Behind the Anglican split

No one should be surprised at the news today that the conservative movement of the Anglican Church is splitting off from Canterbury, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church of the USA. My only surprise is that the break did not come sooner.

On the surface, the battle is about gay marriage and gay ordination. Below the surface it is clear that the basic issue is interpretation of the bible. The struggle is between fundamentalist literalism and modern critical interpretation -- and it is not restricted to Anglicans and Episcopalians. It is everywhere in the mainline churches, including the Roman Catholic Church.

Roman Catholics were told by Pope Pius XII way back in 1943 that interpretation of the bible should take into account the times in which the books were written. The "interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East."

That seems like simple common sense, but over the course of the 65 years since Pope Pius wrote, countless parishioners have seldom if ever been taught about critical (in the sense of analytical) interpretation of the bible. Over decades, I have met folks with college degrees who still interpret the bible literally. They can read chapter after chapter without taking into account metaphor or poetry or myths that were meant to illustrate our origins.

The standoff between literal interpretation and modern scholarship is only going to grow -- and not just among the Anglicans.