New Episcopal Bishop says homosexuality is not a sin

Read it here!

This report set me to wondering: in the theology of the good bishop and those who think as she, what defines a sin? To what does one refer for guidance about the qualifying acts? How might one adjudicate between acts that they are right and wrong or good and bad?

Surely not the scriptures, for she is willing to dismiss the scriptural passages that clearly indicate that homosexuality is a sin. Thus, she has some standard of judgement by which she can pick and choose the moral teaching or claims in holy writ that are unchangingly true and those that are culturally condition. What, I wonder, would it be?

Neither can she look to the tradition of the Church, for the teaching of the Christian Church has, until quite recently, been unnuanced in its rejection of homosexual practice. Thus, she has some standard of judgement by which she decides what part of the Church's moral reasoning to set aside. What, I wonder again, would it be?

Undoubtedly, her standard is essentially human experience understood in the most individualistic of terms. Add to that a good dose of Fletcher's situation ethics in which the vague idea of "love" is all-determinative; and also simply sentimentalize the notion that God is Love. Hence, the subjective self in its own inner experience that begins to determine for the bishop the truth of anything. A person experiences him or herself in a particular way and has no otehr frame of reference for said experience, so -- the bishop must conclude -- God has made this person to be the way she or he experiences her or himself. Why else would she reject the church's teaching and the scriptural witness?

As she says:

"God creates us with different gifts. Each one of us comes into this world with a different collection of things that challenge us and things that give us joy and allow us to bless the world around us," she said.

"Some people come into this world with affections ordered toward other people of the same gender and some people come into this world with affections directed at people of the other gender."

Yet, how would she make this claim, unless she accepts the primacy of individual self-definition to be the trump card in such a moral question?

As I argued in another context regarding a United Methodist bishop's embrace of homosexuality for reasons probably quite similar to the Episcopal leader's:

Were Bishop Sprague’s theological agenda to carry the day and human experience become determinative for doctrine and practice we would, in the words of Paul, be of all people the most miserable. Once this turn to the subjective self occurs, we have no self-transcending reference in terms of which we might talk to one another about ultimate things and the meaning of our lives. This is the case because one person’s experience does not necessarily have anything to do with that of another. In seeking to help us to value others, Sprague produces an ethic that isolates each of us in the dark loneliness of the self and its private, incommunicable experience. Contrast this sad individualism with Jesus’ own command that each of us repent and believe in him. Christ calls us to find our lives not in his personal experience or example but in his redeeming work accomplished for us on the Cross and made complete in the Resurrection. He affirms, redeems, and restores the goodness of God’s created order. Considered in that light, Jesus’ invitation and command that we come and be one with him and "his Father," and thus one with one another, is a summons to find our lives being made into a new and true humanity.

The great irony of both bishops' starting point is that one category of individual experience is authoritative in this matter -- the experience of the purportedly gay person. But, in the Christian experience, the issue is, as are all questions of moral and spiritual living, much more foundational and complex. Let the debate, then, contintue.