THE PRESUMPTION OF GENE ROBINSON

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
1/27/2007

V. Gene Robinson, the homoerotic Bishop of New Hampshire believes, like the Blues Brothers, that he is on a mission from God - in his case, to unite the Anglican world over homosexual behavior.

At the center of the divide, Robinson, the Episcopal Church's first ordained homosexual bishop says he sees a higher purpose to the debate, and said so at a gathering of clergy in Hartford, Connecticut en route to Colorado and the Sundance Film Festival there to view a documentary film, featuring his story and those of four other gay families, that had been nominated for a grand jury prize.

Titled "For the Bible Tells Me So," it is about families split by their beliefs about homosexuality and Scripture. Robinson didn't mention that another Sundance movie ZOO expounded on the joys of bestiality, a position, along with polygamy, that logically follows now that the Pandora's Box of sexualities has sprung wide open in The Episcopal Church.

Robinson, now confident that he is winning the Culture Wars on sexuality in The Episcopal Church with the help of Mrs. Schori and her unleashed legal Doberman David Booth Beers whose job it is to keep bishops from losing their nerve and leaving the TEC, and making sure that their churches stay in line, is now prepared to go out on a limb and hurl it in our faces that the jig is up and he and his pansexual pals have won. His message is one of reconciliation, he says, but it is on his terms and not on those of the orthodox. He wants us to be reconciled to sodomy so he can feel good about himself, justify his lifestyle, and believe he is going to heaven.

Robinson is so confident of his position, and the rightness of his cause, that he publicly espoused the view that he and Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola would one day be heaven together. "I believe with my whole heart that the Archbishop of Nigeria [Peter Akinola] and I are going to be in heaven together. And we're going to get along together, because God won't have it any other way. So we better start practicing now," said Robinson to the dozen local church leaders at Real Art Ways cinema.

Really. The hubris of this statement reeks to high heaven. Robinson and his homosexual Episcopal pals have spent the last three years blasting Akinola for massive homophobia, fundamentalism, lacking diversity and inclusivity, narrow-mindedness, accusing him and the Global South Archbishops and orthodox American bishops of fomenting schism, when it is he and his friends who have brought on the crisis in the Anglican Communion, and now Robinson says that one day he'll be in heaven with the Nigerian leader!

This begs the question; would Akinola want to be in heaven with Robinson? The way to heaven is through the shed blood of the Lamb, through repentance and faith, through obedience to God's revealed will. Robinson believes he can discard the Moral Law of God; that he and a few of his friends can toss out thousands of years of received teaching just to suit his own (homo)erotic tastes and ends, and then says he will go to heaven. It is even the title of his new book "Going to Heaven".

Robinson presumes too much. He presumes on a God who will blink and then wink at his behavior. Robinson believes in a God who he thinks has changed his mind to suit his own homoerotic desires and fantasies; steadfastly refusing to conform to God's will, demanding that God conform to his will. That is a damaging, eternally dangerous fiction that no person who takes Scripture seriously should presume on. Robinson no longer believes in the efficacy of Christ's atoning work at the cross for our sins, he rejects the atonement as necessary for salvation, holding with Pa. Bishop Charles Bennison that the church wrote the Bible and can therefore rewrite it - to include homoerotic sex.

But God is not mocked. We reap what we sow. The Episcopal Church is emptying faster than a broken sewer pipe.

Then Robinson made an extraordinary statement about prayer. "The thing that has sustained me through all this is God has seemed so very close that prayer has seemed almost redundant. ... Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes God lets the storm rage, and calms the child." Personally, "I couldn't be happier. I think that's the best revenge," he said.

So Robinson doesn't pray or need to pray. His end is to be "happy." How ironic. On the eve of his death Jesus spends the night in prayer in a garden, "sweating as it were great drops of blood" praying that "this cup would pass from me" but ready to do His Father's will. Robinson, by contrast, is so confident in his personal righteousness and the rightness of his cause, he can discard prayer, claim he is happy and announce to all and sundry that he has won.

When the lunch ended, Robinson hugged his host, Bishop John Selders of the Amistad United Church of Christ. Interesting, why were none of the three Connecticut Episcopal bishops anywhere to be found? Were they keeping their distance from the controversial bishop for fear that their presence would only heighten the tensions already present in the church and ratchet up the anger on Mrs. Schori when she attends the Primates meeting in Tanzania next month?

Clearly that was not a concern of Bishop Robinson. In an attempt to deflect and play down the crisis in The Episcopal Church, Robinson said the media exaggerated the strength and importance of the small minority of parishes at odds with the national church's liberal stance on homosexuality. The parishes are "seeking to get themselves recognized as the true expression of Anglicanism in this country and not inconsequentially get the Episcopal Church - I don't know what the word is - unrecognized as that legitimate expression. And I think they are using more conservative churches around the globe to support that claim," he said.

Robinson will not face the fact that tens of thousands of Episcopalians are leaving the TEC weekly, and while the parishes may be few in number, the number of people leaving is huge. The only figure to note is Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) and that figure is now well below 780,000 and sinking.

In a final blast, Robinson tried to dismiss the crisis in the Communion saying that in a world facing 40 million people dying of AIDS (a large proportion of whom are gay men practicing anal sex) and the gap only increases between rich and poor, "this seems like a waste of our time and energy, debating the rightness and wrongness of gay and lesbian people and their relationships," he said.

Not if the eternal destiny of souls is at stake, and archbishops like Akinola, and Uganda Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, Kenyan Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi, Central African Archbishop Bernard Malango and American bishops like Robert Duncan (Pittsburgh) believe otherwise, then what is at stake is the veracity of the life-changing message of the gospel itself - and that they will not compromise on.

Perhaps Robinson should be mindful of some words of Jesus who said that many would claim to speak for him saying, "Lord, Lord did we not...and He will say depart from me I never knew you."

END