New Revelation?

The news reports that the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Anglican communion) has a new national level leader, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who almost immediately after her election commented on the contested issue of homosexuality, claiming that this is an “ordered” condition on par with heterosexuality. She offers this bold assessment based, not on the authority of Scripture as interpreted through tradition and reason (the customary Anglican formula for doctrinal discernment), but rather, amazingly, on her own authority: she simply makes her claims with “I believe….”

It is not my purpose here to criticize Ms. Schori for her personal beliefs or to take issue with the beliefs and practices of other Christians. What is at issue, it seems to me, is the fact that such revolutionary alterations of long-held Christian beliefs are propounded by people in church leadership positions as if they have the authority to do so. Now, on the matter of Ms Schori’s pronouncement concerning homosexuality, the Scriptures are quite clear, even putting to one side the Old Testament, where, the argument goes, there are many norms and rules we no longer go by, so why take OT teaching on this issue seriously? Yet, the New Testament is of itself abundantly clear on this subject. Tradition, too, both the unbroken Tradition of the Catholic Church, as well as the centuries of Anglican belief, is also clear. That leaves reason, which Ms. Schori does not really appeal to, fortunate for her, because it would be a daunting task to rationally try to normalize homosexuality in the light of the Scriptures and Tradition.

I find it ironic that the Catholic Church is often labeled “authoritarian” because she refuses to change her teachings to be in conformity with contemporary “values,” even as some leaders of Christian groups feel they have the “authority” to change indiscriminately what their own churches have long taught as unchanging truth. What a pope or Catholic bishop personally believes, of itself, has no authority whatsoever. They are constrained by the teaching of the Church, by the Word of God, whose servants they are.

However, there have been attempts, outside the Catholic communion, to officially and definitively appeal to “authority” as the basis for altering long-held Christian beliefs. In an article from the official website of the Episcopal church, “Scripture, Tradition, and Reason – Hooker’s supposed 3-legged Stool,” a new authority, which can, and does, trump Scripture and Tradition, is derived, according to the author, from “new revelation.” The source of this new revelation? The article writer calls it “modern Experience.”

In recent times there has arisen the view that God (whoever precisely Deity is taken to be) reveals Godself to people today in and through modern Experience. Here Experience is taken to mean the human experience of liberation from bondage (via social, political and economic movements) and the explanation of human life and behavior by social scientists, economists, anthropologists, behavioral scientists and psychologists. So there is Revelation recorded in the Bible and there is Revelation through history and particularly in and through modern western liberation movements. The latter revelation supersedes the former where it provides different and superior ways of understanding the nature and the naming of God, the nature of human life and relations as well as matters concerning the created order. The Revelation recorded in the Bible is taken to be seriously warped because those who received it and wrote about it were the victims of sexism, patriarchalism and heterosexism and they allowed these ideologies to color their understanding and writings. Therefore it is possible for modern liberated Christians to affirm as the will of God for people today that which was clearly understood to be sin in former times. Not that God has changed as such, but that human beings have changed in their ability to read, appreciate and understand what God is wanting them to know and do. Modern Christians are thus reading the signs more perceptively than did the ancient believers and in so doing are experiencing greater freedom.

There is any number of problems with this, not the least of which is that it is opposed to what Christians have always understood about divine revelation: that God has revealed Himself and His will for us for all time, and that our living by this truth is the source of our freedom. In place of this, the experience of freedom is itself the “truth,” and any chosen lifestyle becomes the measure of what God has to say to us. Theoretically, anything can be sanctioned by this criterion. And much has, as well as much condemned: those who adhere to Scripture and Tradition are all bound up in some deviant “ism.”

Strange, though, that the “experience” of all those Anglicans in the developing countries of finding joy and peace through obedience to the will of God as consistently taught by Christianity is dismissed… I suppose as not “modern” enough, not sufficiently Western. It seems that “modern [Western] Christians are…reading the signs more perceptively” than Christians in Africa and Asia are able to, even though the great majority of the Anglican Communion is non-Western. Strange, too, that these African and Asian communities, which consistently resist all these innovations, are growing at a solid rate, even as the Episcopal church has declined in membership since 1970 by some 40%. Serious Christians do not go to church to hear that they can do and live as they like and call it “freedom”; they go to church to worship God and to deepen their understanding of His will for them. And their goal is not to subvert the “freedom” of others, but to know and uphold the truth. “If you hold to my teaching,” Jesus said to those who wanted to be His followers, “you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31, 32). Truth first – and adherence to it – then freedom; not the experience of “freedom” then truth. The moderns have it backwards, and that’s why modernism is dying.