The Pond's Sunday homily, wherein Pellism, Jensenism, piano limbs and complementarianism of the Adam and Eve kind go on an outing together ...

(Above: ice, what ice? Warming, what global warming?)

And so belatedly to the belated thoughts of Cardinal George Pell in the Sunday Terror, currently doing a Glenn Beck in Israel, as recounted in Pilgrims in Galilee.

The Neo-Catechumenal Way community has its elegant House of Beatitudes on the northern shores of the lake, comprising a small seminary for trainee priests and a large pilgrim centre. We visited the library, the two chapels (one for the Eucharist, one for the Word of God) and crawled through the small narrow gate, a symbol for our striving for heaven.

Let's hope the Cardinal has had time to follow another bunch of pilgrims, six British adventurers who became the first team to row to the magnetic North Pole, a symbol of their striving to make sense of global warming.

No doubt pedants and climate deniers will insist that they only rowed 450 miles from Resolution Bay in Canada, and had to drag the boat for the last three hours across ice floes and lumps of broken ice.

As usual, journalists were quick to seize on quick cheap ideological theological points that have nothing to do with the Cardinal's understanding of reality:

Rowing to the pole in an open boat was possible because climate change has meant the Arctic ice sheet has retreated record distances in the last 30 years. (Rowers reach 'impossible' North Pole, thanks to global warming).

Climate change? What climate change?

Of late Pell seems to have gone quiet on climate science denialism - fret not, he will return from his junket to come to grips with canoes and heretics - and instead taken up charades:

Jesus gave these charges only after asking Peter three times did he love him. We acted out this encounter with a seminarian asking each pilgrim in Christ's name "Do you love me?"

An important question for pilgrims.

And an equally important question for gays before they propose marriage, because it remains a long and rocky road in Australia, unlike our friends in the Netherlands who have been happily married for a decade (longer than my first marriage, it has to be noted).

Well there's nothing more ineffably boring than a man on a junket scribbling about the junket, and so it is with Pell:

We travelled from the southern tip of Sinai to Galilee in northern Israel in one long day. The Sea of Galilee is a favourite spot for me and I am glad Jesus enjoyed the locale and came there to pray as well as to teach.

Yes, Jesus was a tourist with fine taste for locales, and no doubt recommends Ray-Bans when travelling in summer ...

Enough already, time to drop in on the Sydney Anglicans, as they attempt to give the Calvinist pursuit of misery and guilt a good name, and who better than Michael Jensen to ask in that nepotic ministry:

Can church politics be played Christianly?

Yep, there are weighty matters afoot in The art of godly church politics?

Jensen outlines a number of principles for the conduct of internal church warfare (bickering, politics, power grabs, snide asides, call it what you will), starting with the notion that the quality of the means matter more than the delivery of the ends. This would rule Tony "I'd even think about selling my arse to score the precioussss" Abbott from playing Sydney Anglican politics (The day Abbott bared his soul).

Shockingly, Jensen acknowledges that Christians share a weakness of the flesh, which rather quaintly casts the pleasure of a good fuck in the more sordid light of the lust for the flesh.

Lordy, we've always enjoyed that rhetoric since the days the Victorians draped thingamejibs over table and piano legs.

Oh okay, we know that's an urban myth, but can there be smoke without fire?

I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them! (Frederick Marryat, A diary in America: with remarks on its institutions).

Poor Frederick also got hauled over the coals by one chaste young lady, who insisted that the word limb be used rather than that racy word leg. Talk about the unholy lusts of the flesh.

Speaking of women, Jenkins is quite grand in his inclusive third rule for church politics:

... a godly church politics ought to seek the inclusion of women as well as men, and the young as well as the old.

It turns out that this is all very well, but hard to implement:

The response to this is not tokenism or the introduction of quotas, but rather a determination to change among those who operate with the church-political sphere. It's harder than it looks, of course: people - especially women - are very busy.

Yes, women are terribly busy, and so running the church, and having women as actual ministers would be a terrible imposition. Better leave that sort of time-destroying business to men, who lead lives of leisure, and let women get on with their especially busy lives, looking after the leisurely men.

Besides, then they'd have to change the wiki on the Sydney Anglicans, and who wants change simply for the sake of change?

One of the visible differences between Sydney and the majority of other Anglican dioceses in Australia has been its unwillingness to allow the ordination of women to the priesthood (itself a term infrequently used in the diocese) or presbyterate. This issue is an indicator of Sydney's difference in ecclesiology and theology to most other dioceses within the Anglican Communion. (here, and also Ordination of women in the Anglican diocese of Sydney).

But enough of Jensen, because with that bit of specious pleading about busy women, he broke several of his inclusionist principles, most notably the last one about the temptation to use spiritual language as an instrument of coercion, since it's impossible to cite a better example of instruments of coercion than the denial of status to women within the Sydney Anglican community.

Still, you will have the pleasure of learning the arcane meaning of complementarianism if you read the piece and the comments to the end.

Roughly put, it means all Anglicans are equal, but male Anglicans are more equal than female Anglicans ... in yet another inspiring tribute to the ongoing validity of the laws enunciated by George Orwell in Animal Farm.

This is of course the same theology that underpinned Michele Bachmann's little outburst about submission, which caused such a fuss in the USA recently:

Today, the tenets of complementarianism are spelled out in a misogynistic document called the Danvers Statement, which is widely disseminated throughout the evangelical community primarily through the international and interdenominational organization known as the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Almost every major Christian denomination subscribes to and aggressively promotes male headship. Many Christians are committed complementarians even if they do not use the term to describe their views. Some have never heard the term but are so indoctrinated into the model they can chant the mantras of complementarianism to perfection. (Submissive question: We have a right to know sacred beliefs).

Not to worry. You can read on the Sydney Anglican site of people ready and willing to call themselves complementarians.

As for the Danvers Statement?

Well you can either go first to the wiki, or you can get the good 'Adam and Eve' oil at The Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Here's a taster:

Based on our understanding of Biblical teachings, we affirm the following:
Both Adam and Eve were created in God's image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood (Gen 1:26-27, 2:18).
Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order, and should find an echo in every human heart (Gen 2:18, 21-24; 1 Cor 11:7-9; 1 Tim 2:12-14).
Adam's headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall, and was not a result of sin (Gen 2:16-18, 21-24, 3:1-13; 1 Cor 11:7-9).
The Fall introduced distortions into the relationships between men and women (Gen 3:1-7, 12, 16).
In the home, the husband's loving, humble headship tends to be replaced by domination or passivity; the wife's intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by usurpation or servility.
In the church, sin inclines men toward a worldly love of power or an abdication of spiritual responsibility, and inclines women to resist limitations on their roles or to neglect the use of their gifts in appropriate ministries.

Golly, one minute you're frolicking with Michael Jensen and the Sydney Calvinists, and the next thing you know you're off with the pixies, which is to say fundamentalist complementarian Baptists still spruiking Adam and Eve and the fall.

But it does suggest one change Jensen can make to his text.

These days it's not that many women are too busy to get engaged with the Sydney Anglicans, it's that they're too sensible.

Let the boys play with their toys and their church politics, especially when there's no point banging your head against an Adam and Eve complementarian view of the world ...

(Below: beam me up Scotty, and fear not, your left behind pets can be taken care of by Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA).