Spiritual Battle

Something that my partner and I see in our church-property litigation is the odd way in which the theologically liberal, uber-tolerant hierarchies literally demonize the conservative local churches who insist on holding to moral and faith positions that were mainstream not less than a decade ago.

Normally, though, you don't see it put as baldly as Washington's D.C. Bishop Chane puts it:

A leading Anglican bishop has condemned conservatives as "demonic" for using his church as a punch bag.

The Bishop of Washington, the Right Rev John Chane, a leading liberal in the Episcopal Church in the United States, accused conservatives of leading the church in a "dangerous" direction.

Bishop Chane, whose diocese covers the American capital, said: "I think it's really very dangerous when someone stands up and says, 'I have the way and I have the truth and I know how to interpret holy scripture and you are following what is the right way.'

"I think it's really very, very dangerous and I think it's demonic ... the Episcopal Church has been demonised. It has been a punching bag and I'm sick of being a punching bag as a Bishop and I'm sick of my church, my province being a punching bag. Do we deserve criticism, absolutely. No question about it."

This is funny in part because I'd bet that Chane doesn't believe in "demons" - given that he thinks that the Resurrection is largely unimportant to his Christian witness, although he is open to the idea that the Koran is the inspired word of God.

The only part of Chane's hilarious sermon that I excerpted was this:

To be an Easter people means claiming a relationship with Jesus Christ that is based very little on history and a lot on the intangibles of relationships, the unknown mystery of unconditional love and the active presence of God in our current world. It means, "fessing" up to not having all the answers, theologically or otherwise. It means standing up and saying, "I don't have a clear understanding of the resurrection…how it happened or what, ultimately, did occur."

So, according to Chane, we can be very open minded about the Resurrection and not be overly concerned with history, but if you don't accept the most current interpretation offered by liberal Bishops like Chane that active homosexual practice is perfectly consistent with Christianity, then you are "demonic."

Weird. Don't these people ever listen to themselves.

On the other hand, Paul VI's Humanae Vitae is really standing the test of time according to First Thing's Mary Eberstadt. Paul predicted that normalizing contraception would break apart the traditional connection between procreation, marriage, the family, sexual activity and sexual morality.

As Eberstadt points out, Paul's prophetic encyclical is 10 for 10. Ironically, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Wilson could not make the prophetic insight of Humanae Vitae any clearer:

However, in an exchange of letters with an evangelical Christian, written eight years ago when he was Archbishop of Wales, he described his belief that biblical passages criticising homosexual sex were not aimed at people who were gay by nature...In his 1989 essay The Body’s Grace, Dr Williams argued that the Church’s acceptance of contraception meant that it acknowledged the validity of nonprocreative sex. This could be taken as a green light for gay sex.

Paul VI's encyclical looks more inspired all the time, which in its own way, to my surprise, attests to something more significant.

Of course, Paul was villified at the time. Those bad things weren't going to happen. We are all too smart for that.

But it happened, and it was obvious now that it would happen, which leads me to ask again, why is "two" so special when it comes to the number of "spouses"?