Wednesday, December 08, 2004
ANTINOMIAN
Websters Unabridged defines it as "A person who maintains that Christians are freed from the moral law by virtue of grace set forth in the gospel."
The word is most often seen in discussions of mystical phenomena such as Pentecostalism. In _Enthusiasm_ Msgr. Ronald A. Knox uses the word "Antinomianism" to describe Beghards, Anabaptists, Ranters, Illuminati, Camisards, Moravians, and Perfectionists.
Essentially the antinomian decides that he has access to the mind of God and so no longer needs to follow the rules.
I recently came upon a contemporary example of antinomianism in a paper by Rev. Canon Gray Temple, Jr. titled "The Gay Challenge and Charismatic Episcopalians" in which he says:
It had been easy until recently to know what's moral and what's not, what kind of behavior is "Christian" and what isn't. ...gay Christians may cause the whole thing to unravel, showing us that our presentations of godly morality have some unintended cruel side-effects we'd previously been able to ignore. Our moral system may feel complete and self-consistent to us, but it is not humane. That raises some question about whether it's godly at all. ...
I know a great number of Christians -- many of us Charismatics -- who have changed from initially opposing homosexuality in general and among Christians in particular. None of us did it head-first. The change did not occur as the result of re-reading Scripture; that came later. Nor did it come from Tradition; re-understanding Tradition came later. Nor was it even the fruit of Reason; again, the reasoning came later. For the great majority of us the change resulted from some combination of two activities: prayer and personal relationships with gay relatives or friends of unimpeachable integrity. ...
Once God and our friendships opened fresh possibilities to us, then came the difficult struggle with the Bible, with Tradition, with Reason. In my experience I've never seen it proceed in the other direction. This is a heart-first, not a head-first change. To be sure, it has great biblical, traditional, and reasoned integrity -- but the heart comes first. ...
Re-read the Bible as a prayerful Charismatic in love with Jesus and in honest relationship with gay people who love him too. Re-examine the Tradition of the Church, filtering out mere customs masquerading as traditions. Prayerfully rethink the whole matter. Finally, budget the courage it will cost to withstand the reactions of those who have not yet acccepted God's challenge. ...
Charismatics should be leading the Church's conversion in this and all matters. That we don't lead is the result of our failing to escape the orbits of the religious theological enclaves God found us in. ...
When I hear Anglo-Catholics describe how the Spirit found them locked in their resentful ritualism and brought them new life, the reports feel real familiar. Just as I remain a "liberal Charismatic" they remain "Catholic Charismatics." But the operant word for all of us is "Charismatic." God before Party. ...
Thus he reasons his way out of Scripture and Tradition and into a new way of thinking that will accommodate the sin of choice. Anyone who has ever sinned and then repented of the sin will recognize the pattern. We are all subject to it.
Temple gives us the clincher with this statement:
The inability of Charismatics to accredit the co-Christianity of gay sisters and brothers thus serves as a sort of X-ray shot of what is wrong with us in other areas. Though "for freedom God set us free," we have "returned again to the yoke of slavery." The Devil has used our fleshly repugnance at homosexuals' manner of intimate self-expression, our rage at the behavior of some at Gay Pride parades, successfully to tempt us to abandon listening prayer and prophetic discerning fellowship. Gays scare us back out of the Spirit's fellowship into our old doctrinal certainties and partisan strifes.
Precisely because Charismatics can commune with the very heart of Jesus by the Spirit's power we do not have to remain wed to older interpretations of the Bible -- especially when those interpretations are so inconsistent with the deepest streams of biblical revelation. Precisely because we have been set free to worship and minister in the Spirit, we more than others should be free of the "traditions of men." Precisely because Jesus has called us "no longer servants but friends" we ought to know he will disclose the Father's purposes to us. That frees us from being enslaved to our own previous intellectual commitments. Jesus did not give us this liberty as a whim -- he seems to require that we take risks with it, that we get brave.
There it is. If you commune with God, you can write your own rules, tossing out or reinterpreting Scripture and Tradition in the process. As Temple puts it, "...most of St. Paul's discussion of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 is as accessible to committed same-sex relationships as heterosexual relationships..."
Or put another way, antinomianism in action.
There but for the grace of God go I.
