Forward in Faith and the Catholic Group in General Synod note with regret that, despite the clear advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of Durham, the Bishop of Winchester, the Bishop of Exeter and other Bishops, the Prolocutor of the Province of Canterbury and the Chairman of the House of Laity and the obvious lack of consensus, the General Synod today resolved to make no meaningful provision for those in conscience unable to receive the ministry of women bishops.
There must now be a period of prayerful reflection. However, members of both the General Synod and of the Church of England will understand that actions always have consequences.
Simon Killwick
Chairman, Catholic Group in General Synod
Geoffrey Kirk
Secretary, Forward in Faith
Stephen Parkinson
Director, Forward in Faith
[blockquote] However, members of both the General Synod and of the Church of England will understand that actions always have consequences.[/blockquote]
Maybe. But based on past experience let’s just say I am not holding my breath.
ICXC NIKA
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
My prediction: The Anglo-catholics of the CoE will bifurcate, half to Rome and half sheepishly remain to be slowly bled away.
The time to act is now and to act with courage and boldness. Seek alternative oversight or die. Next week is too late. If a significant of Anglo-catholics swim the Tiber then tomorrow and probably today is too late.
Don’t the provisions below:
(b) affirm its view that special arrangements be available, within the existing structures of the Church of England, for those who as a matter of theological conviction will not be able to receive the ministry of women as bishops or priests;
(c) affirm that these should be contained in a statutory national code of practice to which all concerned would be required to have regard; and
remedy the situation-at least to some degree? I know they wanted the creation of “super-bishops,” but this seems reasonable. Although I am not familiar with existing accomodations.
Try as I may, I’m unable to name any ruthless, implacable foe of Christianity in general or Anglicanism in particular who could have overseen such devastation of the Anglican Communion in such a short time as ++Rowan Williams has in his short tenure.
Jeffersonian,
In fairness to RW (for whom I have little use) he had a lot of help from the Americans. His role was essentially passive. Nero with his fiddle and all that. But it was 815 and the radicals running the show in TEC that really brought things to a boil.
Of course this day was inevitable from the moment that the CofE approved W/O for priests. How could they rationally then refuse it for bishops? W/O is outright heresy. but again this predates Rowan Williams. I think the worst that can be said of the man is that he has done nothing to stop or even slow down the train wreck. But the wreck itself is not of his making.
ICXC NIKA
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
John
W/O is outright heresy. but again this predates Rowan Williams.,/i>
So you are comfortable saying that ANY person, no matter how orthodox (+Duncan, +Stanton, et al) who supports WO is a heretic (or an apostate if they did not previously hold that position)?
That’s the current Catholic view and was the Anglican view, almost universally held, until the end of the 50s and beyond. That it seems to you outrageous now shows how dramatically we have abandoned our own tradition.
What was forbidden yesterday, argued to be tolerable today will be compulsory tomorrow. It’s our history again, and again, and again, and again…
Brian,
The short answer to your question is yes with respect to heterodoxy. But no with respect to apostasy. Apostasy is more than just falling into heresy. It must involve the rejection of cardinal elements of the Christian Faith. Mr. Spong and Ms. Schori would fall into that category. Not Bps. Duncan or Stanton. Of course I am an Orthodox (big ‘O’) Christian and we don’t really have much use for the so called branch theory. At the risk of being seen as triumphalist (it’s sometimes hard to avoid that when speaking uncomfortable truths) to us, you are either Orthodox or you are to at least some degree heterodox.
Beyond which I will just add my ditto to Driver in post #7.
ICXC NIKA
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
One barely needs to be an anglo-cath to know that WO is wrong, for the simple reason that WO is, quite plainly, anti-scriptural. Period.
FIF has ALREADY done something becoming part of Common Cause Partnership and the GAFCON confessing Anglican movement. According to the GAFCON Statement and Jerusalem Declaration, the confessing Anglicans do not recognize the authority of the apostate provinces, dioceses and parishes…nor are they in communion with them.
The rebels are the apostate entities.
GAFCON attendees to Lambeth – do not blink, wink, flinch or give an inch – stand firm.
The Lord be with you!
and so it is that those who dared believe the promises of 1992- that they would hold a treaured place within the church forever and proper provision would be provided- now discover that the promise was an empty lie. And that discovery comes only after the financial package was removed…those who trusted the church, remained with it depsite pain- will finally have to walk with no renumeration. What a very shameful day for the C of E
Can anyone answer Bryan at 3? I have no idea what these provisons mean. They seem to promise (for what ever that is worth) to do something without saying wht that something is. I suspect that a truly meaningful provision will violate some sort of polity and cannot be done.
yes I can. Here are just some problems presented by a flimsy code.
1) I do not beleive women priests or bishops are the ‘real deal’. This calls into question the validity of their sacraments. This would throw into question every man and woman ordained at their hands. Without a clear structural divide – I would be unable to remain and am thus driven out becuase i would have no idea of whose orders are catholic and whose a modern innovation.
2) I would be equally unable to swear allegiance to a (in my eyes) parady of a bishop. I would then be at her whim- this code at present is not to be legally binding. And we only need look at the charity and love shown in USA by KJS to see the danger lurking.
3) I would be forced to the very margins and to be ‘dealt with’ for the rest of my ministry. My crime? Merely upholding the very faith the C of E itself taught me and refusing to endorse non biblical innovations. I would have no chance of preferment, freedom to move, etc… in short forced out for having some integrity
Is that enough for starters.
Underline all of them with the clear and unavoidable fact that any claim to be catholic and apostolic has been shattered. The church just decided to be truly protestant….so what place do I have as a Catholic? We all know the answer however much we try and avoid it.
Guess i had better pack my bags.
For those who are not Anglo-Catholic, let me explain something.
We see ourselves as part of an organization, the Church, which has a spiritual reality. The titles are not just matters of organizational convenience, but callings and positions of authority that one defies to the detriment of one’s spiritual health.
That makes the decision to leave difficult. It is one of the reasons why we typically head to Rome or Constantinople rather than strike out on our own. But doing either action (going RC or EO) involves altering one’s theology to conform to the organization. The Romans have the issue of papal authority, amongst other issues. The Greeks have a history of conforming to the will of the State (Google the Patriarch of Constantinople), even non-Christian states.
So there isn’t a perfect Church to retreat to. Every Anglo-Catholic in England is going to have to decide, individually, what they should do. For some the process will be quicker than for others. For all, it will be painful.
rugbyplayingpriest, Of course I understhand what you are saying. But supposedily, and I don’t believe it for one minute, the provisions that Bryan cites in 3 are supposed to accomodate the Anglo-Catholics. What I don’t understand is what they purport to do for you. For example just what does “statutory national code of practice” mean?
The present wo debate, we must remember, is only part of a much larger, vastly older war, the war between men and women (See Thurber for an amusing depiction). The Bible stresses the accomodation between, the mutual support between, a man and his wife because the forces that will keep them in battle, openly or tacitly, are so very great. We tend to forget how prolonged and how bitter this battle is, until we reexamine the most recent one, namely gender feminism, and observe how much blood was shed, how completely men have been demonized, and how successful this war was for the women. In a real sense, the battle over homosexuality is a continuation of this battle; it is no accident that wo and homosexualization of the church have become issue joined at the hip.
It is true that wo is unscriptural, but those who are fighting for wo don’t care about this very much. It is politically correct, and for a man to stand up against the collective might of the present women’s phalanx is unthinkable. Men lack the …. well, because the women have taken them. And the men in the Anglican church had better think well before they choose willingly to lose another battle in this war. The struggle for dominance will be stopped by nothing; it will go on every day in every family in ten thousand subtle ways – and as you all know, men are losing at practically every point. (I suspect – this is just a speculation – that evolution has this well planned, that a woman desires to choose a dominant mate for survival reasons. She chooses this mate by standing in power; the subsequent battle tells her whether this male is satisfactory or not. Survival of the race is not a gift, it is a battle to be won or lost, so the stakes are high, and the battle is fought even in the most placid suburban starter-castle. A man need not be a bully or a thug to be dominant; the simple rule is the Alpha male mates. Christ sought to redefine what an alpha male is, and the results have been astounding, haven’t they?) Larry
#!4, And where do I go? I absolutely will not join the ACA and TAC in becoming chummy with Rome on Roman terms alone. I cannot imagine anyone really swimming the Tiber. I wrote to my deacon and +++Hepworth and said so, telling them in the process how much I am infuriated by being given the mushroom treatment. But where do I go now? The only Anglican churches in Maine are ACA’s, as far as I know, and there is no Episcopal church here that is not tainted beyond recall. And I will not be alone in this dilemma. Larry
#17. That is my dilemma as well. I’m in Atlanta, and while there are a plethora of fringe Anglican churches here, none of them seem to fit. The one remaining Anglo-Catholic Episcopal church is seriously compromised, but that is where I remain a member. I’m not in love with Rome (I’m a nominalist), the Orthodox are appealing, but their recent history gives me pause. If you come up with a solution, let me know.
#16. If there is a war between men and women, I surrender. I absolutely refuse to set myself as an antagonist to half the human race. Many of whom I love.
What we are seeing is a clash between those whose ideological blinders compel them to see men and women as the same in all respects and those who, realistically, think that men and women are different. Not that one is better than the other, but different in certain vital, and blindingly obvious, respects.
#3: I think George Conger explained it well:
“a recent ruling by the House of Lords determined that the so-called code of practice is not legally enforceable through judicial review. The possibility of making a code legally binding was also rejected by the group charged with developing recommendations for synod.”
In other words, the CoE views the Code of Practice as nonbinding, sort of like how Bishop Lee of Virginia viewed his Protocol for Departing Congregations.
[blockquote]In fairness to RW (for whom I have little use) he had a lot of help from the Americans. His role was essentially passive. Nero with his fiddle and all that. But it was 815 and the radicals running the show in TEC that really brought things to a boil. [/blockquote]
Indeed it was TEC that opened the flood gates, but you put your finger squarely on the central indictment of ++Rowan’s role here. He had the power to turn the screws at the outset of this cordless bungee jump into abject heresy, and did nothing. Subsequent actions have reinforced the view that this inertia was calculated and malicious, not simply bumbling and incompetent. With minimal anguish, this all could have been stopped. Now, instead, the Communion will fracture on the watch of a man who is utterly unsuited to the office which he holds.
19, what is the Code of Practice?
Williams and the other bishops who wanted, apparently, the super bishop plan to pass seem to be incompetent politicians. You float the idea, you talk it up, you make private phone calls and visits and make sure people understand that the powers that be will really appreciate your vote for their proposal. Instead, they seemingly just threw it out there and then watched it sink.
Anglicanism is dying at the root. If it is to survive it must have a healthy branch severed and replanted in healthy ground. GAFCON, as imperfect as it is, is the best shot we have at acheiving the survival of both a conservative Evangelicalism and a conservative Anglocatholicism. We will need both to persist and to find ways of working together.
This unity will not be immediately possible because of WO within GAFCON elements and the ambiguous attitude toward GAFCON. BUT, there is the real hope that there will be safe space for anglocatholics, space which was treacherously denied them by TEC and now the CofE, space to maintain an uncomfortable integrity in impaired communion with those evangelical portions that foolishly continue to play with what they did not create. This space willalso be time, time to convince the bible believing elements of the Communion of how disastrous WO is and why the priesthood really matters. Maybe this will allow Protestant minded Anglicans to listen to Tradition more and to stop being head-strong Puritans (That last bit is especially for NT Wright who thinks he knows what Puritanism is 😉 ) who think they can contruct the church right out of the Bible by their own interpretation.
What I am hoping for is a confederation of conservative Anglicans who will break from Canterbury and the corrupt church of the English establishment, a federation that includes anglocatholics in one group and evangelicals in another. Perhaps members of TAC and other Continuing Anglicans can be added to this confederation. This must be conceievd as a temporary phaze, while we as a church do the actual discernment about WO, which is just another way of arguing, that was supposed to go on in TEC et al but was abandoned in favor of a poitical process in which the opposition didn’t need to be convinced, only outvoted by a simple majority.
Don’t fool yourselves, all you pro-WO conservatives. If WO is not discussed and put back on the table as something that needs to be proved before it is accepted there will be no hope for anglocatholicism in this new alignment. And Anglicanism without anglocatholics is just another form of Protestantism. And the world really doesn’t need another Protestant church. Anglicanism was, is supposed to be a reformed catholicism, and WO isn’t catholic. If you have any doubts try asking those who actually call themselves catholics whose belief in Jesus you recognize.
There are some simple rules for getting along together:
If you didn’t make it don’t break it, or “remake it”. The Reformation was not intended to remake the church but to restore it.
If you don’t understand the purpose of something you should not do anything to alter or harm it when others say that it has a purpose which is good. Along the same lines, if you don’t think some Scriptural passages are clear you should defer to those who claim to understand them.
Under the political establishment of Anglicanism and its politicized offshoots protestants and catholics didn’t have to convince one another. They only had to defeat them, and this arrangement worked in an inevitable protestant and liberal direction. Once we separate we are going to have to engage in actual dialogue, the good kind, not the BS kind.
I know I am rambling a bit here and repeating myself but I believe that Anglicanism has a purpose and I desire it to have a future. I believe in it not as the best church but as the best Protestant church, a church reformed that maintained its catholicism enough to be a bridge between more radical Protestantism on one side and Rome and the East on the other, with the reall hope of someday healing the schism between us. I have NO desire to remain in a church that carse nothing for the divisions between Christians. I want a church that wants to work toward reunion, how ever distant in the future that may be. To me this is the end of Anglicanism, where “end” means “purpose”. What happened in England yesterday is the end, the termination, the death of Anglicanism as played out as a handmaid to the State and Culture.
For you Anglo-Catholics who have just realized that there really now is no such thing, you need to go somewhere. Every day that you are in TEC proves the point of the reasserters that they can do whatever they choose and “we” will fuss, but not move on. If there is no “Anglo” Catholicism, then where is Catholicism? Answer that and then go there, no matter how painful.
#18. Are there no real choices. The las thing I had expected was to be lost in a spiritual sense. I’m a farmer, and our general rule is, fix it or else. The makes one both hard nosed and strongly self-sufficient. Mother Nature can make you eat dust and learn to squint at bankruptcy,, but she never leaves you lost. Now what? It will be a long cold day in hell when I “revere” Mary or another other idol. Larry
#25 All generations shall call her blessed, Larry.
Just a long cold spell in purgatory, until you come to your senses.
Re # 17
Larry.
Might I suggest you look into the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church? They would seem more in line with what you are looking for.
Re # 18
Mousestalker,
If you are of a Protestant mindset I would also suggest the LCMS for you. However if you are catholic minded than you really have two choices… Rome or Orthodoxy. What recent history has you hesitating with respect to Orthodoxy?
ICXC
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
No. 25, this is not meant as a dig, but… don’t you revere your wife? If you don’t, tell her that please and I’ll be ready with the steak to put on your black eye. 🙂 Don’t you revere, if not THE President, the office of President? Don’t you revere great composers? If you were a British subject, would you not revere the Queen?
David, as King over Israel, did like all good Jewish boys do and enthroned his Mother as Queen Mother at his right hand. If Christ is King in David’s line, as we read in Scripture and sing in hymns, shall we not believe that Mary is honored by him as Queen Mother?
Honor, reverence, and respect are far from the worship due to God alone. I would quake to stand before Christ and say to his face, “I care nothing for your mother.”
Rather than use purely human reasoning, who don’t we all heed the words of Jesus Christ as how he regarded His mother? That should settle the issue once and for all, shouldn’t it? After all, Jesus said “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.
“He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.” (John 14:23-25).
Behold, Jesus shall speak – Matt. 12:46-50 [cf Mark 3:31-35]; Luke 8:19-21; Luke 11:27-28; John 2:1-5.
The Holy Spirit was very careful to leave us a witness on this matter so we might not be deceived.