I think there are some things here we need to explore sensitively together. In doing so I want to acknowledge the honesty and courage of my friend, James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool, who has publicly told his own story of moving his position on the issue of homosexuality over recent years and urged the Church not to allow this issue to divide us in a way that breaks communion. And I also need to acknowledge that I have long been in a different place and so have not had to travel as difficult a path as he has to be in the place where I now am. My own understanding has long been that the Church of England’s current stance is not tenable long term, but that, while we engage, struggle, with these issues, it must be task of the bishop to uphold our agreed policy, with all its weaknesses, and to try to hold the Church together while we tackle the things that divide us. I don’t believe I can move away from that position, though I need to share with you some of my discomfort.
Read the whole thing (Please note: it is not short).
This is a valuable piece because it reflects the actual thinking of so many bishops and priests on both sides of the pond.
It is noteworthy because it is really not open to the idea that there is more than Creedal affirmation that are “first order” or touch on “first order” Christian theology. It is dishonest in that it moves quickly to gloss over that even these “first order” Creedal affirmations are under assault as a part of a package with the other innovations.
It is noteworthy in that it speaks of engaging “cultural realities” as a kind of permitted inroad to innovations as if the Church from its inception did not act in contradiction to those cultural realities and that if there is anything characteristic of the Church in decline it is in fact the embrace of those “cultural realities” as the alleged basis for innovations. I say “alleged” because the culture has actually shaped the mindset long before the alleged theological reflection. This is startlingly transparent in America.
Of course, it also builds on pass “concessions” to the culture to justify further concessions — e.g. divorce — as if that were at all logical. Finally, in the midst of the decline it has actively caused, it appeals to the decline as a basis for saying we need to “get with it” even more to be credible.
I know its heartfelt, but it is crazy.
At one point, the Bishop of Gloucester states that Bishop-Elect Glasspool “is caught in the middle of a controversy that is not of her making.” If he means she shouldn’t have to apologize for being elected, fine, but she chose to be nominated and to accept her election knowing what the consequences would be (which even Bishop Robinson couldn’t have known for certain).
I think Kendall’s highlight in the above passage is probably the money quote.
Pardon the perhaps indecorousness bluntness of my remarks, but when I read screeds like the bishop’s I wonder what sort of ecclesiastical Rip Van Winkle can write such things. I mean, he’s Bishop of Gloucester in the Church of England, and can he be unaware of what has been going on in the Scandinavian Lutheran State Churches (esp. Sweden, Norway and Denmark), where, 30-40 years ago the same kind of promises to respect the consciences of traditionalists were made, that various innovations would not in any way be used against “traditionalists” — but now all the talk is how an “inclusive church” must necessarily “exclude the excluders,” that is, those who don’t accept the “inclusivity paradigm.”
We have all heard of the notion of “American exceptionalism;” is there a kind of “Church of England exceptionalism” that likes to fancy that the same kind of result won’t happen in England?
I cannot imagine that relegating the entire content of christian morality to the “second order” and apparently viewing all “second order” issues as adiaphora will be received very well by the significant evangelical communities in Cheltenham. Am I right to think that the largest and most dynamically growing churches in the diocese are conservative evangelical?
Summary – “please, please people…..remember “an inch at a time”, remember playing the long game……. let’s listen to Rowan – don’t push for too much too soon…….or people may realise how incompatible with scripture our innovations are….indaba…..ubuntu….”
For me, there were two new things I learned from this speech that I was glad to hear. First, that the Bishop of El Camino Real, Mary Gray-Reeves, declined to participate in the consecration of Mary Glasspool, even though LA is the neighboring diocese to the south of ECR, partly because it appears that +Michael Perham and +Gerard Mpango of Tanzania (W. Tanganyika diocesse) begged her not to attend. Good to see some “gracious restraint” actually happening in TEC.
Second, although I support WO personally, I’m glad to discover that clergy ordained by a woman bishop anywhere in the AC aren’t permitted to function as priests (or presumably deacons either) in the CoE. And I’m glad that +Perham doesn’t try to evade or just blithely ignore that canonical restriction the way that some TEC bishops do (“Canons, Schmanons, let’s do what’s right” seems to be the PB’s motto).
But those minor points of encouragement were more than offset by dismay at the incredibly anti-dogmatic thrust of +Perham’s shallow thinking. I join driver8 in finding it astonishing that he relegates the whole realm of all ethical matters to his “second order” level (or pesumably an even lower, tertiary status). But I’ll go a step further and castigate such a notion as utterly unacceptable and reprehensible. He speaks like a pure institutionalist, without a theological bone in his body.
In particular, the bishop of Gloucester’s vapid, weak sense of what constitutes Anglican identity comes through in a way that’s perhaps common enough, but still depressing. He insists that TEC is “thoroughly Anglican,” including in his list of Anglican characteristics that his visits to the US have shown a [i]”real attention to the Bible”[/i] among the TEC folks he met. And then checking off a short list of items, he has the gall to ask his rhetorical question, “If that isn’t Anglican, I don’t know what is!”
Which is precisely the problem, he as a bishop simply has no conception of what Anglican identity really is. Obviously (in his mind), it has nothing whatsoever to do with holding to historic doctrine or to any real biblical authority.
Bottom line: Broad church is no church.
David Handy+
I should just add – that it fills me with sorrow to see the liberal catholic strand of Anglican life come to this. A tradition that began with a desire to defend the faith using the tools that were found to hand in modern historical criticism, sociology etc. – ends up evacuating faith of almost all actual content about human living.
When love – an ethical virtue (at least in part) and unmentioned in the creeds – ends up an adiaphoron in a christian theology – something has surely gone very badly askew.
If you don’t want the Church to divide over the issue, then listen to the voice of the Church and stop acting on your new “revelation” until the Church says that it won’t divide over this issue! So long as the Church says it is a communion breaking issue, then it is a communion breaking issue! What is so hard about that to understand?
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
I note the Bishop does not mention that not only did the Bishop of El Camino Real consent without hesitation to the election of Bishop Glasspool and rejoice at an election that rejected a moratorium requested by the Windsor Report, she, in fact, refused the appeal of both her partner bishops not to consent.
Looking at his web site, Bishop Perham has recently spent some time in the States and visited amongst other places, St. Gregory Nyssa, San Francisco so he ought to know from his own experience just how far parts of TEC are from anything that many folks in the COE, let alone the rest of the Communion, will recognize as Anglican.
Bp Michael has caught the sense of our dilemmas – their pain and cost, and their awkwardness, etc – in the first instance, rather well IMHO. And naturally, his approach, of “first and second order issuesâ€, has a veritable pedigree – even the Roman Catholics speak of a “hierarchy of truthsâ€.
However, real problems emerge pretty quickly. For the question then becomes: where to place what on such a hierarchy, and why. For example, the Canadians, in the St Michael Report, spoke of “core doctrine†and by that they meant “creedalâ€, even as they also acknowledged many loci were affected by the current presenting issues of homosexuality and homosexual behaviour. Their verdict that such issues were not directly “creedal†and so were effectively second order, as per now Michael Perham, is also a commonplace among some. But not everyone – by a long way …
Others spell it out like this: that the likes of Gal 5:21, with its severe sanction of “not inheriting the kingdom of Godâ€, address certain forms of established behaviour – including in their view homosexual practices. So it has become a soteriological issue for them. And I seriously sympathise. I myself crank it up and wish to say that key anthropological issues may not be relegated to “second order†status (which St Michael Report seemed to do), since these impact directly both Christology and Image of God stuff – which is to say, “creedal†issues: the entire second article, and the immediate statement therein, “for us humans and for our salvation, … he became humanâ€.
All of which suggests the matter of boundaries and their having consequential import has always been at the core of the Christian Faith. To fudge this, as + Perham now does, is plain impossible and probably a little silly, since it has more to do with contemporary forms of “cultural tolerance†than genuine Christian hermeneutics.