us how it is that “the world may believe” (John 17:20ff.). There is nothing sentimental in this; because the “oneness” to which his own prayer aims his divine heart is something that goes through the Cross.
VIRTUOSITY: You wrote: "There have been struggles over doctrine and discipline, to be sure, but pursued within the church community, they have not been without positive effect. In short, our leaven within the common work of the diocese, here as elsewhere, continues to be a witness to the Lord's Kingdom." Are you saying that there is never a time for believers to leave what many judge to be an apostate church? Should one always stay?
RADNER: I feel sometimes that this question is a little like the one posed to Jesus by the Pharisees: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matthew 19:3). Jesus doesn’t really answer the question directly: he says that Moses permitted divorce for some reasons – “hardness of heart” – and that under at least one condition (“unchastity”, whatever exactly that is), divorce and remarriage is not the commission of adultery it would otherwise be. However, he makes it clear that God “from the beginning” did not will divorce. As we know, people have argued endlessly over this response. And through it all, they have gotten divorced and managed to justify it almost every time.
With respect to the question of ecclesial separation, I would say this: Christians will divide, since they always have (cf. 1 Cor. 11:18). And there will be all kinds of reasons for doing so. Furthermore, people will positively offer a host of justifying reasons for doing so, based on this or that Scripture or moral argument, just as people find plenty of good reasons to get divorced. But how could we ever “commend” such a thing (Paul certainly doesn’t)?
The Church herself, through her theologians and leaders, ought to avoid casuistry on this matter altogether, and stick with the simple “from the beginning”; in the case of division, they must always ask the simple question, “is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13). If they do not, and we continue to whittle down the details that justify division in answer to the anxious, just as with divorce (and here I include the generalized fiction of annulment used by the Roman Catholics), the Church will find that she has offered so many rationalizations that the very purpose of her critical indulgence – pastoral care of the broken – is subverted because there is nothing whole left to maintain.
VIRTUOSITY: You say that part of our decision to stay in the Episcopal Church explicitly derives from traditional Christian commitments themselves. Staying represents a "higher calling" than leaving. It is a "higher calling" in the traditional Anglican sense of being a "safer path to salvation", a more certain grasp at the health of the soul in its accountability before God. It is "higher", "safer" and "more certain" because it is aimed at the simple following "in the steps of the Master", and these steps, we know, are ultimately pointed towards a Kingdom of great light, for which the world longs. My question is, there are many who point to specific Scriptures, especially from Paul's letters that would indicate that lines should be drawn, specifically Galatians about "another gospel" being proclaimed, unequal yoking and so forth. How do you answer those critics?
RADNER: Paul obviously holds himself out as a model for all Christians, whatever their role or ministry. His own particular ministry, however, is specific: that of “apostle”. And it might be helpful to view his relationship with erring Christians and with false leaders within the church from the perspective of this apostolic role, a role that later became paradigmatic for the episcopacy (would that all bishops took Paul as their model!).
It is from this position that Paul encourages Christians to keep clear of false teaching, false teachers, and immoral persons. He urges them to do this as members of his flock, within a given church. He does not urge them to leave churches and to divide congregations – for they are his in a special way! -- but rather to exercise within their own ranks the “discipline” necessary to maintain a clear witness and godly context of common formation. This is the whole burden of his Corinthian correspondence in its focus upon moral purity: maintain the integrity of your common life.
Paul’s personal relationship with teachers he judges to be in error, however, is slightly different than it is with individual members of his congregations. In this case, he is speaking to them if not exactly as ministerial “equals”, at least as colleagues of a sort do. Paul can argue with them, berate them mercilessly, “oppose them face to face” as with Peter (Gal. 2:11), and encourage his flock not to follow their errors. But he is very careful to maintain the integrity of the church’s common life, even as it is somehow engaged with a broad range of other teachers. Each teacher, he insists, is responsible before God for his or her own teaching (cf. 1 Cor. 3;10-15). Indeed, the “curse” that Paul promises to preachers of a false Gospel, in Galatians 1:8f., is probably pointing to just such final accountability, and not to some formal “ban” from the local or larger church (it is, after all, aimed at “angels” not just guest preachers!).
In any case, Paul never asks that congregations split over their adherence to this or that teacher, however false they may be. (This is clear in his argument with the “pseudo-apostles” in 2 Corinthians.) For all his fulminations and even claims to be morally autonomous of them, he even maintains his connections with the Jerusalem church and its leaders, and indeed labors tirelessly to embody these connections materially and physically, to the point of risking and suffering final arrest because of it.
The reason for all this is fairly simple, think: his congregation and its people are a trust he has been given. While they may be “foolish” and “bewitched” (Gal. 3:1), they are his “little children”, and he their mother, “in travail until Christ be formed in” them (Gal. 4:19). As a parent to them, he is responsible for his charges, and accountable for their lives unto the end, however wrecked or veering towards wreckage they may be. Even his urging that the Corinthians banish one of their immoral members from their midst is done for the offender’s ultimate salvation (1 Cor. 5:5). Like Jesus’ own parable of the Lost Sheep, Paul is a shepherd who leaves those who are well in order to find the one who has wandered astray. At their most recalcitrant and hostile – as with the Galatians and the Corinthians – Paul speaks to them as his “brethren” (cf. Gal. 1:11). And at his most severe in terms of demanding discipline, he promises it for “building up and not for tearing down” (2 Cor. 13:10).
Much could be said about particular passages and about the evolution of the practices of discipline and even of excommunication in the developing Christian Church. These are serious and complex matters, often poorly understood by historians. And they should not be dealt with cavalierly, as they tend to be in the midst of present argument. My point is simply that, from the perspective of one who is a steward of the Church of Christ, and of its people, the line between division deemed “necessary” and actual abandonment of the larger flock is not one that can be drawn with much degree of certainty, on a Scriptural, let alone a broadly spiritual level. We should beware.
VIRTUOSITY: You point to "centuries of church tradition" to justify your position. But didn't the early Church Father St. Cyprian specifically say we should not follow disobedient bishops? And more that we should try every effort to remove them?
RADNER: The appeal to someone like Cyprian, David, is greatly mistaken. This 3rd century North African bishop was, by all critical accounts, one of the great contributors to the “juridical-canonical” understanding of the Western Church’s structures and unity. Even someone like Hans von Campenhausen – no happy promoter of this development in the Catholic tradition – is forced to admit this about Cyprian. Cyprian was a great disciplinary rigorist, of course: he argued strongly for strict penances and even what we would call “excommunication” for those who had compromised with the State’s enforced idolatry during persecutions. This applied, in his mind, especially to priests and bishops – using the “contagion” model of immorality and heresy, he believed that church leaders who failed in their person to uphold the faith needed to be separated from the body. He was not, for instance, willing to accept the validity of “heretical baptisms”. But two important things need to be said about this.
First, Cyprian’s notion of clerical “infection” was eventually ruled unsound by the larger Church, something Augustine in his controversy with the Donatists classically articulated. The Anglican 39 Articles (#26) concur. Second, Cyprian was adamant that the “separation” of people from unfaithful clerical leaders was a form of ecclesial discipline and therefore could only take place legitimately within the unified structures of the church as a whole, people, clergy, and bishops working together. No individual or individual congregation or individual bishop, according to Cyprian, had the right to impose such discipline on another individually – they could do so legitimately only by acting in counsel. Thus, in a letter often cited these days to support “separation” (i.e. #67 in some enumerations), Cyprian urges that two “lapsed” bishops in Spain be deposed; but he insists that the “whole brotherhood” exercise “suffrage” in this matter, and that bishops of the province in question make the decision and be involved in its disposition. On several occasions he labels those who rise up against their bishop outside of these conciliar disciplinary frameworks to be “like Korah” of the book of Numbers rebelling against Aaron, and thus worthy of God’s wrath.
Cyprian, in this sense, was precisely a precedent for “discipline within communion”, exactly the kind of thing I insist we must pursue, for the sake of our common life in Christ and the integrity through accountability of our mutual witness in the truth, and exactly the kind of thing that we are in fact pursuing through the common work of the Network, Primates, Commission, and Archbishop of Canterbury together. And, to this, degree, Cyprian stands in complete coherence with what became the standard notions of conciliar discipline outlined in the canons of the great Ecumenical Councils, canons that, I would emphasize, demand to be read authoritatively in concert with the conciliar Creeds.
VIRTUOSITY: You point to Jesus, in his relationship with his (often wayward) people, arguing he was a "stayer", not a "leaver". Given the present debate, this fact is crucial above all other claims. In mission and ministry within Israel, Jesus met error, rebellion, and faithlessness by proclaiming his Gospel upholding the authority of the Scribes and Pharisees (who "sit in the seat of Moses" -- Matthew 23:2), and maintaining table-fellowship with his enemies. And then you say that had he left, and formed a separate community of "purity", like the Essenes, [Jesus] would probably have survived into a longer ministry. This seems to beg the question that if ECUSA bishops consistently preach heresy, should orthodox laity place their souls in jeopardy, perhaps even permanently corrupted, by listening to that which is not true?
RADNER: I don’t think this “begs” the question at all: it addresses the question straightforwardly. If we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, where does that lead us in the face of religious leaders who are teaching error? Abandoning the Temple? Out into the wilderness? Separation from the Pharisees? The point is pretty simple, David: all the Scriptures and the Law are “fulfilled” in Him, and the shape of our life, even in these particular decisions, is being called into Him and into the form of His own self-giving.
Of course, this calling isn’t easily accepted and pursued. That I will agree with. The apostles themselves didn’t have the stomach for it, initially anyway: standing up, speaking the truth, engaging honestly but persistently, rebuking where necessary, allowing for one’s own failure of power, trusting in Another’s power… It is almost inhuman, I realize.
And so, when you speak of “souls in jeopardy” and of their “permanent corruption”, it’s hard to know exactly what this might mean – corrupted because they cannot do what Jesus asks of us to do? What I have certainly seen are souls that are exhausted in the face of the battle against error and disobedience. I have felt exhausted myself. And I am not about to judge those whose exhaustions can only find some rest in “going away”, in finding some more peaceful avenue in which to journey. And, I realize also, the Episcopal Church isn’t exactly “the Temple of the Lord”! Still, the footsteps of Jesus are not thereby erased because we all at some point meet the limits of our strength. Separation has its exhaustions too, as many who have pursued it will attest. What is certainly not acceptable is to brand those whose choices are at least to try to follow such traces of the Lord as they mark a resolute adhesion to Israel’s people with a kind of failure in pastoral responsibility or even of disloyalty to the Gospel. This simply makes no sense.
VIRTUOSITY: Jesus finally abandoned Israel, "how often would I have gathered you but you would not", and Paul takes his message to the Gentiles because the Jews were too hard-hearted to hear the message. Does this not indicate an exasperation point can be reached to which the dust must be kicked off ones shoes and one moves on to more fertile spiritual ground?
RADNER: The notion that Jesus “abandoned” Israel is nonsense, David. Indeed, a very pernicious nonsense, if I may state it so strongly. Jesus died for Israel, in the form of Israel, and tied to Israel. The passage you cite (Matthew 23:38) expresses the sorrow of Jesus at Israel’s rejection of his love, not his own rejection of their person. The Parable of the Vineyard (Mat. 21:33ff.) speaks, in the end, of the Kingdom of God “being taken away” from one set of tenants and given to another; but only after the death of the householder’s son sent to them, who remains with them even through his maltreatment and murder; and who these “others” are and in what fashion the “kingdom” is “taken away” is left unclear. Jesus died for the world as well, of course, but only through Israel. “Salvation is of the Jews”, he tells the Samaritan woman (John 4:22), and he means it. His is Israel’s “flesh” (Rom. 9:1ff.). The classic Scriptural commentary on this matter is, of course, Romans 9-11. It’s complicated and murky, but one thing it is clear about is that Israel is not “abandoned” -- “Has God rejected His people? By no means!” (11:1) – nor is Israel’s present rejection of the Christ to be a kind of anathematized consignment to Gehenna (11:26, 32). The relationship between Jew and Gentile is one of mutual provocation, judgment, jealousy, humility, fruitfulness, and grace. The Christian Church’s subsequent adoption of a radically supersessionist view of Israel is in fact historically tied to the promotion of separatism and schism within the Christian Church itself, something that has obviously had sorry effects not only on Christian vision and practice, but more materially on the life of Jews. No one should think that the moral stakes of this argument throughout history, and perhaps even now, are limited and intramural.
VIRTUOSITY: You write: "We do not, quite simply, find in Scripture a way of "following" our Lord that leads away from the people who reject him, for they remain always "his" people." Many feel that ECUSA's revisionist clergy and bishops are not "his" people. They are false teachers who corrupt the flock, like Bishop Spong? How would you respond to that?
RADNER: The appropriate response to error among church leaders is communal discipline. The separation and division of a church over error is an admission somehow that the community is incapable of applying discipline. The question then is “why?”. It is possible right now, and quite easy in terms of getting the numbers, to request presentments for virtually every bishop who voted for Robinson’s consent. It would certainly be legal and probably appropriate. Why don’t we do it? The assumption many hold – based on a single attempt with an assistant bishop, charge not even with teaching but with an ordination, viz. Bp. Righter – seems to be that discipline is pointless. But it has only been tried once! (Philip Turner’s essays on the history of all of this are illuminating; not least of all because they emphasize the sharing of responsibility for ECUSA’s state among all stripes and parties over the past decades.) And, after all, discipline only makes sense within a context in which it has some kind of expected and habituated forms and demands and is tethered to accepted spiritually informed limits. Here is where work needs to be done, however slowly and patiently.
I want to be clear, however, that what is needed is in fact discipline, and not dialogue. Dialogue is useless at present, because there is little shared basis of evangelical commitment upon which to follow the persuasive compulsion of argument. Actually, I am myself convinced that we are not really dealing simply with “error” and “false teaching” within ECUSA. Rather, we are dealing with something akin to madness. I believe, that is, that the church is, in a real sense, possessed by a spiritual illness, where otherwise intelligent and self-consciously and religiously committed people are being led, because of our sins, somewhere through the providence of God that has placed leaders in the grip of strange and destructive powers.
I have had my own personal, and certainly much pastoral, experience with mental illness, and I see all the analogies at work in our common ecclesial relationships of the moment. It is not possible, for instance, to convince a deeply depressed person, no matter the incontrovertible realities on display as proof, that the world is not falling apart; it is not possible to counter the misapprehensions of reality that a schizophrenic holds by pointing to something more rational. And so in our situation: “Scripture in its plain sense, its accepted authoritative sense, its use within the Church and churches over time; authoritative teaching, saintly and godly testimony, natural reason, conciliar decision -- all point to the error of your choices and teaching”, we say; but it’s as if the words are gibberish and the argument nothing but wind. We are talking to people in another world.
One’s responses to this kind of situation are limited: to argue endlessly and with increasing vitriol; to sullenly acquiesce; or to shut up altogether, suffer the encounter silently, and then walk away. This dynamic has been in existence within ECUSA and other denominations now for decades. It is the way people deal with madness, and I have seen it in many a family. And its final endpoint is not unusually a separation of life altogether, simply for the sake of holding on to depleted energies. This is, surely, where many of us are.
But it is not, it seems to me, where the nuptial character of Christ’s own marriage to the Church (Eph. 5) would lead us. There is, after all, yet another way to deal with madness. To move forward simply with what is real and true, to do so decisively and with the willingness to place practical limits on the irrational behavior and claims of the other partner (i.e. a kind of discipline), to live within these limits for oneself with the other as best one can (thus discipline becomes a kind of self-offering) and to let time and the grace of God bring healing if that is His will.
VIRTUOSITY: Should not a man like Spong been publicly rebuked and tossed out of the church?
RADNER: In brief: rebuked: yes; disciplined: yes; if impenitent, permanently stripped of his authority and office (such as it is in retirement): yes, yes, yes.
VIRTUOSITY: You cited the French Revolution and the Roman Catholic Church response, which, by staying, won the day. But what of the Reformation? Are you saying that Martin Luther was wrong to fight the ecclesiastical corruption of his day? He never wanted to split the Church, he wanted a pure church, or at least a better one. Out of it was born Lutheranism and the three great truths, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia and Sola Scriptura. Was Luther wrong?
RADNER: Wrong about what? The truths you enumerate were and are the Church’s truths, and Luther articulated and promoted them brilliantly at a time when they had been forgotten or twisted by many. None of this is in dispute, at least for me. I know that there are those who would like somehow to tar me with the brush of being disloyal to the Reformation. But what does that actually mean? We are living in the 21st century, not the 16th. And the Reformation isn’t a current reality; we have, rather, ideas, habits, cultures, and the rest which have been left behind by the 16th century and which have evolved out of that period and movement. Including Anglicanism! It is hard to be disloyal to the past, unless of course, you believe in the Communion of Saints in a rather tangible way; which, of course, I do. But in that case, you are also bound to loyalties that go far beyond particular national and temporal movements: Luther, for instance, must be heard, learned from, and responded to within the extent, the embrace, and the constraining grace of the Church Universal.
My interest, in a scholarly way, has been with the fruit of Christian division, not with the integrity of this or that Christian leader (like Luther) in the course of this or that struggle. And my critical focus has been on, among other things, the way that the Catholic-Protestant divisions of the 16th century and beyond actually created modes of thinking theologically and of reading Scripture that obscured rather than illuminated certain basic realities of the Gospel (the figural reading of the Scriptures as a unity of Testaments embracing the life of the whole Church, the character of charity and communion as a vehicle of truth, the shape of the Holy Spirits work, the nature of conversion, and so on). Like it or not, we are heirs of these modes of thinking and reading, we are bound to them. Is it possible to get outside our skins in this regard, and see ourselves more clearly and thereby hear our vocation more honestly?
One of my contentions is that we both should try to do this, but that it is also deeply difficult to succeed at doing so within a state of multiple and divided Christian communities and churches. This is both a sociological and a spiritual contention. That is, there is a dynamic at work in the Christian church today, embodied in our divisions, that is in fact tied to the work of God in our judgment. Its not just a matter of getting our structures right, or of getting our ideas right, or of being on the right side although we are not free to disregard the obligation we have to make faithful decisions in this regard. What is at stake, at this point, is yet more profoundly how we are going to act under the hand of God, what posture we shall take. And this is the posture in which we should be making our decisions about structures and ideas and sides. My commitment to hearing the Scripture in communion i.e. in the communion of the larger Church as best as we are allowed to be a part of it, in all of its strange and blurred contours and my sense that we are called to exercise our difficult mutual responsibilities and accountabilities within an ordered process of discipline that reflects that communion, all of this is informed by my sense of posture as a penitent before God, demanded by the very history of our churches.
None of us, to my mind, have been placed in the true church among other churches; at least, not so that we could discern it. With respect to Anglicanism, we have been placed here and not somewhere else; and while placed here, we have been entrusted with a wealth of riches, theologically, liturgically, ethically, intellectually from the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Fathers, the Puritans, the Restoration, and so on. We are bound to receive these with humility, gratitude, an ordering of priority even, and the critical spirit of a penitent heart seeking God in the midst, especially now, of assaults upon the Gospel and spiritual wreckage wrought by confusion and unfaithfulness of an extensive kind; and to do so knowing that we are called to something bigger than the preservation of a way of divided life in Christ. For however good God has been in providing us with blessing in the midst of division and God has been good indeed, far beyond our deserving there is no renewal in division, only the hard hand of God, gloved with unmerited mercy. Scripturally, our divisions are simply contrary to the Word of God, the prayers of Jesus, and the mind of His self offering (cf. Philippians 2:1-11).
I know that not everybody agrees with this, nor should they in any prima facie fashion. But my argument is borne out on a number of historical fronts I believe, and it would be helpful if people attempted to approach it critically, rather than ideologically (which has tended to be the case).
VIRTUOSITY: You say that a second reason why conservatives are staying in the Episcopal Church is their institutional loyalty and obedience. This, you said was branded as "legalistic", "mechanistic", and "structural" -- somehow beneath the spiritual depth of truth-seeking? Are you saying that there is never a time for believers to leave a corrupt institution that preaches against the very things it is supposed to uphold? Should one forever be "loyal and obedient" to a corrupt institution?
RADNER: I would prefer to use the word subjected love, in the sense of Paul’s usage in Ephesians 5. Jesus himself was, at least in the minds of the religious authorities, disobedient on matters like the Sabbath law. However, he was subject to their power, in the ultimate way of willingly allowing himself to be arrested, unjustly condemned, and finally executed. We are told rather called -- to follow in his steps and to trust to him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:21ff). The whole developed philosophy of conscientious objection which can be deeply subversive of unjust structures, as well we know -- is rightfully and in fact historically linked with this reality. It would be odd if Christ were to have bequeathed to the wider world (including Hinduism) a way of life Christians no longer themselves judge worthy of their spirit.
VIRTUOSITY: What if ordinary people sense that their very souls are being jeopardized by staying in a morally and theologically compromised church, what if the Spirit is saying, "begone, the lampstand has been removed, I have gone."
RADNER: The situation you describe is also described in the book of the Prophet Ezekiel. It would be interesting to draw potential similitudes between the experience of a pneumatically abandoned people like Israel placed into captivity and subjected to exile, with our own vocation today. Indeed, that is precisely what I have encouraged us to do. And one response is this: you cannot escape the judgment of God upon your people by trying to find another people more worthy of your affiliation. The accepted and even deliberately pursued division of the church is, ultimately, a way to remain irresponsible.
VIRTUOSITY: You appeal to both Catholic and Reformed traditions, the submission to the "order" and "law" of institutions, especially those of the Church, is a necessary "bridle" upon the innate tendencies of individual pride that lead to sin. Without this submission (or at least acknowledged presumption of subjection), even in cases of individual conscience, the passions of autonomy and rebellion will and must eventually destroy the very means by which truth can be established. IS submission and acquiescence the same thing in the end?
RADNER: Is the Cross of Jesus Christ a form of acquiescence to sin? There are certainly those who believe it is. But not the Christian Church.
VIRTUOSITY: You talk about legal safeguards by which the "rights of the accused" are protected. In the ECUSA the "rights of the orthodox" seem to be anything but protected. Can you draw a direct analogy here?
RADNER: There is a need for the freedom of worship, teaching, and deployed leadership of orthodox Christians within our denomination to be respected and protected. That is a moral obligation of any church, obviously. And it is one that the Primates, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have formally and publicly upheld, to the point of placing their own authority behind its guarantee. This is a promise we must hold these leaders accountable to keep, and to do so with all the persuasive and importuning means we have.
VIRTUOSITY: You say the Archbishop of Canterbury, is lifting up the supreme value of jurisdictional canons within Anglicanism, but is not thereby diminishing the value of the Gospel's truth in relation to some merely human and self-serving structure. He is rather acknowledging that the truth cannot emerge as determinative, without securing its freedom from the depredations of individual striving and delusion, a security given only in the social contours of a stable institutional life. But what if, at the end of the day the Liberals triumph in the are of morals and try to push pansexuality onto the rest of the communion and they balk, what happens then? Should provinces like Nigeria and Uganda stay?
RADNER: David, you raise one of the more sobering speculative possibilities that we are facing. For the moment, I believe, the Archbishop is indeed working to maintain a context in which the truth may freely be apprehended, shared, and proclaimed within our Communion. His support, and indeed formative encouragement of the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes is real and has made a difference to this group’s ability to move forward in the face of much opposition within the 815 crowd; his work in keeping the Primates working together, not simply to avoid a problem, but to address it as far as possible within accepted, because historically rooted, commitments and values of Anglicanism, is critical in assuring the edifying outcome to their work for the sake of the Communion as a whole. I could go on, and should, because there are many people working very hard, and providing depths of theological and intellectual resources to this work, much of it going on quietly and persistently. One day, I hope they will be thanked.
Still, it could all come to naught. In such a case, we will see the end of the Anglican experiment of non-centralized and non-coercive Scriptural catholicity in mutual subjection and mission. It has been a grand experiment, I need to say. Marvelously grand! And its failure will be a deep disappointment, not only to day-dreaming individuals like me, but to the nations, who have longed for a testimony to this possibility of life together, and whose salvation is tied to the God who might make such life possible. In the face of this hope now shattered, they will see the visage of God’s re-ordering judgment.
But if this happens, the question will be for individuals, not for churches as a whole to answer. There will be nothing for Nigeria or Uganda to stay in. They will go their own way and call themselves what they will. But to individuals I would say: The Anglican Church is dead! Whatever you do, wherever you go, do not call yourself by that name any longer. It has become a byword among the nations.
VIRTUOSITY: You write: "A third reason why most conservative Episcopalians are staying in the Episcopal Church is related to the previous one. To speak bluntly, it is because we have tasted the fruit of unbridled separatism, and the fruit is bitter indeed." Are you referring to the Continuing Churches in this statement that flowed from St. Louis in 1979?
RADNER: I am not pointing to anyone in particular, but to all of us and each of us together.
VIRTUOSITY: You seem to take particular aim at the AMIA. What is your basic beef with them? They seemed to have made off with some 8 parishes in the Diocese of Colorado?
RADNER: I don't have a particular animus against the AMiA. My worry, as is crystal clear, is with the whole habit of division and separatism that permeates our culture, ecclesially and in secular terms, and for reasons I have already enumerated. I believe that the AMiA like the rest of us! -- embodies aspects of this culture. The point you are raising is related, of course, to the fact that these embodiments are known and immediate, and not theoretical. And my concern, in an immediate and deep sense, has been primarily pastoral. The AMiA didn’t make off with some 8 parishes in Colorado at all. They formed, from the division of these parishes, new congregations, so that where there was one in each case (by and large), there became two. (The particulars of each congregation’s history are not at issue here.) That, in itself, is not even problematic: many churches grow through mitosis, as it were. But these divisions were of the divorce kind: leaving in their wake hurt, anger, mistrust, mutual recrimination, charges and counter-charges, weakened witness, scandal and so on, among conservatives and the unchurched alike. And, as with many divorces, we can list a whole host of good reasons to separate. But it hardly seems reasonable to go the next step and encourage the multiplication of divorce, which is exactly what our culture has done (with the churches happily following along).
The disagreement that has become public between myself along with others! and the leadership of the AMiA is one that helpfully brings into profile in part what is at stake in our larger Anglican conflict: are we a mutually accountable communion, bound by the ordering virtues of Scripture’s common hearing and individual deferral? If we are not, there are of course many different paths we could still follow, which would still pit conservative and liberal against each other. But if we are, then this particular doctrinal and ethical conflict we are in must be pursued within a special context of its own conciliar, communal, with the patience that bespeaks passion. And since I believe we are such a communion, I also believe we are making a serious mistake, as I have said over and over, if we do not resolve this conflict within the conciliar context that explicitly defines communion.
As I have also said over and over, the AMiA is filled with faithful and self-sacrificial Christians; certainly no less faithful than anybody else; and far more faithful than I in many respects! I pray that someday there will be an ecclesial reconciliation among us all. I would pray too that none of us make the eternity of such a prayer necessary by our own actions.
VIRTUOSITY: You write: "Finally, driven by passions for success and rapid advance, and unbridled by the slow structures of ecclesial canon, leadership has been recruited and thrust forward without prudent testing, formation, or accountability. This is the bitter fruit of impatience. Are you saying this of the AMIA or of all separatist vagante groups that have left the ECUSA?
RADNER: The issue of formation is fundamental if we are to rebuild a faithful church. Bp. Allison has long drawn out attention to this truth. And failure to get straight the rigorous demands of selection, formation, and accountability have crippled many movements of protest and reform within the church, separatist or not. I have been a student, as you know, of 17th and 18th-century Jansenism, a reform movement within French Catholicism. It was a movement filled with spiritual and theological geniuses, with ascetic virtuosos, and with courageous confessors and martyrs. Their greatest influence came within the limited efforts of their educational and formational ministries; their more extensive failure can be tied directly to the fact that these efforts were as limited as they were, and that the call to formational rigor soon gave way to the more immediate satisfactions of polemical displays and sacrifices. We dare not fall into this trap. One, by the way, that our greatest Reformation teachers did not.
VIRTUOSITY: You say the search for order, is ultimately liberative. Many of those who leave ECUSA for the AMIA and other groups say THEY feel liberated, no longer under the curse of apostate bishops. What would you say to them?
RADNER: I'm certainly not in a position to judge how other people feel. The liberative gift of ecclesial order’s genuine search is not a subjective reality in the first place, but one that describes the actual character of the spirit formed into the image of Christ through a sharing of His sufferings (cf. Philippians 3:10), something St. Paul places squarely within the experience of seeking a common mind. The freedom for which Christ has set us free, as he writes in Galatians, is governed by a Spirit whose gifts provide fruit, nourished and grown within well-ordered common life (cf. Gal. 5:1, 16ff.). At some point, surely, what the Spirit makes of us, becomes the very thing we are grateful to have become. Then our freedom is turned into the subjective heart of thanksgiving. There is certainly no virtue in feeling bad; nor is there any in feeling better. Virtue lies in the image of Christ.
VIRTUOSITY: What is the correct response to false teaching? What of our Lord's admonition to "take heed that no one leads you astray" (Matthew 24:4). And Paul's injunction about "preaching another gospel" and being declared "anathema". Does this not imply that separation might be necessary in extreme circumstances?
RADNER: I encourage people to read the Pastoral letters of St. Paul 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus -- especially in answer to this question. Chapter 6 of 1 Timothy, for instance, provides a wonderful outline for how to teach in the face of falsities and dissension. The outline, furthermore, is tied to the shape of Paul’s own life and body, about which I have already commented.
VIRTUOSITY: How far can we accommodate sin in the church before we say enough is enough?
RADNER: It is God, I believe, who says that enough is enough. We have been accommodating sin all over the place over the centuries. Not necessarily to our credit, mind you. But the line in the sand is a wonderfully adjustable measure, more frequently used for self-protection than for the building up of neighbor. What we are asked to do is provide clarity and example, and discipline where needed, in face of these shifting sands.
VIRTUOSITY: A recent study by the Barna Research Group painted a devastating portrait of the Episcopal Church as scoring at the bottom of the heap of American denominations as to the accuracy of the Bible, sharing the faith with others, the importance of religious faith to them, that Christ was not sinless, and their commitment to Christianity. It would appear that the ECUSA is capitulating to the culture. Can this go on without separation at some point?
RADNER: The details of Barna’s picture are indeed dispiriting. But Barna’s research indicates a whole range of religious inefficacy that runs across denominations including many evangelical groups. We are in a time when Christianity itself is losing ground in America, and it isn’t primarily because of ECUSA that this is so, although she is part of the trend. The response, furthermore, to this trend is not obviously to start new churches as opposed to reforming and renewing current ones. Indeed, the decline of Christianity as a proportion of the American population has taken place when there are actually more denominations of Christian churches than ever before.
Numbers aren’t the issue anyway, as you point out earlier. Rather, the integrity of our witness is. And the context of that witness informs its integrity in ways I have been trying to underline. One of the greatest religious turn-offs for young people is the divisive infighting among Christian communities. That is not to say that we are called to avoid conflicts that are over critical matters; rather we are to testify to a way of upholding the truth that can overcome easy division and embody the true form of Christ Jesus. This witness is one that young people yearn after. In fact, they hardly know that it is possible, so distant has its realization been among the churches for so long.
VIRTUOSITY: Thank you Dr. Radner
