The point is that the Presiding Bishop begins with the tendentious claim that TEC’s action accords with Scripture and represents a new work of the Holy Spirit. Here is the tail (TEC’s action) that she then uses in an attempt to wag the dog (the weight of Communion teaching, procedure, and opinion).
…What I mean is this. To sustain her position she launches an attack on the Archbishop’s response. She seeks to show not only that the Archbishop is acting to quench the Spirit, but also that he has taken a morally dubious course that violates longstanding Anglican tradition. A hallmark of Anglicanism, she says, is a form of “diversity in community” that manifests “willingness to live in tension.” This tolerance of diversity “recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree.”
I have already noted that her view of the Spirit’s leading seems incoherent. I will leave it to the historians among us to assess her claims about the tolerant character of the Elizabethan Settlement, but it has never seemed to me that the Act of Uniformity was meant to put up a big tent, or that the treatment of Anabaptists (they were burned) showed great openness to contrary views of the Christian’s relation to the state. The fact of the matter is that “Anglican inclusiveness” serves more as a charter myth for legitimizing contested issues than a solid historical precedent for innovation. Anglican history, though not overly confessional when it comes to doctrine, manifests extraordinary caution when it comes to changing practice. If anything, caution in respect to changing practice is a “hallmark of Anglicanism.”
The real issue, however, is not the claim about “diversity in community” or “willingness to live in tension.” The real issue is what Anglican’s are to do when the action of one Province, diocese, or person within the Communion takes an official action that others do not “recognize” as consonant with Christian belief and practice. The issue of “recognition” stands in the background of the first Lambeth Conference. There, the question of recognition centered on Bishop Colenso’s interpretation of Holy Scripture. Latterly, the question of recognition surfaced with the consecration by TEC of a partnered gay man. Now it has surfaced once more with the consecration of the Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles.
[blockquote]I have argued elsewhere, that in comparison with that proposed in the Covenant, her view of communion is “thin†rather than “thick.†It does not ask the Provinces to have mutually recognizable forms of belief and practice—only that they keep open lines of communication and provide one another mutual assistance. And it appears that this view of communion stems from an attempt to justify a contested action already taken.[/blockquote] Yet canon law as interpreted by TEC leadership, is the iron hand of uniformity within TEC. It seems to me that everything KJS is arguing for in the communion is not how business is conducted in TEC itself. Progressives are willing to live with “tension” as long as they see their side advancing.
TEC wants its dioceses to retain their American monopoly on the Anglican Communion’s expression of Christianity – while abandoning that very expression.
Mark Brown
San Angelo, Texas
June 10, 2010
We should be very grateful to Dr. Tuner for the labor, depth, and quality of his analysis. We very much need ACI in these times. Thank you.
Thanks be to God for Philip Turner & the ACI. Thoughtful, deep, Christian, Anglican reflection is harder and harder to come by in the States these days.
Mark Brown (#2),
You have to either laugh or cry at such an absurdity, but you nailed the irony or logical incoherence of TEC’s claims perfectly. Bingo.
Everyone else,
While I join #3 & 4 in a sense of gratitude for the learned ACI team, I continue to find this sort of calm but devastating analysis of the follies of ++KJS drastically understated. For example, to label her ridiculous charge that the Covenant is some kind of draconian instrument of control, foisted on the AC by a power-hungry ABoC is much more than “curious.” It’s absurd, patently false, and downright slanderous. Come on, Dr. Turner, why hold back? Tell us what you really think.
On a more appreciative note, I did especially like his more spirited rejoinder to the PB’s highly implausible accusation that there is something “unAnglican” about even suggesting that there are any limits whatsoever on provincial autonomy in Anglicanism (however common that notion may be in certain circles). Dr. Turner’s line is apt and pointed: “[i]If anything, caution in respect to changing practice is a ‘hallmark of Anglicanism’.[/i]” And of course, he’s absolutely right that the Elizabethan era was a far from tolerant one. As is all too clear from the historical record in terms of how the few Anabaptists in England back then were treated with extreme harshness (and I’d add: not to mention the relentless persecution of Catholic recusants after 1570).
Dr. Turner is dead on with his assessment that fundamentally, the PB is trying to remake the whole AC in the image of TEC. In her arrogance, she blithely expects that the American tail really should be able to wag the worldwide dog, the rest of the AC. And that isn’t just silly. It’s insufferable and intolerable.
David Handy+
Yet another profound irony, which is also actually serious in its implications, is her continued talk of “colonialism†– while she herself trips around the world, canvassing support for her version of the AC, in an attempt at self-fulfilment of the last paragraph of her reply to the ABC’s Pentecost Letter.