You are bound to displease someone, whatever you do; and for prudential reasons you may even feel it necessary to displease everyone. While I sympathize with these possible dilemmas, I cannot however be bound by them.

In the case of the Rev. Bonnie Spencer, you have defended her character in a way that I would, no doubt, join you in doing. You have admonished her for a failure to act in a way that embodies “restraint” and appropriate concern for avoiding “potentially divisive consequences” among us, given the nature of the “time”. I share with you these perspectives.

You have, however, gone further and articulated reasons for your disciplinary actions that in fact state formally and publicly views you hold about the Scriptures’ and the Church’s teaching on sexual behavior that, until now, you have expressed only informally and personally. This having been done, it is incumbent upon me, as a man under vows before God and in the service of Christ’s church, to state formally in response my own incapacity to receive these views of yours as authoritative in my ministry and in the church I serve.

You have now stated publicly that the “events” of Bonnie Spencer’s and Catherine Anderson’s same-sex “commitment” ceremony in the Church of the Good Shepherd “do not constitute a violation of the Canons”. This judgment, among others in your explanation, is hard for me to grasp, either logically or theologically. These canons, after all, find their purposeful meaning and accountability in the Scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer (as affirmed in the ECUSA Constitution, Preamble), and the interpretation of this relationship has always been consistently clear. Indeed, it is upheld personally by the vows that we have made as clergy, which link “loyalty” to the canons of this church to, among other things, the Scriptures as the Word of God (e.g. BCP p. 526).

The elements of this relationship between Scripture and ecclesiastical canon pertinent to the matter at hand are well-known to all of us:

The Prayer Book is clear that “we recognize truths to be taught by the Holy Spirit when they are in accord with the Scriptures” (BCP p. 853); we recognize Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, “to be the Word of God” (e.g. BCP p. 526); Scripture has clearly taught that same-sex relationships are contrary to God’s will (Leviticus 18:22 , Rom. 1:26f., etc.); these numerous texts have been interpreted, not in a piece-meal or arbitrary way, but as part of a coherent teaching about human life’s created purposes; marriage “between and a man and a woman” has been deemed the creative purpose of God “from the beginning” by Jesus himself (Mark 10:6ff.); and the BCP teaches that “Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people” (BCP p. 423); this teaching has been universally and consistently upheld within the larger Church over the centuries; this understanding continues to be upheld by preeminent Anglican scholars (e.g. Bp. N.. T. Wright) and by the councils and leadership of Anglicanism as a whole (e.g. Lambeth Conference, Primates’ meetings, ACC meetings, the Archbishop of Canterbury).

It is simply impossible for me to believe that none of this represents an essential part of the “faith, unity, and discipline of the Church”, or is contained in the “heritage” of the “faith of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs” you have promised – as ordered by the vessels of discipline that constitute the canons of this church – to “guard” (BCP p. 517) and to which your priests and deacons are bound by oath to conform.

And that being the case, it is impossible for me to believe that a process of “commitment” in which “promises” are exchanged, rings are mutually given, witnesses are present, done within the house of God and before the altar of Christ, accompanied by the reading of Holy Scripture itself, in which one partner is in fact an ordained clergy person – it is simply impossible for me to believe that all this does not represent an attempt to mimic the forms of marriage that Scripture and our Prayer Book have called “holy” and “sacramental”, but now done in a way that patently contradicts the intentions of God and Christ’s Church.

The fact that “no vestments, no clerical collars, no blessings” were worn or formally articulated is, quite frankly, irrelevant to the attempted meaning of these actions, whose import is clear from the Prayer Book itself – “Now that N. and N. have given themselves to each other by solemn vows, with the joining of hands and the giving and receiving of rings…” (BCP p. 428). I do not see how you or anybody else can view this as anything other than an attempt to appropriate the forms of Scripture and the Marriage service to a purpose in violation of their own meaning and of the teaching of the Church universal. And as a result, I do not see how this can be anything other than an egregious contradiction of the meaning and purposes of our canons as they exist to uphold the teaching of Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer.

You have, by your written decision, now gone on record as rejecting this understanding of the Scriptures, the Prayer Book, and the canons that support them. Given that when discipline and/or realignment of our Communion takes place in the coming months over these matters, this record will doubtless come into play, it is imperative that I also go on record as publicly disassociating myself from your decision and the reasoning and teaching that supports it. The import of this disassociation is something we shall have to consider and prayerfully discern in the coming weeks and months.

The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is a theologian/rector in the Diocese of Colorado