Year after year, Cardinal Kasper comes to the UK to give more or less the same speech, in which he challenges the Church of England to decide whether it is “a church of the first millennium” or “a church of the Reformation”.
To which Anglicans answer: “Why not both?”
The answer to that question, of course, is everywhere in the Anglican “summer of schism” ”“ and it lies in ecclesiology. Containing the differences and resolving them without moving apart requires following Dr Rowan Williams’s essentially “Catholic” method of resolving disputes, ie: move together or not at all; give time and space to allow the Holy Spirit to meld what is not humanly irreconcilable; in the meantime, prefer unity to the assertion of liberal or Biblical principle.
But Dr Williams’s ecclesiology has been constantly rejected: by the North-American Episcopal Church (TEC) in 2004, by the evangelicals of the developing world (FOCA) just recently in Jerusalem, and by the liberal reformers of the Church of England this week in Synod. Each is following the logic of an essentially Protestant ecclesiology.
Which is why, as the Bishop of Durham graphically put it at Synod, Anglicans “are living through on many levels a massive outworking of the law of unintended consequences — or in plain English a slow-moving train wreck.”
I generally concur that the CoE is becoming a liberal protestant sect. However, statements such as:
[blockquote]”Rowan Williams’s essentially “Catholic†method of resolving disputes…”[/blockquote]
are not easily squared with his patently [b]un[/b]catholic thwarting of the conciliar DES Communique, as well as the neutering of the Lambeth Conference.
🙄
Rowan Williams does not believe in the Catholic witness to human nature and the use of human sexuality. He has already gone on record one of his books as being a supporter of the notion of ‘faithful covenant relationships’ between homosexuals. Though such a position is radically at odds with anything remotely Christian, much less “Catholic Christian”, Williams practices the compartmentalization which is the dis-ease of so many Anglicans in our day. More’s the pity!
Ecclesiology? This is a new concept for some of the former Anglican Communion dilettantes. They now have the old order over the barrel of their conceptualizations (sheerly enculturated definitions to suit itching ears). Law of intended consequences, rather!