Dublin: Irish evangelical leader Bishop Harold Miller of Down and Dromore conceded his decision to attend the Anglican Lambeth Conference “did not make sense” in light of the agenda and invitation list put forward by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but it was important to “give it one more chance” so as to preserve the gathering’s “moral authority.”
In his Presidential Address to the Synod of the Diocese of Down and Dromore on June 19, Bishop Miller noted this month’s Lambeth Conference would be marked by the absence of a “quarter of our bishops.” He was “deeply saddened” by their decision as it would undermine the “moral authority” of the Conference, as well as excluding the voices of the most vibrant churches in the Communion.
However, he also expressed concerns about the conference as planned, noting it had been recast into a “retreat-come-training-conference and a meeting and listening place for bishops.”
The agenda “bothers me,” he said, asking “Who is doing the ”˜training’ and how is it going to be ”˜slanted?”
“He also asked what “listening†meant when the Episcopal Church “does not seem to have listened? Does it mean ‘you must keep on listening till you come round to a particular point of view?’”
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“He also asked what “listening†meant when the Episcopal Church “does not seem to have listened? Does it mean ‘you must keep on listening till you come round to a particular point of view?’”
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The answert is , “Yes.”
Progressives are by nature ‘utopian’ in their outlook.
They believe that their ‘experts’ have spoken and that their point of ‘view’ derived from the analysis of those experts is the only acceptable point of view.
Therefore, progressive-revisionists are compelled to keep ‘pushing’ their point of view until it is accepted.
Regardless of the consequences.
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Elves, please remove my initial comment in item #1. I prematurely pressed the “submit” button.
Bishop Harold Miller of Down and Dromore; quite evidently a kindred spirit.
Has he said anything new that has not been cogently stated here before? No, but he is not being led around by a revisionist ring in his nose, either. I pray for all such leaders – known and unknown to me.
Don
#2. Don, yes, let’s pray for the many Bishops who have been quiet behind the scenes that they may have been part of a ‘silent orthodox majority.’ If they are out there, it is time for them to come ‘out’ here. — Stan
T 1:9 published an outstanding letter by Bp. Miller earlier this year about his eye-opening tour of the US six years ago. Here is the link: http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/5943
Apropos bishops in Ireland, I should think that those who browse here will not want to miss the July 4 USPG address by the Most Rev. Alan Harper, Archbishop of Armagh. See [url=http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/news.cfm/2008/7/4/ACNS4419]ACNS 4419[/url]
[blockquote]
There can be very few who would resist the view that Richard Hooker is even more formative of Anglican Theology and the Anglican theological method than was Thomas Cranmer of Anglican liturgy. Furthermore, the 16th century debate within which Hooker made his most significant contribution was one with striking similarities to the debate underlying the troubled state of the Anglican Communion today.
[/blockquote]
Presumably Paul’s critique of idolatry is also doubtless grounded in the limited first century “evidence base” available to Paul and so can now be shown to fall outside the prohibitions of God’s law. The great power of this hermeneutic is that one can use it to relativize more or less any passage in Scripture. Every part of Scripture is separated from us by an historical and cultural chasm (Lessing’s famous “ditch”). One simply identifies a relevant cultural difference – of which, on any issue, there are always several – and then safely leaves Scripture amongst the archaic and impoverished “evidence base” of the past.
Of course the danger is that you you, so to say, provide a means by which the entirety of Scripture can be eliminated as authoritative and then one might simply ask, how do you know at all that God is Triune, that Jesus is divine or that God is love…
I think there is good reason to challenge this. Hooker was hardly a formative Anglican theologian at all during his own lifetime. Indeed he didn’t really come to have significance as the “iconic” Anglican theologian until the end of the seventeenth century.
I think it’s also fair to say that as a theologian, Hooker is so say occasionally “proof texted” and has been subject for a handful of largely historical monographs. Yet Hooker hardly functions as an active theological authority amongst Anglican theologians any more than Cranmer does, in the distinction to the way that, for example Aquinas has functioned in Catholic theology over the last hundred years.
driver8 (# 6),
[blockquote]
Presumably Paul’s critique of idolatry is also doubtless grounded in the limited first century “evidence base†available to Paul and so can now be shown to fall outside the prohibitions of God’s law.
[/blockquote]
Sorry, I don’t think so. The archbishop suggests that the behavior in question was understood by Paul as a punishment for unfaithfulness. This is the reason he says the described behavior is “byspeak” rather than law. Even if you don’t want to buy into “punishment”, it’s plain from the [i]Romans[/i] text that Paul’s attitude toward the behavior is “duh”. That is, Paul is not trying to persuade his audience that it is bad behavior but, rather, is using the behavior, which he and his audience see as obviously bad, to demonstrate the fallen state of those he’s criticizing.
[blockquote]
The great power of this hermeneutic is that one can use it to relativize more or less any passage in Scripture.
[/blockquote]
What hermeneutic?
Let me ask: do you mean here to criticize Archbishop Harper or Richard Hooker? (My guess is that you’re taking on Hooker.)
driver 8 (# 7),
So your target is Hooker.
I don’t know the history.
But what I suspect is that if one denies the application of [i]reason[/i], as understood in the Anglican tradition, in theological matters, one is left open to the acquistion of superstitious propositional beliefs and possibly one is left in the position of having to affirm the Church’s persecution of Galileo.
As I wrote in this book review:
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0599-tighe
“When Invoking “the Holy Spirit†Will Justify Just About Anything
Anglicans and Tradition and the Ordination of Women. By H.R. McAdoo. Canterbury Press (St. Mary’s Works, St. Mary’s Plain, Norwich, Norfolk NR3 3BH, United Kingdom). 138 pages. £11.99..
Henry McAdoo was Anglican Archbishop of Dublin (Church of Ireland) from 1977 to 1985, and served as the Anglican co-chairman of the first series of sessions of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, or ARCIC I, which met from 1969 to 1981. In such books as The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (1949), The Spirit of Anglicanism (1965), The Unity of Anglicanism: Catholic and Reformed (1983), and Anglican Heritage: Theology and Spirituality (1991), he interpreted the thought and principles of Anglican divines of the 17th century in such a way as to assert their foundational status for contemporary Anglican thought and practice. In the new work reviewed here, the retired Archbishop (who died on Dec. 10, 1998) seeks to defend the ordination of women by Anglican Churches against those who contend that such an innovation constitutes a violation of historical orthodoxy.
This is a bad but instructive book. It shows how far a learned divine is willing to go in “reinventing†Anglicanism in order to make a case for an innovation that is thoroughly incompatible with tradition. And thereby it makes clearer the religious “ecological niche†that the Anglican Churches of the English-speaking world are coming to occupy at the end of our millennium.
The book unintentionally serves as supporting evidence for this twofold thesis of mine: (1) Anglican Churches in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the British Isles are now occupying the “niche†that Unitarianism occupied from the late 18th to the mid-19th century in New England — that is, they have become religious bodies promoting a radical transformation and secularization of Christianity to make it over in a way more agreeable to the elites of society; and (2) Anglicanism, when uninfluenced for the good by more robust strains of Christianity (e.g., Calvinism in the 16th and early 17th centuries; certain aspects of Greek Patristic thought in the 17th century; evangelical pietism in the latter half of the 18th century; the Oxford Movement and its Anglo-Catholicism drawing on Roman Catholic belief and practice in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries) — Anglicanism, when bereft of such influences, finds its natural state in a thoroughgoing Erastianism for which the most suitable biblical prototype is Bethel, of which we may read at Amos 7:12-13 (“And Amaziah said unto Amos, ‘O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there. But prophesy not again any more at Bethel, for it is the king’s chapel and the king’s court’â€).
(snip)
But why should reasonableness limit itself to approving of women’s ordination? Issues of sexual morality are also susceptible of swift resolution by ascertaining the world’s understanding and simply christening it. In principle there is no hurdle so high that this horse could not leap it. The perennial problem for Christian converts in polygamous societies — the problem of paring their wives down to one — is also susceptible of easy resolution thereby. And should real polygamy (as opposed to its serial version) come back into vogue among society’s elites in the post-Christian West, the Anglican Churches could easily reason their way into approving it. (On a sexually egalitarian basis, of course: polyandry for the ladies, polygyny for the men, and polypartnership for those preferring to match rather than mix.)
The book’s final chapter, which focuses directly on the ordination of women, abounds with invocations of the Holy Spirit “abiding in the Church, inspiring, guiding, and enlightening.†These amount to vacuous rhetorical varnishings, intended to clothe the Erastian Reason at work in this book in a garb of piety. The book concludes with (further) criticism of the Catholic Church’s stance against the ordination of women and with additional praise of McAdoo’s selective Anglican tradition, the place of Reason within it, and the connection with it of “the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit,†of which the reader has heard so much talk and seen so little evidence.
Reading McAdoo, one recalls the preacher who wrote at certain points in his notes for his sermon: “Argument weak, talk louder.†McAdoo’s constant invocations of the Holy Spirit fulfill the same function in this book as that preacher’s increases in volume did in his sermon — and to as little effect.
The only interesting thing about McAdoo’s enterprise is that he is simply one of the latest of a whole series of Amaziahs who have been reshaping Anglicanism to the liking of their earthly masters.”
Ten years ago an Irish archbishop was deploying creative hermeneutics, and the invocation of Hooker, to justify WO; today another is doing the same thing to justify SS (= Sanctified Sodomy). how “creative;” how droll; how apostate. I look forward to further theological effusions from Archbishop Harper, especially when he takes cudgels in hand to lambaste us poor papists for twisting Scripture by not embracing SS. Ah, the glories of the Via Media!
No my target is not Hooker. Instead I argued briefly that Hooker is “totemic” in Anglican theology, that is to say he is put forward to “give gravitas to whatever position the author wishes to support. Does Hooker argee with the Bishop on the moral status of non-celibate same sex relationships. There is not a piece of evidence to suggest he does!
I mentioned a significant difference between the way Anglicans have used Hooker (“proof texting”) and the way Aquinas has been repeatedly used by catholic theologians over the past 100 years. Thus I denied that Hooker was formative in the way that Aquinas has been for contemporary Catholic theologians and I think that’s right. Hooker is used to “proof text” views that are arrived at on other bases – as we see again in this case.
Of course reason is to be applied. Along with Paul, I would take a natural law direction myself (thus perhaps closer to Hooker than the good Bishop). So same sex desire, according to Paul, is a denial of the creational ordering intended by God and its disorder is itself its own punishment. Of course, Paul’s argument is that outside of Christ all creation is disordered. (Hence my point about idolatry – creation is out of right relationship with God – and the disorders that ensue are themselves their its own judgment).
[blockquote]Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves[/blockquote]
On what basis does one separate Paul’s critique of idolatry in Romans 1 from his critique of same sex passion or slander or greed – in other words the disorder of sin that imprisons both Jew and Greek – and which holds them (in other words, us all) captive under they are transferred from the mastery of Sin to the Lordship of Christ.
As Paul says later in Romans:
Let me add – I don’t disagree that the human mind, by God’s providence, should seek to understand the providentially given divine communication that is Scripture. Of course I do deny the Bishop’s purely instrumental view of reason and see reason rather as making sense in the light of our participation in the divine logos. Thus I see Scripture as shaping us in virtue by God’s grace and so leading us to deeper and deeper participation in the life of God.
Even on the Bishop’s purely instrumental, desacralised view of reason – on what reasoned grounds does he distinguish Paul’s view that greed, or slander (etc.) evidence the disorder of Sin from his view that same sex passions do the same. As I see it, it is because he sees Paul’s “evidential base” as culturally bound – but of course so is his view of greed, or slander, or idolatry, or love. As I argued above – if it is enough to argue that Scripture can be relativized because it was given by God at a particular moment in time – then all of it goes out the window.
Thus, to give an example, if one were to show that some kinds of greed, for example, were causally influenced by posession of certain genetic traits – would that also add to “the evidential base” and mean that greed should no longer be seen as a vice? What if worshipping other gods was argued to be “natural” (universal) in human cultures. What if Paul’s notion of love in 1 Corinthians 13 was argued to be a cultural product of the first century. And so on, and so on and so on….
Dr. Tighe’s entry is particularly instructive for me, because it bears directly on what I have been saying about the language of affect, most recently in relation to the ethereal flights of ideality in the Declaration.
If one interjects “the Holy Ghost” in place of God and Natural Law as creating natural rights, then you would have a speech straight from TEC. To declare a matter as intuitively so is to put it beyond the discursive mind; what TEC has done is call it the Holy Spirit at work, but in all cases the effect is the same: To grant oneself unassailable authority to rewrite scripture to suit oneself. The argument from “cultural relativity” is merely the version by which the quasi-scientific mentality of the present advances the “Holy Ghost” argument, for the “cultural relativity” declaration is an absolute – all cultural matters are relative; it is an unassailable position – and this is precisely the point at which we realize that the speaker is speaking the language of affect. LM
Moral authority requires moral standards and upholding them. Who’s not doing what? Lambeth spoke with authority at 1998. But who the hell really gives a damn? Not the ECUSA/TEC/GCC/EO-PAC and its minions in Canada and sycophants in financially-tethered “Provinces”.
Those that do care are marginalized by the very design of the Lame-beth. It is designed to make the whole crippled by the slewed.