25 forum messages posted by
+ Andrew

I enjoyed this article and it raises legitimate concerns and shows good perspective on what might happen.  I should take issue, however, with the developing notion that, somehow, Cardinal Kasper and the PCPCU have been out-manoeuvred or excluded.  The competence of the PCPCU is with dialogue between churches, and thus the pursuit of a particular kind of ecumenism.  The competence of the CDF is with doctrinal questions and with individuals or groups who adhere to the Catholic Faith and wish to be reconciled with the Holy See.  Thus, this has been an exercise of the CDF and not of the PCPCU.  Also, before saying that Cardinal Kasper has been out-manoeuvred or excluded, I should want to be sure that he isn't himself a member of the CDF. (Cardinals often belong to more than one dicastery, just as C of E bishops often sit on more than one board or committee). My impression is that he is on the strength of the CDF.  Certainly when we went to Rome we saw both Cardinal Kasper and Cardinal Levada, as is a matter of public record (and, to quell a piece of distortion elsewhere, I should say that we discussed our visit with Lambeth beforehand and produced a report afterwrards).

What we are seeing, I think, is a new and different kind of ecumenism in Anglicanorum coetibus, responsive rather than proactive but much less long-winded than some of the ecumenical ventures of the past, where ecumenicacs could safely dream dreams that would never be realised in their lfietimes.

Quite how we shall all react, I'm not sure, but I think there is an onus on those who pray for the pope in the eucharistic prayer, use Roman liturgy in a sort Lund principle way, and express longings for unity with Rome, to explain themselves if they don't explore this new ecumenical possibility very seriously.

My prayers for you all.

+ Andrew

I found Andrew Goddard's article very helpful because it clarified for me what are two important issues.  The first is what is a first order issue.  The second is where fellowship can exist without ecclesiological foundation. 

For those who accept anything like the currently fashionable nuptial theology as an explanation for why the Church does/should not ordain women to the episcopate and priesthood who should be ordained is a first order issue.  Like the elements of the sacraments - water, wine, bread, oil - there is a certain arbitrariness in it and God could have done (but, in my view, did not do) it differently.  With the premises of Catholic theology, to accept a change here is to change who we think God is.  God is unchangeable and his self-revelation was not partial.  The order of the Church - like her Bible, her Sacraments and her Creeds - are unchanging.  We may want to excise the Song of Songs or 2 Peter or 2 or 3 John or parts of Leviticus but we can't and shouldn't try.   It's not unthinkable: the Mormons and the Witnesses are proof of that, so, arguably, is the attitude of some of the Reformers to the Septuagint (which, for many Christians, was the authentic version of the Old Testament).

The second matter - ecclesiology - is similarly troubling.  Anglicans have co-existed uneasily these last five hundred years.  For some it has been the whole of our history.  For others it has been a third of our Anglican history.  Co-herence round the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, that is round agreed external symbols interpreted in widely divergent and sharply contradictory ways, worked for a national church and its international spin-offs but, once, amodst a culture of choice, the external symbols are no longer common and the notion of a national church is finally discredited, not least because of very different arithmetical cicumstances - within the nation, between the 'mother church' and her offspring - we are in trouble.  There is a frantic search for a 'reformed magisterium' - as Lambeth 2008 showed - and much fragmentation.

I want to make common cause - find fellowship - with everyone who loves the Lord Jesus and makes a priority of telling the story and working for the Kingdom but the thought that that can be done by forming new, purer and more holy exclusive fellowships has been the Protestant tragedy.  This fissiparous continues but what Anglo-Catholics are starved of - not least by the Church of England - are coherent ecclesiological structures in which we can continue to live the Catholic life.  This does raise urgent and related issues, not least what to make of the genuine apostolate of orthodox women whom, I believe, have been mistakenly ordained to the ministerial priesthood (and, in one case at least, whom I have met and shared fellowship with) even the episcopate.

Like my namesake I too shall be going along to 'Be Faithful' but not confident that FOCA or GAFCON can deliver anything with enough ecclesiological rigour to satisfy the basic needs of Anglo-Catholics.

May God bless any who read and forgive any shortcomings in me of charity and understanding.

+ Andrew

Though I broadly agree with Pluralist, I must gently protest about the phrase 'extreme traditionalism' being used to describe those who believe what the whole Anglican Church officially believed until a generation ago and the two largest communions in the world continue to believe in.  He is, however, substantially right: either there is the paradox of the narrowing of the boundaries by the full inclusion of women in holy order or there is the full breadth of inclusion whereby all who ever have been included continue to be included, however contradictory their views (which has been the predicament of Anglicans since the sixteenth century).

There is a kind of paralysis in this position: one wonders, for instance, how far the World Council of Churches will manage to get with its new procedure for consensus decision making.  But, as I have said, there has been a major decision for open evangelicals: how 'open' is 'open'?  I think we have passed the mark in the sand on, for example, divorce and re-marriage and now on the ordination of women bishops.  The next one is the gay thing and, I guess, thereafter, gender language about God and the uniqueness of the Christian revelation.    

+ Andrew

Sorry, John (Martin).  I thought this thread wasn't going to run so I posted my comment amidst a contribution to the 'Patience and Urgency' debate of Graham Kings.  I do think it's 'Goodbye ARCIC' but not before the ABC has a go at persuading the PCPCU and CDF in Rome that the Ministry of Women Priests and Bishops is unfinished ARCIC business.  I think, however, it would be more correct to say that it is 'unstarted' and, as with the Orthodox and the Church of the Triune God, there is little possibility of getting beyond the 'we say this, you say that' point, which has not been the ARCIC methodology.

Best wishes

+ Andrew

This should perhaps be on the Cardinal Kasper and Anglican Orders thread - and I mention Ken Petrie and John Martin's postings on that - but I think it is, overall, a 'Patience and Urgency' matter.   The patience and urgency of deciding what the Anglican Communion is, how it should govern itself, and what are the limits to theological diversity, is upon us and this, I believe, is a godly time to sort them out.  ++Rowan's guiding principle - I hazard a guess - is something like John 6:39: 'lose nothing - nobody - of all that' the Father has given the Son.   I have heard him speak movingly about the little people of TEC, saying their prayers and singing their hymns, and, of course, about Christians in straitened circumstances, politically and economically, in Africa.  But we do have to look at what kind of a Church - or churches - Anglicanism is or constitutes.  There is the beguiling vision of 'Reformed Catholicism' - the Rome of Augustinian theology, high art and disciplined liturgy, rather than the barely-baptised paganism of much peasant spirituality.  But, as Newman saw, this will not quite fit the Erastianism of the Established Church (nor, as he would have foreseen, the various evolutions of Anglicanism emerging from the competitive ecclesiologies of the nineteenth century mission field).

Ken Petrie writes (on the Kasper thread), with regard to Rome's 'role as discerning what are changes in contemporary understanding requiring the reformulation of doctrine and what are attempts to change the underlying "deposit of Faith"' the 'we must keep talking until Rome concludes we mean the same as them, even if it looks different'.  He also says that 'in the meantime they will keep reiterating their current position because that is the current standard by which everything else is judged. For the rest of us this is sheer frustration.'  Isn't this the same both ways round?  In other words, aren't Fulcrum Evangelicals simply repeating what they believe to be the "deposit of Faith" revealed in Scripture and waiting for Rome to realise that this is the Faith? 

As for John Martin and Cardinal Kasper's scratched record, all Christian denominations have their scratched records.  Baptists insist on believer's baptism, Methodists take us back to the Priesthood of All Believers, Orthodox to the Church of the Seven Councils - and so on.  The issue in question - women in holy orders - is, for the Roman ordinary magisterium, an issue similar to the elements of Sacraments, the books of the Bible and the articles of the Creeds.  However logical changes might look - using rice instead of grain, beer instead of wine, rearranging and editing the canon of Scripture, amending the Creeds - it simply cannot be done. 

The important question, raised by Ken Petrie, is 'what (then) about the ministry of women'?  For me, the issue is, urgently, 'how can an ecumenically creative way be devised of mobilising the ministry of women'?  Support for the revival of the diaconate for women - embraced in theory by all the Orthodox in Cyprus in 1979 - has not been matched by Rome, which maintained a studied silence until, in Papa Ratzinger's final years at the CDF, they ruled that the sacrament of Order is indivisible, and that the diaconate - qua holy order - is not therefore open to women.  We might conclude that the initial enthusiasm of the Orthodox - no great innovators, they - and the studied silence of Rome were - signs of great attentiveness to the Anglican experiment with women's diaconal (deaconess) ministry.  Could this be done without accelerating demands for women to be admitted to holy order?    

The de facto ministry of women in the Roman Catholic Church - as catechists, eucharistic ministers, lay pastors and lectors - has been an encouragement but there are issues of power and resourcing.  Is the ministry of women inevitably non-stipendiary?  Here the Church of England has a fairly unimpressive record itself: there was an explosion of non-stipendiary ministry, and a hasty rearrangement of categories of selection, when women were ordained.  There have been examples of women unable to gain stipends because of their husband's income - would that happen in reverse? - and women obliged to take non-stipendiary cures as substantial as the stipendiary cures of male neighbours. 

I'm not suggesting - I don't know - any way back or forward on all this.  It's no use Anglo-Catholics continually saying 'we warned you that this would be the result'.  I raise the dilemmas.  Rome does evolve: Dei Verbum is some considerable advance on the position at the time of the Modernist crisis, and I imagine most open evangelicals find the hermeneutic approach of Dei Verbum congenial.  Similarly there will be rejoicing at the advances in mutual understanding with regrard to Justification.  But they aren't going to modify bread, wine, water, oil, the gender of ministers, the books of the Bible orthe doctrines of the Creeds.  Talk of the next pope but one has always been absurd...

So my guess is that it's 'Goodbye ARCIC' and a recognition all round - not just by Open Evangelicals - that the Anglican Communion is, after all, a Church of the Protestant Reformation.  The old romantic (!) Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology, like the Romantic Movement has finally died.  We're left with what Michael Vasey used to call 'the Laudian Takeover' of Anglican liturgy and - perhaps - as Alister McGrath has said presciently with a new Roundhead ascendancy just ahead of us.  Open Evangelicals are walking blindfolded into women bishops: it is fairly clear to this friendly observer that the unifying feature of Evangelicalism - classical, conservative and open - might have been a male episcopate and men and women presbyters and deacons, with male rectors for those who insist.  Had you gone for that, and insisted that the liberals didn't exclude us from their vision of 'Inclusive Church' you would have had many of us Anglo-Catholics around longer.  But that would have hindered the recognition that we are, after all, a Church of the Reformation.  That said, what are, I repeat, the limits of theological diversity in Anglicanism post- Lambeth 2008?

Prayers and greetings.

+ Andrew

Dear L Roberts

I nearly wrote to you privately but there was no way of knowing whether the Crockfords 'L Roberts' is you or not.  So I shall just add this blog-answer to clear up the question of whether I am simply drawing pay from one organisation but working for another.  Who knows, others might have thought the same?   It was all over the papers a week or two ago that I am about to defect to Rome but, inevitably, it is all quite a bit more complicated than that and Rome was neither built nor journeyed to in a day.  I turned down media interview offers on the last weekend of the Lambeth Conference because I did not want my story to be in any sense a spoiler.

But thanks for your remarks and the challenge therein.  My position is a tad less hypocritical than you suggest - though who knows the depths of anyone's heart.  What I was speaking about with regard to the Roman magisterium and Orthodoxy - which I think are much, much less diametrically opposed than you suggest (as the joint appearance of Benedict and Batholomew recently symbolised powerfully) - was the notion of authority.  Almost every commentator - inside and outside - has agreed that the Anglican problem has been and is one of authority and the Lambeth Conference, a very rich experience for me, indicated once more that Anglicanism urgently needs to seek a consensus on authority and, cautiously, I have been suggesting that progress is being made.

As for the suggestion that I am disloyal - enjoying the benefits stipend of a bishop of the established church whilst making public affirmations of allegiance to Roman Catholicism - I think you would need to know a great deal more of what is going on than you can from a blog-site to substantiate that.  Anglo-Catholics have worked very hard for a structural solution that would allow us to continue the ecumenical journey which had been the commitment of Anglicanism as a whole - though not all Anglicans - since the setting up of ARCIC.  As Anglicans and Roman Catholics diverge alarmingly, we do have to consider our position.  Meanwhile General Synod has ruled out the structural solution we need and something more radical - and I believe radically graced than we have so far experienced - is taking place.

To know any more than that you would have to know me and, of course, there is a limit to what can be said in a public forum.  But thank you for your challenge and thank you for your generosity.  I think you have enjoyed calling me to account but can I say, finally, what is cake for if it is not for eating?    And that really, really is the end of my Lambeth blogging.....

God bless

+ Andrew

Monday morning  (the Feast of the Cure d'Ars, Patron of the Parochial Clergy)

As promised, I post this last 'guest blog' from home.  I left Canterbury after yesterday's final plenary session in the Big Top, which, in many ways, was a cross between morning worship in a certain kind of evangelical church and a school speech day.  (I make the comparisons kindly and not in a spirit of criticism).  There were the little songs, linking together announcements and nuggets of Christian goodness: this was the church bit - church as entertainment, fellowship and simple melodiousness.  It was clearly all leading up to the big sermon at the end and the mini-sermons as we went along built up the impetus and prepared us.  The school speech day bit was the applause for each and everyone - design group, stewards, bible study leaders, listeners and so on.  We didn't quite get as far as the coach drivers and the dinner ladies but at one stage it seemed inevitable that we should.  And why not?  The coaches ran well and ther mashed potato never ran out.  (I enjoyed asking the breakfast team 'Now what have you got for us today?' because, each and every day, it was the same.... )

I was immensely impressed by the ecumenical comments from Kallistos Ware - Greek Orthodox - and Iain Torrance - Scottish Presbyterian.  Neither was a stranger to Anglicanism or, for that matter, Englishness.  The one implicitly criticised our preoccupation with the North American gay rights agenda - which is being exported as swiftly and surely as Starbucks - the other endorsed the notion and mechanism of Covenant.  Kallistos' gentle criticisms focused specifically on our failure to focus on marriage, stable family life, and the importance of fathering: it is the collapse in these three related areas which is causing enormous damage to the fabric of society and these are the areas which traditional Christian Faith has most to say about and most to offer on.   As for the Covenant notion, it is gracious gift, given and received, and not contract, thrashed out line by line.  I am sure the Archbishop of Canterbury was grateful for support from both reflections.

Eventually, the songs sung and the plaudits applauded, we got to the third presidential address.  It was a magisterial defence of catholicity and of the urgency of discovering what I myself have called a liberal magisterium, a hermeneutical consensus for the sake of the whole.  It will involve moratoria, fora, the strengthening of the instruments of unity and a patient redefinition of canons, dioceses, provinces and communion - so that these features of shared life have agreed meanings and interchangeabilities.  Whether this will be possible will depend on patience and restraint in the liberal West and the conservative South - and there are lots of adverse signs and fragmentation is a force which is hard to contain.  I wish the Communion well but cannot help but thinking that the arguments we have heard about restraint on issues of human sexuality, mutatis mutandis, apply also to Faith and Order questions.  The presence of women bishops at Lambeth - and it was a great privilege to meet and get to know two or three of them - should remind us all that North American 'prophetic action' on women's ministry was what precipitated the gradual removal of the gender bar in ministry (which we are having to catch up with fully still in England) and it is exactly that 'prophetic action' - which has enthralled, obsessed, and overshadowed Lambeth 2008 - which will probably lead to same sex marriage becoming acceptable, eventually, throughout the Anglican Communion, as it has in secular Western society. 

That leads me to my concluding reflection.  I am immensely grateful for the invitation from Fulcrum to join them as a guest blogger.  I have given it my best shot - I am not a saint, a sage or a scholar - and have been dismayed only when I seem to have caused offence.  I have never before been attacked for being in any sense 'anti-gay', and that has been a bit of a shock.  I stand by the Catholic Faith, revealed in Scripture and Creed, held by and interpreted by Tradition, and, sad to say as I sat amidst the throng of a vibrant, reformed but clearly Protestant Communion, authority can now be found, in my view, only in the Roman magisterium, magnificently expounded and exemplified by Benedict XVI, or in the buried treasure of Orthodoxy, where all is intact because nothing perceptibly changes.

if that makes me a conservative, then I am proud to be one but always, I hope, motivated by and sustained by a care and concern for God's people.  I fall flat on my face over and over again but God in his mercy raises me up. 

May the Lord bless you and keep you, whoever you are, and bring you into the full light of his saving Presence.

+ Andrew

Saturday night and Sunday morning...

Two figures have loomed large in this Conference. For some, one or other is an archangel, the other a demon. For most, they have been signs of the tragic polarity that the Anglican Communion has experienced and is experiencing. One is the representative of LGCM, the other of GAFCON. The LGCM - and I apologise if I have got the organisation wrong - have strategically placed bins of newsletters, Lambeth Witness. Many - at least initially - will have regarded these as official conference handouts and it has been a mistake of the conference organisers unwittingly to collude with this impression. Other, more essential and official information, has been available in paper form much more discreetly, so discreetly that we haven't always found it. GAFCON, meanwhile, has been very discreetly lobbying - I myself wasn't lobbied at all - and several bodies - Bishops from South Asia, and CAPA, for example - have produced statements in support of Lambeth 1.10 and moratoria. The final hearing having taken place, Sunday has a bible study, an Indaba, a plenary and a closing Eucharist in Canterbury Cathedral. Will the moratoria proposed by the Windsor Report hold? Will a Pastoral Forum, as proposed by the Windsor Continuation Group, be established? What other bright ideas will emerge in the closing stages? There has been much warmth, many deep and generous relationships established and a huge volume of affection and personal support for the Archbishop of Canterbury. But what will be the outcome?

Some things we know already. One is that any moratoria that can be agreed could be guaranteed only until the next meeting of the General Convention of TEC. Another is that the Indaba method has been a great success for consultation and stakeholding and, even if it doesn't yield (or maybe hasn't yielded) concrete decisions, it could be evolved to the point where it did, and is a major candidate to replace the disgraced seventies synodality that the Church of England, for example, has landed itself with. A third is that Bishop Christopher Hill's response to Cardinal Kasper, admitting that English structures are tied up with the emergent (Protestant) nation state, has opened up a whole area of thinking for those who would have preferred - would still like to cling to - an idea of Ecclesia Anglicana as a branch of the Church Catholic maintaining historic faith and order.

In my view, the Communion - with which I myself am in impaired relationship because of the faith and order questions - needs to grapple with the relationship between diocese, province and international gathering of provinces - and that needs major work on each of these items and something much more like a consensus on what they all mean. As I have said before, bloggingly, this might be half a century's work and will almost certainly take a very long time. But it is achievable. And, I think, worth achieving.

But what about GAFCON? Who knows? Here is a cliff hanger. My prediction is that those of us who are Catholics as regards faith and order need urgently to seek unity with the ancient churches. The Copts and the Orthodox may well be the place to seek that unity in some parts of the Anglican world. The British and the Americans need urgently to look to Rome and take up Cardinal Kasper's hint, perhaps, about the 'pastoral provision' as a vehicle - a hint dropped in his lecture, or was it in the question time that followed it? (I haven't yet had chance to read the text of the lecture, though I was there.) Meanwhile, those who accept fewer councils and are more enthusiastic about the BCP Communion Order, the 39 Articles and the reformed Ordinals of the sixteenth and seventeenth century will be better off within the Lambeth Communion, but relying on the immensely impressive Global South leadership that did come to Lambeth and is committed to being and representing mainstream Anglicanism, a reformed, biblical and evangelical faith. (Mind you, Fulcrum, it will probably have some hard questions to ask of you).

My view has always been that GAFCON should have been a meeting in the wake of Lambeth, to assess where we had got to. It could have been in England - saving a few plane fares - and those who stayed away from Lambeth should have been here. Tragically many stayed away: we missed them and there could have been ways of being here without being here, if you see what I mean. I myself was pleased that this was 'the Lambeth Conference' and not 'the Lambeth Communion', and that one could attend daily mass off campus rather than subject each day's tent liturgy to a doctrinal test. But most of all I was pleased that I have been able to talk to women bishops, to Americans who support gay marriage and to many others. A daily bible study with a Seventh Day Adventist as the ecumenical member of the group has been a tremendous blessing as have been our bible study leader, Indaba leader, Indaba rapporteur, and Indaba listener.

Last word for this posting must go to the Stewards, young people from throughout the world. They have been brilliant models of openness, patience and holiness. One or two trickled in and out of the traditionalist mass - a young, fiercely intelligent English woman in her early twenties (we Anglo-Catholics have quite a number of those), a Canadian student, a visitor from the Far East and, as you might expect, a young Texan. But all of them on duty at their station were impressive: I especially enjoyed the conversation with the young biologist whom I think I persuaded that Jesus, humanly speaking, derived a significant part of his genetic material, not to mention his nurture and formation, from the Mother of God (not someone mentioned terribly often on the Fulcrum website, I dare say). If I didn't persuade her, I think I set new thought patterns going. Better than Jove descending from Olympus and having his evil way: a version of the Virgin Birth which I sometimes think is lurking around when there is no adequate Mariology. (We're nearly in extra time, Graham, so there's no point in handing out the red card.....) My last posting, I think, will be from the comfort of my office back home. Meanwhile, thank you for your company, your patience and your long suffering godliness. It's all that that we need in the Church, not the slings and arrows of internet polemic.

+Andrew

Much, much too late - 'Sailing by' has already sailed by - for a proper post and some distractions early in the morning will prevent a good session then.  I managed one and a half Indabas today: a little 'horizontal theology', as my brother of Richborough calls it, meant that I managed only the second half of the second Indaba.  What was moving this morning was that we managed to go off piste and devote three quarters an hour in our group to the question of supporting the persecuted Church in Zimbabwe.  (The excellent Bishop of Harare is in our midst and we want to say to the world at large that anyone who harms him or wishes him ill harms us and wishes us ill).   We grappled with Covenant ideas and this is still a cliff hanger...  Who knows what might happen tomorrow?  My guess is that we shall end up with a result that is not newsworthy. 

I have benefited from reading Bishop Nick's blog, posted a little earlier, and agree with him thoroughly about Bishop John Chew.  Not sure about Chris Sugden: he doesn't seem to know what I look like and, from his reaction, am not sure if he knows that it is me nodding politely in his direction.  Certainly I have not been asked to go along to any GAFCON-esque meetings - if there have been such.  And I too wonder whether pink-hatted Anglo-Catholics (a little pink skull cap is so much easier and more minimalist than the purple pink shirts and purple pink cassocks so many liberal bishops regard as de rigeur) can sign up to a limited diet of councils, a particular and rather eccentric eucharistic liturgy, and the 39 Articles.   

For me the fascinating questions of the day are ecclesiological: not how to stave off disaster for the Anglican Communion, but how the Indaba method (however unlike it is in pace, shape and direction to a genuine African Indaba) could be a genuinely new way of synodality.  There is a possibility of participation and stake-holding - not to mention godly consensus - not available in our normal decision-making procedures.  Perhaps this is because, as Christopher Hill responded to Cardinal Kasper, a reformed Church has taken on and become ensnared by the politics of the nation state - whether English monarchism or American republicanism.  We need a new way of synodality - not least to replace the discredited synod systems of the seventies.

The overwhelming question is how diocese (local church) relates to province (group of local churches with common cultural, national or ethnic characteristics) and province to Communion.  A covenant would work out these relationships, local and international, and tackle the huge disparities and anomalies in how these terms are used and are weighted in different parts of the Anglican Communion.  (Colin Podmore is the authority on the confusing use of these words).

People are in a hurry over this process but I myself should expect it to take 50 or 100 years to get it right, especially now the English cultural backage is being stripped away in post-colonial fashion.  A comparison with Roman Catholic ecclesiology would be appropriate in terms of time-scale.  A century separated Vatican I and Vatican II - and the discovery of the balance between universal primacy (Vatican I) and collegiality and the local church (Vatican II).  Since Lumen gentium there have been forty years of work on collegiality, synodality and subsidiarity and the work has barely begun.  Meanwhile Anglicans are strong on Province and Communion - without being good at either - and RCs are strong on diocese and papal primacy - without getting either quite right. 

Mentioning Lumen gentium, we shall probably (with a prevailing wind) come up with a Lambeth document of this genre.  There will remain a dangerous hole - a way of arbitrating competing hermeneutics.  But all of this will either sound dry and technical or warm and obvious. The newsmen will despair.....  I myself have just turned down a media invitation to build up a Kasper story this weekend.  ('Bishop of Ebbsfleet defects to Rome as Cardinals declare Anglican-Catholic relations dead in the water' is not a story I want to give any impetus to.  For one thing, I have promised to wait for the February 2009 Synod.  For another, if there is to be a new 'Parting of Friends', which seems inevitable, it will be a process not an event, a journey and not a story.)

I predict (dangerous this) that Lambeth 2008 will be of intense interest to theologians, ecclesiologists and church historians but a great disappointment to the newshounds.  I am not predicting success or solutions to Communion crises and I remain in impaired communion with the Communion but a committed member of the Conference.  The English bishops have voted for my job description to be scrapped but Anglican bishops of all stripes seem to have valued my noisy taking part in the forum.  At least two women bishops have been very affirming - to use the C of E word.  One senior woman has told me that, of course, she realises that the issue is not gender but authority.  Another, initially very suspicious of me, has become very warm and supportive.  And - but this is a story not to go into - I even had a brief and very cordial word the other day in the coffee queue with the presiding bishop of TEC.  Mind you, I suspect that, like Chris Sugden, she hadn't quite spotted who I was.

Lambeth has been much too long but it needs another couple of weeks and we are into the last two days - slightly less for me.   And, Radio 4 having long turned into the World Service as I write, so to bed.

Good night campers

+ Andrew

Friends, Romans Catholics and Countrymen. I met the Bloggers' Minder yesterday (Thursday) at the Gulbenkian Theatre tea rooms - half a dozen bits of plastic garden furniture under a Greenwood Tree, something between 'afternoon tea on the lawn' and the gathering of African Christians shaded from the sun. Not conversational enough, said he (the Minder), and stop banging on about women's ordination. A yellow card, I thought, but we're in the closing stages of the match. Seriously, he was friendly and appreciative and promised me that, though only three people have written in comments, my blog has a wider readership than I might imagine. Dan Brown proportions? Under the same Greenwood Tree - I seem to remember the next phrase is 'come lie with me', not a good way to go on 'the Bishop and Human Sexuality Day' - I found Christopher Cocksworth (who once caught me out - whilst an Anglo-Catholic curate) preaching on Justification by Faith. I also saw Francis Bridger, who used to be my neighbour in Nottingham. His was the low church at the top of the hill and mine was the high church at the bottom of the hill. He had forty eight lay readers, minimum qualification 'consultant surgeon', I had a motley group of servers, none of whom ever did the same thing in  the same way twice, and a children's choir of interesting youngsters, most of who had found their way to mass despite parental apathy or hostility. And a cantor who shouted at me and shouted at them.  But they were the golden days.

Now, Father Baines, what should Mr Burnham say to you? I think you've seriously misunderstood Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue. When Dr Fisher visited the Vatican, they did their best to call him 'Dr Fisher', no robing was allowed, no photographs and he - later the hero of Trent Rectory - had to pretend that he was calling in on the way back from somewhere else, otherwise the Protestants would have been revolting. When Michael Ramsey went, he was in Convocation robes, the Pope gave him his episcopal ring - wasted on a lay man - and he was known by his title, feted and photographed. Similar gestures were made to Archbishops Coggan and Runcie - including a visit to Runcie's cathedral. The present Archbishop, it is said, would haved censed and sprinkled the coffin of JPII at the end of the funeral rite, if only the Orthodox present had been able to agree amongst themselves which of them should represent the Orthodox world in this significant gesture.  And when Rowan visited Benedict, he was given the privilege of a papal altar, at the Dominican Church, to celebrate the Anglican liturgy and, moreover, was received at the door with incense and holy water, as bishops are when, in the Catholic rite, they solemnly visit.  (Don't know if that happens to you, Nick, but it happens to me a lot and, when they sing Bruckner Ecce sacerdos magnus with trombones, I haved to look round to see whether someone really important has slipped in behind me.)  These are all symbolic matters in a symbolic world but, if you want to do the ecclesiology, have a look at the books produced in 1996, the anniversary of Apostolicae Curae.  Since 1896 we've had 'the Dutch Touch' (Old Catholic input into episcopal consecrations), increasing convergence on the theology of ordination as authority and not just charism, consultation on ordinal texts (the new CW Ordinal went to Rome to be checked through), and the work of ARCIC on Ministry.  But I'm getting boring and, sadly, most of that is history. 

Two more things before breakfast: first, how lovely it was to hear from John Martin about evangelical-catholic convergence and how disappointing that this should be dismissed by some of our correspondents as cynical political manoeuvring. It didn't work but - to be honest - I continue to find that my greatest support and encouragement is not from the high church liberals, who put the same clothes on as me and use rites and ceremonies similar to me (though toned down and Englished a little), but from the excellent evangelical bishops who treat me as an exotic grape picker, who can reach some of the rarer varieties of grapes in the vineyard and harvest them for the Lord.  I'll even hand out prizes: Birmingham, Coventry and Lichfield.  (And when I say Coventry I mean the last one and the new one: the new one will be just as supportive....a word of prophecy).  So leave off the cyncical stuff.  We're co-workers, them in their way, me in God's...  (A jest not a jibe).

And what about sex?  The Indaba group was quite good but the Bishop of Harare - brave man - is persuading us to move on a bit and talk about supporting persecuted Christians, and we're going to break out and do that today, instead of what the programme says we should be doing.  In my view it could go either way on the sex.  (No joke intended).  Quite where we'll get to by Sunday, whether there'll still be an Anglican Communion, does rather depend on the Americans, but there are mixed messages coming out.  There is even a chance that the whole Indaba methodology will be vindicated and that we shall leave not only on a nimbus of niceness but with something of a deal.  The deal I should like to see is that homosexual marriage is a first order issue - a first order disorder - but that how, quietly and pastorally, we deal with disciples in homosexual relationships is a second order issue.  We need to leave room for conscience and difference but not explain away the weight of biblical teaching and exegesis in the tradition.  Not sure that would work but it has worked in England.  There have to be no more V G Robinson cases.  The bishop is the husband of one wife, Scripture tells us, and nothing makes me think either that that means the bishop can be a woman or the wife a man.  Whoops, I'll have the blooging minder after me.  But, if I get a red card, you'll only lose the Saturday and Sunday blog.

And no, friends, Roman Catholics and countrymen: much as I have enjoyed being a guest blogger at Lambeth, I have no intention in becoming a blogging blogger thereafter.  I like reading the postings but otherwise have more than enough to do keeping the e-mail Inbox empty. 

PS I went to Ebbsfleet yesterday. Ebbsfleet Lane had a sign saying 'Road Closed' but I went a nd had my picture taken standing by the St Augustine Cross, the basis of the Ebbsfleet logo.  We (the Bishop of Richborough and I) also went to Richborough castle, quite near the Viagra factory, where some of the building seemed very tall...) I demanded from the English Heritage lady that the Bishop of Richborough be paid his rents and tithes.  Instead we bought lemon curd and chutney and mischievously peeped at the castle ruins without paying the admission charges. What next? They'll be charging people to visit cathedrals next....

+ Andrew

Greetings to Bultmannites, Spongites, and Zoroastrians.  (Will that do, Nick?)  Greetings also to all who love the Lord Jesus. 'Living under Scripture - the Bible and the Bible in Mission', yesterday's theme, was motherhood and apple pie where we were - but I am a frequenter of Walsingham, and when it's on the menu, I nearly always choose the apple pie.  Meanwhile my good friend John Martin - how I miss those editorial meetings of New Directions board back in the 90s - when, as the Anglo-Catholics chuckled at and parodied outrageously the lunacies of the Church, John would do his rejoicing with those who rejoice and his weeping with those who weep whilst calming bringing us back to the project and the demands of godliness.  I have always suspected that 'the project' was what, in one sense, 'did for' John as CEN editor: the reading public weren't where we were and the evangelical-catholic synthesis, creatively at work in the States, was just not part of our story.  And, as John suggests - and much to my chagrin as an evangelical Catholic (a bit like a Catholic evangelical but you swap round the adjective and noun functions) - not, even now, quite our story.  I won't flog this one further - I promise - but, please note, I wasn't asking Fulcrum for anything more than support for our essentially hermeneutic (though, exploring a different ecclesiology, it comes to slightly different conclusions about who can be presbyters).  Enough, but thanks for writing John.

Yeterday's story for me was the Cardinal Kasper address.  It was obviously going to outgrow its scheduled venue - which would have been an insult to a Prince of the Church. (Come on, readers, allow me a little irony: having met Walter Kasper, he wouldn't pull rank on a curate if he thought the curate was doing a good job).  His talk will be published in full as, I hope, will Bishop Christopher Hill's response.  (Neither of the other Anglican responses were as interesting but Christopher, friendly fallen angel, knows the territory and had some intersting things to say about the Protestantpolity of our church government, its relationship with the emergent nation state in the sixteenth century and its need to evolve.  Zizoulias and others were mentioned: clearly what we have is a parliamentary style of synodical government, based on amending, blocking, dividing, lobbying, rotten boroughs and voting each other down.  Gets us into trouble, doesn't it?)

Kasper clearly thinks we Anglicans are in trouble: though he prays for the unity of the Anglican Communion, he thinks the same-sex stuff would put us outside the Christian mainstream tradition and that women bishops puts us firmly outside the apostolic succession of Faith and Order.  Heading this way, the goal of full sacramental communion, and mutual recognition of orders - ambitions of ARCIC (which he pronounces Arch-itch..) become unattainable, and the thrust of joint mission, envisaged by IARRCUM, a lost opportunity.    

He did however indicate unambiguously that, unless the Anglican Communion desist from its present innovations, the goal of Anglican - Roman Catholic dialogue cannot be the full sacramental communion which has driven the ARCIC process for 40 years and more recently the work of IARCCUM too. He made much of our 1,500 years of shared life (75% of Christian history), to us as part of the Western Rite, a severed part of the Western Church.  Speaking warmly of the Caroline Divines and the Oxford Movement, he encouraged us to seek to form a new Oxford Movement. 

Although Cardinal Kasper drew 100 - allowing for hangers-on, that was probably 1/7 of the Lambeth Fathers - I didn't see a Lambeth Mother there (we have, I think, 13 of them) - it is clear that Anglican-Roman Catholic stuff is not on the radar for most people.  The IARRCCUM self-select I attended earlier in the week was 50% RC observers and visitors and, of the remaining seven, one was an Anglican lay theologian (Mary Tanner), three were traditionalist bishops and two of the remaining three were there to give position papers on IARCCUM progress in their countries - USA and NZ.  It was good to have a Nigerian there - an impressive guy - but he turned out to be a young RC archbishop.  Cardinal C M O'C did a self-select earlier in the week on 'Dead in the Water or Money in the Bank' - a reflection on Anglican-RC dialogue these last 40 years - and, though he was politely optimistic, he was speaking to an audience of less than 20, some of whom were from his team. 

Not moaning but reporting what others might not be in a position to report.  Meanwhile I need a good shave and shower: we're doing human sexuality today.  That still seems to be everybody's favourite subject: I'd rather it was handled at self-select sessions in, say, the Isle of Skye.  That might be far enough away to stop these agendas so dominating the Gospel task.  Oh, and I caught my first glimpse of Vicky Gene last night: in the bar at Rutherfords.  I'll make a note in my Observers Book of Rare Species. 

God bless, all you pagans and Wykehamists (yes, I know it doesn't mean that - I was at New College in my youth and still go there for a spot of good music in a space which Cardinal Kasper's folk and mine shared from 1379 to the early 1530s).

+ Andrew