Speaking of the Dark Ages

Seymour Hersh is a great journalist. From My Lai to Iraq, he has broken some of the biggest stories ever reported about the American military. He has spent decades building up what seems to be an enormous network of sources in the military and intelligence services. That is all the more surprising since, if we had to attribute a bias to Seymour Hersh, we would unhesitatingly call it a liberal one. Still, a great journalist and a servant of the free society.

Who, at the moment, seems just a little kooky.

Speaking in Qatar this week, Hersh delivered what Foreign Policy calls "a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe ... expressing his disappointment with President Barack Obama and his dissatisfaction with the direction of U.S. foreign policy."

Nothing particularly kooky there. A lot of people (although not at the Egg!) are less than enthusiastic about the president these days. But here's the kooky part. He said that, both in the Cheney era and today, the wars in Asia have been conceived (on the part of American policy makers) in explicitly religious terms:

"We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal ... and his [JSOC] successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." ....

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

First off, if that's true, they're incompetent. Because in the chaos created by our invasions, the Christian populations of central Asia have been pounded savagely. Far from protecting them, our troops have put them in significantly greater danger, and in Iraq may well have assured their eventual extirpation. Second, and needless to say, the Pentagon denies it all. And they sound pretty credible doing it, which is more than Hersh can say.

Now, there is some stuff that isn't kooky at all. When Hersh talks about a military in which religion is used as a tool for motivating the troops, he is on to something we have heard elsewhere, and often. Hersch goes on to say this:

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”"

We don't know whether it is true, but it does match up with other things we have seen. In case it needs saying, this is -- if true -- a bad thing for many reasons, ranging from military strategy to the First Amendment.

But. The Knights of Malta? Opus Dei? This is the stuff of conspiracy nuts, the same people who put on tin-foil hats to block the CIA transmission through their fillings. The actual Knights Hospitallers of St. John etc. are a charitable organization, and Opus Dei, while certainly sinister enough if one is a liberal Roman Catholic still nursing the dream of a new John XXIII, isn't that kind of sinister. (And of course, they've been a huge boon to the small guild of craftsmen making hair shirts. Joking.)

In fact, so far as we can tell, the religious wing-nut contingent in the US armed forces is largely run by neo-Protestant fundamentalists. (Here, here, here, here, for starters.) It is vocal and aggressive, but not especially well-organized. Less a conspiracy than a movement -- although a very wicked movement indeed.

But please do note our qualifiers here: If. So far as we can tell. The fact is that Hersh does not sound credible, and has yet to lay out any evidence. We suspect him very strongly of having turned an unfortunate emotional corner, much like the former Lutheran former theologian Bob Benne. But the other fact is that he has been, for many years, a reliable reporter of facts which might otherwise seem unbelievable. So let's see if he's got some now.

Benne's "Sad Career"

Ow, that hurts.

Pardon the hopping up and down as we hold a bruised shin. We have just stumbled across this essay, from 2006, by Pr. Ed Knudson. It is called Against His Church: the Sad Career of Robert Benne, and it is linked above for your reading pleasure.

The essay has a few problems. It is far too long, and marred by many punctuation errors. Although he engages Benne's writings and public statements since the 1960s, Knudson would have been well-served by the use of frequent quotations and, ideally, footnotes, all to assure us that he is fairly representing his subject. Worse is that underneath it all lies that classic and desperately tedious Boomer agon, the mutual resentment of those who retained their liberal idealism and those who found it transformed into modern neoconservatism.

Despite this, Knudson does a remarkable job of documenting Benne's transformation, and the degree to which Benne has opposed his own church from its very foundation in the late 1980s. Even more usefully, he puts a finger upon the problems with Benne's theological method, which will surely be apparent to anybody familiar with other "theocons" of the same generation. It boils down to a preference for economics to Scripture, and for ideology to compassion. (Incidentally, this is precisely the same critique which conventional theology makes of South American-style liberationism, and with equal justice).

In essence, Knudson cites Benne's own description of a conference in Dublin, years ago, in which he was the lone American theologian, and found his nation maligned by people who found it a convenient scapegoat for all the world's ills. We have been in the same situation many times, and recognize the twin temptations, either to spinelessly cave or to rise up in a righteous dudgeon shouting "My country, love it or leave it." Both responses are categorical errors, and in Knudson's description, Benne made the latter, and then proceeded to make a defense of "America" -- meaning capitalism in its least restrained form -- the center of his ethical system.

The heart of Knudson's matter, as we see it, is the accusation that Benne long ago began to worship in another church -- one distant not only from Lutheranism, but from Christianity:

Benne really does advocate capitalism so strongly that one cannot help but get the impression that it has become more important for him than anything else. Benne says “I began eating from the tree of economic knowledge…” in the most radical form of market-based economic theory, that of the so-called Chicago school which believes the free market explains all human behavior. “I had gotten acquainted with faculty members of the University of Chicago Business School and Economics Department…..” (p. 3) Now, to read Benne’s glowing account of these teachings leads one to have the feeling he has discovered a new and better church. This feeling is increased when he begins to talk about his affinity with neoconservatism.

And again, but more directly, Knudson cites a 2005 essay in which

... Benne was asked by the Journal of Lutheran Ethics to write an article on civil religion in the United States. In the article he calls for the “appropriation” of a civil religion by Lutherans. This has been a major goal of the religious right which indicates Benne has now explicitly joined in the campaign for religious nationalism.

Five other Lutheran scholars were asked to comment on Benne’s article. None of them agreed with it, saying it was not in the tradition of Lutheran social ethics which questions natural theology, any revelation of God other than that revealed in Jesus Christ.

In his article Benne had referred to this Lutheran tradition and expressly rejected it, referring to Lutherans who taught it as an “elite” who were not in touch with the American people.

Hmm. While it is true that the precise of nature in theological reflection is debated within Lutheranism, the more important point is that no serious theologian, least of all a Lutheran, can take "being in touch with the American people" as a criterion for theological competence. Substitute "German" in the sentence and you'll see why. And no, we're not obliquely accusing Benne of Fascism; we are accusing him of precisely the same captivity to culture that he claims to find, everywhere he looks, in Lutherans who disagree with him.

The frequent use of word "elite" to describe peers who disagree with him, a trope for which we have criticized Benne before, is also a window into his distorted world-view. Knudson links it directly to the rhetoric of the religious right, although he might have done better to trace it further back, to the Populist movement. Either way, though, it is the language of class resentment, and specifically of building a sense of outrage among those who feel that their interests are being ignored by the powerful. This is a tool beloved of demagogues, despite the obvious irony when it is used by those who support the interests of the wealthy against the poor.

Neoconservatives believe a “New Class” of elites dominates public consciousness of the country, liberal government workers, liberal media, liberal church leaders. They say these liberals hate the country, they hate capitalism, they hate common people, they are atheists and relativists and secular humanists. This is an absurd notion, but it has been repeated again and again so much now that this language has itself become dominate in public consciousness. Liberals are immoral atheists! ....

There are some other tidbits worth mentioning. The one that hit us hardest was this. In 1979, when he spoke to a workshop for pastors serving in the south side of Chicago,

... Benne actually made the comment that the church has to learn the facts about the way the economic system works. He gave an example. He said that he is paid by congregations to speak to adult forums. Money incentives are important in this economy. So it is just natural that he will speak to congregations when he is paid, but may not do so if he is not paid.

... Benne was saying basically that a person, even though serving the church, is always going to be motivated by money. This meant for me that Benne would lend his talents and abilities to suburban congregations who had the money, but not to the mostly black and poor congregations in inner city Chicago. Benne was taking his conceptual commitments very seriously indeed.

"Conceptual commitments" -- nice little euphemism for "idolatrous worship of Caesar and Mammon," don't you think?

You Don't Have a Dog, Part Deux

In response to our remarks on the little tiff between Mr. Benne and Fr. McCain, two readers have responded with comments that deserve some above-the-fold attention.

First, PSanafterthought asks, in effect, "Why are those LCMS people so mean?" She has herself tasted their lash in response to a few online comments, and wonders if she has been dealt with severely because of her sex.

To be honest, we think not. Our theory, which we have described once or twice before, is that the Missouri Synod was formed in reaction against the Prussian Union, and has since been doomed to live in a constant state of reaction. Its identity, and in particular its internal cohesiveness, depends upon the ability to identify itself as a faithful remnant, and the Other -- usually meaning the rest of world Lutheranism -- as Augustine's sartago flagitiosorum amorum. The "meanness" is a conditioned reflex, a rhetorical device which seeks to reinforce the loyalty of their members by constantly assaulting the (perceived) wretchedness of outsiders.

This is typical sectarian thinking, needless to say. Although we often complain that the ELCA is not sufficiently brisk about defending itself, the golden lining is that the ELCA (and its membership) rarely go on the attack, either. It may seem a bit high-and-mighty, but at least it isn't ... well, you get the idea.

Second, Fr. James of the Tonsure asks, also in effect, "Has the Pope started ordaining women and nobody told me?" Well, not quite. What he actually asks is why Benne rejects the LCMS as a possible future church home, while talking grandly about a dive from the Ponte Sant'Angelo. In fact, Benne offers two reasons that, should the New ALC fail, he prefers Rome to St. Louis:

One is women's ordination. I know of too many fine ELCA women pastors to deny the validity of their ordination. One of my own pastors is a fine woman pastor.*

Second, the quasi-fundamentalism of some of the Missouri guiding documents would probably guarantee that I would not last long as a theological ethicist in the Missouri Synod.

Hmm. Why do we find this ringing hollow? Obviously, the Roman church does not ordain women, nor will it in the conceivable future. So Benne's first point is pure bluff.

His second point is more interesting. A few commenters take him up on it immediately, giving (weak) testimony that the LCMS does permit some wiggle room on, say, the seven days of creation. Still, it seems readily apparent that the church of Rome grants far more freedom to its teaching theologians than does the church of St. Louis. On the other hand, who doesn't? Seriously, who?

But "wiggle room" isn't quite the same as "academic freedom," in the sense that Benne's own church has always permitted it.

The Popes have come a long way from the days of the Index, and the theologians censured in recent memory are a bunch of wild-eyed liberationists. Not at all Benne's crowd. But the point remains that the Roman church does not care much for its internal critics. At least its hierarchy does not; dissidents can often find teaching positions at church-run universities, much to the chagrin of the church's faithful. You know -- a place where the bishops may growl, but can't actually touch them.

But come to think of it, that's what Benne already has, isn't it?

_____________________________________________________

* Blogger's Note: We know her, and she really is. A fine pastor, that is.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You Don't Have a Dog

A few days ago, the First Things website published a brief essay by elite ELCA theologian Robert Benne, on his favorite subject: "Why the church from which I draw my paycheck is no good."

As Egg readers know, our opinion of Benne is not high. We think -- and it bears repeating -- that he is a typical late-career academic, angry and resentful that his true brilliance has never been acknowledged and rewarded with prizes and maybe a college presidency. He expresses this resentment like any willful teenager, by lashing out at Mommy. "You're the worst church ever! I never asked to be baptized!" And so forth.

But that's not the point to our present post, which has less to do with Benne's post than with the responses it drew. They are the usual run of online crankiness, notable principally who is playing. The original post was little more than an advertising broadsheet, laying out the newly-revised mission statements of WordAlone and CORE. (Curiously, though, he does make one claim which we are eager to test: that CORE's New ALC "represent[s] the 'evangelical catholic' or high church wing of the [ELCA]." We suspect that a great many people may have missed that memo.) What attracted the most attention were Benne's closing remarks:

For many [WordAlone and CORE] are the last, great efforts to live out the promise of Lutheranism as a church on this continent. If they fail, the only remaining option may be a bracing swim across the Tiber.

The comments began promptly. One respondent proposed buying Dr. Benne a wetsuit. But the comments that fascinate us, wholly against our will, are those by Paul McCain, the director of Concordia Publishing House and a bizarrely omnipresent figure when Lutheranism is discussed on the web. McCain is greatly put out by the idea that the "only" option for pissy Lutherans may be Rome. "Hey," he says in effect, "what about the Missouri Synod? We've been pissy since the Prussian freakin' Union, okay? We are the natural home for Lutherans who can't play well with others."

In fairness, he doesn't quite put it that way. But he does suggest that by skipping over the LC-MS as a possible refuge, Benne is "audacious," "arrogant," and despite his own protestations, already "looking to swim the Tiber." He calls for Benne to offer "humility" and, later, an apology. When Benne responds, murmuring something about the ordination of women, McCain is ready to go: "so much for evangelical catholicism," he snaps. "The disappointment [sic] of [Benne's] remarks are superceded only by their inanity." For "these people," apparently meaning the entire ELCA, including its dissidents, "the mark of the church is enthusiasm from the 60s."

Yikes. Did somebody wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

Actually, that's our real point here. Benne's original post isn't time-stamped, but it is dated 27 May. McCain's response, the first by several hours, is time stamped 27 May at 8:25 in the morning. We at the Egg have long wondered whether McCain spends hours upon hours doing Google keyword searches for his favorite words, and then writing in to sell his own products and slam those of his competitors. We now wonder whether he gets up very early and begins his day doing this stuff. Has the man no family to care for? No dog depending on him for food and affection? No real work waiting at his desk?

But perhaps we're being unfair. If so, Pr. McCain will no doubt inform us presently, deriding our arrogance, not to say inanity, and demanding an apology.

Touché, at Last

"When teaching about sex replaces teaching about salvation as a defining mark of the church, something has clearly gone severely awry."

This is the most instantly quotable sentence from a recent essay in the online Journal of Lutheran Ethics. The odds are that most Egg readers have already seen it, since the link has been passed around with great excitement. While we aren't in love with the essay, we do like it, and hope that readers will also.

Jon Pahl (whom we do not know, despite his association with two institutions dear to us) is on the faculty of the Lutheran seminary in Philadelphia and has had a fellowship at the formerly Presbyterian university in Princeton. His essay reveals a number of tendencies which make us squirm with discomfort, particularly in this context: an affection for Rene Girard; a connection to the AELC; and a rhetorically unfortunate readiness to bash in passing the conventional bogeymen of American liberalism, such talk radio hosts, on the assumption that his readers already share his likes and dislikes. (Good for blogging, bad for academic discourse).

Even with these reservations, his essay is well worth reading, both for theological reasons and -- let's be frank -- tactical ones.

Theologically, he goes after CORE, the New ALC and the Word Alone Network from two angles. First, he demonstrates (with somewhat slender documentary evidence for our taste) that they are prone to many of the classical heresies -- namely, docetism, Donatism, and Pelagianism. This section of his argument is based on the "Common Confession," a document which lays out a distinctly inadequate ecclesiology, even by the modest standards of Lutheranism.

Pahl's use of the terms is a bit loose. For example, his accusation of docetism rests upon the idea that the CC holds up congregationalism and the "invisible church" beloved of some Lutherans, which magically exists outside of any actual human institution. Therefore, it is not the reality of the body of the man Jesus Christ which they question (as did the docetics of old) but the reality of the visible Church as the Body of Christ. Still, despite a small liberty with the term, he is onto something important. Those who diminish the importance of the institutional Church clearly do fail to "discern the Body," in just the sense that Paul meant it.

Second, Pahl attacks the CORE/NALC/WAN for participation in what might be thought of as a modern heresy, or cluster of heresies, the "American civil religion." The term is not always used consistently, but its coiner, sociologist Robert Bellah, meant it to identify a system of beliefs, symbols and rituals which exist outside of and parallel to those of conventional religious communities, and which connect the civil realm to the spiritual one in the popular imagination. It's not really all that modern, to be sure; there was a Roman civil religion long ago, with which Christianity found itself in memorable conflict.

This argument is strung out piecemeal through the essay, the organization of which Pahl describes in a comment below, but which we found confusing. Perhaps the most direct evidence that CORE et al. participate in the ACR comes late in his discussion of the Common Confession. After describing some of the obvious Scriptural and historical problems with the language of marriage as "one man to one woman," Pahl says:

Even more, the specific language of the way Lutheran CORE defines "marriage" has a quite clear historical origin, and it is not The Holy Bible or the Lutheran Confessions. Lutheran CORE's language that defines marriage as "between one man and one woman" is derived directly from the recent spate of DOMA Laws, or "Defense of Marriage Acts" that have emerged in federal and state legislation as efforts to keep gays and lesbians from the civil and economic rights that accrue to couples who marry. These laws are distinctively American, and they are unjust because they legitimize unnecessary violence — as I have argued in print elsewhere.³⁸ By adopting the language of these unjust laws as part of their "Common Confession," Lutheran CORE reveals its loyalty not to the "great tradition" of biblical revelation and Christian creedal tradition, but instead to the imperial constructs of the American civil religion.

This is a neat trick, incidentally, since the accusation of "civil religion" has more typically been used by cultural conservatives against cultural liberals. Whether or not Pahl makes his case about civil religion, he does remind us quite nicely that everybody's idea of "what the church teaches" is conditioned by their own experience of what they were taught themselves, by word and example -- which is rarely quite what the Church actually means to teach.

Whatever its analytical strengths and weaknesses, which are both considerable, Pahl's essay is also instructive as an example of a tactic which we hope to see used a bit more frequently in the near future: the counterattack.

Over the years, the ELCA and its supporters have had comparatively little to say to or about those who criticize the church. The idea was probably to take the high road, rather than answering every little pissant snipe from the Herman Ottens of the world. But as the criticisms have gotten louder and dumber (despite coming, as some of them have lately, from extremely bright people -- we're thinking of you, Michael Root), it has seemed to us at the Egg that firmer and more bracing affirmations of the ELCA's convictions have been called for.

And by the same toke, so have more blunt assessments of the foolish arguments put forward by people who should know better. We at the Egg have taken a special delight in this latter field of endeavor, and so does Pahl. We especially enjoy, for example, his comments on Robert Benne, an ELCA theologian teaching at an ELCA college who has nonetheless taken to ranting about unnamed but sinister "elites" in the world of ELCA theological ethics. Pahl will have none of it:

... Benne imagines that the ELCA is in decline because it has accommodated itself to American "liberal Protestantism." "Skewed commitments," by which Benne means the liberalism of Lutherans in the ELCA, "led to dramatic membership losses." Apart from the fact that this is lousy history, it also reveals again American millennialist and dualistic scapegoating — someone must be to blame for declension — as a founding assumption underneath the movement.

Historically speaking, in fact, immigration patterns and birth rates have far more to do with Lutheran membership ebbs and flows in America than anything else. It's not as if Lutherans used to be great evangelists and theologians and have now become lousy at both. ...

In recent decades, and especially since the dramatic changes in immigrant law established by Congress in 1965, immigrants to America have come primarily from Latin America, Africa, and from South and East Asia, and decidedly not from Scandinavia and Germany. Couple that with the fact that in the late twentieth century Lutherans began to practice birth control and to have smaller families (to their moral credit, globally and ecologically speaking), and the causes for Lutheran "decline" clearly take root not in some imagined Lutheran doctrinal purity or its absence, but in documented demographic shifts.

Furthermore, it is not just liberal churches that are suffering numerically. Even culturally "conservative" churches associated with European enclaves (such as the LCMS and the Roman Catholic Church — if you subtract Latino/a membership increases due to the new immigration) are now losing numbers across North America.

He had us at "lousy history." And again:

More subtly, the blame-game of moralism among Lutheran CORE members projects a view of history that identifies ELCA leaders with having abandoned "the great tradition," and of having left behind the norms and practices of some supposedly more morally pure earlier age in favor of a relativistic liberal tolerance. Robert Benne again claims that Lutherans were once "protected from the allure of American culture by their thriving ethnic enclaves, but that day is over. We're all Americans now."²⁸ As with Benne's false claim about the cause of numerical losses among Lutherans, this rosy-colored view of past Lutheran ethnic harmony and purity is also historical nonsense. ...

In fact, any fair reading of the histories of the predecessor bodies to the ELCA will recognize that Lutherans in those churches (and especially the laity) were, by and large, stumbling over one another to be as American as possible, as quickly as possible, consciously or unconsciously, while also managing to bicker constantly over issues like millennialism, predestination, membership in lodges, and more.²⁹

Oh, yeah, says the reader, waking up from his WordAlone-induced stupor. I did read that in a book somewhere, dinnit I? Once again, real facts trump romantic fantasies. Pahl then follows it up with a case study in how the facts about the ELCA vary from the "Evil Empire" created by its zealous critics:

For instance, the ELCA social statements (a favorite target of Lutheran CORE members) embrace a paradoxically critical and affirming approach to American society that is far more nuanced and authentic in its Lutheranism than most of the productions by the supposedly pure ethnic churches that preceded the ELCA. The social statements tackle issues those churches largely did not or would not take up — race, economics, war and peace, the environment, and abortion — in ways that simply do not fit Lutheran CORE's stereotype of "liberalism" in the ELCA. The abortion statement is a perfect case in point. It sees abortion as tragic, something to be avoided, but also not to be legislated out of existence, especially in cases of rape or danger to the health of the mother.³² Such a paradoxical, nuanced judgment is characteristic of Lutheran public theology at its best. The caricatures of Lutheran CORE — Benne claims that "no one can really challenge the ELCA's ... persistent pro-choice stance on abortion" — are, simply, false.

This essay is disorderly and sometimes annoying, but well worth reading. We hope that it is the beginning of something that is long overdue: a serious response by supporters of the ELCA to the bad history, bad theology and outright lies being peddled by its power-hungry dissidents. Like Robert Benne.

Grumpy Old Man

While we're on the same subject -- the proposed Anglican Covenant -- we submit for your approval an essay, linked above, by the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, a well-known Episcopal writer who teaches theology at what Wikpedia calls a "low-church and evangelical" Anglican seminary in Toronto.  (And a tip o' the biretta to Our Beloved Godfather for pointing us toward the piece).

Like much of Radner's writing, it is engaging and clear, and often provoked the Egg review committee to murmurs of assent.  Radner says that he is "is "and remains" a member of the Episcopal Church, which is significant.  We have considerable respect for critics of the (D&FMS of the) PECUSA, or any other church, when they remain in communion despite disagreements on matters of moral theology.  Those we respect least, of course, are the ones who attempt to steal their parishes and property while leaving.  You know who you are, you dirtbags.

This essay certainly is critical.  According to Radner, the Episcopal Church is a decadent relic of its former glory:

[It] is simply no longer the church filled with even the strength of purpose we saw only 10 years ago ....  [E]ven then, it was church that was growing in outreach and faith.  That church, shimmering still with some of the vibrancy of love spent for the Gospel seen 140 years before, even 90 years before, is now gone.  And [it] will not survive in any real continuity with this past and its gifts.

His case goes like this:    (1) The Episcopal Church has lost members, and therefore money, since 2000, endangering (inter alia) its seminaries; (2) it has experienced a "moral unravelling" represented by unpleasant name-calling and expensive lawsuits, and connects to the "rapidly-accelerating habits of despising tradition" and "the notorious matter of sexuality;" and that therefore (3) the Episcopal Church, despite its relative wealth, can no longer offer spiritually credible mission support to the poorer churches of the "developing" world (much of which, as Radner rightly observes, isn't really developing at all).

As we said, murmurs of assent here.  It all sounds so intuitively right, doesn't it?  

The problem is that, upon more sober reflection, the essay itself started to sound suspicious.  It contains signs -- too many signs -- of a rarely-diagnosed condition which the Egg's ecclesiastical maladies board calls "Matthau's Disease."  Named after our second-favorite movie star of all time, the disease afflicts bright, brash, idiosyncratic persons, world-beaters in their youth (think of Matthau in Fail-Safe) by turning them into grumpy old men (think of Matthau in Bad News Bears and everything afterward).  As it progresses, the disease affects the organs of memory and judgment, bathing the recollected past in an artificial glow, and making the present appear comparatively wan.  Most at risk are those who once nourished unrealistically high expectations for themselves and for their world.

In its preterminal phase, Matthau's Disease provokes the patient -- so enraged by the imagined wretchedness of the present -- to lash out rhetorically, especially at younger colleagues.  This typically takes the form of unsubstantiated ad hominen attacks upon an individual or, more easily, an entire class of individuals.  (Readers may recall the sad case of Robert Benne, who shortly before losing the use of his faculties entirely, declared that all "elite ELCA ethical theologians" were guilty of shallowness and captivity to culture, without offering a single instance to substantiate, or even illustrate, his case.)

In Radner's essay, the symptoms are readily apparent.  To begin with, does anybody seriously accept his claim that, as recently as 2000, the PECUSA was "filled with strength of purpose," and "growing in outreach and faith," and that it has declined so rapidly from that position?  Lutherans remember, with considerable embarrassment, the 1991 remark by Walter "Skip" Sundberg, that going to bed with Episcopalians was the ecclesiastical equivalent of necrophilia.  It was rude and foolish, but it is remembered, in part, because it reflected such a widespread perception.

Of course Radner is correct about the loss of membership and money, although that is not remotely unique to the Episcopalians.  The entire mainline, including such supposedly protected conservative elements as the LCMS, is suffering.  Radner mentions the defection of some parishes to AMiA over the past decade, but doesn't consider the possibility that comparative membership and money totals ought properly to include former these former Episcopalians.  

For the sake of perspective, let's remember that the number of parishes in the PECUSA actually peaked in 1915, and the number of communicants in 1970.  So any complaints about numerical decline must properly be directed to the Department of Slowly Dying Protestantism, rather than to the Bureau of Recent Infighting.  (Even adjusted for inflation, receipts are at an all-time high, a seemingly "good" sign which, as Radner suggests, makes the thoughtful wary of disaster to come.)

But it is in the margins of his argument that Radner truly betrays Matthau's Disease.  His most shocking claim is this one:

Episcopalian ministers and scholars generally have received some of the best-resourced educations within the Christian churches;  in their ranks are some of the most lively minds and engaging personalities. ... But they remain among the most intellectually lazy Christians I know, most of whom stopped reading rigorously years ago, prefer arguments based on prejudice, and have contributed virtually nothing to the Anglican and larger Christian theological forum for decades now. 

Really?  For decades?  Pardon us for a sudden case of Sundberg Syndrome, but a quick poll of the Egg's historical theology department suggests that "centuries" might be more appropriate.  Or, since Radner is limiting himself to the American province, "ever."  It sounds harsh to say this, and we beg the forbearance of our many Episcopalian friends.  But the truth, more gently worded, is that the rest of us have never really looked to you for your distinctively intellectual contributions.

On the contrary, we have admired your custodianship of the ecumenical church's history and traditions, specifically as those are embodied in your marvelous liturgical formularies.  We have envied your good taste, both in architecture and in vesture.  We -- and especially we Lutherans -- have marveled at your ability to keep under one roof people with such sharply different convictions.  But for philosophy and theology, we usually look somewhere else.  From the death of Richard Hooker, and certainly from the beginning of the Enlightenment, the burden of theology for its own sake has been carried by the intellectually disciplined and theory-obsessed writers of northern Europe, whence it is now spreading elsewhere.  (Whether and to what degree this is a good thing is another question; perhaps we are just lazy ourselves, but we sometimes wonder whether the Church as a whole is actually improved by Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Troeltsch, Barth, Rahner, Moltmann et al., or whether they are just decorations on the cake).

Still, assuming that we are wrong in this estimation of Anglican theology through history, it seems to us that Radner has an obligation to spell things out.  If in fact his colleagues are now intellectual lazyboneses, he should be able to point to a time when they clearly were not, and describe the failures by which they came to be.  Absent such a narrative, this simply sounds like "things were better in my day, when men were men and Bishop Pike was an embarrassment."

There's more evidence.  Early on, he tells a delicious anecdote:  

I know a young person who sneered at the faith of an Episcopalian – a more conservative person – who chose to leave TEC for another set of ecclesial structures.  “You would do such a thing”, this young person said to him:  “yours is the generation, after all, who invented no-fault divorce”. 

This is a note-perfect instance of why we cannot take the generation of mildly-conservative Protestant clergymen now in their late 50s to mid-60s all that seriously when they complain about the present condition of the church.  Like any other good Boomers, they want what they themselves asked for:  a church which marries priests, ordains women, worships in modern English, engages with the political realm and speaks frankly about sex.  What they can't bear is that the generations which grew up with these freedoms might regard them differently or consider them stations rather than destinations. 

So unable is Radner to hear this criticism that he dismisses it in an almost unitelligible wave of the hand:   

In fact, in this case, the complaint was less directed at a purported hypocrite, than at what he perceived to be the witness of an impotent God, unable to garner the sacrificial steadiness of His adherents.  

Later, Radner practically shouts the name of his illness in one grammatically troublesome paragraph:

And it is hard for me to say all this – after almost 30 years of ministry, once high hopes, and actual experience for some brief but glorious times, if mixed with struggle, of witness in all of its giving, forgiving, and abundantly receptive modes, bound to persons whose lives once shared are now the fodder of division without quarter.   There are days we weep.

So enchanted is he by his memory of those "high hopes" and "brief but glorious times" that he loses sight of a central (albeit subsidiary) truth of Christian history:  the days are always right for weeping.  After Eden, there has been no Golden Age, but only an endless march of folly (hey, good title for a book!), punctuated now and then by brief victories of justice and decency, and made bearable by the presence of Christ among us, promising an end to life as we know it.  Sunt rerum lacrimae and so forth,.

For all this grumpiness, though, the essay manages to end on a note of hopeful expectation.  Whether his hope -- in a working group and its new covenant -- is reasonably placed, only time will tell.  God has used stranger instruments.