Chateau Lloyd

The Episcopal church in the US never ceases to amuse.  In January, a parish priest decided to deny Communion to his congregation because he considered society to be too racist.

Now comes the news that the bishop in charge of refugee resettlement has decided it would be better to shut the whole thing down than fund the resettlement of a few dozen white South Africans.  They have a history, you see, and one the Episcopalians feel disqualifies them from aid.

Theologically speaking, this is not a recent development.  Particularly during the age of the slave trade, there was a Christian heresy that argued that black Africans carried the "mark of Cain" and were therefore accursed, fully deserving enslavement.  The Mormon Church adopted this concept and stuck with it until the 1970s, when a "new revelation" declared it to be void.

The concept is fully in alignment with predestination, and if people think the Problem of Evil is a tough nut to crack, the notion that a loving and merciful God has consigned most of humanity to hell without any possibility of escape is insurmountable.

It is one think to argue that evil exists because of free will and the constant tendency of humans to rebel against God.  Simply asserting that God is good in spite of the obvious injustice of damning people regardless of their actions is a much tougher argument to make, and in fact, I utterly reject it.

But it is of a pace with the complete collapse of the Church of England, which has been without an Archbishop of Canterbury since early January.  A vacancy that long in the Catholic Church would be a crisis and a scandal, and that it gets so little coverage proves just how irrelevant the Anglican Communion has become.