Anthropolical Heresy?

Another post on the House of Bishops/House of Deputies Listserv takes an interesting turn with the following comment. I like this idea, and it well sums up a way of looking at this issue of homosexuality and the current controversies in the Church and in society. Although he says he is a Traditionalist Anglican, he takes a position on partriarchy that most “traditionalists” would not share. Here is the post –

What strikes fear into the hearts of traditionalists, of which I count myself one, is the possibility that it is not just people who are challenging our impeccable opinions, but God. If we have learned anything about tradition over the centuries it is that tradition is flexible, and interrupted and altered sometimes by the God who is alive and well. That can be both comforting and threatening to us who love God but wish that He (…or She. Why is there not a non-genderous pronoun for God?) would stop giving us new information about truth, just when we thought we had it right.



The Reformation of the 16th century, initiated I believe by God, addressed errors of traditional theology. The Reformation that is now going on, in which God is so much a part, and in which we are so embroiled both in the world and as a Church, is addressing the errors of traditional anthropology. It has to do with the sin of representing women and homosexual persons as less than human; as made less, somehow, than creatures made in God’s image.
The worldwide tradition of practicing patriarchy, of representing masculinity as if it were a virtue, is simply heretical. That view of the human race has been held since our prehistoric ancestors, some 3000 or more years ago, discovered the secret of paternity, i.e. that males actually had something to do with the generating of children. Fatherhood then became a greater virtue than motherhood, and the men began naming all children after themselves. Women were suddenly perceived as merely the soil into which the seed (the life) of the male was planted to create children. (It is of historical interest that the human ovum was not discovered until 1827 A.D.!)
The continuation of the heresy of patriarchy, both by the world and by the Church, only promotes discord and violence in the home, in the community, and eventually among nations. It promotes the foolishness of thinking that males must somehow prove their masculinity, and supposedly their superiority, over women and other men. It promotes the foolishness of thinking that females must somehow prove their femininity by deferring to men, and competing with other women in being better deferrers.
The chief promoters of this anthropological heresy in the Church have been, and are, those whose intent is to preserve patriarchy. That would include the immediate past and present Popes (“The Church is not a democracy.”), and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, (“The man has the final say!”), and many others.
I think it behooves the Church to abandon anthropological heresies as
Well as theological ones.