Forum Thread
Patience and Urgency: Lambeth Conference 2008

Immediately after posting this, I went to read tomorrow's gospel (Matthew 18:15-20).  It is dealing with what to do with a fellow believer who sins against you.  first we chat to them privately, then with a couple of other folk, then bring the matter to the church at large. if none of that works, what we are to do then is to treat the offender like a pagan or a tax collector.  and how did Jesus treat pagans and tax collectors? invited them to dinner, healed their loved ones and praised their faith. Words we should all try to live by, whichever segment of the quadrant we inhabit!  (Jesus does ask a lot of us, doesn't he!).

I shall be dispatching an invitation to Akinola forthwith, praying for the health of his family and acknowledging his faihtfulness forthwith. And perhaps receiving similar invitations in return.

I feel so torn when I read John Chane's article.  I suppose that is because I would be a 'communion liberal' in GK's model.  Lesbian and gay people  are being scaegoated  so that the rest of us can feel a sense of togetherness.  But, then again, we have a responsibility as a family to listen to one another, to allow others time to understand why we are passionate about what we believe - and vice versa, and an epistemological humility that understands that we might just be wrong and need always to be open to that possibility.

The language of 'scapegoat' is increasingly gaining theological currency.  I think we all need to pause and reflect a bit before we accuse other people  of scapegoating.  The Christian understanding (via Girard) is that Jesus is the defnitive scapegoat and the defining mark of being a Christian is our penitent admission that  we  are the ones who scapegoat.  In this consists our unity- we are a band of violent, hypocritcal, scapegoating self deceivers who are, through the grace of Christ, being led somewhere else. Instead of defining ourselves over and against' those wicked scapegoaters' we define ourselves as identical with them in what really matters - our sinfulness.

At the moment we have the scenario that us liberals accuse the conservatives of scapegoating lesbians and gays, while at the same time scapegoating Rowan Williams and forward in faith types.   Liberals and the TEC in particular are scapgoated in turn by nearly everyone else, while nearly everyone else scapegoats Gafcon.  Maybe we could redraw GK's quadrant and draw lines to indicate who is scapegoating who! This is a pile of self righteous nonsense! What seemed to be gift of Lambeth is that this stopped for a short while as people encountered one another as people.

 Eschewing justification by the faith of Christ, we seek to justify ourselves either as righteous through our doctrinal purity or as justified through are experience of being victimised.  We think ourselves holy either because we have the 'right' beliefs or because we have suffered at the hands of others in some way.

We do however, need to think about people who are suffering as a result of all this.  Lesbain and gay people suffer.  The poor of the word suffer as we waste our energy blaming each other. This does not make them holy or better than anyone else but it does make them in need of our urgent assistance.  But we need to find ways of witnessing to this and doing something about it without recourse to denouncing one another.  (answers on a post card...)

John Chane, the Bishop of Washington, has published an article, 'Lambeth and the Life of the Communion', in the September edition of Washington Window, which was also published on the Diocese of Washington site this week.

Riazat Butt yesterday reported his article in 'Archbishop accused of marginalising homosexuals', The Guardian, 5 September 2008.

In my 'Patience and Urgency: Lambeth Conference 2008', I mentioned:

Bishops from The Episcopal Church USA who wanted to press ahead with their ecclesial sexual inclusion project and ignore the Windsor Process and the Anglican Covenant, had been carefully ‘minded’ by their media advisers not to react in anger. They went away tight lipped. They were angry, but not in public.

In the 'quadrant' diagram in my 'Reading and Reshaping the Anglican Communion', I included John Chane in the Federal Liberal section. His article confirms this suggestion. It is worth reading as an indication of his views of the outcomes of the Lambeth Conference.

I don't dissent from Pete Broadbent in that things are more complicated: they usually are, but it depends how they line up. I agree the Last Rites book was polemical, but its swep had a core truth in it about moving from relative stability to instability, that the paradox was inclusion by its exclusion led to instability.

John Robinson had quite a critical view of theology, of course he later was seen as more orthodox because of early dating of the NT. But he was going for some pretty central metaphors, and his changes did affect, for example, how to understand prayer. Jenkins, however, was Barth and Bonhoeffer influenced, and arguably more sound on God. The difference was Jenkins was more focussed on details not the big scheme, and people were worked up on details that had been ordinarily accepted in the theology world for decades and decades.

GAFCON made statements about the Bible not contradicting itself which were ridiculous, and there has been the rise of the hard selective literalist, a tiny minority in Western Anglicanism that has managed to make itself more noticed than it deserves.

Liberalism grew in the Anglicans from long roots, but in modern times rose along with the rise of Anglo-Catholicism: the Broad Church always had a radical wing. Nowadays it has become more identifiably "liberal" because the other branches are more identifiable, though the traditionalist Catholics are falling off the edge.

No I don't want it to be simple, but sometimes in a short piece you have to be able to summarise what is going on. Another swift statement is to say that the more you put up the defences, the bigger the gap there is between Church and society, and the more the Church becomes a sect. I don't know how important that it is. Another sweeping point is that a lot of parish life goes on regardless, though this is in a situation of measured decline.

Sorry - note to self - use spell-checker. For faut, read "faux". [ed. now corrected]

I'm not sure Pluralist should remain unchallenged about this latest piece of faux-sociology. Hampson's account is hardly objective - more a piece of bitter polemic than a clear analysis. The ins and outs of catholic and evangelical in-fighting, though sad, are much more subtle than Pluralist would allow. The problem for splits in the Church of England is that there are a number of different fault-lines, with alliances being formed over different issues - ConEvos and TradCaths against the ordination of women; a large swathe of diverse catholics, evangelicals, and MoRs affirming the received understanding of the creeds and formularies; a similarly diverse (but not coterminous) group affirming traditional understandings on sexual ethics.

The doctrinal disputes over Robinson were never the same as those over Jenkins. Nor has evangelicalism in the CofE been literalist since well before the 2WW. Robinson was attempting to restate a fairly traditional faith in a different conceptual framework; Jenkins, on his own admission, was being a cuckoo in the nest.

Similarly, the vast majority of the CofE has held to a traditional view of lifelong marriage between two people of the opposite sex until influenced by the gay rights movement of the last 30 years.

On the question of the ordination of women, the debate among evangelicals has been primarily about scripture, not about human rights.

The common agent of division is of course liberalism, which is by definition parasitic on the body politic. If you wanted to devise a Graham Kings type paradigm of where the CofE is splitting, you could quite easily draw it with liberalism as an invasive tide, lapping simultaneously on a number of different beaches, where different opponents would either, in Pluralist's terms, be engaged in Canute-like activity, or in my terms, be building flood defences and diverting the waters off back whence they came! I'm sure Pluralist would like it to be as simple as he portrays it, but such a view would be as naive as saying that because some bishops all talked to each other, we can solve everything by "intensification" (whatever that means), or that because some other bishops met together and agreed credally in Jerusalem, they've solved the problems. None of this stuff is susceptible of simplistic analysis...

There is this view that a few decades back all Anglicans thought more or less one way (with tendencies for worshipping) and it has all unravelled. It isn't so. When John Robinson wrote Honest to God he received thousands of letters that showed a wide variety of belief, that much later Robert Towler classified into types that were at some variance from official belief. When twenty years on David Jenkins said considerably less the storm seemed all the greater. Now we have influence seen as never before by selective literalists even over an Archbishop and that Advent Letter of 2007. The arena seems to be narrowing all the time.

Michael Hampson in Last Rites shows that this strife we have now has arisen because the demise of the traditionalist Anglo-Catholic has led to something like a straight fight between conservative evangelical and liberal. What sociologists (after George Simmel) call a triad, which is stable, has become a dyad, which is unstable. The actual situation, however, is that the conservative evangelicals pick on other evangelicals as a means of clearing the way to taking on the liberals.

But as the ordination process goes on, the tendency towards the liberal group will recover; the support for women's headship is broader than the liberals of course but the upshot could be that the division comes to the open evangelicals as a result of this divisive and unstable dyad.

What the shrinkage will do is have a smaller triad, possibly, particularly if the Conservative Evangelicals have gone and do their own farming.

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

Every so often an impasse is reached, a zero-sum that you have to face. I canot see how any open evangelical can end up excluding women from being bishops, except on a delay basis. That's for them. However, if an existing group says the principle of women as bishops is an impossibility and that therefore they will leave, then you either pass this point or you don't. In the end they exclude themselves, if some don't leave no one will require them to go. What they want, of course, is a new, separated off associate Church, but after GAFCON (but anyway) that would seem to be an invitation to a formal division.

Let's be clear: the expansion of the full ministry to include women is a narrowing too - the boundaries are coming in. The effect is the placing outside of an extreme traditionalism, or the completion of the division that happened in 1993. Women's ministry tends to be more moderate and even liberal. This is the direction of travel, and has implications for all the other issues under discussion, including gay inclusion and the nature of any Covenant that the Church of England might want to consider (if the law allows).

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

Update on the discussion on StandFirm:  Fr. Matt Kennedy's response to my comment about "raw power" was further discussed.  We were really talking at cross purposes.  I was talking about forcing a mixed-opinion parish in a small town with an orthodox rector in a realigning diocese to take a vote on whether to stay in TEC or realign, when such a vote would destroy the parish (there not being enough people in any of the 3 camps to keep the parish as a viable entity).  I was not talking about confronting false teaching.  The discussion on StandFirm went on for a number of posts, and I think perhaps we now understand each other better. 

Matt Kennedy's reply makes perfect sense within a tradition that believes the Sacrifice of the Mass was a bad idea. 

If we take RW's statement below,

"I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had the about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness…"

we wouldn't do any injustice to Erasmus if claimed that he said something like:

"I concluded that the Sacrifice of the Mass might therefore reflect union with Christ in a way comparable to the Lord's Supper as instituted by Jesus, if an only if it were supported by centuries of Church tradition"

(Erasmus wrote to Bucer: 'I never approved of the abolition of the Mass', 11 Nov 1527).

There are times when error comes to 'the citadel' (Calvin) and it's time to come 'outside the camp' because that's where Jesus is (Heb 13:13). 

I'm have yet to hear from the 'communion centre' why the present situation is so very different from the one in the 16th century.

Best,

Steve