The end of the American Church is imminent. At least two states have willfully attempted to stop the Church from meeting together, provoking the Supreme Court’s rebuke,[1] and there remains open hostility to the sanctity of life and marriage by so-called progressives.[2] Both major political parties are jointly liable for the Church’s decline, at least…
PART 1 PART 2 PART 3 2. The Beauty of God We have seen that beauty, as a transcendental, is a property of not just some beings but all beings. From this a significant implication follows: The point here is the very notion of a “transcendental”: the word indicates that which transcends, or goes beyond,…
For those of us in the Church of England attuned to its particular frameworks of time (the Church Calendar) and place (“this realm of England”[1]), the Valentine’s weekend of 2021 marked a solemn matrimony of two historic events. On the one hand, we were greeted with the news that 13 million of those most susceptible…
Almighty God, To whom all restless hearts are open All old desires known And from whom no guilty secrets are hid Of thy great mercy, Regard the split men. Regard the man Who still dreams Christian dreams, Who cannot pass a chapel Except he enters in, Who cannot hear a carol Except he joins the…
Meeting God in Paul: Reflections for the Season of Lent. By Rowan Williams. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015. 96pp. $12.00 (paper). Archbishop Williams originally prepared the material in this book for a series of Lenten lectures. The audience of this book is primarily the layman. This is a departure from Williams’ usual writing…
We saw it sink; the tides took it, the tug of oars between the strand and formlessness that left the sands forlorn; out past the wrack, beyond the harbour-walls’ embrace, the embers ebbed to black. Listen, the land is locked in silence; waves and waders moved as one to cede the shore; the godwits gone,…
Part 4: Symbolism and Conclusions In the previous three installments, we have examined the plausibility structures of women’s ordination (WO), Witt’s view of history, and his handling of Greek philology. We now turn to questions of symbolism, a topic that Witt discusses mainly in dialogue with Roman Catholic authors, especially Manfred Hauke.[1] Hauke’s argument is…
People say there are no longer any ogres left in the world, but it is not true. I have a friend in a distant country who was afflicted by one for some years. Bran had amassed a great collection of historical and artistic material on behalf of his nation and was famous for his work…
PART 3 – ERRORS OF PHILOLOGY Having discussed plausibility structures and history in the previous two parts of this review, we come now to what, for Protestants, will be the central question of the debate: can Witt show that the passages that have long been thought to pose an obstacle to women’s ordination (WO) do…
PART 2: WITT’S CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY In the first part of this series, we examined the plausibility structures on which Witt’s book relies for its persuasiveness. We saw that Witt teaches a novel modern anthropology: he sees human beings not as fundamentally sexed creatures in a pervasively gendered cosmos, but as individuals who take on…