Bishop Duncan Interview

Episcopal Church faces ‘significant pruning’ over doctrine, bishops says

By Mike Sullivan
5/24/2007

The following is an excerpt -

Our Sunday Visitor: How do you respond when people accuse you of dividing the church?

Bishop Robert Duncan: It’s rather like a father in a family who confronts a teenager who’s acting out. And what the other members of the family say is, “Dad, don’t be so hard, you’re dividing our family.” It’s a bizarre argument, but it appeals to the modern heart and mind because it gives the modern heart and mind precisely what it wants.

That is to say, “We ought to be able to do what we want to do.” And the modern Church has no doctrine of sin and no sense of boundaries. So, I divide the church by simply saying: “Well, sin is what human beings are wired to do and from which they’ve been delivered, and the father actually has boundaries, rules and a way he wants us to live because he’s designed and called us to live that way. It’s what’s best for us.”

The other criticism that gets made is that we’re just worked up over sex. That’s not it at all. We’re actually worked up over what scripture says, and in every regard. We’ve been lax about allowing remarriages after divorce. We’ve been lax on what scripture clearly says about human life and its sanctity. We take those positions in morality because of what the word says. Because of what the Lord said. And that’s the same thing that Catholics have always done.

Our Sunday Visitor: For Catholics, the church’s doctrines are clearly defined for the faithful by the church. We know the doctrines of the faith as they are handed on to us by the popes and the magisterium. Would you comment on the basis of the authority for those in the Episcopal Church?

Bishop Robert Duncan: For Anglicans, tradition helps us to understand Scripture, but scripture is the ultimate authority, and Anglicanism as a result of [the Council of] Trent also factored in human reason.

That is to say that God had given men and women the ability to think and understand, and that reason should also be applied to the plain sense of scripture and of how you coordinate scripture and tradition as you try to live it in the present.

That understanding – that scripture is the ultimate rule and standard, mediated by tradition and by human reason – has stood intact until the very recent sort of postmodern assault where truth and words mean what you want them to mean. In fact, in the Episcopal Church now, it would be said that reason and human experience is the trump. Not scripture or tradition. And so we’re in midst of this vast battle because the basis of authority has been so altered.

To read the entire interview, see: Episcopal Church faces ‘significant pruning’ over doctrine, bishops says