Note from Rowland: Harry Cook is a lovable heretic, I believe, like Bishop Spong. He's embedded in the 'far left liberal' end of the Episcopal theological spectrum. His essay is included here F Y I, not because I go along with all of it.

~~~

Feb. 11, 2007

What Took So Long?

By Harry T. Cook

Just two days short of my 68th birthday and midway in the 42nd year of my ordained ministry, I learned that I may, at long last, be charged formally with heresy. That's what I've been told by a very nice man who cannot reconcile my published writings with the fact that I am considered - at least for now - to be a priest in good standing of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan.

He read my 1997 book Christianity Beyond Creeds wherein he found that I treated such ideas as the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus as metaphor, and certainly not as objective truth. He could not understand how this could be. "You can't be a priest and a heretic at the same time," he said in wonderment.

One can, in fact, be both, but perhaps not for long. A Fourth Century priest named Arius didn't last long as either one, if you credit historians of antiquity. The word among them was that Arius, once he was anathematized as a heretic by the majority of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea for his insistence that Jesus Christ was not of the same substance with the Father, promptly died a horrible death while attempting to defecate in a public latrine. Something about his guts extruding from his torso.

God must have been crankier in those days. Now our heretical books are merely panned by detractors, though the canon law of the church does make it possible to present a clergyperson on charges of holding and teaching publicly or privately, and advisedly, any doctrine contrary to that held by this Church.

That canonical provision together with what is known as the Oath of Conformity (to a copy of which I did truly and knowingly put my name on the day of my ordination) are the two things that make my would-be accuser believe I should be disciplined. Here, by the way, follows the text of the oath:

I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation; and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

Until ordination day, I had known neither of the oath's existence nor of the requirement to subscribe to it. With the organist already playing the pre-service music out in the church, I told Bishop Richard S. M. Emrich back in the sacristy that I could not in good conscience be on record as calling any part of the Bible "the Word of God."

"Come now, Mr. Cook," the bishop said. "Those words don't mean literally what they say. You should know that as a young scholar of the Bible." I asked the bishop if the language in question could be taken as metaphor. "Indeed, it can" he responded as I shakily took his proffered fountain pen and scrawled my signature upon the face of the document.

Any lawyer would tell me that my exchange with the bishop as reported above would be a thin reed upon which to rely for defense inasmuch as the bishop is dead, and I recall no other witnesses to our brief conversation. Thus could a charge of heresy withstand at least initial scrutiny by an ecclesiastical court.

The noun "heresy," by the way, comes from a Greek word that means "choice" - a heretic then being a "chooser." In the church's peculiar dialect, what is "chosen" is belief or advocacy of a point of view not held by the majority. That was Arius' sin, as it was that of Pelagius, of Nestor, of Donatus - and the list goes on.

I told my once and future accuser that I do not and I will not embrace abstract beliefs that are not grounded in discernable data about the existence of which there is no doubt, and upon the meaning of which reasonable persons can debate. There exist no such data to support the virgin birth of Jesus - and, in fact, very few to support the actual existence of such a person, much less his supposed resurrection.

As for the Bible, as I have said before on this website forum, I have given the best of my intellectual gifts to its research over more than 40 years, never once being led to consider that it was the word of any god.

Should any of these statements in some official way be deemed heretical, thus making me subject to defrocking, a heresy trial might well materialize. That would make my various publishers rejoice greatly as the sales of my books would undoubtedly increase. And, who knows? Perhaps even Oprah or Larry King might become curious. It could be the show-trial of the century, and we are just barely into its seventh year.

So, as it is said on the street, "Bring it [on?]."

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.