My concluding comment to both the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops at Lambeth is this. “Holding paradoxes in appropriate tension” – which is the call from Lambeth 2008 – may be a useful process in certain domains. Our understanding of the behaviour of light in contemporary physics is one such. But to ask Athanasius or the Cappadocians of the 4th C, and now the Anglican Communion of the 21st C, to stay in formal fellowship with those whose beliefs and practices are “essentially” contradictory and not merely complementary (as are the two contemporary models regarding light) is itself anathema – as many a Church Council canon has affirmed. At root, the traditional logic that undergirded the idea of comprehensiveness is no longer the contemporary logic that is driving the call for inclusivity, in all manner of spheres. It is therefore a “catastrophic failure of leadership” (Nelson Mandela), I submit, to permit, let alone to foster, the continuation of such an incoherent form of Communion as is now the result of Lambeth 2008.
This comment is not born of frustration or fear. Nor does it try to preempt what may or may not happen at the next ACC meeting in May 2009 re the proposed Covenant, nor the extended probable scenarios beforehand via the Primates or thereafter via all the provinces. On the contrary, it has grown itself from a fellowship that is quintessentially Anglican, a process of broad conversation and engagement, pastoral and intellectual, local and international, with the living and the dead, over 25 years, coram Deo. It comes, as with Archbishop Orombi, out of “love [of] the Lord Jesus Christ, and … love [of] the Anglican Communion”. Such love comes too with a final concern: “For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31).