The whole world is watching. This gathering is about the future. In my travels around North America this spring it has become increasingly clear just how much faithful Anglicans are looking to what we will do here. In contrast, there is almost no popular expectation surrounding Lambeth.
We are here on pilgrimage. With the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, we know ourselves to be strangers and exiles, aliens here. We are headed to a lasting city.
We know that everything we do has to do with the story: the old, old story. Finally, it is not about England, or Canterbury, though these relationships matter to us. Our life, our witness, our leadership, our pilgrimage here is all about Jesus.
What comes out of this gathering we cannot predict. But we are confident that God is not done with Anglicanism. We are confident that GAFCON is one piece of what God already has in mind as part of a Global Settlement of Anglicanism. This Global Settlement of Anglicanism we also understand to be but one aspect of a 21st century Reformation of the whole Christian Church.
It is tempting to be impatient. But impatience is just that, a temptation. Impatience does not become servants. We will do our part here. We will work hard here. We will build relationships here. We will focus on the story here. We will try to get out of God’s way here. We will say our prayers here. We will dream here. But finally we will entrust everything to our Master here. Our God is sovereignly re-forming his Church, of that we may be sure, and of that this Global Anglican Future Conference is an unmistakable sign. The Prophet Jeremiah has a word for us: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jer.29:11) We do well also to remember St. Paul’s assurance at the end of I Thessalonians: “He who has called [us] is faithful, and He will do it.” [5:24]
This promise is true, as are all the promises, not least for us Anglicans.
Had to stop reading The Way, the Truth and the Life midway, to print and read wonderful address, so far, my favorite part – the Mere Christians section. I am hopeful. At last.
What do people think C S Lewis, author of Mere Christianity, would have made of GAFCON?
Before asking what Lewis would have made of GAFCON, I think we should ask what he would have made of every step away from historic Christianity made, at least, in the past decade (none of which needs to be rehearsed here) at high levels of church leadership. Of course, we don’t really know, but we do know that the atheist-turned-believer was capable of changing his mind.
Throughout the controversy I have often been reminded of the Liberal Bishop in [i] The Great Divorce. [/i] A classic portrayal of unfaithfulness, to my mind.
In contrast to +Bob’s five hallmarks, does TEC just have two? – Universalism and Litigation. Oh, I forgot methane gas. Worship the creation, and not the Creator.
He speaks truth clearly to me. Well done.
[blockquote] We who are gathered here recognize that the Reformation (Elizabethan) Settlement of Anglicanism has disintegrated. [/blockquote]
I have not perhaps read enough to have seen this point emphasized much in all the proceedings up to now; it is a significant one. Reappraisers seem to think that the Elizabethan Settlement means that the boundaries can be stretched indefinitely. From another sector, Cardinal Kasper has called on Anglicanism to decide (after 400+ years) whether it is Catholic or Protestant. The times really do seem to be a-changing.
But the African bishops and archbishops spring from an entirely different culture in so many ways. It is truly ‘my way or the highway’ in most parts of the African Church. And their finances are distressingly opaque. Much of the money donated for one cause seems to simply vanish, with very little accountability. The bishop is very much a ‘corporation sole’; to question the bishop is to question God for so many of these folk. Their culture is largely that of following a strong chief; and a bishop/archbishop falls within this pattern. This continues to trouble me, and others who otherwise admire their witness to the faith.
You go Bishop Bob! This is spot on, straight shooting and so hopeful. Thank you Bishop for highlighting the place of 21st century Anglicans as Missionary Christians.
I so look forward to the day when I know that when I have lead someone to faith in Christ, I will be able to bring that new one to any parish in the Communion I am part of and know that that lamb will be loved, protected, fed and turned into a disciple of the Good Shepherd. ” At present, I am in the place where I have actually had this experience: I share faith with someone, he comes to new found faith, I begin to try to think of which parish would be best for the new disciple, it hits me that I cannot bring him to certain parishes because he will not only not be discipled, but an attempt will be made to make him believe that the experience of conversion that he has had is nothing but emotional excess.
So, I look forward to a day of healthy, hopeful church that serves the Lord more faithfully. I believe it will come, and I believe that GAFCON is integral to that restoration and reformation.
Graham (comment 2), I wonder if C.S. Lewis might have said something like this about GAFCON, “It’s not safe, but it’s good.”
The one thing we do know is that C.S. Lewis believed the ordination of women to be apostasy and that if the church ordained women it would find itself worshiping a different God from the God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. That, in and of itself, tells us what Lewis would think.
Norman, thanks for articulating a dream common to many of us!
Oh, yawn, Dr. Lewis (a marvelous Christian apologist) was also an inveterate user of tobacco, and it finally killed him. That tells us as much about him as does his 1920s views of the ordination of women. In other words, he was very wrong-headed about some very important matters.
yawn, snort, fart.
Little cabbagehead,
Lewis suffered from Kidney disease and was killed by a heart attack. Ciggarettes do not appear to be involved. And his views on the ordination of women were not 1920s view. They were the view of 19 centuries of Christianity.
But don’t let facts get in the way of your ideological positions.
Actually (contra #1), I thought that the part about Anglicanism being a form of “Mere Christianity” without any distinctive features of its own was the one major glitch in this outstanding address by +Bob Duncan the Lion-Hearted. On that score, I have to agree with Prof. Paul Avis, and +Stephen Sykes. If you’ll recall, in his book by that name, C.S. Lewis compares “mere Christianity” to a hallway in a large manor house that has many fine rooms opening off that hallway. Anglicanism is one of those rooms. Hallways are not meant to live in. But if by “mere Christianity” you mean something like classical Christianity, well, that’s a whole different story. I wholeheartedly agree with that.
This is a marvelous speech. Vintage Bob Duncan, which is to say that it’s boldly visionary, movingly eloquent, deeply profound, and lucidly clear. It is tremendously heartening and inspiring.
And I’m in 100% agreement that what he rightly calls “the Reformation Settlement” (which is indeed more apt an expression than the more familiar phrase, the Elizabethan Settlement) is kaput, finished, dead. That noble settlement lasted for 300 years, but its long run is rapidly coming to an end. It will not survive this crisis. The new Global Settlement, whatever form it ends up taking, will indeed be post-colonial. More importantly, it will also have to be a “post-Christendom, post-Constantinian” type of settlement.
The New Reformation is here. Thanks be to God. I’ve long wished to see this day and wondered if I’d live long enough to participate in this great adventure, the remaking of the Christian Church. We are indeed at the most critical crossroad since the 1500s, and the fate of all western Christianity (and not just Anglicanism) hangs in the balance.
“Let goods and kindred go!”
David Handy+
Dear Little Cabbage, (cher petit choux?) The need for accountability all the way up and down the hierarchy of God’s Church is very much apparent in TEC as well as the UMC, etc…it is not limited to African Anglicanism. It is the ‘achilles heel’ of the hierarchical church. Captain Yips aptly calls it oligarchy…(power and control in the hands of a few who answer only to themselves).
The Way, the Truth and the Life and Duncan’s address both cover this concern. Leaders as servants not lords/overlords is the concept of this global reformation of the church that is taking place (like it or not) at this time in history.
The pewsters are tired of their money and the Name of Christ and their denominations being used for non-christian unscriptural immoral destructive ends.
#10 and #13:
So what of the Bishop of Pittsburgh? Do you count him as worshipping another God? If so, I have not seen him being demonized. Maybe the anti-WO folk will wait until he leads the split and then kick him and his Diocese out of the “true Anglican Communion” for breaking with 19 centuries of Catholic tradition. (or is that OK for Bishop Bob?)
We have not focused sufficient attention on the significance of the bridge being built between a black society and a white. There is so much remarkable, so full or portent, and it foreshadows so much, that in fact GAFCON is only one facet of this new jewel. At present the light reflects most strongly from this facet, but the light will shift and we will see other facets no one has seen before. Larry
Re WO, Eugene…God means every Christian man woman and child who abides in His word and walks in the Spirit, bears the mark and is filled with the life of Christ, and without exception, are commanded to minister and witness to his love, truth and life – whether in an ordained professional office or not.
I expect the WO problem can be solved very simply by adjusting the matter of semantics…calling ordained males priests or presbytrs and giving ordained women another title and complementary but not identical roles in the church. This hearkens back to the words, Zawkar (bring, cleanse) and Nequebah (to be pierced) in Hebrew from Genesis…Men fulfill the role of the Bridegroom, preach the word of the kingdom and repentance, women (the Church) receive and meditate on the word, like Mary, like the Church, ponder it in their hearts, nurture it, present their reflections in a different complementary way.
Complementarity is congruent with God’s design in nature, and in the Church, complementary roles and functions.
This (lack of complementarity) is the problem with WO as it has been practiced and with homosexual acts as well. They are also not true to nature (Romans 1), are opposed to God’s image, design (Genesis 2), word and will.
Faux-copulation – homosexual desires and acts – come from and produce emotional and physical disorientation, deprivation, harm and death, not life, health and peace. (See Theology of the Body, John Paul II)
#14
I agree with you that +Duncan’s reduction of Anglicanism to “Mere Christianity” is shocking. As the whole mess in the church has unfolded and we’ve split into reappraiser and reasserters, I’ve been continually troubled by this lack of clarity on the part of my reasserter leaders on what makes Anglicans distinctive. As I have told them repeatedly, if the answer is “nothing” then why the need for setting up new “Anglican” parishes and structures? Why not just troop off to the nearest community church or Baptist Church or whatever “merely Christian” church they find acceptable? I am glad to see that +Duncan appreciates the necessity of recovering the classic BCP as our standard for worship if we are to have any truly “common” worship that unites us. The GAFCON “Way, Truth and Life” document also seems to understand that there are necessary Anglican distinctives, though it errs, in my opinion, in the direction of being way too Reformed.
Right now the battle is over a substantial rejection of basic morality, anthropology, soteriology and the authority of Scripture. After that battle is resolved we are going to have to deal with issues of ecclesiology. WO is issue number one on that count.
Eugene, I don’t on where you are coming from so i don’t know exactly how to respond. Of course no one here thinks +Duncan is worshipping another god, but his respect for the Tradition of the church and its catholicity is less than it needs to be if we are to hold ourselves together. Evangelicals and Anglo-catholics were held together in Anglicanism through the Establishment because they had reached a balance both could live with. But when one side starts changing things like the priesthood that balance is gone and the center can no longer hold.
The unity of our Communion is suffering from wounds that began long before GVR, and we will be bringing many of those with us into GAFCON. If there is no willingness to repent of those wounds there will be little hope for future unity.
#20 CH
I guess #10 meant C. S. Lewis would have thought that Bishop Duncan was worshipping another God, since he believed in WO.
There will be further splits down the road. Being in a “liberal” denomination allows the more conservative types to live with other conservative types. Once everyone is conservative (post split) other reasons for new splits will arise : WO, 1928 or 1662 PB, charismatics, Anglo-Catholic, Reformed etc.. This is, if not a principle of Protestantism, certainly a practice of it.
#18. Your general recommendation is sound and sensible, and even I, who oppose WO, find in this differentiation of rights and responsibilities in the church as the right course to pursue. I have advocated for such a distinction before, and I am pleased to see someone else who sees the same kind of resolution in front of us. It ‘s true that I do not want a women as a priest, but I can certainly see roles of equal importance, e.g., the adjudicator of internal disorders, for example, or as director of all music in church ceremonies, or the leader of all Outreach activities.
Larry
“What do people think C S Lewis, author of Mere Christianity, would have made of GAFCON?”
Well, we know – as you do, Graham – what Lewis thought of the idea of women priests and of homosexuality. The first he rejected on catholic ‘representative’ grounds, the second (reflected in private letters quoted in ‘A Severe Mercy’) he saw as a sensitive pastoral issue- certainly not a ‘good thing’. Lewis, of course, eschewed and ‘party’ identity but an observant reader of this Christian Platonist can see his sympathies lay in a catholic direction. An easier question to answer would be: What do Fulcrum posters make of C S Lewis?
[i] Deleted by elf. [/i]
ps to my last post: It is a proven medical fact that tobacco usage aggravates heart disease, therefore makes one much more susceptible to heart attacks. Sad, but true.
[i] Deleted by elf. [/i]
[i] To #25 and #26: you’re taking this thread off on your own tangent. Please stop. [/i]
May I try to return this thread to the subject of GAFCON, and to the extreme liberalism it is reacting against, by drawing on Richard Hooker and his debate with Walter Travers?
I [url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=231]wrote[/url] in September 2007:
[blockquote][Richard] Hooker defended the Church of England on two edges: against Roman Catholicism and the Puritans – or Rome and Geneva, as Hooker often put it. As an Anglican, he was ‘Reformed’ in theology but drew on ‘natural law’. Rather than respond with an instant tract to the Puritan opposition to him in his church, The Temple, he retired to a quieter parish and wrote his magisterial, multi-volume Of The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity.
What are the two extreme ‘edges’ that the Anglican Communion needs defending against today? It seems to me that they are the ‘autonomous rootless liberalism’ that too often has undergirded the actions of The Episcopal Church and the ‘independent relentless puritanism’ that ignores the pivotal, gathering role of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both positions, in effect, have tried to trump the ‘interdependence’ of the Communion with their pre-emptive actions and reactions.
Immensely learned and biblically founded, Hooker drew on a hinterland of classical literature, patristics and ‘natural law’.[/blockquote]
It may also be worth quoting a wonderful passage with a contemporary ring from C. S. Lewis in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century:
[blockquote]In the first place the Polity marks a revolution in the art of controversy. Hitherto, in England, that art had involved only tactics; Hooker added strategy. Long before the close fighting in Book III begins, the puritan position has been rendered desperate by the great flanking movements in Books I and II. Hooker has already asked and answered questions which Cartwright and Travers had never considered and which are fatal to their narrow scripturalism. He also provided a model for all who in any age have to answer similar ready-made recipes for setting the world right in five weeks. (Travers is dead: the type is perennial).[/blockquote]
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: OUP, 1954) p. 459.
With the GAFCON rhetoric of a new Reformation, we see indeed that the type of Travers perennial…
Graham Kings (#28),
On what do you base that charge? That is, that those of us who support the CCP and GAFCon are the modern equivalent of the Puritans? Needless to say, I’m very skeptical about that, and not at all inclined to agree that such an accusation is fair or true. So you’ll have to argue the point and make a case for it, and not merely assert it. For instance, although I am indeed a passionate advocate for the New Reformation, I am under no illusion that it will be simple or easy to carry out, and certainly not in “five weeks.” Nor am I the sort of narrow scripturalist that Travers was.
May I suggest that you set forth your case by showing where +Bob Duncan the Lion-Hearted has misjudged the state of Anglican affairs today when he takes the famous statement of John Stott back in 1967 at the Nottingham Conference about what conditions would have to be met before he’d consider leaving the CoE and then declares that those conditions have all been met. Personally, I think +Duncan is absolutely right. All Stott’s conditions have indeed been met, at least here in the U.S. I’ll let you and your colleagues in Fulcrum evaluate the situation in England, which could be different.
Remember that the middle way is NOT always the best and wisest way. Sometimes, a seemingly extreme position is the true and appropriate one. Thus in the Arian controversy of the 4th century, the via media (if you will) was represented by the so-called “Semi-Arians” (like Eusebius of Caesarea) who argued forcefully for an irenic mediating position, i.e., that Christ was simply “of like being” to the Father. But Athanasius and the Cappadocians insisted that the hardline and seemingly extreme Nicene position that Christ was “of one being” with the Father was the only legitimate and acceptable position, despite the fact that “homo-ousios” was not a directly biblical term. And the hardline Nicene radicals were absolutely right.
Similarly, in the later Pelagian controversy, there were the so-called “Semi-Pelagians” who resisted the seemingly extreme positions taken by Augustine. And yet here too, they were wrong, and Augustine was right.
We need to get over our obsession with moderation in Anglicanism. Moderation is generally a fine and sensible thing, when taken in moderation itself. Alas, I think we Anglicans have all too often exhibited “an immoderate love of moderation.” Let’s recall that “Moderation in all things” is a PAGAN Greek ideal, not a biblical one. What the Scriptures call for is balance and self-control, not moderation per se. After all, the Great Commandment is to love the Lord our God with ALL our heart, mind, soul, and strength. There is nothing moderate about that. But there is balance.
Remember the stern rebuke the Lord Jesus gives to the complacent church of Laodicea in Revelation 3. They are “lukewarm.” Better to be either hot or cold, he says. Anything but “lukewarm.” The via media is NOT always best.
David Handy+
Passionate advocate of High Commitment, Post-Christendom style Anglicanism of a radically and unabashedly sectarian and confrontationl Christ-against-culture sort.
Thanks, David, #29. A few comments:
1. I am not arguing for moderation. I am arguing, with others (including ACI and Covenant) for a renewal of the [url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/centre.cfm?menuopt=1]evangelical centre[/url] of the Church of England and of the Anglican Communion. You don’t renew by splitting – for splitting leads to further splitting. Fissiparousness is catching. I do agree with you that often moderation can be tepid and inappropriate. For an ironic critique of this, you may enjoy Guy Browning’s tongue in cheek article, [url=http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/wellbeing/story/0,,2283910,00.html]’How to… be Moderate'[/url], The Guardian, 7 June 2008.
2. The argument for my assertion of ‘Travers being perennial’ re CCP and GAFCON has been built up over a period of months in Fulcrum Newsletters and rather than repeat it all here, I give some of the references below:
[url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2006/newsletter11.cfm?doc=168]’Splitters United or Passionate Patience?'[/url] November 2006 – which also points out the important differing contexts of TEC and the C of E
[url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2007/newsletter13.cfm?doc=188]’To Cleave or To Cleave? The Primates’ Meeting in Tanzania'[/url] February 2007
[url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=231]’The Edge: The Episcopal Church'[/url], September 2007
[url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=270]’Substance and Shadow: Lambeth Conference and GAFCON'[/url], January 2008
[url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=301]’Faith and Fellowship in Crisis'[/url], April 2008
[url=http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=310]’Reading and Reshaping the Anglican Communion'[/url], June 2008 – which you may not have seen since it has not been posted on TitusOneNine nor Stand Firm yet…
3. As to C S Lewis, people who think he would have been favourable to GAFCON are unlikely to know his wider works nor the power of his deep loyalty to the Church of England. John Stott also has a continuing deep loyalty to the Church of England.
#30: Graham, if C S Lewis was alive today, apart from being 110, he would, I believe, have joined the Roman Catholics or Orthodox many years ago, certainly before WO, and probably before the episcopates of John Robinson and David Jenkins. His love for the English church did not override his love for ‘mere Christianity’ or his own rooting in the Catholic culture of Europe. It’s one of the oddities of today that his biggest fan base is among Wheaton evangelicals, while many so-called Catholics in the COE (AffCaff) really have no time for him now.
As for John Stott, he is 87 and I imagine his mind is focused on more personally important matters.
Isn’t ‘Fulcrum’ itself an example of splitting and fissiparousness, arising as a breakaway group at an evangelical conference in 2003?
Due to the strange way ecclesiastical patronage seems to work in England, I can only imagine that you lib- pardon, open evangelicals will be ‘rewarded’ for championing WO and women bishops by getting a few of your number appointed as bishops or deans, while the benighted conservative evangelicals are excluded from preferment – which seems to be exactly what has happened. Can you name ONE CE bishop (other than ‘flying bishop’ Wallace Benn), dean or archdeacon? I bet you can name *scores of AffCaff and OEs in such positions.
Edward Norman in his book ‘Anglican Difficulties’ described exactly such a scenario for evangelicals – you ‘go along to get along’. But if you end up pushing CEs out, you will have to square up to the liberal catholics who dominate the power structure of your church (even while few people go to their parishes). Calling evangelicals ‘puritans’ is an old tactic from the partisans of ‘Thinking Anglicans’.
To my friend David Handy’s question about whether all of John Stott’s categories have been met, I propose that this one has not:
• when the majority have silenced the faithful remnant, forbidding them to witness or protest any longer.
Have two retired bishops been deposed in a pastorally tone-deaf manner because they crossed diocesan boundaries? Tragically, yes.
Have a good many congregations decided that they cannot in good conscience remain in The Episcopal Church? Yes.
Have parishes and dioceses ended up in scandalous court battles over property? Yes.
Could both sides do more to avoid such court battles? Yes. Consider the examples of Resurrection, West Chicago, and the Diocese of Central Florida.
Battles over property and the deposing of two retired bishops do not equal “silencing the faithful remnant, forbidding them to witness or protest any longer,” unless property battles and border-crossing are the only two means of faithful gospel proclamation within The Episcopal Church.
I do not doubt that some imperious bishops attempt to push rectors around. I would welcome seeing proven examples, though, of bishops who have actually silenced rectors or their congregations. As much as some bishops or church lawyers may act as though it were not so, First Amendment rights still exist, even within The Episcopal Church.
I do not believe Christians are called to be moderate. I believe God wants us to be bilateral extremists, profoundly committed to God’s holiness and His love, to His sovereignty and our responsibility, to the imperative of sharing the unshakable Gospel truth and the great commission of listening and understanding, of living to God and dying to ourselves.
I guess #10 meant C. S. Lewis would have thought that Bishop Duncan was worshipping another God, since he believed in WO.
That might be true, except for the human tendency of incinsistency. Men often do not fully integrate any of their ideas into all of their thinking. Thus a heretic may be better than his heresy. It also means an orthodox believer may have many inconsistent beliefs crammed in among his orthodoxy. You can swallow a heretical idea and yet maintain orthodoxy on other areas, even areas that should be dierectly effect by that heresy. Lweis was pointing to what was the natural and logical effect of WO. That doesn’t mean all will be so logical and follow that path. But it does mean that their overall theology becomes conflicted and less coherent, and so weak as a faith that can be transmitted. When a pro-WO conservative (which term I use as contextual for obvious reasons) evangelizes, will his converts adopt his inconsistency or will they integrate one aspect of his theology more consistently than he does? If they do the latter, will they make the understanding of the Fatherhood of God primary or the ordination of women, and all that logically flows from that, the primary truth?
Since theological inconsistency is such a natural characteristic, especially in Protestantism that has no Majestium, and since the very nature of inconsistency is that it is unsystematic there will always be many varieties of inconsisteny. As long as they are bound together within a unified church this problem isn’t so serious, or so obvious. But once we lose that unifying force the various brands of our incosistenct are going to become much stronger agents of destabilization.
Anglicanism has made its foundation in this tendency of theological inconsistency. That accounts for our broadness and allows us to hold divergent elements together, within limits. This is a two edged sword. It makes it harder for heresy to fully take over the church, but it also makes it nerely impossible to fight heresy with any strength. Heresy must be overcome by a long process equal to the spread of heresy. But, and this is not so much an observation as a predicxtive diagnosis, once heresy acheives a critical level, there is no way back short of cataclysm, rebooting. It seems +Duncan and +++Akinola recognize we may well be there. What I do not see yet is a clear definition of Anglicanism that will resolve the divergent theologies and ecclesiologies that threaten to tear us apart.
Questions that need to be addressed:
1. Why should Anglicanism exist, or why should it survive? This is the problem with saying we are “mere Christians”. If Anglicanism doesn’t have a distinct calling there is much less reason to fight for it, to fight the forces of separation that face us.
2. Why are we separate from Rome? +Duncan’s address does not address this at all and seems to want to present the history of English Christianity as if it had always been autonomous rather than part of the church under Rome. In the Reformation we broke from Rome. This is not just an incidental historical fact. It is a continuing scandal. How do we relate to it? Should we care that the body of Christ is so disunified? What do we believe that required us to be separate and which cintinues to do so?
3. What does it mean to be part of the “one, holy and apostolic church”? Thsi is a real weak area among those who see no problem in altering fundamental aspects of the church. What authority is there in Tradition? What limits are there to our diversity in worship and structure, and hopw are those limits defined so that they are no arbitrarily constructed to justify whatever we chose to do?
Anglicanism is supposed to be reformed catholicism. That should mean that it is catholicism with a reformed Gospel, not just a an evangelical Gospel with a catholic flair.
My critique notwithstanding, I am optimistic that these issues will be addressed, but it might require constant prodding.
On another note, is there a discussion thread on the GAFCON document? I saw something in the document in the article Authentc Anglicanism which I do not quite understand. That is, I have suspicion of what it means but do not like it. It says that Anglicanism embraces “the Book of Common Prayer (the two versions of 1552 and 1662)”. Why the 1552 and not the 1559, which was the versionm established by the Elizabethan Settlement? And why two versions anyway? What is wrong with just the 1662 as the standard for the BCP? Are there some Anglicans in the world who descend from Anglicans who did not have the 1662? This seems to be perpetuating a disagreement with the 1662, which disagreement I can only interpret as being Puritan, and if the 1552 is not a typo but really means the 1552 before Elizabeth, it is a disagreement that questions the very unity of Anglican prayer. If there are some saying, “We like the 1552 better” cannot others say, “We like the 1549 best”, and others still say, “We prefer the old Sarum rite”?
There’s something going on there. I’m not sure what it is, but we are going to have to address it.
#35 Chris: I believe the T19 thread on that is here, although it seems to have wandered into a discussion of the Rwandan HOB. There’s also the Stand Firm thread, here.
I’m about halfway through the GAFCON document, and so far I admire it. Naturally, as a reappraiser I disagree with several of the premises and many of the conclusions of this document, but it is (so far) a pretty clear and concise description of a coherent position.
It does strike me as being a fairly Reformed position, though, which is hardly surprising considering its authors. I’ll be curious to see how the more Anglo-Catholic reasserters take it.
Chris – Thx. for your posts nos. 34 and 35.
Chris,
Your #34 and #35 raise excellent points. I particularly appreciated #34. As an Anglo-Catholic, these questions, and the lack of answers in the GAFCON document and +Duncan’s talk, as well as the whole “mere Christianity” Reformed tone, are cause for concern.
I welcome Graham Kings’ links that he posted in his #30, but I don’t think he has really addressed the question I raised in my #29 about whether or not John Stott’s conditions for leaving the CoE had been met already. I’ve read some but not all of those links, so I’ll defer any further comment until then.
And I also welcome my friend Doug LeBlanc’s relatively rare venture into the fray and his respectful and typically thoughtful comment #32. I agree with him that of Stott’s conditions, the one he highlights is the one most in doubt, i.e., whether orthodox spokesmen are being silenced by the revisionist majority.
But there is absolutely no doubt in my own mind that the silencing has already begun. In some places it’s much more advanced than others. Just look at New Westminster, and ++Michael Ingham’s notorious attempts to intimidate and silence even a cardinal rector like David Short+ at big St. John’s, Shaughnessy in Vancouver.
Doug, you already know this part of my own personal story, and I’ve mentioned it on other SF or T19 threads from time to time, but I myself have experienced a very definite attempt to silence opposition to the pro-gay agenda in the Diocese of Southern Virginia, where I reside. But for those who don’t know the story, here is a brief summary.
In the fall of 2003, along with a few other orthodox clergy in the Richmond, VA area, I sought to start an AAC chapter for the Richmond region (taking in both sides of the James River and hence some parishes in the Diocese of VA and some in So. VA). I called all the forty some TEC churches in the metropolitan area and invited the rectors or vicars and I tried my best to make it clear that this was not some sort of secret conspiracy to undermine TEC but a way of providing an essential rallying point for orthodox members of TEC who were dismayed by the fateful actions taken at the Minneapolis General Convention in August, 2003.
I was totally shocked when I got an irate phone call from the acting bishop of So. VA, the infamous, ultra-liberal +Carol Gallagher (the ordinary, +David Bane was then on sabbatical). She angrily threatened me in no uncertain terms. She literally yelled at me over the phone, screaming things like, “How dare you start an AAC chapter?” And, “I forbid you to do this.” She demanded the names of other clergy behind the effort to launch the chapter (I refused). And she warned me that if I went ahead and held the organizational meeting anyway, she would immediately yank my license to officiate in the diocese (I’m canonically resident in Albany, thank God).
Now +Carol Gallagher is a nut case. She isn’t all that representative, fortunately, of most TEC bishops. But I’ve heard other horror stories of such Machiavellian, bullying tactics being used elsewhere in TEC. To his credit, +Peter James Lee made no such threats against me. He didn’t even seem concerned. There was already a strong AAC chapter in northern VA.
But make no mistake about it. The silencing has begun. Given the loathsome current administration of TEC, it’s only a matter of time…
David Handy+