Bisectuality

An article that the Sword of the Lord borrowed from the Institute on Religion and Democracy caught my eye: "The apparent rejection of a controversial candidate for bishop in the Episcopal Church could be a historic move...Kevin Thew Forrester has not received the necessary consent of the majority of the diocesan standing committees...

"...Forrester first drew attention for his Zen Buddhist 'lay' ordination, earning him the moniker of the 'Buddhist Bishop.' Further investigation of his practices revealed unilateral editing of the Book of Common Prayer's baptismal rite and the inserting of a verse from the Koran into a church service as the Word of God."

What's the Qur'an verse that Forrester stuck in? According to these folks, the verse was: "Those who fulfill Allah's pact, and break not the covenant, and those who join what Allah has commanded to be joined, and fear their Lord, and dread the evil reckoning". Since "Allah" is just the literal Arabic word (al ilah) for "The God", you could stick "God" or "The Lord" wherever the passage says "Allah" and you'll get something that sounds like it came straight out of the Bible.

We can infer that Forrerster has a non-fundamentalist view of the "Word of God". He finds religious inspiration in all sorts of places, and judges a passage not by what book it came from but by what it says. Forrester is one of those people who treats non-Christian religious texts the same way they treat the Bible - pick this passage and that passage, interpret this one way and that another, and pretend the rest isn't there until someone presses you to acknowledge that it actually is, and then brush it off as being for another people in another time. Of course, fundamentalists treat the Bible the same exact way, but I've already written about that.

These Episcopalians concede that Buddhist meditation doesn't necessarily conflict with Christianity, but they question whether a bi-sect-ual Bishop can "guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church". I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not the one to give it. That answer should be given by the diocesan standing committees, and apparently they gave it.

"...The last candidate rejected on purely theological grounds was James de Koven, denied consent as bishop of Illinois in 1875."

Like Forrester, James deKoven was elected bishop, but not given consent by the committees. He was a leader of the "Anglo-Catholic" movement, and his ritualist stance was too controversial. He had it easy, though - being denied an episcopate wasn't the worst penalty some men received for not being Protestant enough.

"Smells and Bells" were pretty much banned in the Anglican Episcopal Church by Parliament's passage of the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874. Five priests did time in prison after being prosecuted under this law. They weren't imprisoned for breaking this law, though. They were imprisoned for "contempt of court". Since they rejected the authority of the new law, they rejected the authority of the new court it formed, and so they didn't show up to their court dates.