The Sheepcat

Change Is Afoot in the "Ex-Gay" Movement

The president of Exodus International, Alan Chambers, has confirmed to Ex-Gay Watch that the organization he leads has shifted direction, turning away from public policy in order to concentrate on ministry.

Since the first day we entered into policy discussions and activism it was a struggle for us. I felt strongly about the issues we were defending, but conflicted about the fact that we might be alienating people that simply wouldn’t call us for help because of the perception that we were becoming a partisan and political organization rather than a ministry for all.

Not long ago, Wendy Gritter, executive director of the Toronto-based ministry New Direction, gave the keynote address at the 2008 Exodus Leadership Conference (PowerPoint presentation, 29 MB audio recording). As Warren Throckmorton describes it,

The mission of New Direction is “creating a safe place for same-gender-attracted people to journey towards wholeness in Christ.” The focus of New Direction appears to be much more focused on Christian ministry to same-sex attracted people as opposed to mediating change of sexual orientation.

He quotes Wendy:

[W]hen we look at those who now have their stories on the Beyond Ex-gay website…we also ought not to be patronizing?  There can be this subtle sense that ‘you just didn’t try hard enough….but see we did.’ How can we engage relationally with those who have come to different theological understanding than we have?

There is much to digest here and in the lengthy comment thread that Wendy's talk initiated at Warren's blog, but it seems to me that we are witnessing a historic development in the way evangelical Protestant churches and ministries deal with homosexuality, in that Exodus has really been the flagship for an approach focusing on orientation change.

Exodus, along with its charismatic and evangelical allies, has boldly--dare I say "loudly"?--proclaimed the reality of God's power to deliver people from homosexuality. But affirmation of the truth of divine deliverance from bondage of any kind needs always to be held in tension with acceptance of the reality of thorns in the flesh (2 Cor 12:7-9) which God in his providence allows us to learn to live with. Call this, if you will, a theology of suffering--which the great Catholic mystics always affirmed but which some churches (especially ones influenced by Pentecostalism) have been loath to recognize.

Now, while the Exodus approach has grown out of churches that stand very firm on the teaching that homosexual acts are always sinful, the same cannot be said within the context of the Anglican Communion, at least in North America and the United Kingdom. There too, though, it's notable that the Zacchaeus Fellowship (to which I belong as an associate member) has emphasized its pastoral calling.

We want it known that we are neither an ex-gay ministry nor a counselling ministry, although we do refer people when asked. We are not a political lobby group but a pastoral fellowship. We are not militant, but we try to exemplify the love of Christ in everything we do and say.

The sad spectacle of the moral and organizational collapse well underway within the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church points to the need for vigilance lest a healthy sensitivity to the voices of people who feel marginalized by the Church lapse into relativism. I heard recently that the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada and the moderator of the United Church of Canada apologized for missionaries' declarations that Christianity was superior to indigenous North American spiritual traditions. Sorry, but that won't do. We need to remain firmly attached to the true Vine (John 15), or we will bear no fruit.

Chances are very remote, though, that Exodus will go mushy any time soon. The change that Wendy Gritter calls for is truly welcome. Let the brittle bits of caramel be folded back into the pliable, leavened lump of dough. A fuller Christian message affirms complementary aspects of teaching rather than defending one truth at the expense of another. Courage, the Catholic apostolate to people living with homosexual attraction, has never emphasized orientation change but rather chastity and discipleship.

Two years ago, Alan Chambers and Michael Bussee along with many others batted around the idea of retiring the "ex-gay" label. As I wrote back then,

[T]he ex-gay claims and ex-ex-gay counterclaims are kind of irrelevant when moral codes are based not on private judgment but on the guarantee to God's people of "the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error" (CCC 890). In other words, there's a lot we don't know yet about the etiology (CCC 2357) and potential changeability of homosexual desire, but no outcome of these controversies can undermine the basic call to every last blessed one of us to live our whole lives in chastity, be it within or outside heterosexual marriage (CCC 2337-2350, esp. 2339, 2342).

Link thanks to Warren Throckmorton.

AmCath Hemorrhage

Amy Welborn's hosting a fascinating combox conversation about why so many American Catholics have left the Church and what can be done to bring them back. The starting point is the Pew Forum's recently published U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. That the overall numbers of Catholics have remained relatively stable is an artefact of Hispanic immigration, not completely unlike the influx of Polish Catholics to the United Kingdom.

Sherry Weddell points out that for every U.S. Evangelical who becomes Catholic there are eight U.S. Catholics who become Evangelical.

I expect the trends are somewhat different in Canada. I'd be eager for some hard stats if anyone's got them.

Protestant Thinking on Contraception Swings Back

Starts to swing back, I should say. Anyway, …

In Touchstone, Allan Carlson charts the changing fortunes of contraception in Protestant teaching and practice since the time of Luther and Calvin.

This special role of the Pastor’s Family was rarely codified in church doctrine, but the Protestant rejection of both celibacy and contraception created a visible expectation. Barring infertility, a faithful Protestant pastor and his wife would be parents to a brood of children.

As the son of a United Church minister, I find this idea of the Pastor's Family all very interesting.

The other very striking thing is the way Protestant doctrine has followed practice

As late as 1874, the average Anglican clergyman in England still had 5.2 living children. In 1911, however, just three years after the bishops had condemned contraception, the new census of England showed that the average family size of Anglican clergy had fallen to only 2.3 children, a stunning decline of 55 percent. The British Malthusian League—a strong advocate of contraception—had a field day exposing what it called the hypocrisy of the priests.

As the league explained, the Church of England continued to view contraception   as a sin, and yet its clerics and bishops were obviously engaging in the practice.

Hmm, now where else have we seen clergy practices leading to a lowering of standards for the whole flock?

But the article ends by observing a swing back from the contraceptive culture among some Protestants. Hopeful signs.

Link via Alice the Camel.

The Magisterium of the Evangelical Theological Society

As a follow-up to the Beckwith story to which I linked the other day, Fr Al Kimel asks who will interpret the founding documents of the Evangelical Theological Society once the founders have all died. A tidy problem for sola scriptura types!

Thomas Howard on Lord of the Rings as a Catholic Masterpiece

Just came across this interview with Thomas Howard, author of Evangelical is not Enough, talking about The Lord of the Rings.

“Vicarious” suffering is also, of course, central to the saga, as it is for Catholicism: the Company of the Ring endure what they endure for the sake of the salvation of the world, so to speak. This bespeaks what is central to our own story, namely Our Lord’s suffering, and that of the saints, on behalf of fallen humanity. One caveat: Tolkien disliked allegory most sedulously (he thought Lewis’s Narnia was too allegorical), so there is, in fact, the danger of “baptizing” the whole thing too eagerly. Frodo is not Christ, nor is Aragorn (the unknown, but legitimate, returning king). Galadriel is not an allegory for Our Lady, pure and lovely though she may be. But, at the end of the day, we may, with Tolkien’s approval, speak of the saga as a Catholic masterpiece. A postscript to this might be the observation that no Protestant could conceivably have written this saga, since it is profoundly “sacramental.” That is, redemption is achieved wholly via physical means–cf The Incarnation, Golgotha, the Resurrection, and the Ascension–and the tale is sprinkled with “sacramentals,” such as lembas, athelas, Galadriel’s phial of light, mithril, etc.…

[O]ne of the baffling aspects of our story is “the silence of God.” The Ring Company (like the saints in our story) have to muddle along, doing the best they can with their resources, without the luxury of some ready hocus-pocus that will dissolve Dark Riders or send orcs packing. Our story, often, seems to us mortals to be like this. Where is God? And Tolkien’s characters are not “religious.” No one says his prayers (there is one instance where Faramir and company pause before they eat, but this is, I think, as close as we get to prayer, unless the cry “O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!” may be thus understood). Readers may think the following observation somewhat capricious, but, as a latecomer to Catholicism myself, I recognize in this inarticulateness as to “faith” on the part of the characters a very Catholic quality. Catholics don’t chat about the Faith ordinarily. Protestants, especially evangelical Protestants, are stumped by this muteness. Catholics must not be believers, they think, if they can’t croak out at least some “testimony” to their faith. But Tolkien, as a cradle Catholic, would not, nay could not, have his characters forever nattering about God, any more than he (Tolkien himself) could have any part of a testimony meeting. The fugitive references to the West, and the spectacle of the elves “passing, passing, passing” to the West, tincture the whole narrative with the tincture of glory. Not here, not here, the word seems to be, is your ultimate home. Beautiful and appealing as the Shire, Rivendell, or Lothlorien may be, even they are not the final locale of felicity. All must go West. Here again, Tolkien has made the very fabric of his story virtually indistinguishable from the fabric of ours, and hence has gained a seriousness otherwise impossible.

Read the whole thing, especially the remarks about the film's omission of Tom Bombadil.

Link via Jimmy Akin's combox. The post was on Rick Santorum's LOTR analogy as parodied by Stephen Colbert.

Blog Roundup

Good news to see that David Morrison of Sed Contra is back at the keyboard following some time away after his father passed away. Good posts on chastity and the misrepresentation of the Courage Apostolate by a dissident group claiming to be Catholic while rejecting the Church's teachings on homosexuality.

I recently came across Muttering in Manitoba, which blogger Mutt-Man bills as "Politics, religion, humour and other dangerous topics, by conservative Western Canadians." I like his self-deprecating sense of humour. Perhaps modesty prevents him from mentioning that he's also got some terrific photography.

Speaking of photography, daily dose of imagery has been my favourite photoblog since some time before I started blogging, but I realized lately that I've rarely if ever linked to it in the body of this blog. A few recent highlights, according my own taste. But check out Sam's archives to see the full range of his work, all arranged by category or date.

Fellow Canadian Marcia Laycock has graceful words to share from time to time at Spurts. Marcia explains,

The title of this blog, like the title of my book, The Spur of the Moment, is taken from Hebrews 10:24 - "Let us consider how to spur one another on toward love and good deeds."

More active of late is her other blog, Writer-lee. She won the 2006 Best New Canadian Christian Author Award for her forthcoming novel, One Smooth Stone. Here's how she explains the genesis of the story.

It was born one Sunday after a woman from a local crisis pregnancy centre gave a talk at our church. I chatted with her afterwards (I had worked on the hotline for her organization) and we got talking about abortion. She said, "Can you imagine what it would be like for someone to discover his mother had tried to abort him?" I could and did and now it's going to be a book.

And journalist/author Deborah Gyapong, who interviewed me last year about that priest in Montreal who is so unwilling to accept Church teaching on homosexuality, has lots of good material. Here's her own contribution to the safe-versus-good thread from Relapsed Catholic that I posted on just the other day. First, responding to a review complaining that her newly published novel, The Defilers, was disturbing, she writes:

Well--if a novel that deals with issues of child pornography, and demonic oppression is not disquieting, then I have failed as an artist. Readers who want to lull themselves to sleep with sanitized entertainment can read another book. There is lots of product out there for them. I hope people will be disturbed. I hope that the novel will make them think about how their own heart is a battleground between good and evil and that ultimately they will choose the good, but not without their eyes wide open.

Then in a follow-up:

I think the Left Behind series is bad art and consequently bad religion, though perhaps many people find they're prompted to say the Sinner's Prayer after reading one of these books about the End Times. And maybe some of those people are genuinely repenting. God can even make a donkey speak if He has to in order to reach someone, but that doesn't make the donkey anything other than a donkey.

I love it! Deb also links to this provocative essay, Why Evangelicals Can't Write, by one Peter Leithart:

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics.

The Defilers is a very good read, by the way, with well-drawn characters and a compelling plot. Check it out.

Michael Liccione on Why Authority Is the Issue

An illuminating discussion over at Pontifications on Why Authority Is the Issue, starting from a post by Michael Liccione.

Many people past and present have tried to bypass that problem by insisting that only God, through the person of Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit who vivifies the Church, has the requisite authority and thus merits the requisite submission of mind and will. Jesus did after all say that “all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.” But so long as the question who teaches what Christ would have them teach is to be answered by human preference alone, then the question what is taught on earth with Christ’s authority is only a matter of opinion; and as I have argued before, opinions cannot be objects of divine faith. Of course there have always been theological opinions and always will be. That is not only inevitable but, to a certain extent, healthy. But if nobody on earth shares divine authority to say what is not merely a matter of opinion, but is rather revealed by God in Christ, then the question where to draw the line between theological opinion and divine revelation is itself, always and necessarily, a matter of opinion. And that effectively renders the entire subject matter one of opinion, not of revelation. As Newman so pithily put it: “No revelation is given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.” Such an authority cannot of course decide on its own “what is given”; to serve its function, it can only do so with the authority Jesus Christ gives it. Hence “this teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission; and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed” (Dei Verbum 10).

And in response to a comment…

The reason that I need you to address this pathological tendency for Catholics and Orthodox to go for the throat whenever any subject common to them both is raised (I have been guilty here myself, I admit) is that while reading the comments on this blog for the last couple of years I have had these (until now secret) urges to re-consider the work of Pavlov and B.F. Skinner.

I can see it now. Pontificator posts an essay on old family recipes and an argument breaks out as to whether or not those recipes should be guarded and preserved by one of the family’s matriarchs, or by the whole group of matriarchs. Good grief.

… Liccione posts an interesting metaphor for the relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

A Completely Secular Argument Why Sola Scriptura Makes No Sense

As a math major long ago, I was tickled a little while back to come across Zippy Catholic's application of Gödel's incompleteness theorem to showing that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura is incoherent. It's a brain-bending discussion, but the basic idea is not all that complicated: using purely secular mathematical logic, Gödel showed that any finite formal system that is powerful enough must contain a true statement that is not provable within the system.

Sola scriptura is just the understanding that whether a proposed doctrine must be believed or not (including the doctrine of sola scriptura itself) is decideable from the text of scripture. If scripture does not say that a doctrine must be believed, then it does not have to be believed.

From a related post of his:

I would not want to claim that incompleteness forms the major underpinning of some kind of overall theory of moral truth. On the other hand it is quite useful in exposing certain sorts of claims as fundamentally irrational. For example, if I am not mistaken, the claim "Given a proposition D, if proposition D must be believed it has to be derivable from text B" is as fundamentally irrational as claiming "2 + 2 = 5".

Importantly,

Godel's Theorem doesn't apply to the Deposit of the Faith generally, because the Deposit of the Faith is not a finite text. Showing that sola scriptura is deeply anti-rational is by no means the same as showing that Catholicism is true; but since Catholicism does not assert sola scriptura it dodges the bullet.

The nub of the argument:

Sola scriptura states that if a doctrine is proposed as true, its truth must be decideable from the text of scripture. To claim that whether a given proposition must be believed or not is decideable from the text of scripture is to claim that scripture is complete. Sola scriptura also claims that it is, itself, derived from the text of scripture. And so, via Godel's Theorem (the proof/comprehension of which is left as an exercise), sola scriptura asserts its own logical inconsistency:

"The hermeneutical system of which this sentence is a theorem is complete."

The only way for this not to be a logically inconsistent claim - and you will see the quibbling about this between myself and the real mathematicians in the comments - is if the hermeneutical system is expressly restricted not to be smart enough to do arithmetic. If any abstract concepts that can be used to build a functional arithmetic sneak into our hermeneutical system (we don't have to actually do any arithmetic, we just have to make use of abstract reasoning capable of doing some), then sola scriptura asserts the inconsistency of the hermeneutical system. Sola scriptura asserts its own irrationality. Martin Luther was presciently right to decry reason as the mortal enemy of sola scriptura.

In answer to criticism that this is just an analogy, he answers,

[N]o amount of axiom-shuffling can take the wind out of Godel's sails. [Gödel's theorem] applies in general to any formal system that is capable of representing arithmetic.

And in answer to one critic…

Goedel's theorem here is most certainly irrelevant as it claims to evaluate human systems and not the mind or words of God.

Not at all. I am merely assuming that when God reveals things to us, He does not contradict Himself.

And if that's too complicated, there's this basic point about non-contradiction. If your premises are false, you can prove anything you want within your system. Unfortunately, that about describes a lot of what passes for moral argument these days.

So logical foundations are important. I keep referring my Protestant friends to Mark Shea's By What Authority? We need some way of distinguishing truth from error, and unfortunately scripture is not sufficient for this purpose, even though it's necessary. Necessary, that is, with regard to questions about specifically Christian revelation; there is also a role for natural reason, a role that Bible-only Protestants tend to downplay.

Do Protestants Need a Pope?

(Guess what my answer is.) But this piece, from a few weeks after JPII died, was written by a teacher at an evangelical Protestant seminary. In_need_of_a_pope.pdf (application/pdf Object).
Link via Singing in the Reign via Waiting in Joyful Hope's combox.

Objections to Marian Dogma?

Over at Titus One Nine are some very stimulating discussions of reservations that very many Protestants (and more than a few "cafeteria Catholics") have toward the Catholic dogmas of the Assumption of Mary and the Immaculate Conception. (Also at Pontifications.) Some highlights:

The main theological point about Mariology is simple enough but seems to be curiously unmarked in most discussions: the Marian doctrines point up how Mary is always and pre-eminently what every disciple is called to be (#122).

* * *

I believe if more evangelical Protestants were to approach Marian devotion with an open mind (and an even more open heart), they would find that their fears are unfounded. For Mary leads us to Jesus - not to herself. This is the essence of the motto “Ad Jesum Per Mariam” - It is not “Ad Mariam per Jesum”! Can one be a good Christian without being devoted to Mary? Of course! However, an even better question is this: Can one be a good Christian without loving Jesus completely and totally? Of course not. And if we were to ask who, among all those who knew Him, who had the greatest love for Him, the answer is obvious - His mother. The more we honor her in song and devotion, the more we are reminded of her love for Him. This is the heart of the matter (#24).

* * *

John Henry Newman, … whose knowledge of the early Church was rivalled by few, had no problem declaring: 

“I fully grant that devotion towards the Blessed Virgin has increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries; I do not allow that the doctrine concerning her has undergone a growth, for I believe that it has been in substance one and the same from the beginning” (#134).

* * *

I finally felt myself drawn to Catholicism, but the Marian hurdle proved to be most difficult to overcome.

I can only share my testimony. Having admitted to myself that I was being drawn towards Catholicism, I earnestly prayed about my difficulties. Specifically, I prayed: “Lord, she is your Mother. I don’t know whether the Catholic Church is right to emphasize her so, but I only ask that you give me a love for her that mirrors your own. I want to love her as you love her - neither more nor less.”

That is still my prayer. And He has answered it. My appreciation of Mary’s faith, hope, and love has grown considerably. I have come to see her in an entirely new light, as the exemplar of Christian faith and discipleship. And my love for her, and devotion to her, as become central to my spirituality.

Does this detract from my devotion to her Divine son in any way? No - in a way that is hard to describe to those on the outside, it has deepened it. Mary constantly draws us closer to Christ (#59).

I found Scott Hahn's Hail, Holy Queen a good introduction to Marian doctrine. Someday I'll have to read Hugo Rahner's Our Lady and the Church, which has been highly recommended as a profound theological reflection upon the Blessed Virgin.