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ECUSA: Via Media Spins 'Middle Way' While Pushing All Out for Changed Church

VIA MEDIA SPINS 'MIDDLE WAY' WHILE PUSHING ALL OUT FOR CHANGED CHURCH

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue

Almost a dozen revisionist Episcopal groups meeting under the banner of Via Media will meet in Atlanta March 25-27 to, in the words of Lionel Deimel, president of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh, "swap notes, meet each other and plan strategy."

That's a half-truth. They will meet to figure out how to deal with, bend to their will and destroy, if it comes to that, the biblically orthodox minority in The Episcopal Church.

It is absolutely ironic that they call themselves the Via Media, in Latin, the Middle Way, because in truth they are as far from being the 'middle way', as a drunk driver telling a cop that he was driving down the middle of the road, because he was frightened that if drove on either side of the road he might just drive off the black top and hit a tree.

When one of the founders of Anglicanism, Richard Hooker first coined the term, Via Media was the special grace of the Church of England in that it took the best insights of Reformation theology; especially its evangelical stress on salvation by grace alone, and combined it with the spiritual disciplines and sacramental worship of the traditional church.

According to William L. De Arteaga, Ph.D. in his book "Forgotten Power", he writes that the Wesley brothers did exactly that. "They brought passion to both the evangelical and Catholic sides of the balance. They were better evangelicals than most Protestants and, at the same time, better at the disciplines of the spiritual life and more loyal to sacramental worship than most Catholics."

This is not what the contemporary Via Media types in ECUSA are planning, rather plotting to bring to the table.

Among the 40 odd revisionists gathering in Atlanta will be three representatives from the national church. One of them, Virtuosity has learned, is David Booth Beers, the church's attorney and Griswold's personal attorney. He comes at a price break of $350.00 an hour.

Now he will not be there to via media anything. You may take my word for it. He will be there to inform these angry revisionists, with all legal solemnity, that they are the true and faithful sons and daughters of the Church and they have nothing to fear, and if anyone tries to leave the ECUSA with their property they will get a taste of hell in this life. Just watch the fun and games begin in the Diocese of Missouri with the Church of the Good Shepherd in St Louis. They have left the diocese and ECUSA and plan to keep their parish property.

If you don't think that Beers has not been in touch with Bishop George Wayne Smith (Missouri) and his attorneys with legal advice, then you need to rethink your doctrine of Original Sin.

This gang is saying they do not want their church to split over Robinson's consecration and they plan to establish a nationwide alliance of clergy and laity who stand for moderation, tolerance and inclusion, leaders of the movement told the Washington POST.

Deimel said the Via Media groups have some members on both sides of the thundering debates in the church, including whether to bless same-sex unions and whether to support the election of V. Gene Robinson.

That is a fiction. If they didn't believe fundamentally in ECUSA's adopted pansexualism they wold be a member of the AAC or NADCP. They are not. These ultra liberals have one goal - to win the culture wars in the Episcopal Church and to turn it into a theological whore house with the vestal virgins (ECUSA's orthodox) paying the bills. Anything else is lies and spin.

Deimel says he believes "in a united church in having a view of the Episcopal Church as
being a welcoming, inclusive church with broad tolerance of theological differences."

Interpretation: Inclusion without redemption, tolerance for those who believe in sodomy and calling the biblically orthodox "fundamentalists" and "homophobes" if they don't go along with the new religion.

Via Media groups can be found in such dioceses as Pittsburgh, Albany, South Carolina and Fort Worth, oddly enough they are ALL in orthodox dioceses. If they were so "Via
Media" why is there not one single Via Media in a liberal or revisionist diocese?

And the answer is that they don't need them there because those bishops have already sold out and rolled over to the new religion, so a "Via Media" group is unnecessary.

While the orthodox continue to say with loud voices that they are not leaving ECUSA
and the new Network say they are the legitimate sons and daughters of orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church, it might well be that this face off could lead to the very schism everyone says they are trying to avoid.

The Rev. John T. Sorensen, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Plattsburgh, N.Y.,
and a leader of Albany Via Media says that the Via Media groups "are basically here to demand that we remain an inclusive place that is not only embracing of liberals or gay
clergy but also of conservatives and everybody in between."

That's a fiction that even his own boss Albany Bishop Dan Herzog does not buy and never will.

Most of the 11 Via Media groups are small, so far, with fewer than 100 active members, but with the national church behind them and all their media power you can be sure it won't stay that way for long. Sooner or later the two sides will face each other for an all out battle, and when the dust clears, there will be bodies all over the beach.

Via Media no more represents the true center of the church, than Frank Griswold represents Anglo-Catholicism. It's all a great lie.

Nor is this about extremism, it is about the 'faith once delivered' and that faith does not include abandoning doctrines people find nauseating like the Atonement or upholding sex outside of marriage. Those are positions that no other denomination, so far, believes in except the ECUSA. One cannot simply agree to disagree, the eternal destiny of thousands of souls are at stake.

As one astute observer noted, "Via Media is made up of liberals who are working
for reconciliation in the same way that the communists did through "re-education." As Lecutious of Borg (Star Trek) said, "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

Futile it would seem, and spiritually fatal.

END

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