The Sydney Anglicans, a storm in a teacup in a nineteen fifties kitchen ...

The cri de coeur from Sydney Anglicans about failing so often is on another matter than the recent news that to be a married Anglican woman you need to be a submissive woman.

But still it does evoke the sublime irrelevance of the church to the goings on about town.

Oh sure there was a flurry of letters in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning about the new submissive Anglican wedding vows, with Anglicans in an 18th-century frame of mind setting the pace.

The pond forgives the correspondent - Anglicans in a first century frame of mind doesn't have quite the same ring to it, when the point is that the Anglicans want to head back to women doing needlework in best eighteenth century style.

As you'd expect, in the name of balance, there were also a few favourable letters, strangely from gender traitors, who didn't seem to mind submitting to the Jensenist heresy.

The tone evoked for the pond the pleasure of reading a Fairfax rag from the nineteen fifties.

Then Julia Baird took the whole thing seriously, and scribbled No place for spirited women.

Amazingly Baird is listed as a former member of Sydney Anglican synod and the Movement for the Ordination of Women, but she did at least allow for risibility as a response:

...does it matter, in a broader cultural context, that there is a deep strain of misogyny in Anglicanism, and women are still described as subordinates? Is it just a private matter of belief? Or just arcane, irrelevant and even risible?

Yes, yes, yes and yes. The Sydney Anglicans can't possibly be taken seriously, and there's no point debating their misogyny with them, and the only sensible, feasible response is laughter.

There's a fine flurry of comments below Baird's piece, but when you go looking for other responses, the intertubes is silent.

There's unhappiness about the death of Neil Armstrong, or Lance Armstrong being called a drug cheat, but nobody seems to mind or to care about the latest Anglican folly.

The drift into irrelevance is strong, the tendency towards cultism seemingly irreversible, the possibility of a reversal and a reaching out highly unlikely.

And the Sydney Anglican website is itself wreathed in navel-gazing silence about the issue.

The role of women? Why not try instead Phillip Jensen's Apologetic Evangelism ... An Oxymoron?

If ever you wanted an epic gobbledegook call to conservative arms, Jensen's piece is just for you.

Defiance is the key, and let's not have any post-modernist suggestion that the bible is multi-layered, written by a variety of authors with different agendas, and open to all sorts of conflicting interpretations, many of them embedded in conflicting textual points:

Paul did not apologise for being a Christian but he used apologetics as he preached the gospel. He rejoiced with the Philippians in both the ”defence and confirmation of the gospel” (Phil 1:7). He argued and dialogued with the opponents of the gospel. In Acts, his evangelistic work is described as involving arguing, reasoning and persuading - as for example in Ephesus where “he spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading” in the synagogue and then reasoned daily in the hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:8f). In his relationship with the Corinthians he speaks of destroying “arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” and taking “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Submit you heathens!

Put it another way. Baird and any other woman wanting a debate with a Jensenist should either submit or walk away before they cop a serve of triumphalism. No need to apologise if you think you're on the money:

This was not apologising for dividing the synagogue community or for offending other people’s religion or for calling people callous, greedy and impure (Ephesians 4:19). Paul’s apologetics was not apologising for the gospel or its effects upon people – there was nothing to apologise about in the gospel. His apologetics were a form of arguing and answering objections as he declared the truth of the gospel, and through this he showed the folly of rejecting it or embracing other views. In this he was no different to his saviour, who made no apology for speaking the offensive truth boldly.

And no need to think you might be fallible in your thinking, or your interpretation of the bible, not when the language of humble uncertainty is just a way of disguising an almost megalomaniacal certainty:

In adopting today’s language of humble uncertainty, we may be denying our own message. For we may be agreeing with the moderns’ arrogance that God is answerable to human reason rather than human reason being answerable to God; and confirming the post-moderns’ irrational relativism that everything is just a matter of opinion and God is answerable to me.
Is speaking with humble apology a genuine attempt at “being all things to all people”, or is it a mask for our embarrassment about the Gospel?

Yep, there's no embarrassment for a Jensenist turning back the clock. All the way back:

It is not triumphalism, but the truth that Jesus liberates us to live different – and better – lives than we were living when we were in “the domain of darkness”.

Evangelism doesn't simply speak the truth, it also changes lives and societies; from worse to better ...

And women from people with minds of their own to submissive, amenable, pliable, malleable, ductile, soft, receptive and agreeable creatures (per Baird).

And that, you have to believe, is taking the world from worse to better, as we all go back to the past ...

No thanks, but what rich comedy, because living as a Sydney Anglican means living in a time warp or perhaps a time capsule, changing lives and societies back to Judea in the first century.

Or perhaps to a Sydney Anglican dreamtime. Evoke it for us, Sydney Anglicans' graphic artist: