ORTHODOX ECUSA THEOLOGIAN RIPS COLORADO BISHOP

By Dr. Ephraim Radner

Dear Bishop O’Neill,

We were very grateful for the time, extended as it turned out to be, that you offered to spend with us last week to discuss the implications of your discipline in the case of the same-sex commitment ceremony held at Good Shepherd, Centennial. Grateful too for your willingness to try to explain clearly your own thinking and reasons behind the way matters have been dealt with. It was not an easy gathering, and I admire your equanimity and patience in our gathered midst.

Secondly, we at Ascension in Pueblo were grateful for your visitation this past Sunday. While it might have been expected to carry with it tensions brought on by the previous week’s meeting and the disagreements involved, the visit instead proved one filled with grace—brought by your own spirit of openness and gentleness. One of the confirmands spoke to me of the sense of your own deep faith in Christ that you communicated; and this was indeed a gift to us and one we could share with joy.

I do not take these signs of grace lightly. We have been challenged by you and others in the Communion to embrace and work energetically for and through the things “we hold in common” in our faith, even in the midst of our differences. And the Taskforce you have set up is working hard, I know, to discern what and how this might be so. It is precisely because we do hold so much in common, in Christ Jesus our Lord—indeed, because we are driven to “love one another” in Jesus’ own Spirit, and it is His grace alone that provides us this privilege and power—that the very confusions, perceived deceptions, strayings from the truth delivered to us, and undisciplined life together that will be detailed below wounds us so deeply, and makes of every decision that we pursue in our ministry together in this diocese a matter of spiritual agony. May God uphold us, and save us from presumption, indifference, and despair!

So then, what shall we do with the situation before us about which we met last week? Our discussion, as you yourself admit, was unsatisfactory in that we left unconvinced by your explanations, and indeed even more distressed by the implications of your actions than we had been at our coming together. In what follows, I want to detail some of what we discussed, why it is that many of us are made yet more concerned by the answers we received, and finally how it is that we perceive ourselves as moving into a realm of confused relationships with you and the larger church. As I will point out, there is precedent for this present time in the past history of the church; one from which we can gain guidance and, I pray, hope itself. I do all this at length, I realize. But the details, concerns, and future laid out below deserve to be known and reflected upon by the larger church, not merely by those “in the know.” And laying them out in this manner is necessary if we are to move forward “in the light,” rather than in secrecy and assumption.

(The remainder of Dr. Radner’s letter continues with detailed theological and ecclesiological arguments, outlining factual discrepancies, raising ethical questions about secret protocols regarding same-sex blessings, and appealing to historical precedent and the consensus of the faithful. For brevity and readability, the full text has been preserved in spirit but condensed here.)

Where is God leading us? We prayerfully hope that it is not into the kind of sixty-year conflict that the 4th century saw over Arianism; we pray that it is not into the kind of division of clergy against clergy, people against bishop, that once paradoxically unveiled the power of the faithful’s hidden wisdom; we pray that it is not into a protracted struggle, in which Caesar is called upon to marshal force and insure sullen conformance to egregious faithlessness.

You asked us on Wednesday to “forbear” from pressing for disengagement of the kind just mentioned. This is also our wish, and I—and, I know, others—will do all we can to fulfill it. We do believe, after all, that Christ “shares us” in His grace. He has “bought” us, not we Him. We cannot keep silence, however, nor will we; secrecy and strategic reticence are things of a broken past. “Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops” (Luke 12:3). But we can certainly be as patient, in our testimony, as the farmers of Bithynia long ago.

Of you, however, we would also make a request: heed the call of the Church—not of a few voices from among us certainly, nor from among our local disputants, but from the wide countryside of Christ that spreads out over continents and world. Here are the people found from whom the living integrity of your episcopate derives, and only finds its rest, God willing, in this small corner. Listen to them.

May the Lord bless you and us all as we seek to serve him faithfully and together.

In Christ,

Ephraim Radner, Ph.D.

Church of the Ascension

Pueblo, Colorado

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