Pam

Thanks for your comment.  I think we are pretty well agreed, I'm glad to say. 

On the issue of how outsiders see the church treating women: I've long noticed that it is the churches which are less  "inclusive" (in PC terms) that are actually growing!  

(NB You actually find a very wide diversity in many conservative churches - but liberals just tend to focus narrowly on sex nowadays).  Liberal churches are the ones that are dying out - which makes a mockery of their oft-repeated arguement that it is lack of PC inclusion that is causing people to not join the church!

This observation supports, I think, the view that it is obediance to Christ and the Apostles that is crucial for churches.  Cultural imperatives are very important (I do support PC inclusion as far as it doesn't contradict clear Scriptural teaching) but they are NOT crucial.

Erasmus asked:

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Pam, doesn't the imperative to Christian love mean that we have to be prepared to accept legitimate difference on secondary matters.  One person eats only anything, the other won't eat meat.  One should not look down on the 'weaker' Christian and the other should not judge their Christian brother. (This is on secondary issues, you'll note - not credal and sin/salvation issues!)

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I'm not sure what I've said that makes that question necessary - everything is secondary to the fact that Christ died for us really, the question 'is this what Christ died for?' is a pretty good corrective to many flights of fancy.

I was very taken by Tony Higton's book, Prophesy!, in which he repented of making an issue of things which were not salvation issues.

To me,  whether my brother takes communion from me or not is not a salvation issue.

But I suppose someone oberving how women are treated in the Church and therefore not wanting anything to do with it just might be - though in fact I believe God is a little bit more on the ball than that.

PS  As it takes quite a while for posts to appear, a 'preview post' option would be very helpful - I found my last post quite scary, the typeface was so large and bold, so goodness knows what other people thought. Also I could have worked out how to show Erasmus' quote as a quote.

ps Liddon, if the truth is something you find offensive, it is not me who has a problem!   But if what I said was wrong, you only need to show that you really do believe in an absolute sense.... you might start by explaining how your idea of a broad church hasn't changed? 

Pam, doesn't the imperative to Christian love mean that we have to be prepared to accept legitimate difference on secondary matters.  One person eats only anything, the other won't eat meat.  One should not look down on the 'weaker' Christian and the other should not judge their Christian brother. (This is on secondary issues, you'll note - not credal and sin/salvation issues!)

If I wanted to explore what offended me in what other Christians believe and do I'm sure I could have a field day.  But I think you would criticise me for being too "narrow and judgemental"....

Isn't that exactly what anglican Liberals are now turning into?  

Hi. I posted a reply to Erasmus, and a comment on Andrew Burnham's latest post. These have not appeared. Did they got lost?

The problem with the period of reception idea is that it seems to infer that ordination is provisional and can be undone.

As an ordained woman with a fairly high view of the sacraments I see that as essentially undermining of everyone's ordination, and of the sacraments at which I preside, as well as of those to whom my priesthood is very real.

When I trained we studied ecumenical theology with the nearby Catholic seminary. We (ordinands from the C of E, the URC and the Methodist church) were warmly invited to receive a blessing when we attended the seminary chapel, which we did. I was surprised to discover that I felt deeply distressed doing this, not intellectually  - I knew the score - but spiritually and emotionally. However it felt wrong to refuse the hospitality that was offered, even though it was limited.

When the seminarians came to our college chapel they sat with their arms staunchly folded and did not receive a blessing. Despite the fact that we were studying ecumenical theology together, this was never touched upon in our seminars. we seem to have an enormous capacity to distance ourselves from our own and others' pain by keeping things at arms length, keeping it theoretical or legislative. Not being in communion with others hurts.

I have also had the experience of being offered communion by a friend who is a priest who does not accept the ordination of women. I hadn't thought about the implications of this beforehand - it was sprung on me - but as we came to communion, everything in me was crying out 'I am not in communion with you' but I forced myself for the sake of friendship, for the sake of the sacraments and perhaps for the sake of Christ who died for both of us equally. I'm still not sure if that was the right thing to do but it seemed and still seems to me this goes beyond 'feeling and right into the territory of sharing in the brokenness of the world. Which also hurts.

I did manage to talk to one of the seminary lecturers in the bar about the sacraments. He was originally a C of E priest who had moved as a result of the ordination of women to the priesthood. He assured me that dealing with female ordinands on the course was not a problem as 'we do not regard any of your orders as valid'.

Lets get real. There will never be a period of reception long enough to bring everyone round to the same way of thinking. We have to find ways for those of differing views who wish to continue together to do so. We can't be driven by those who say 'unless I get my own way I'm leaving'. It's also unfair on those who aren't happy but who are staying to characterise all those who are unhappy as being at that point. Some people are unhappy but committed to staying. Nor can we look to legislation to hold us together on the journey. Only God can do that.

We need both mercy and justice, we need to trust in God for the grace to get through, to focus on the things which we hold in common give him the space to surprise us by doing a new thing.

Perhaps if we'd done that in 1992 things would be clearer now.

I believe more and more in less and less.

Liddon

I think that +Andrew has just made his points very clearly, so I won't repeat them.  I think the trouble with many liberals (count yourself in or out as appropriate) is that they think they believe in things - such as some of those things you listed - but only because those things seem to help achieve their liberal objectives... not because they really believe in them (in absolute terms). 

Hence the recent demise of the liberal ideal of a "broad church" - in favour of a Liberal church (cf Pluralists post)!

ps I noticed that the beliefs you listed were only ones related to current political issues :-o  I believe in God the Trinity, Jesus as Saviour and Lord of all humankind, that God inspired the writers of the Bible (properly interpreted), and that the Church is, uniquely, the Body of Christ.

Sorry to come back again.  I'm not one of those who think that catholic traditionalists have a monopoly on truth.  In my view an evangelical ecclesiology is possible, in which women and men are authorised to minister.  It doesn't quite work for me as equality in ministry because, for me, the bridegroom and head, bride and body typology are part of the Bible's eco-system and our misunderstanding of that is symptomatic of our deep confusion about gender - collapse of family, catastrophic falling of birth rates in W Europe, the need for wives to earn a full salary to make the mortgage manageable - and yet the continued expectations on women to do more than half the home and family stuff.    It's the area that Pope John Paul II calls 'human ecology'.  But if it isn't equality then it is, of course, complementarity and there is much work to do on that.  The Church is stuck in the era of unisex hairdressers and everyone else is thirty years on from that.   

The problem with the Synod vote is not that a Code of Practice could not be devised that was generous, or even that liberals would necessarily block an inclusive Code of Practice as relentlessly as they blocked structural provision for traditionalists.  The problem is that we have foreclosed on the doctrine of reception.  Reception in the early 1990s was conceived as an ecumenical - even eschatological - notion: the admitting of women to Holy Order could not be said to be 'received' as authentic Christian doctine until it had been accepted by the ancient churches, who have always formed the majority of the Christian Church and by the evangelical churches which cleave to male headship.  Reception now has been reinterpreted to mean 'until people generally in this culture accept women's ministry' - which, of course, in an equal ops. culture means 'right now'.  The problem with this doctrine of reception is that it has already got evangelicals into trouble on the subject of divorce and remarriage, is now getting evangelicals into trouble on the subject of gay sex, and will shortly get you into trouble, I suspect, on the relativism of religious truth.  Different paths up the mountain: TM is as good as the Jesus Prayer &c.

Traditionalists - catholic and evangelical - don't buy this revised doctrine of reception, any more than we buy any of the rest of it.  My problem with a certain bishop in the news - as with some other American bishops - begins with the ending of his marriage.  I have immense compassion towards him - and to others in this situation (and should feel even more if he had stayed at home and not become a campaigner for his own lifestyle).  I simply think that we need to heed the pastoral epistles on what is required in bishops and deacons (and hence presbyters) and abide by the wisdom of tradition - which honours holy matrimony and chaste celibacy as lifestyles for Christian ministers.

By foreclosing on the doctrine of reception, those who have quaint beliefs - the beliefs of the last two thousand years and the majority of the Christian family - are herded into a reserve, where they can be protected and isolated from the mainstream of the Church of England.  A ghetto.  Ghettoes are not created by the inmates. 

I hope this somewhat lengthy posting explains something of our predicament and the folly of a synodical process which allows majority votes on issues of doctrine, particularly on what are, for some of us, first order doctrinal issues about who God is, how he reveals himself in Jesus Christ to the world and how we preach, proclaim and celebrate his saving power.

+ Andrew Ebbsfleet

Erasmus, I'm sorry about the rather sneering tone of your reply to me, in which you say that FIF  people BELIEVE in something. The implication, of course, being that the rest of us don't. I can only speak for myself. I believe that God is calling women to the priesthood and the episcopate. I believe the C of E has the authority to recognise, accept and respond to that call. I believe in the unity of the clergy in a diocese, grouped around their bishop. I believe in the universal nature of priesthood. I believe that the C of E must not accept structures which institutionalise the abuse of women. I believe that no priest in the C of E should refuse eucharistic hospitality to another priest. I believe that the Church must be a winess to the world in matters of justice and equality. I believe that God has neither person, parts, nor passions, and that the female is part of the godhead as much as the male. I believe a few more things, too, but will that be enough to go along with? And, i believe I am not alone in my beliefs.

I would agree that the vote and the future conclusion of that vote for women bishops does exclude the barriers that the Church Union and Forward in Faith have set for themselves.

I'd go further and say that this will complete the marginalisation of traditional Anglo-Catholicism to the point of exclusion. There is a predicament in such a vote that means that the Catholic input into the C of E will be of the Affirming Catholic kind. The same may well come about with evangelicals too as a result of FOCA and all it comes to do, especially with groups signing up to it. Furthermore, FOCA had an effect to underline no alternative structures: it was not the only or main reason, but it was there.

I'd say that the Church of England by these actions is moving towards a more concise shape, and one closer to TEC and the other Anglican Churches in the British Isles than before. Plus it has been shown that, ideologically, women's ministry does push the institution into a more liberal identity, that is a trimmed version of what existed from before twenty years ago.