Jonathan Merritt of Religion News Service writes:
First Things, a conservative religious publication, has launched a movement encouraging pastors to refuse to perform marriages as representatives of the state. A signing statement called “The Marriage Pledge” has been posted to their website where ministers can affix their names electronically. It was drafted by Ephraim Radner, an ordained Anglican and professor of historical theology at Toronto School of Theology’s Wycliffe College, and Christopher Seitz, an ordained Episcopalian priest and senior research professor at Wycliffe.
He notes that this idea has been proposed more than five years ago, by Bishop Gene Robinson, the man whose 2003 consecration drove Radner and Seitz into fits of ineffective and often comical activism from which one had hoped they had retired.
Long time Cafe readers will remember that Radner and Seitz were two of the three (sometimes four) members of the Anglican Communion Institute, an organization notable primarily for a) working against same-sex marriage within the Anglican Communion; b) working to punish the Episcopal Church for moving toward the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians, and c) doing so in ways that were notable for their comical skullduggery.
Followers of the Anglican sexuality struggles will remember when Radner and Seitz fell out with a third member of the ACI, the Rev. Don Armstrong, after he got into some significant legal trouble regarding the way he handled money. The duo disassociated themselves from Armstrong, only to discover that he had the keys to their website. So the “institute” that was sometimes described as “three guys with a website” was now, for a time, without a website.
In April 2009, Radner, Seitz and several Episcopal bishops were discussing their plans to undermine Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, snatch a parish in the Diocese of Colorado and put it under a more conservative prelate and publish a statement on the polity of The Episcopal Church on a group email and one of the participants in the conversation mistyped an email address and sent it to a marriage equality activist, after which it became public, leading to significant negative reaction.
More recently, Radner served on the group that drafted the proposed Anglican Covenant while serving as a board member of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which is dedicated to undermining churches in the United States that take polically progressive stances on issues of same-sex marriage. This conflict of interest helped undermine support for the document which has not, as many of its proponents had hoped, become a whip with which to lash churches that bless same-sex relatinships.
That Radner and Seitz have embraced an idea put forth by Robinson and many others on the Christian left (without crediting them for it of course) is a clear indication that the end times are just around the corner.