Magic Statistics

The Most Rev Andrew Hutchison, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, preached last Sunday morning at Christ Church Cathedral.  Since I kinda sorta vaguely intimated that I might say something about that, maybe I should.  On the other hand, maybe I shouldn't but, as they say, fools rush in . . .

Since the primate was visiting, the service, as would be expected, was a very big deal for the Diocese of Yukon.  Archbishop of Yukon Terry Buckle, Dean and Rector of Christ Church Peter Williams, and almost all the diocesan clergy were in attendance.

What follows are recollections from memory, so there are no direct quotations.  If my memory is faulty, I stand to be corrected.

Archbishop Hutchison is a very personable and genial fellow with a good sense of humour.  Coming to the front-centre of the chancel—he did not enter the pulpit—he spoke without notes in a relaxed, affable, and endearing manner.  He began by describing his beautiful cloak, the "Canada coat" given to his predecessor Michael Peers and now part of the primate's wardrobe.  He also expressed his gratitude to Abp Buckle for the warm welcome he and his Principal Secretary, the Ven Paul Feheley, had received.

The Gospel reading was St Mark 8:27-38, in which St Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah.  Abp Hutchison focused on verse 35, shortly after Peter's declaration, where Jesus says,

Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.

In this verse, he said, Jesus is calling us to transformation, to change.  God is about change, about challenging people to understand things in new ways.

The primate began speaking about issues that the church has misunderstood in the past, but changed her mind after God led the church to look at them in new ways.  Many Christians, he said, used to think that slavery was God's will for some, and they supported this by quoting Bible verses referring to the sons of Ham.  And didn’t St Paul tell slaves to obey their masters?  Over time, however, Christians came to understand slavery very differently.  The Holy Spirit brought about a change in their thinking: Slavery came to be seen as demeaning, dehumanising, and contrary to God’s will.

Then, he brought up the role of women in the church.  At one time, on the basis of an interpretation of biblical passages, women were forbidden to speak and teach in church.  But this also came to be seen as mistaken.  Here the primate quoted this verse:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Further to this, women have now been accepted for ordination, although that remains controversial in some quarters of the Anglican Church.

The question of divorce after remarriage is another contentious issue on which the church has changed its thinking.  The Christian Church, on the basis of an interpretation of the Bible, used to deny divorced persons permission to re-marry in the church.  After a period of controversy and discussion, we came to believe that prohibition was mistaken, and that the Bible doesn’t mean what we used to understand it to mean.

Today, he said, some people have affections that are oriented toward persons of the same gender, and want their relationships blessed by the church.  Others, however, interpret the Bible to say such relationships are wrong and rejected by God.  How can we be sure our interpretation is correct?  We got slavery wrong; we got the role of women in the church wrong; we got re-marriage after divorce wrong.  Maybe the Holy Spirit is trying to challenge us again.  Maybe God wants us to see this issue in a new way as well.

Here endeth the brief summary of the sermon.

The primate's point was clear: he believes that the old understanding of biblical teaching concerning homosexuality (he preached the whole sermon without saying the word) is wrong.  He strongly suggested (but never actually stated) that God in fact does not disapprove of homosexual activity.  By implication, everyone should stop living in the past and keep up with the latest moves of the Spirit.

And why does he think that?  Because Christians of long ago held positions on other issues that the church has since repudiated; and they supported those now-rejected positions by appealing to Scripture.  That’s really all there is to it.

My terribly blunt verdict: This is singularly unpersuasive.

I agree that slavery is horrible and telling women they can't teach in church is obnoxious, but the fact that Christians (How many?  In all denominations or just Anglicans?) in the past believed otherwise in itself says nothing about homosexual activity.

Christians were on both sides of those old arguments.  An important part of the abolitionist apologetic was engaging the relevant biblical passages and arguing that the pro-slavery understanding was mistaken.  Enough slavery-supporting Christians were persuaded to change their minds that anti-slavery legislation eventually passed the British Parliament.  (Need I point out that the abolitionist movement was spearheaded by Christians, including the Anglican William Wilberforce?)

It gets worse, IMHO: Acceptance of the primate's line of reasoning (I hesitate to refer to it as "argument") would necessarily risk the renunciation of every theological teaching and moral precept of the church.  If the church's understanding of homosexual behaviour is to be tossed into the dustbin of history because some Christians at one time thought the Bible prescribed slavery, why should it end there?  Hey, we got slavery wrong, so how do we know that God's opposed to polygamy, paedophilia, incest?

And why stop at sexual behaviour?  We could be wrong about God's view of economic oppression, unjust treatment of the poor and weak, environmental stewardship, wars of aggression, helping the less fortunate, paying taxes, etc., etc.  After all, once upon a time we got slavery wrong.

The logical implication of the primate's sermon is that everything the church has ever taught is potentially up for grabs.  If we've misunderstood the Bible in the past, then we cannot be trusted to have a right understanding of anything in our own holy book.  It's difficult to imagine a more anti-intellectual approach to Scripture.

If the primate wishes to change minds regarding homosexuality, there is no substitute for prayerfully and humbly engaging the relevant biblical passages.  Careful exegesis and persuasive exposition are essential.  Attempting to short-circuit the hard work of examining the Scriptures is a myopic, self-defeating, and potentially destructive strategy.

My fundamental objection to what the primate had to say is not with his view of homosexual behaviour (although, as I said to him on the way out, I disagree with him on that), but his comprehensive undermining of the authority of the Bible.

Providentially, perhaps, today I read the pastoral letter sent from the Church of Nigeria Standing Committee Meeting last weekend.  I was struck by these words:

We also discerned afresh that the voice of the people is not always the voice of God since, as in the case of the Israelites and the golden calf, the voice of the people can actually be rebellion. The serious implication for us is that when our culture, tradition and disposition go against the Word of God, we must choose to be on the Lord’s side. The time-tested and inerrant rule of life must remain the written Word of God.

I was struck by the contrast between the approach to the Bible recommended in this letter and that recommended by Abp Hutchison last Sunday.

h/t for Church of Nigeria Pastoral Letter: American Anglican Council BlogSite

Previous related post: An Anglican news exclusive 

Some Turkish nationalists want to prosecute three notorious criminals— Uncle Dirkan, Grandma Shushan, and Auntie Zeilha—for “insulting Turkishness”.   Unfortunately, however, the three miscreants are unavailable because they’re products of author Elif Shafak’s imagination, so she is being put on trial instead.

Mrs Shafak, 34, has been charged under Article 301 of the penal code with “insulting Turkishness” through the fictional dialogue in her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul, about the intertwined history of a Turkish and an Armenian-American family.

What heinous offence did the three fictional characters perpetrate?  They discussed that old bugbear, the mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

The crime committed by her characters is to refer to the taboo subject of mass Armenian killings in Ottoman Turkey in 1915. The Armenians call it genocide, Turks say large-scale wartime deaths. The fictional Uncle Dikran speaks of “Turkish butchers”, others talk about being “slaughtered like sheep” and claim all Turks are either nationalist or ignorant. More absurdly, some Turkish characters are charged over routine gripes about the country.

The accusations demonstrate a wilful misreading of the book, in which the families are so mixed up that it is hard to take sides. Mrs Shafak, describing how many contemporary Turks are descended from minorities in a multicultural Ottoman Empire, is critical both of Turks’ amnesia regarding events before the country became a republic in 1923 and of the Armenian diaspora’s apparent obsession with history.

Some government officials fear that the trial will hinder Turkey’s ambition of being accepted by the European Union.  In fact, the case was brought by an extreme nationalist who hopes it will indeed block the country’s path into the EU.  He has another cockamamie idea.

Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who brought the case against Mrs Shafak, is behind several other such cases. He insists that EU membership would be a disaster for Turkey, and has claimed that it was not Mrs Shafak but some shady imperialists who penned her novel as part of a plot to destroy Turkey.

Curses! Those shady imperialists have struck again.

Previous related posts:

• Turkey adamant: Armenian genocide shall not be discussed
• Turkey pressures Canada to back away from recognition of Armenian Genocide

UPDATE (21 Sep.): She's been acquitted!.  h/t: Celal

Microsoft's ballyhooed Zune media player isn’t due to be released for months yet, but Quebecers are already making fun of it.

Microsoft Corp. market researchers in Quebec found themselves in a potential linguistic pickle when they conducted consumer test-runs of the digital music player Zune, which the company officially announced on Thursday will be competing by Christmas with Apple's hugely successful iPod.

A Microsoft spokeswoman in Montreal told CanWest News Service that "it was pointed out to us" during focus groups in the province that the proposed brand name sounded much like a French-Canadian term used as a euphemism for penis or vagina.

The French word "zoune'" and the variant "bizoune'" typically serve as a less jolting way of referring to male or female genitalia when addressing children.

The spokeswoman says the company’s market research indicates that the embarrassing double entendre will not jeopardise the product’s acceptance.  On the other hand, one Quebec resident has doubts:

"All of Quebec has been giggling for the last couple of days at the thought of Mr. Gates swearing that there was an 80 per cent chance that he'd whip out his little zoune before the holiday season …"

In a related story, several market analysts who have studied the features and appearance of the Zune doubt it will compete successfully with the iPod.

h/t: Macworld UK

Previous related posts:

• Latest iPod accessory: iSuit
• Latest iPod accessory: iRobot
• Microsoft is “going to get eaten alive”

That's a question most Canadians would dismiss out of hand as foolish and absurd, but it has been brought before our judiciary regardless.  An Ontario court is soon to hear arguments on that very issue.

The case, scheduled to be heard by the Ontario Court of Appeal Sept. 25-26, involves a lesbian couple raising a child conceived by artificial insemination. Both women want to be considered the legal mother of the child. The biological father is also actively involved in the child's life.

If their case is successful, it will mark the first time a child would have three legally recognized parents.

The Alliance for Marriage and Family, an umbrella group of several Christian and pro-family organisations, has filed a brief opposing the change.  Not only would it implement group parenting without the approval of the legislature, it would open the door to a hornet's nest of legal complications, jeopardising the best interests of the children.

A lower-court judge rejected the request for those very reasons.

The judge who heard the original application rejected the claim that the partner should also be declared the mother of the child. He argued that to do so would involve stepping into a legislative role.

The judge also pointed out difficulties the change may pose to the welfare of other children.

"If a child can have three parents, why not four or six or a dozen?" he wrote. "What about all the adults in a commune or a religious organization or sect?

"Quite apart from social policy implications, the potential to create or exacerbate custody and access litigation should not be ignored," the judge wrote.

Legal and moral experts see ominous implications if the application is approved.

Douglas Farrow, professor at Montreal's McGill University, has argued that there are totalitarian implications in these changes, which represent an intrusion of state power into the biological family.

He has said the state used to recognize the family as a pre-existing institution.

McGill ethicist Margaret Somerville has warned that same-sex marriage jeopardizes children's rights to be raised by and to know their biological parents.

h/t: Family Scholars Blog

Previous related post: Call to civil disobedience over Bill C-38