Posted on 10/15/2005 5:18:54 PM PDT by sionnsar
ECUSA shills that they are, Episcopal News Service is not without occasional great value. Covering the recent “Values, Vision and the Via Media” conference, an attempt by the Christian left to come up with ways to get people to pay attention to them, Dana Wilkie wrote the following:
The idea for the conference took root after last year’s presidential election, when progressive Christians organized to protest attempts by the Religious Right to co-opt the name of the church in America. Exit polls indicated that voters associated “moral values” with narrow and divisive issues -- such as abortion and gay marriage -- instead of a broader Christian agenda. This, experts agree, focused public attention on the church as guardian of personal morality rather than the church as defender against racism, poverty and war.
Read any thelogian of any Christian tradition you care to and you will never run across a more brilliantly concise explanation of the current battle than that one. And I'm quite literally not joking. Wilkie may not have intended to say it but unintentional genius is still genius and Wilkie says in three sentences what I've spent the last two years trying to say.
It's all there. Individual sins, such as abortion and homosexual activity, are "narrow and divisive," leading people away from "a broader Christian agenda." Thanks to the evil "Religious Right," people began to think of the church as being concerned about sin "a guardian of personal morality" rather than the "defender against racism, poverty and war" good Episcopalians know that it has always been.
Which pretty much nails it. I've said before in this space that I had to learn who Jesus Christ was from Billy Graham rather than from the Episcopal Church into which my mother had me baptized. I don't remember too many Episcopal sermons about sin at my old parish. Certainly none about sins like adultery or marital fidelity; venturing into those areas might have cost my church many a pledge check.
What sins I did hear about were usually things like racism, sexism, poverty, war, conservatism, refusing to think that homosexual activity was perfectly normal and Christian orthodoxy in general, regardless of its source. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with me. I'd had some water splashed on me when I was an infant so all I had to do to get into heaven was to fall into the socialist line and stop wasting time sweating the small stuff like who or what I slept with.
This might be fine for someone who has no need of a Physician. But if you know deep down that there is in fact something fatally wrong with you and that there is only one Healer, all the anti-racism training, anti-poverty letters and anti-war demonstrations in the world will not make your knowledge go away.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams.
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