Swedish press reports that the Church of England and Church of Ireland will boycott the consecration of a partnered lesbian priest as Bishop of Stockholm are not true, spokesmen for the Archbishop of Canterbury and Archbishop of Armagh told The Living Church.
Nevertheless, no episcopal representatives from the Churches of England or Ireland, the Church in Wales or the Scottish Episcopal Church will be present for the Nov. 8 consecration of the Rev. Eva Brunne by Swedish Archbishop Anders Wejryd of Uppsala.
The Swedish Christian newspaper Dagen reported on Nov. 3 that the Church of England and Church of Ireland will boycott the ceremony as a sign of their displeasure with the ordination of Pastor Brunne, who lives with her partner, a fellow Church of Sweden pastor, the Rev. Gunilla Lindén.
1. So much for the Porvoo Agreement. Doubtless we will now want to talk about what this unilateral action by the Church of Sweden means and send them another stiff letter. “You know, we really, really, are going to think about doing something if you keep on doing this…”
2. Unsurprisingly I recall that TEC is working towards a full communion agreement with the Church of Sweden.
driver8: I think that first stiff letter was a pretty outrageous interference by representatives of the C of E in an autonomous Church’s internal polity. It was entirely pointless, as decisions in the Church of Sweden are made bottom-up and not by an unaccountable episcopate like the C of E’s.
My response too, driver8 (#1). The Porvoo Agreement was obviously useless if no “consultation” occurred on a matter of such great importance.
I also note that George Conger’s article points out that the Church of Sweden also last month approved the new policy of letting clergy do same sex weddings. Another nail in the coffin for the small faithful remnant of the once great “evangelical catholic” wing of the CoSweden. And more fodder for all our Lutheran friends who rightly insist that the apostolic succession of bishops is really worthless if the guardians of the apostolic faith don’t do their job.
And driver8, you’ll perhaps recall that it was Stockhom where Harvard’s Krister Stendahl was once the bishop. Alas, that liberal NT scholar might well have approved both of these scandalous, unbiblical developments.
David Handy+
Mark (#2),
I couldn’t disagree with you more. It wasn’t “interference,” when the Porvoo Agreement supposedly committed the two churches to working together and consulting each other on major issues of faith and order. If there was something “outrageous” about that letter you mention, it was the seeming hypocrisy of thus appearing to try to take the speck out of Swedish eyes, when there’s this massive log in the eye of so many leaders of the CoE, which desperately needs to get its own house in order.
David Handy+
The Porvoo Agreement committed the Church of Sweden to consulting with their Porvoo partners. No such consultation took place. The COE acted responsibly terms of the Agreement in informing the Church of Sweden of the potential consequences of its actions. No one compelled the Church of Sweden to enter into the Porvoo Agreement. Thus the COE finds itself, just 15 years after the Agreement was made, in impaired communion (that is unable to receive the ministry of a bishop) with the Church of Sweden.
#2 Bottom up – yes – if you a church utterly dominated by the agendas of secular political parties counts as “bottom up”. The Lutheran compromise between church and state is premised upon an assumption that the Magistrate (civil authority) is “godly”. The Church of Sweden shows us what happens when the form of the compromise is maintained even though the Magistrate has explicitly repudiated its “godly” responsibilities.
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#2: It was entirely pointless, as decisions in the Church of Sweden are made bottom-up and not by an unaccountable episcopate like the C of E’s.
A rather curious description of authority in the Swedish Church, whose “Church Assembly” is made up largely of those chosen by the Kingdom’s political parties and includes some who have not been baptized and others who do not believe in Jesus Christ as described in any Christian creed.
driver8 & Steven: but it is the case that the civil authority is more “godly” (I would say “ethical”) than the Church. Certainly this is the case in the UK, where the civil authority says it is wrong to exclude people from office simply on the basis of who they are in terms of gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group. The Church doesn’t pick any quarrels with the last of those three grounds for discrimination, but cannot face dealing fairly with the first two. That is immoral.
The state currently imposes a higher morality upon employers than the Church practices, which I find deeply shaming, as a Christian. Our righteousness is, after all, supposed to exceed, not fall far short of, that of the Scribes and Pharisees. No-one at all can logically explain why the C of E should continue to take up its entitlement to take part in the legislative process by means of its bishops in the House of Lords, and yet keep those seats in the Lords limited solely to men. It is, frankly, embarrassing.
[should have read:]
driver8 & Steven: but it is the case that the civil authority is more “godly†(I would say “ethicalâ€) than the Church. Certainly this is the case in the UK, where the civil authority says it is wrong to exclude people from office simply on the basis of who they are in terms of gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group. The Church doesn’t pick any quarrels with the last of those three grounds for discrimination nowadays, but cannot face dealing fairly with the first two. That is immoral.
The state currently imposes a higher morality upon employers than the Church practices, which I find deeply shaming, as a Christian. Our righteousness is, after all, supposed to exceed, not fall far short of, that of the Scribes and Pharisees. No-one at all can logically explain why the C of E should continue to take up its entitlement to take part in the legislative process by means of its bishops in the House of Lords, and yet keep those seats in the Lords limited solely to men. It is, frankly, embarrassing.
Of course, if central to one’s understanding of the word “godly” is altering the church’s teaching on human sexuality – then the Church of Sweden will be the most “godly” place on earth.
The state imposes a different morality on employers than on the COE. The church rightly has an exemption to protect religious freedom (which still is, despite its marginalized status, a human right). Of course our ethics should not be dictated by the judgments of secular governments (the twentieth century rather taught us that, I thought): as members of the church should be interested in not just the exercise of competing rights but in living according to God’s will.
We’re in a weird place in which some clergy of the church not only disagree with their own church’s teaching but in which they say they don’t even understand what the church’s traditional teaching is. That is, they don’t actually disagree with it (because they never understood it) they simply find the church’s teaching nonsensical. It’s an Alice in Wonderland world.
Let try to round off my contributions to this by, at least, trying to be eirenical. It shows to me again how hard it is discuss such things, how difficult it is to discipline our own (and I mean, my own) emotions and how different are the things we take for granted when we think about faith. Neither of us seem to believe this in an adiaphoron. We disagree concerning something that both us recognize touches in some way the heart of what faith is about. It’s not that I can’t recognize the good faith or the sincere passion for justice – it’s just that we disagree about what is the truth of the matter. Apparently both of us feel the other is avoiding some challenging truth implied by the Gospel. Do we still recognize the shape of the Christian life in each other? I’m not sure and blogs aren’t appropriate places to come to such judgments. Anyway, and at least, thanks for taking the time to talk.