Pem's Remarks to the Bishop's Examiners

Pem's Remarks to the Bishop's Examiners stands as the intellectual and spiritual fulcrum of Thomas Pemberton's crisis of faith, the moment when the Episcopal priest lays before his church's examiners a theology that cannot reconcile itself with the doctrines he is sworn to uphold. The remarks are not a mere formality of clerical review but a confession of the deepest tensions in his belief, delivered with the urgency of a man who knows he is arguing for his place in the church even as his words carry him away from it. What emerges from the examination is a portrait of a priest who has come to see faith not as a supersessional knowledge that answers the intellect with a patronizing smile, but as something that must achieve parity with the questioning mind. He will not claim that the examiners' access to the numinous is a delusion if they will not tell him his intellect is irrelevant. This demand for reciprocity, for a faith that includes rather than excludes the reasoning faculty, is the core of his position and the seed of his eventual departure.