What’s in short supply in some quarters are those much-prized Anglican virtues of patience, forbearance and tolerance. They have been strikingly absent in one small US diocese, New Hampshire, and in the dioceses of Nigeria and Sydney; each side mirrors the other’s disregard for how commitment to an institution brings a collective responsibility to each other and for each other. No one has the monopoly on truth or virtue; understandings of intimacy and sexuality are far too complex across cultures to be reduced to the western claims of superiority, maintained two gay Anglican priests separately to me. In the UK we may have achieved a welcome end to legal discrimination, but homophobia is still rife – while in other cultures there may be more tolerance than we care to acknowledge within the privacy afforded to sexuality.
Williams has been unfortunate to arrive for a torrid shift in Canterbury. Global communications are disrupting all religious traditions, traumatising identity and fuelling a literalist fundamentalism; the result is a gross simplifying of the complexity and paradox that is part of human experience. While Anglicanism’s travails are laid bare for the bloggers to pour scorn on, the Catholic church has become a parody of its own past, a ruthlessly centralised authoritarian structure in which all the debates troubling Lambeth are simply being postponed. As one priest put it to me, that is also a massive risk.
Williams has remarkably managed to instil dignity and warmth – as anyone in York Minster for his sermon before General Synod will testify – into proceedings, which gives plenty of room to hope that his Lambeth conference will pass smoothly and that those bishops prepared to turn up will find in the face-to-face encounter beyond lurid headlines that it is possible to find a way to accommodate difference. And, as Hooker would say: “Charity in all matters”.
I disagree with some of Madeleine Bunting’s observations — e.g., her vast understatement of how many U.S. dioceses neglect patience, forbearance and tolerance. Still, I share her sense that media treatment of Archbishop Williams is frequently hysterical and that he’s far more up to the challenge than most of his critics recognize.
During Lambeth 1998, Archbishop Williams was one of the few bishops who made himself available for one-on-one interviews at the conference media center. I’ve always appreciated him for that.
Sorry, Doug. The only thing keeping me from rating Dr. Williams’ leadership in the Anglican crisis as unutterably abysmal is that there hasn’t been any actual leadership for me to rate.
[blockquote]No one has the monopoly on truth or virtue[/blockquote]
You’re okay, I’m okay, everyone’s okay…
I believe that God does have a monopoly of truth and virtue. Therefore He has the sovereign right to define them.
But maybe Madeliene is right, maybe a church that can hold together differing views on a doctine only formalized in the twelfth century and not canonized by the East can finf room for disagreements about that which Christians, Jews, heretics Muslims and religions accross the spectrum have been united for millenia. perhasp we can hold together vegetarians and canibals.
I also like her definition of holiness: the ability to “grasp the intense suffering of the human condition without fear or flinching, and yet [be] able to live with that knowledge and find within it hope and a great compassion”. Well, I “liked” it in the deeply satiric sense in that it gave me a dark pleasure to confirm her total theological ignorance by her identification of holiness without referencing God at all.
ugh, I meant, maybe a church that can hold together differing views on a doctine only formalized in the twelfth century and not canonized by the East can find room for disagreements.. etc
We are “separated by a common language”, but it is no longer between England and America. It is between Christianity and the religion of Einstein and Tagore. You can Google the two names for more info. In the religion of Einstein/Tagore, art and beauty and science are all rolled into one. What is valued is an aesthetic sense, a numinous way of relating to nature and other people.
Bunting writes:
[blockquote]Let’s start with holiness. There are a handful of people I have met – albeit briefly – of whom I would unhesitatingly use the word holy. … and strikingly it is not in what they say that one senses it, but in their presence and how they relate to people: the warmth and humour, the lack of egotism to neither perform for listeners nor manipulate them, the humility and the capacity to pay attention.[/blockquote]
This religion has no place for Moses, Jeremiah, Jesus in the temple, Peter, or the sons of thunder. God loves all people but he chooses people who are passionately committed to him to do his work.
“From the mouth of non-Anglicans”
Spectacular article, great perspective.
Thank you Kendall for posting this
Re: transsubstantiation: one can easily make a Scriptural argument for a Real Presence in the Eucharist, and also one for a symbolic act of memorial. (full disclosure: I favor a real presence) One cannot make an argument from Scripture to support a homosexual lifestyle.
Additionally, parents can agree to tolerate teaching different theories of why children should take Communion.
Homosexuality is not a differing theory of marriage, though. This is where A is teaching that concrete action Z is wrong and B is teaching that it is right, in an area of life with undeniable impact on the world. Accommodation is unlikely.
There is a major difference with the homosexual agenda and transubstantiation disagreement. Transubstantiation difference while very major are differences which both sides based their arguments upon Holy Scripture and Tradition. In the cases here we are having differences over things which one side is taking a ‘civil rights’ approach while the other is holding to Scripture and Tradition.
The Church of England has already made the maximum allowable compromise and those who support sodomy want more. Those with homosexual proclivities are for the most part allowed to be priests if they promise to refrain from sexual acts. Yet homosexual activities want more, which Scripture and Tradition will not allow. Except to repackage it somewhat, I see not room for the C of E to allow for more of the homosexual agenda.
[blockquote]”each side mirrors the other’s disregard for how [b]commitment to an institution[/b] brings a collective responsibility to each other and for each other. No one has the monopoly on truth or virtue”[/blockquote]
Actually, commitment to Jesus (not an institution) brings us to the One who is the Truth.
[blockquote]”The Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker will likely get a star billing in Canterbury over the next fortnight.”[/blockquote]
Probably not. Only in the most superficial way; Hooker’s theology holds Scripture in too high a position to be actually featured. Instead, the fable of the three-legged stool gets passed on and on and on.
And, of course, Anglicans didn’t dodge or deal with transubstantiation: the Articles REJECTED it 400 years ago because it “overthroweth the nature of a sacrament” and is “repugnant” to Scripture. Doesn’t sound too charitable, does it?
Richard Hooker certainly rejected the idea that truth is somehow inaccessible or unknowable or too complex, etc. His work was steeped in the natural law tradition, and his position on Scripture is unambiguous: “the word of God is his heavenly truth touching matters of eternal life revealed and uttered to men: Unto prophets and apostles by immediate divine inspiration; from them to us by their books and writings . . . . we therefore have no word of God but
the Scripture.”
The author’s name is perhaps providential. The quintessential Anglican characteristic … bunting rather than swinging for base-running over the outfiled fence home run to revealed Truth. This is a far, far pun-ier thing than I have ever posted before.
Upun my word, dwstroudmd, you may be right; but this Bunting appears to be a Brit, so using baseball analogies just isn’t cricket.
[blockquote]One cannot make an argument from Scripture to support a homosexual lifestyle. [/blockquote]
Well, sure you can. It’s a weak, dishonest, and vacuous argument, but it can be and has been made. The problem is that you can argue nearly ANYTHING from scripture alone by torturing the language and resorting to the loosest translation possible. It’s all a matter of who gets to definitively interpret scripture.
Does charity in all matters mean acceptance of any view? Does it really? LM