THOSE WACKY ANGLICANS

For about a decade, I made whatever Internet reputation I have goofing on them so I thought I'd check back in with the Anglican religious tradition.  What are those krazy kidz up to these days?

You only get one guess.

This recently happened at St. John's Cathedral in Brisbane, Australia.

On September 16, St. John's Cathedral in Brisbane held a service of "Choral Evensong for the Brisbane pride festival." The church's Facebook page posted photos of the church decked in rainbow flags, the sermon referred to the Trinity of God as the church's "queering principle," and according to reports, prayers were said to a "Rainbow Christ" and an "Erotic Christ."

Quick.  What legendary MCJ catchphrase am I going to use right now?

Well, of course they were. 

Moving on, as for whatever the hell, and yeah, I used that word deliberately, a "queering principle" is, that will soon become clear.  Unless you own a Christian Bible, read a Christian Bible and take the words that you read seriously in which case it won't become clear at all.

"The Trinity is our Queering principle, that which invites us to defy binaries and labels," Peter Catt, the cathedral's dean, declared in a sermon entitled "Queering the City of God."

Don't look at me. In case you're wondering what that whole "binaries" thing is, that refers to that whole man/woman business God and God Incarnate were always going on about.

In that sermon, Catt praised LGBT activists in the 1990s who "used the term to point us to the dangers of seeing people through binary lenses. Queer thus came to be used for people who did not fit the approved categories; people who transcended the limiting territory created by labels."

Maybe you enjoy getting it on with the ficus tree a la Harvey Weinstein. Or maybe you self-identify as a ficus tree and let the other house plants regularly have their way with you. Either way, you've "transcended the limiting territory created by labels" and good for you. But this gets even stupider.

"Queer serves to remind us that no matter how many identities we describe or allocate there will always be those who feel excluded from all of them," the dean argued.

If I were inclined to write one, this is where I'd put my NAMBLA crack.  But how about a little "theological" justification for all this.

As could be expected, Catt seized on Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." The dean argued that this passage meant "the Christian is not to understand their-self or others in terms of the great binary classification [sic] that were applied to humanity at the time," but to "transcend these three binaries."

Yup.  Dude went there. FreakingGalatiansFreakingThreeFreakingTwentyFreakingEight means we can go ahead and do away with that restrictive man/woman "binary" that was "applied to humanity at the time." Never mind the fact that NO SERIOUS THEOLOGIAN would EVER dream of offering such an idiotic and dishonest interpretation of that Scriptural passage.

And you have to love the leftist Anglican conceit.  The man/woman "binary" was "applied to humanity at the time" but it just so happens that only now are we advanced enough to "transcend these three binaries," whatever the hell that means.

Funny how that works.  In 2003, the Anglicans suddenly decided that all Biblical restrictions and sanctions on homosexuality needed to be abandoned.  Just so happened that that was the same year Gene Robinson got his pointy hat and his hooked stick. Unless I see a pillar of cloud and/or fire somewhere nearby, I'm not buying it but that's how far the Anglican "tradition" has fallen.

"We talk of God as being a Trinity: Three in One. The Anglican Theologian Sarah Coakley suggests that the fact that God is a Trinity trumps all our binaries," she argued. "No binary is of God.

So unless you want the Anglican deity to, well, not do anything at all, start identifying as a man/woman, a ficus tree and a belt sander.  Or something.

She also points us to the fact that Church fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa held that there is a gender fluidity within the persons of the Trinity."

Not to put too fine a point on it but nuh-uh.

This argument is hogwash. Gregory of Nyssa's "On the Holy Trinity" emphasizes the equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and never once suggests that any of the persons of the Godhead are female or feminine, or that their gender is "fluid."

For those of us who have abandoned "official" Anglicanism, our decisions were not quick.  It took me and I suspect most ex-Anglicans a long time to come to the inescapable conclusion that we needed to stop rationalizing our continued membership in this "church" and move on.

What started us out the door?  For me, it was the increasing inability to square what I heard from the pulpit with what I read in the Word of God.  But I never heard anything this radical, this much of an absurd pseudo-intellectual stretch.

You seldom ever do. 

At first.