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Albany Episcopal Bishop Faces Ecclesiastical Execution

Albany Episcopal Bishop Faces Ecclesiastical Execution

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline.org
January 15, 2019

For it is better, if it is God's will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. 1 Peter 3: 17-18

The news broke just before lunch on Friday, January 11.

The Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, dubbed the "love bishop" for his endless talk about love, announced that the godly orthodox Bishop of Albany, William H. Love is hereby "partially restricted" from performing his duties as a bishop, because he had canonically offended the Church by refusing to allow homosexual marriages in his diocese.

Under Canon IV.4(1)(c) he now faces a trial where he will inevitably be inhibited, deposed and thrown out of the Episcopal Church. His ecclesiastical fate is sealed forever.

Bishop Love is a bible believing, evangelical catholic who believes in God's Word written more than he believes in the efficacy of General Convention resolutions, many of which have gone against God's revealed Word and will for our lives.

He is the last of the orthodox bishops in The Episcopal Church, and now he will soon be gone because he refuses to succumb to the siren call of Resolution B012 which demanded that every diocese allow homoerotic couples to receive the Church's blessing on their coupling, even though Scripture denounces sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman as the only ideal God recognizes and approves.

This resolution is the final stand in a decades long march by Episcopal pansexualists to push their sexual behavior onto a gullible House of Bishops and clergy in the hope that their new-fangled doctrine of inclusion would somehow fill churches with homosexuals and lesbians just waiting to push open the red doors in the name of diversity.

That has not happened. In fact, the reverse has happened. The election and ordination of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire promptly emptied the Episcopal Church of more than 100,000 members, resulting in the birth of the Anglican Church in North America.

But still a handful of bishops, calling themselves Communion Partners, (CP) thought they could stand and stay as the Church's loyal opposition; their views honorably respected by the other side.

Over time, opposition grew dimmer, as one by one the CP bishops died or retired with no replacement for their views being found in incoming new bishops who swore fealty to the prevailing presiding bishop. It also became apparent that the House of Bishops would only give consents to bishops who permitted the progressive and revisionist agenda of the Church. In fact, eligibility to be a bishop, (preferably now women) was only possible if one signed on to the predominant sexual zeitgeist.

KISSING JUDASES

The Episcopal Church's progressive and revisionist hierarchy have, tragically, become "kissing Judases" (taken from Søren Kierkegaard) --- followers of Jesus who betray him and his teachings, hell bent with every nerve to reach successive generations of the cultured despisers of the Gospel: and then join them and become like them, no longer faithful to Jesus Christ. As Christian sociologist Os Guinness noted, "Some have surrendered to Enlightenment ideas, and become skeptics about God's sovereignty, or skeptics about human sin, or skeptics about the possibility of the supernatural and any world beyond the here and now."

The Communion Partner bishops are quislings who issued statements disavowing B012, but intent on staying in TEC, becoming traitors of the gospel. They collaborate with Curry and the HOB, washing their hands Pilate fashion, assigning progressive bishops to do what they themselves won't do. They submit "pastoral care" to another bishop or a DEPO bishop, as Central Florida Bishop Greg Brewer has done.

Ironically, Brewer got raked over the coals, when a woman priest, the Rev. Alison Harrity, rector at St. Richard's Episcopal Church in Winter Park, told ENS that when she informed Brewer that two men of the parish had asked her to perform their marriage, the bishop told her, "St. Richard's needs a broader oversight." Brewer delegated episcopal pastoral oversight to Kentucky Bishop Terry Allen White, Harrity said. Brewer "didn't even say, 'Let's have a conversation'; he just gave us away." However, Harrity added that the DEPO arrangement feels freeing to her and the congregation.

But as Jesus reminded his hearers; "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it." These quisling bishops who claim the mantle of orthodoxy will have to answer for their sin of commission.

"Any denomination that eliminates a male-female requirement for marriage breaks faith with a foundational element in our Lord Jesus' sexual ethics. It breaks faith also with the apostolic witness to Christ in the New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures that preceded Jesus, and the historic tradition of the Church universal," writes Dr. Robert Gagnon, theologian and world authority on homosexuality and the Bible.

"Jesus regarded God's creation of "male and female" (Genesis 1:27) as the foundation for all other sexual commands. According to Jesus, God's creation of two complementary sexes is our best indication that God intended marriage to be limited to two persons. This suggests that for Jesus homosexual practice was a more severe violation of God's will at creation than unions involving three or more persons, because it strikes at the very foundation of marriage.

"The Apostle Paul teaches that for a person to attempt sexual union with someone of the same sex is to "dishonor" or "degrade" oneself, for it treats one's sex or gender as only half intact in relation to one's own sex as opposed to the other sex. Rather than have the two halves of the sexual spectrum, male and female, unite to form a single sexual whole, a homosexual union presents a bizarre picture of two incomplete half-males attempting to become a single whole male or two incomplete half females attempting to become a single whole female. Approving homosexual practice in the Church is the antithesis of love because it celebrates that which dishonors the God-bestowed stamp of gender."

Bishop William H. Love will stand before his Lord "in that day" secure in the knowledge that he obeyed Scripture rather than pleasing a group of mitered men and women who approved a resolution that had the blessing of the culture. Theirs may well be a different end.

END

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