Big words are being thrown around in the Church of England these days; words such as schism, with echoes from 1,000 years ago when the world divided between Rome and the Orthodox; words such as Reformation, with echoes of the split between Catholic and Protestant, which spilt a deal of English blood in the 16th century.
Some 1,333 vicars and other clerics have written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York threatening to leave the church if its General Synod presses ahead this weekend with the idea of women bishops.
Ho-hum, says the rest of society, for whom gender and sexuality equality has become an unquestioning desideratum, if not an always practised norm, over the past decades. For those with a secularist world view such debates have become a yawning irrelevance. But the air is febrile with a sense of history in the church and for reasons which are not always immediately apparent to outsiders. Women and gays have become its totems.
Just because the world approves and partakes of sin, that does not mean the Church should.
It is the job of the Church to define holy, to live in reverence for truth, love and life. If the Church moves away from God’s requirements to embrace the culture’s norms and wishes in the areas holiness, truth, love, life, as the CoE and The Episcopal Church has, the Church has failed to reveal the Christ and His Word to the world. The Church has failed to be the Church.
Do at least some of you not see that making this into a fight about “women and gays,” as if the two issues were indivisible, is to write off a huge bloc of moderate reasserters… those who are absolutely orthodox in Nicene or Chalcedonian terms, and who have no trouble at all affirming the authority of Scripture as God’s Word, but who simply cannot see any moral equivalence between supporting same-gender sexual activity and supporting women’s ministries? Can at least some of you not see that any claim to be the rightful successor to the authority (and property) of the former Anglican Communion becomes much more difficult if your faction includes only a fraction of the former members?
Dale Rye, I don’t find “women and gays” connected at all, as I am not an Anglo-Catholic and do not believe their theology.
But I am uncertain as to where we’ve written “off a huge block of moderate reasserters” . . . those like me who are oppose WO, yet find it adiaphora have *plenty* of opportunity to be involved in leadership amongst reasserters in and out of TEC. And those who *support* WO are the same, as is clear amongst the AAC, the Network, Gafcon, the ACI, the Communion Partners Plan, and any number of other initiatives.
If you’re talking about the “moderate reasserters” who have decided that yes, even though they think the Episcopal church has gone off the rails in the past five years, but it doesn’t matter enough to really raise a ruckus about it . . . well, they’re not even reading this blog anyway to hear your question.