Another day, another tone-deaf report from Anglican Journal. Archbishop Hutchison has spoken again to AJ, with mixed results.
The primate of the Anglican Church of Canada doesn’t seem to have been in a very good mood this past week. In a blog entry written from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, before the start of the primates’ summit, he expressed his displeasure with the meeting’s agenda. After almost a week talking with his fellow primates, culminating with the release of a communiqué signed by all, he now says he’s “profoundly discouraged”.
Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said that he had been “profoundly discouraged” by the communiqué issued by Anglican leaders warning the U.S. church of consequences if it did not abandon its liberal stance on sexuality, and had found it “tempting” not to sign it.
He says he signed it only because he decided to follow the lead of TEC Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.
Archbishop Hutchison said primates had also struggled with what he called “a chicken and egg situation” involving the American church and conservative primates who have overstepped their boundaries by providing Episcopal oversight to dissenting churches and congregations.
I don’t think so. Referring to a “chicken and egg situation” implies that it’s impossible to tell which of two issues came first. The two issues in the Anglican Communion are: (1) innovative teachings on human sexuality in TEC and ACC, and (2) interventions by orthodox primates across provincial boundaries. Abp Hutchison implies that the primates saw those as two equivalent pastoral problems. On the other hand, however, this is what the communiqué actually says :
10. The Windsor Report identified two threats to our common life: first, certain developments in the life and ministry of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada which challenged the standard of teaching on human sexuality articulated in the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10; and second, interventions in the life of those Provinces which arose as reactions to the urgent pastoral needs that certain primates perceived. The Windsor Report did not see a “moral equivalence” between these events, since the cross-boundary interventions arose from a deep concern for the welfare of Anglicans in the face of innovation. Nevertheless both innovation and intervention are central factors placing strains on our common life. The Windsor Report recognised this and invited the Instruments of Communion to call for a moratorium of such actions. [references omitted]
Later in the communiqué, the primates propose a Pastoral Council and set forth a pastoral scheme to ensure proper episcopal oversight for orthodox congregations and dioceses in the American church. Only after those are in place and functioning satisfactorily will primates be expected to end cross-boundary interventions.
Once this scheme of pastoral care is recognised to be fully operational, the Primates undertake to end all interventions. Congregations or parishes in current arrangements will negotiate their place within the structures of pastoral oversight set out above.
Doesn’t sound like a “chicken and egg situation” to me. It seems clear that the primates regard innovative teaching as the prior cause of cross-boundary interventions. If the first had not happened, the second would not have arisen. Solve the first and the second will go away.
An unnamed staff member of AJ thinks the primates should just butt out. This individual wants the rest of the Communion to stand back and allow the theological innovators to follow their fancy.
The Canadian primate was also asked about how primates “can dictate” policies when it was only traditionally intended to be nothing more than a collegial body for heads of Anglican provinces. “It’s so un-Anglican,” a staff member commented, to which the primate responded, “the primates’ meeting was formed in 1978 for deep sharing and consultation and the ground is shifting now.” He acknowledged that not all primates are comfortable with the change, which will be enshrined in a covenant that Anglican provinces are being asked to look at and accede to as a way of healing their division over homosexuality.
“un-Anglican”? Does Anglican Journal have on its staff a one-person Un-Anglican Activities Committee?
Be that as it may, that understanding of Anglican polity is historically uninformed and quite wrong. Providentially, The Rev Dr Peter Carrell, an Anglican theologian in New Zealand, yesterday addressed this very point in a comment on protests against the communiqué.
The Primates’ Communique (Feb 2007), and the Draft Covenant now being circulated for consideration (Feb 2007) are significant steps in the development of Anglican ecclesiology. There are predictable protests about the tenor and content of both documents.
I want to suggest that these protests are the last cries of a movement within the life of the Anglican church which is now being called to account.
No doubt this movement will be seen again at some point in the future, but its days of present life are numbered.
For a century or two a notion has been fostered by this movement and allowed to develop by much of the remainder of the Anglican church to the point of becoming the reigning theological motif of the leadership of many Anglican churches and of the leadership at the upper levels of the Anglican Communion. This notion is that Anglicanism’s hallmark is freedom and flexibility, applying to theology, liturgy, and ethics. It has allowed the likes of John A.T. Robinson (at least the JATR of ‘Honest to God’), Don Cupitt, and John Spong to preach a new gospel. It has allowed the breakdown of almost any sense of ‘common prayer’. It has allowed the possibility of revision of the common standard of sexual ethics (for brevity’s sake I will describe this common standard as ‘marriage or celibacy’).
It has lauded the new, the different, the eccentric, and made it uncomfortable in various places to argue for orthodoxy, orthopraxy and for common prayer.
This freedom and flexibility pushed to the nth degree is appropriately labelled ‘liberalism’ though in truth, compared to the freedom won by the martyrs of the Reformation it is a form of licentiousness!
But the exponents of liberalism - the finest being found in TEC - have over-reached themselves. In doing so they have both unbalanced the church and awoken it from a form of slumber. The church is now alert to the possibility that in its overbalanced state it will come loose from its moorings in Scripture and tradition (including the tradition of its common standard on sexual ethics to which it has returned again and again though tempted often to move permanently away from it). The Anglican church is recognising that if it is to remain a true church of God it must change, and if it does not then it will become a false church, marked in the West, at least, by its virtual indistinguishability from secular humanism. Thus the church is seeking to re-balance itself, centred again on the Word of God.
Recognising that it has operated with little or no rules in the field of theology since it allowed the notion that one might sign adherence to the Thirty Nine Articles but not mean anything by that signature, our church through its Lambeth Conference, Primates’ Meeting, and its Archbishop of Canterbury has begun a process of developing a covenant which will limit the potential for our theological freedom - wrought from the Babylonian captivity of the 16th century church - to be abused in the name of Anglicanism.
Thus at work in our midst is an operation of the Spirit that will not be gainsaid by dismissing Akinola as a ‘fundamentalist’, or wringing our hands and saying ‘but, but, but … our General Synod has not statuted this development’, or repeatedly calling for ‘more work to be done on hermeneutics’.
What is happening is not the work of extremists, or shadowy figures behind the scenes manipulating puppet bishops (as if!!).
My thesis is that the Anglican church is being reformed by a force greater than any one individual or any one network. A counter-movement to the liberal movement is underway. We are in the midst of a tectonic shift in theology and ethics (at least, liturgy/common prayer is not figuring much at the moment). Despite some appearances to the contrary, and some liberal rhetoric claiming otherwise, this is not a shift to the extreme ‘Right’, but a correctional movement back to the centre as marked out by 2000 years of reading, understanding, and applying Scripture. It is a sign of how far we have travelled from this centre that the correctional movement can be characterised as some kind of victory for conservative forces.
That says it all. Parts of the Anglican church have strayed so far from our roots in the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Word of God that the beginning of an attempt to turn back is denounced as right-wing conservatism. Rave on.
h/t for link to Peter Carrell comment: Anglican Mainstream
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Magos Solomon Semere had been in jail for over four years for worshipping in an outlawed Protestant church. He was told that, if he signed a statement renouncing Christ, he would be given medical treatment for his injuries and illnesses. He refused, even though three others who signed were released.