Sewanee Theological Review Editor: Christopher Bryan Poetry Editor: Greg Williamson Book Review Editor: James Dunkly Managing Editor: Mary Ann Patterson Cover Photo: Buck Butler Editorial Advisory Board: O.C. Edwards (Chair), J. Neil Alexander, Susan Bear, Lawrence A. Britt, Julia M. Gatta, Robert MacSwain, John M. McCardell, and James Turrell ©2018•The School of Theology•The University of the South•Sewanee, Tennessee PUBLISHED QUARTERLY IN DECEMBER (#1), MARCH (#2), JUNE (#3), AND SEPTEMBER (#4) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER SF 77–50•ISSN 1059–9576 All correspondence and manuscript submissions should be addressed to Sewanee Theological Review, The School of Theology, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee 37383-0001. 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Sewanee Theological Review formerly St. Luke’s Journal of Theology Editorial: Must the Weak Acquiesce? 315 CHRISTOPHER BRYAN Contributors 331 Preface 335 PIERRE WHALON A Primer on the Government of The Episcopal Church and its Underlying Theology 341 ECCLESIOLOGY COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF BISHOPS What is Ecclesiology? 375 WILLIAM O. GREGG Proto-Conciliarism in Acts 15 417 C. K. ROBERTSON The Key to Understanding The Episcopal Church 425 PIERRE W. WHALON Conciliarism and the Ecclesiology of The Episcopal Church 447 WILLIAM FRANKLIN Towards a More “Ecological” Ecclesiology: Subsidiarity and Conciliarism in Context 495 GEORGE SUMNER What is a Bishop, Anyway? 509 PIERRE W. WHALON 312 SERMONS AND REFLECTIONS Future LGBT priests: Advocates for Christian orthodoxy 527 IAN MARKHAM and PAUL MOBERLY MAZARIEGOS Homily for the Funeral of William Hoover Hethcock 537 ROBERT C. LAMBORN Homily for the Funeral of Thomas Edward Camp 545 ROBERT C. LAMBORN POETRY Star-Bottom Boat 553 PETER COOLEY The Passing 555 WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS The Barn Owl 557 ROB GRIFFITH A Declaration of Intent 559 SOFIA STARNES Act of Worship 561 N. S. THOMPSON 313 BOOK REVIEWS Singularity —Christopher Bryan 565 O. C. EDWARDS JR. Virginia Cary Hudson, The Jigs & Juleps! Girl: Her Life and Writings. 567 —Beverly Mayne Kienzle O. C. EDWARDS JR. Sewanee Theological Review 61:2 Editorial: Must the Weak Acquiesce? CHRISTOPHER BRYAN There is a deservedly famous moment in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War when the Athenians have the much weaker Melians at their mercy. The Melians appeal for compassion to Athenians’ essential decency—to their sense of human rights. The Athenian generals’ reply is realpolitik at its worst. Rights, they declare, only exist between equals. The Athenians will do what they please with the Melians because they can: “the strong do what they have power to do and the weak acquiesce” (PW 5.s 89).1 In other words, might is right. Let bullies rule! The irony of the situation lies, however, in two facts of which Thucydides makes sure his audience is aware. One is that the Melians’ appeal is in essence precisely the appeal that the Athenians themselves made some decades earlier when faced by the might of the Persian Empire. The other is that the logic by which the Athenians now respond to the Melians is precisely the logic by which they in their turn will be crushed some years later by the might of Sparta. Such a pattern of events is, of course, not only to be found in pagan literature. It is in the Scriptures. The ancient Hebrews are 1 δυνατ δ ο προύχοντες πράσσουσι κα ο σθενε ς ξυγχωρο σιν. ὰ ὲ ἱ ὶ ἱ ἀ ῖ ῦ 316 CHRISTOPHER BRYAN oppressed by the Egyptians. They cry to God in their suffering, and God hears them and delivers them so that… so that what? According the Scriptural narrative, so that they in their turn can go to the Promised Land and oppress the Amorites and six other nations worse than they themselves have been oppressed. The Egyptians merely set the Israelites to hard tasks. On the grounds, however, that God “gave us this land” (Deut. 26.9) the Israelites now feel free to wipe out those other nations: “you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy” (Deut. 7:2). Now of course I am aware that there is in Scripture another narrative than this—indeed, I would say the dominant narrative, running in an entirely opposite direction. This second narrative speaks of all God’s creation as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and declares, indeed, that God’s people exists so that in Abraham’s seed, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3; cf. 22:18)—an idea that is wonderfully developed in the Second Isaiah’s words to God’s servant—“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6). These words are in turn said of the infant Christ by the aged Simeon in the Temple at Jerusalem—Simeon’s song, Nunc dimittis, that Christians have been reciting in their evening prayers for millennia. Jesus himself is the light to enlighten the nations, and thereby also the glory of his people Israel (Luke 2:29-32). Jesus when lifted up from the earth is to draw “all people” to himself (John 12:32). All this goes without saying, or at least it ought to. And therein lies the rub. For it remains there is an element in us that EDITORIAL 317 prefers the former story, the brutal story, and is even willing to claim divine sanction for it, just so long, of course, as we are on the winning side. And it is a part of the Bible’s faithful witness not only to the graciousness of God but also to the sinfulness of humankind that it does not hide that fact—nor does it hide its results. Israel, like Athens, will in her turn suffer defeat and destruction at the hands of the powerful. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans: Israel must succumb to each of these mighty races in their time. Here, too, “the strong actually do what they can and the weak acquiesce.” The flip side of which, it turns out, is “they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Alas, in succeeding centuries we seem in these matters to have learned little either from Thucydides or from the biblical narrative. A great Jewish biblical scholar, Jon D. Levenson, suggests that there is a parallel between the Bible’s account of Israel’s rapacious negation of the nations who had preceded her and the way in which Christians later rapaciously superseded the Jews.2 He is right. Indeed, throughout the two thousand or so years of Christian history, one sees Christians using these stories of Israel and the promised land to claim biblical warrant, directly or indirectly, for all sorts of abominable nonsense: the burning of heretics, Christian theft of lands from their previous inhabitants (including, of course, those lands that we now call “the United States”), babble about “master races”, “manifest destiny” and “exceptional nations”, and by bitterest irony, the only too evident involvement of “Christians” in the Nazi holocaust, wherein Israel herself becomes the Amorite to be exterminated. 2 Jon D. Levenson, “Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New Testament Anti-Semitism?” Journal of Ecumentical Studies 22 (1985) 242-60. 318 CHRISTOPHER BRYAN One might wonder why, in the course of reading through the collection of papers on Episcopal and Anglican identity, focussing somewhat on Anglicanism and the conciliar ideal, I should have found myself reflecting on such dark and depressing themes as these? On the one hand, I suppose I did so because even Christian history, of which Anglican and Episcopal identity are certainly a part, displays almost as much a preference for the brutal story, the narrative in which “winners” do what they want and “losers” put up with it, as does any other part of the human enterprise. “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” goes a well-known hymn,3 presumably following Tertullian’s famous description of pagan reaction to Christians: “look,” they say, “how they love one another!” (Apologia 39.7)4—apropos which I am inclined to think that Tertullian was more willing to indulge in wishful thinking than one imagined.