The Wind of Change: All Africa Bishops Conference, Uganda.

In February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan delivered his historic ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape Town, heralding the end of Great Britain’s colonial presence in Africa. Fifty years on, there is a spiritual ‘wind of change’ blowing in Africa which promises to end the predominance of London based institutions in the leadership of the Anglican Communion and the current All Africa Bishops Conference in Entebbe convened by CAPA (the Council of the Anglican Provinces of Africa) provides the clearest evidence yet of this change in the spiritual weather.

It must have seemed to Lambeth strategists that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s presence at this high profile African conference with an agenda dominated by uncontroversial humanitarian issues would be a golden opportunity to portray the Anglican Communion as back to ‘business as usual’ after Rowan Williams’ decision to invite the consecrators of Gene Robinson to the 2008 Lambeth Conference led to the principled absence of some 230 mainly African bishops.

If so, they badly misjudged the mind of the conference. After the first day, the public relations dream is threatening to turn into a nightmare and Dr Williams may well by now be wishing that he had stuck to being a merely virtual presence by video as at April’s South to South Encounter in Singapore. Press reports coming out of Uganda will make grim reading in London; Dr Williams is described as ‘the centre of attraction for the media at the conference’ because of his ‘open support’ for homosexuality and Uganda’s Prime Minister bracketed the practice together with terrorism and corruption.

And it is not only the Archbishop’s views which are being challenged; as Christianity’s centre of gravity shifts to the Global South his historic claim to leadership of the Communion is no longer being taken for granted. For instance, the chairman of the Council of the Anglican Provinces of Africa, Archbishop Ian Ernest, said ‘Christianity did not begin in Britain; we should counteract false ideologies that creep into the church and blur the truth’ while Uganda Archbishop Henry Orombi spoke of the need to re-evangelise England, describing the Church of England as ‘an ailing church in need of guidance’.

However, the leader of this ‘ailing church’ has not shrunk from offering guidance to the African Bishops. In his sermon (http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2975) at the opening Eucharist, Dr Williams recognised that we may well be in the ‘African century of the Christian Church’ , but his advice to the assembled bishops showed that he is unwilling to embrace all that entails.

Reflecting on Jesus as the Good Shepherd (John 10), he notes that the sheep follow Christ because they recognise his voice, which he takes to mean ‘addressing what is most real and alive in them’ and goes on to warn about the temptation ‘to ignore the deepest and sometimes the most difficult questions in people’s hearts and minds’, yet in an African context that is precisely what his sermon does by skirting round the ‘most difficult’ if not ‘the deepest’ issue of homosexuality.

Worse, on this particular subject it is impossible for this Archbishop of Canterbury, as a shepherd of the people of God, to speak to ‘hearts and minds’ because he has taken it upon himself to split off his personal views on homosexuality from the teaching he upholds by virtue of his office. Since one can only speak to hearts and minds from the heart and mind this entails that Rowan Williams can only speak on this subject in the way he thinks a bishop should when he is not speaking as a bishop!

The other main lesson he draws from the example of the Good Shepherd is that of not abandoning the flock when danger threatens, as does the hired hand. ‘We cannot’, he says, ‘refuse to take risks alongside our people and to take risks for them – to put ourselves and our comfort at risk for the sake of the community’s life’. I wonder what Archbishop Robert Duncan, seated for the service with other Archbishops, made of those words? The Province he leads has come into being as a direct result intervention led by Africa after Rowan Williams’ failure to offer any meaningful protection to the churches now under his oversight, many of which have suffered the litigious depredations of the ‘wolves’ within TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada

In fairness to Dr Williams he does acknowledge that ‘we are all –myself included – painfully aware of how often we try and step aside from the risks our responsibilities bring’, but if this is truly the case, an encouraging sign of true repentance would be to take steps to recognise the ACNA forthwith!

But whatever might now be done, it seems very difficult to imagine that the formal structures of the Anglican communion can be sustained for much longer. Speaking in Canada last year Archbishop Duncan said:
‘In the year 2000 the Archbishop of Canterbury was the second most important Christian leader in the world. In a short space of time that office has utterly been diminished. It shows that the
British model of Anglicanism has failed. The new Canterbury will be in Africa’ (http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/holy-post/archive/2009/12/30/374578.aspx)

The confidence being displayed by the leadership of CAPA in this conference, not least in receiving Robert Duncan as an Anglican Archbishop, is a clear sign of that Anglican future.

Charles Raven

25th August 2010

The Church of England’s General Synod: Doing the Best Things in the Worst Times

Tucked away in the English countryside, Staunton Harold Hall has a church in its grounds with an inscription above the west door which reads (spelling as original) ‘In the year 1653 when all thinges sacred were throughout ye Nation either demolisht or profaned, Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, founded this church, whose singular praise it is to have done the best thinges in ye worst times and hoped them in the most callamitous. The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.’

Without necessarily agreeing that erecting a church dedicated to the High Church Laudian tradition was one of the ‘best thinges’ that could be done in the time of the Commonwealth, or that Cromwell’s rule was ‘the most callamitous’ – after all it was during this period that there were some outstanding Reformed clergy in the pulpits of English parish churches, most notably Richard Baxter of Kidderminster – we may nonetheless look back and admire Sir Robert’s courage and initiative.

At a time when General Synod’s intransigence towards those who oppose the innovation of women bishops threatens the Church of England with a degree of chaos and division unprecedented since the turbulence of the mid seventeenth century, it is good to ask what the ‘best thing’ for English Anglicans might look like in our own ‘worst times’.

While some may draw comfort from the apparent ruling out (if he was ever ruled in) of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Southwark, the Church of England’s direction of travel is now abundantly clear. Whether or not we agree with David Virtue’s assessment that the Church of England ‘is now Province XVII of The Episcopal Church’, he is absolutely right that we are seeing the same ruthless marginalisation of the orthodox as has happened in the United States. It is entirely certain that the Church of England will soon have women bishops and not far behind will be openly gay bishops because that is the relentless logic of power relationships, rights and inclusion which sustains the long march of radical liberals through political and ecclesiastical institutions on this side of the Atlantic as it has in North America.

The fundamental changes taking place in Anglican institutions are reflected in the accelerating collapse of that spurious middle ground which Rowan Williams has tried so hard to establish through the Windsor Covenant process. On the international level, the resignation of Bishop Mouneer Anis from the Anglican Communion Standing Committee in January presaged a steady stream of other orthodox members heading for the exit, the fifth and most recent being Justice Akrofi, the Primate of West Africa, while the recent outspoken criticisms of Rowan Williams by Mrs Jefferts Schori and members of WATCH in the Church of England reflect the growing boldness of the liberals. In this context, Synod’s rejection of the Archbishops’ amendment is a further sign that institutional fixes designed to nuance the underlying dynamics simply will not work.

Of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury maintained in his closing speech to Synod that the process has not yet reached the ‘end of the road’, and the Archbishop of York has described himself as ‘a prisoner of hope’, but there is a distinct air of unreality about even this guarded optimism. Surely the fact that both Archbishops were willing to take such a gamble by staking their authority on a very uncertain outcome shows how desperate the situation had become.

Sir Robert not only hoped for ‘the best thinges’; it was also his ’singular praise’ to have acted on that hope, but both Archbishops seem to have nothing left to offer except to press ahead with the unamended legislation and hope for the best. They are not so much prisoners of hope as prisoners of a kind of ecclesiastical false consciousness brought on by years of adaptation to the contradictions of the Church of England. For Rowan Williams, this is a personal issue – his incapacity to act with any conviction stems from a form of double mindedness which holds that on the most divisive issue of homosexuality, even an Archbishop can hold one view personally and uphold another by virtue of office.

In the case of the Archbishop of York, it seems that he is a good man trapped in a resolutely institutional mindset. Three years ago he warned that those who failed to attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference would be severing their links with the Communion and that disagreements with American liberals on homosexuality were not ‘core issues’. Just as the Synod ended, he told Ruth Gledhill of the London Times that ‘In the end these other tribes – evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, liberals, Reform – they make people become more single-issue focused. For myself I am only Anglican, Anglican right to my fingertips. The Anglican tradition is always the middle way. They never press people to the left or the right because the cross of Jesus straddles the whole spectrum.’

This is precisely the bankrupt ecclesiology which has allowed a false gospel to infiltrate parts of the Anglican Communion so successfully – it dismisses those with a confessional understanding of Anglicanism as ‘tribal’ and effectively equates a shifting institutional centre with the mind of the Holy Spirit, a centre which is falling apart as the now dominant liberals refuse to play any longer by the old rules of tolerance which enabled them to establish a foothold in the first place.

So however good their intentions, it is difficult to see what hope either Archbishop can hold out. Speaking on the BBC yesterday morning, Bishop John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, one who would no doubt see Sir Robert as one of his spiritual forebears, said that the 1,000 Anglo-Catholic clergy he represents had been ‘dispossessed’ ; the honoured place they believed they had when women were ordained to the presbyterate in 1992 no longer existed. Some will leave, but he believed that others would ‘just defy’ and refuse to co-operate.

So the rickety structure of the Church of England looks set for inevitable collapse as its doctrinal incoherence manifests itself in practical disorder and confusion. The pressing question for the orthodox now is to clarify that ‘best thing’ they can do if they are not willing to abandon Anglicanism for the Ordinariate. They could take their chance in a crumbling structure and hope against hope that by 2012 there will be sufficient in numbers in General Synod to vote the legislation down, which seems to be Reform’s position, but even if that were to happen the signs are that Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee would be very reluctant to accept anything other than unimpaired jurisdiction for female bishops.

And then even if that hurdle were to be overcome, could conservative evangelicals live with the same arrangements being put in place for the next stage of the revisionist agenda which would be bishops in openly homosexual relationships? While it may be possible at a stretch to maintain the position that there can be ‘two integrities’ on the ordination of women, they are convinced that there is no ambiguity in Scripture about homosexuality and would therefore have great difficulty being part of a structure which holds out such a lifestyle as an acceptable option.

The ‘best thing’ now is to take action and form, as a matter of urgency, with or without official blessing, a religious/mission society based on the proposal by Canon Chris Sugden in his article ‘A Question of Jurisdiction’ in the Church of England Newspaper (9th July). Although presented as a solution to the problem of women bishops such a grouping could offer an unassailably Anglican alternative to the Ordinariate if it were to be recognized by the GAFCON Primates.

In the unlikely event that the revisionist juggernaut were halted, it would at least have provided a structure for those twenty or so congregations in the British Isles and continental Europe which are led by Anglican clergy, but for reasons of biblical conscience and mission are outside official structures. It might even be a way in which continuing Anglican bodies like the Free Church of England could engage with the Anglican mainstream as has happened with its sister Church, the Reformed Episcopal Church which is now part of the Anglican Church in North America.

However the probability must be that the Church of England will slide into further chaos and incoherence and it was precisely to bring a sense of order into a disordered Communion that the GAFCON movement was formed. But recovery may well take a generation or more and it helps to recover a sense of historical perspective lest we become discouraged. For instance, in his insightful article ‘The Limits of Anglican Diversity’ (Churchman 117/4 2003) Roger Beckwith examines the Constitutional Report for the Anglican Communion accepted by the 1930 Lambeth Conference which recognised significant similarities between the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox polity and he makes the interesting comment that in comparison, the Anglican Communion is ‘still young’.

If we see the Anglican Communion as not yet fully formed, our vision should be that the revisionism which is so dominant in the more economically developed areas of the Communion today will come to be seen as an ecclesial cul de sac, a temporary aberration. The significance of a GAFCON sponsored mission in the British Isles would therefore be not just to act as a holding structure for the marginalized, but to articulate and teach as clearly and powerfully as possible the reformed Western tradition of classic Anglicanism as we have received it, rooted in the theology of the sixteenth century reformers. This would surely be the best of things in our worst of times.

Charles Raven

14th July 2010

A Dangerous Structure: Can General Synod Stave Off Collapse?

London’s Lambeth Council has some helpful advice on its website about dangerous structures: ‘If you notice a building or structure that appears to be in a dangerous condition, or in serious neglect, an engineer will inspect the problem and take the necessary action. If the structure is unsafe, but there is no immediate danger, then the owner will be contacted to make it safe – if they don’t, they may face enforcement action.’

There is no question of course that the material fabric of Lambeth Palace, the historic London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is in good order. In fact, the Archbishop’s website reassures us that there are ’plans for future work to upgrade the fabric of the Palace’, but the spiritual fabric of the Church over which he presides is looking increasingly precarious. Many believe that the Church of England’s forthcoming General Synod in York may well be the last chance the proprietors have to stave off collapse – and there are strong hints of enforcement action if they fail to take adequate steps.

The immediate pressure on the Church of England’s structures comes from the relentless drive to see women in the episcopate on terms which will effectively eject those who cannot in conscience accept female oversight. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have belatedly put forward a formula which, they believe, recognizes that both those who oppose and those who accept women’s ordination are ‘loyal Anglicans’ as agreed at the 1998 Lambeth Conference (Resolution III.2.c), but for their pains have been upbraided in an open letter by curate Lindsey Southern, a member of the committee of the feminist pressure group WATCH (Women and the Church), for adopting a ‘smoke and mirrors’ strategy.

Such boldness from a junior member of the clergy reflects a growing confidence about convictions which are held with evangelical passion, but are energized by political fashion rather than the gospel. Within the Anglican world, the leading expositor of this counterfeit gospel must be the American Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. According to the New Zealand Anglican website Anglican Taonga she claimed last week that the legacy of slavery had shaped the struggle for women’s rights just as it had the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the 1960s and it reported ‘“the move for gay and lesbian rights,” she told an Auckland forum this morning, “has followed that same trajectory.”’

A half page advertisment by WATCH in today’s Church of England Newspaper neatly illustrates her thinking. Headed ‘Gifted, Called, Consecrated…Women Bishops of the Anglican Communion 2010’, it includes pictures of the Anglican Communion’s 28 female bishops, including Mary Glasspool, the partnered lesbian suffragan bishop of Los Angeles. And the point of this? Surrounded by the assembled dignitaries, of whom 17 are from TEC alone, is the prominent slogan ‘England…Still Waiting’ – waiting, that is, not only for female bishops, but also for partnered lesbian and gay bishops too.

The chances of the Church of England being able to resist this inexorable pressure must be rated as virtually nil. John Richardson has recently documented the alarming loss of nerve occurring amongst the Church of England’s House of Bishops as a growing number, including some who identify as evangelicals, embrace the incoherence of ‘optional orthodoxy’. Rowan Williams has done much to create a climate where this is acceptable. If even the Archbishop of Canterbury can articulate orthodox Anglican teaching on the neuralgic question of sexuality while refusing to renounce his personal disagreement with it, then it becomes easy to think of doctrinal issues as organisational rules rather than matters of conviction – and so the attempt to get some doctrinal underpinning underneath the structure is never going to be convincing.

The speed at which the English episcopate is retreating from the position established by Lambeth Resolution 1.10 of 1998 was underscored by a further development following John Richardson’s article – the Bishop of Chichester, the Rt Revd John Hind, known as a leading traditionalist on the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church, has given his blessing to a project by the gay pressure group Changing Attitude to compile a list of the extent to which churches in his diocese are ‘gay friendly’.

He has justified this on the basis that Lambeth Resolution 1.10 called for a ‘listening process’, but as regular readers will know, the ‘listening process’ now promoted as part of the Windsor process is a spurious and contradictory interpretation of the resolution – see for instance Moses Tay: A Prophet confronts Lambeth Pragmatism . So we now have a senior conservative bishop who, according to an officially sanctioned press release, has concluded that it is acceptable to have churches with an ‘affirming “openly gay people are integral to the life of our church” approach’ as a legitimate expression of diversity in his diocese.

Perhaps even worse, such churches are contrasted with ‘traditionalist’ congregations whose line is “homosexuality is condemned by the Bible” and so churches which are both faithful and loving come to be represented as hateful. Anglo Catholic incumbent Edward Tomlinson in neighbouring Rochester Diocese draws out the consequences of allowing revisionists to frame the debate in this way: ‘Hence this church, which we know is loving and welcoming, and myself in particular, must live with the reputation of being ‘bigoted and intolerant’ simply because we uphold the biblical line. The liberals love to tag us as ‘gay haters’ and ‘misogynists’ – even though every woman and homosexual in this congregation is loved, valued and – I hope- always treated with respect.’

In this climate, was it then a mistake for the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in the UK and Ireland to issue a statement welcoming the Archbishops’ last minute attempt to square the circle on women in the episcopate? Was this collusion with a short term shoring up exercise which, in the unlikely event of it succeeding, would simply create a precedent for accommodating to the next wave of the liberal agenda rather than opposing it root and branch? I think not. Firstly, the statement makes the same point about the ambiguity of the Archbishop’s proposals as fiercer critics have done, but does so by implication, offering ideas for amendment rather than strident criticism.

Secondly, and more significantly , it then goes on to observe ‘As you will be aware there is much interest amongst us in the concept of a mission society’ and this is seen as a way of providing a structural solution for those affected by the introduction of women bishops. This is not couched in language to grab headlines, but its implications are radical when we remember the context: it is now almost a year since a plea was made to the GAFCON Primates Council at the launch of the FCA UK and Ireland for intervention on behalf of orthodox Anglican congregations which for reasons of biblical conscience and mission found themselves on the edge or even outside of formal Anglican structures.

A public response came on October 20 last year when the GAFCON Primates released an open letter in which they pledged to support the marginalised orthodox in the UK, stating ‘We are encouraged by your commitment to work for an internal solution that can address these deep concerns. Steps taken early enough to make provision to address them can preserve good order. We firmly support your efforts to ensure the provision of appropriate oversight, and if this is not forthcoming, to provide it.’ It is hardly plausible to believe that this coincided with the Pope’s announcement of the Ordinariate by accident.

Although the FCA statement expresses the hope that necessary arrangements can be set up ‘in a clearly Church of England framework’ – which would seem to imply an ‘internal solution’ – the chances of the Church of England’s ascendant liberals accepting what they would see as a huge concession, akin to a kind of non-geographic Third Province, must be considered as remote.

The question will then become this – does belonging within ‘a clearly Church of England framework’ necessarily mean being within the Church of England framework? From a legal and constitutional standpoint, the received wisdom is that the difference between the indefinite and the definite article is insignificant; in other words ‘Church of England’ must refer to that which falls under the metropolitical jurisdiction of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. There is an urgent need to review the legal issues which lie behind this assumption because it is clear from a confessional standpoint that the Church of England in its ramshackle practice is increasingly at odds with what a Church of England faithful to its formularies should look like.

As issues of succession for incumbents and training opportunities for ordinands become more acute for the orthodox, the likelihood must be that the authentic voice of the Church of England, although recognised by the GAFCON Primates, may have to come from outside the structures of the Church of England, just as during the Second World War it was General de Gaulle from exile who articulated the authentic voice of the French nation rather than the Vichy Government of Marshal Pétain.

Subject to the strains and stresses of mounting revisionist pressure, the Church of England is becoming an increasingly unsafe place for the gospel. If the present proprietors will not accept offers of help to make at least parts of the structure safe, then in the not too distant future, enforcement action will have to be taken, even if that means the faithful have to be prepared to move into alternative accommodation.

Charles Raven

2^nd July 2010

TEC and Friends: Inclusion with Attitude

Although TEC’s Presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori, avoided an explicit attack on Rowan Williams in her sermon at Southwark Cathedral yesterday, it is clear that TEC and its allies are becoming more militant and that far from suggesting that the Windsor Covenant process has at last found teeth, the Archbishop’s attempt to discipline TEC only underlines its ineffectiveness.

Mrs Schori did not expand upon the accusation of  ‘colonial control’ she made in her reply to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Pentecost letter, but  she did warn about Simon the ‘curmudgeonly host’ as she preached on the lectionary reading from Luke’s gospel about  the dinner which is disrupted by the lavish gratitude of a notorious woman overwhelmed by Jesus’ forgiveness (Luke 7: 36ff). To help us join the dots, ‘Inclusive Church’, effectively an outpost of  TEC within the Church of England, has given some pointers as to whom she might have had in mind as one of Simon’s modern day equivalents.

Inclusive Church called on its supporters to attend the Southwark service in order to demonstrate that ‘it’s not just in the States that open, generous Anglicanism is thriving’. It also recommended a new Facebook group ‘The Anglican Resistance Movement ‘ created by the Rev’d Susan Russell, one of TEC’s leading gay activists. The Chair of Inclusive Church, Giles Goddard, had already written an open letter to the Presiding Bishop to assure her that ‘We do not support the Archbishop’s position that only those in agreement with the majority view can be participants as Anglicans in ecumenical dialogue’ and for good measure also wrote an open letter  to Rowan Williams, chiding him for setting up ‘exclusionary structures’ and reminding him somewhat loftily that ‘Supporters of Inclusive Church have spoken with you on a number of occasions about the vital urgency of speaking generously about the breadth of Christian experience’.

There is no doubt that TEC and its allies in the British Isles are becoming more militant.  As soon as the Archbishop deviates from the gay activist agenda he supported so wholeheartedly before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, he is subjected to stinging criticism from erstwhile friends. It began with his withdrawal of support for Canon Jeffery John’s appointment as bishop of Reading in 2003 and since his proposal of a ‘two track’ Communion in response to TEC’s repudiation of the Windsor moratorium on the consecration as bishops of those in same sex unions at its General Convention last summer, it has taken on an air of menace.

 At that time, Giles Goddard spoke of the need for a ‘progressive alliance’ between TEC and the Church of England, believing that now was the time to change tactics. In a revealing statement he called for a more direct approach and admitted ‘As my American friends have often observed, we’re not as open as you; there’s a different relationship with the hierarchy and we tend to get on with things without being too public about them, while trying to work with the structures to bring about change. I don’t defend that – it’s just the way we are. But that’s changing now. Not a moment too soon, you might say.’  

 In a similar vein, Peter Selby, the retired Church of England Bishop of Worcester, gave an address at an Inclusive Church Conference in October 2009 provocatively entitled ‘When the Word on the Street is Resist’ which directly attacked Rowan Williams for ‘false consciousness’ because of the way he had split off his personal view on homosexuality from the teaching he articulated in virtue of his office. 

 

Such double mindedness invites double standards and it was this almost institutionalised hypocrisy in the Church of England that was forcefully challenged in the Presiding Bishop’s response to Dr Williams’ Pentecost letter when she wrote that the sanctions being proposed ‘do not, apparently, apply to those parts of the Communion that continue to hold one view in public and exhibit other behaviors in private. Why is there no sanction on those who continue with a double standard? In our context bowing to anxiety by ignoring that sort of double-mindedness is usually termed a “failure of nerve.”’

 

This is one point where orthodox Anglicans can agree with the leader of TEC. Sanctions based on the Windsor Covenant process lack theological and moral integrity because they are being applied through the authority of an Archbishop who himself does not believe in the position he is required to uphold and is therefore unable to enforce church discipline in his own Church and beyond with any credibility. And although the Presiding Bishop is profoundly in error to argue in her defence that the Holy Spirit could lead the church into the acceptance of a sexual practices which are precisely the opposite of that which Scripture teaches, we can also agree with her in so far as she understands that the role of the Holy Spirit involves bringing a sense of conviction to our consciences, not just the orchestration of a shifting institutional consensus as is implied by the Windsor understanding of the ‘listening process’.

 

Now, the Windsor process is being revealed as a kind of game in which participants colluded to the extent that they believed that their mutually incompatible aims could stand a chance of being reached. The concept of ‘listening’ allowed TEC to maintain its official standing without sacrificing the sexual inclusion agenda after Lambeth 1998, while pragmatic conservatives saw it as a way of being able to preserve conscience without losing TEC money or having to confront the consequences for their own security and comfort of the  growing gap between formal teaching and informal practice.  

 

As ideas increasing taking shape in formal practice, the need to try and retain some credibility with the Global South has forced Dr Williams to act against TEC, albeit largely symbolically, but the Covenant game is increasingly irrelevant to TEC and easily discredited. In fact, during her address to the USPG Annual Conference on 10^th June the Presiding Bishop gave a strong hint that TEC could simply form its own Communion now, referring  to TEC’s presence in 16 nations and implying a special affinity with other communion Churches which describe themselves as ‘Episcopal.

 

So Dr Philip Turner of the Anglican Communion Institute is right when he argues  that by insisting on continued recognition by  the Communion, despite the  innovations it has introduced unilaterally, the TEC tail is seeking to wag the Anglican dog. However, he has succumbed to the unreliable logic that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend when he concludes that ‘The Covenant supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury is a means of maintaining commonly recognized forms of belief and life.’ This statement flies in the face of the evidence of the past six years and overlooks the basic methodological flaw of the Covenant – that it is based on the ‘listening process’ which is so essential to Rowan Williams because on the key issues of Scripture and sexuality he cannot say ‘here I stand’. In contrast, Mrs Schori and her friends have an ideology of radical inclusion which means they can say with conviction ‘Here we stand’ and the only effective response to that false gospel is Confessing Anglicanism which says with equal conviction, but on the one apostolic and biblical foundation ‘Here we stand’. As TEC and its friends become increasingly militant in England, they are likely to force upon the Church of England this uncharacteristic, but very necessary, degree of clarity.

 

Charles Raven

 14^th June 2010

 

 

 

 

Disorganised Doubt

  It seemed to me that pretty much all that needed to be said about Rowan Williams’  Pentecost letter ‘Renewal in the Spirit’  had been said, with general agreement that his rebuke of the American Episcopal Church for proceeding with the consecration of Mary Glasspool was little more than a token gesture.  Although his admission that the Communion has not ‘found a way of shaping our consciences and convictions as a worldwide body’ was surprisingly frank, he had nothing new to offer for the future beyond a plea for diversity and ‘mutual exploration’ within the framework of the now widely discredited Covenant process.

 Yet when I heard the first of this years’ BBC Radio 4 Reith lectures by the eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist Professor Martin Rees, his description of the scientific enterprise as ‘organised doubt’ set in motion a train of thought which led me to think that the term ‘disorganised doubt’ could shed some light on why Dr Williams and the other ‘instruments of unity’ are incapable of restoring coherence to an increasingly disordered Communion.

 For science it is axiomatic that nothing should be taken on authority. Discovery proceeds through the systematic testing of hypotheses and if we may speak of a good scientific conscience, it is not so much to do with the particular facts a scientist holds to be true, but the integrity of the scientific method by which the claim is arrived at.  But what does it mean for the theologian to have a good conscience?

 Traditionally, the answer has been faithfulness to a body of doctrine and the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement defines the core identity of Anglicanism in this way, adapted from the Church of England’s Canon A5 –

The doctrine of the Church is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures.  In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.

 For Rowan Williams, a good conscience looks somewhat different. Although we are worshippers and the Trinitarian God can never, by definition, be merely the object of our inquiry, nonetheless theology proceeds through critical questioning. He believes that the best theology is ‘like the noise of someone falling over things in the dark’.  Scripture is not in itself divine revelation, just a witness to that revelation in Jesus Christ mediated through fallible human authors. So he can write that ‘Religious and theological integrity is possible as and when discourse about God declines the attempt to take God’s point of view (i.e. a ‘total perspective’)’.

 On this account, theological honesty is not so much about faithfulness to the teaching of Scripture as a healthy suspicion of systematisation because the biblical narratives are not a clear ‘Word of God’. They give us instead an underlying theological and Trinitarian ‘grammar’, a way of thinking and living which can enable us to encounter Christ as we conform our lives in our particular circumstances to God’s loving purpose.

 This entails a willingness to doubt – in the sense of counting provisional – our doctrinal and moral positions so that truth can emerge through a kind of Hegelian dialectic, something which the Archbishop hints at in the closing paragraph of his letter when he urges that ‘we must have a ‘kenotic’, a self-emptying approach to each other in the Church’.

 But without a firm anchor in Scripture and the historic formularies, this willingness to doubt has malign results. In science it may illuminate; in theology it confuses because it relativises rather than shapes the conscientious convictions which Dr Williams seeks to address in his letter (not least about the status and role of Scripture). This becomes evident when he refers to his decision that representatives of TEC should no longer represent the Anglican Communion in ecumenical discussions -

 ‘In our dealings with other Christian communions, we do not seek to deny our diversity; but there is an obvious problem in putting forward representatives of the Communion who are consciously at odds with what the Communion has formally requested or stipulated’.

 But if this is the case, on what basis does Dr Williams continue in office as the Anglican Communion’s chief representative? Is he not himself ‘consciously at odds’ with what he has acknowledged is the Communion’s consensus on homosexuality as expressed in Lambeth Resolution 1.10? On various occasions since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury he has been invited to renounce his support for the legitimacy of same sex unions and has persistently refused to do so, drawing a distinction between the teaching he articulates in his official capacity as Archbishop and the views he holds ‘privately’ (which are, of course, published and therefore completely public).

 Given that the Archbishop shows no sign of seeing his own position as compromised, being ‘consciously at odds’ must in his mind therefore refer to the rejection of  institutional procedures, not simply to holding theological convictions which are incompatible with Anglican teaching.  In fact the sort of double mindedness Dr Williams models may to him be a virtue, a kind of humility which is willing to embrace ‘kenotic’ doubt about its understanding.

 But such ‘doubt-as–virtue’ screens out the real theological issues and reduces down to the wearily familiar quest for ad hoc structural solutions such as the ecclesiological innovation of a ‘two tier’ communion as proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury last summer after TEC’s General Convention and general ‘indaba’ without end. It will only serve to intensify disorder within the Anglican Communion for three briefly stated reasons:

  Firstly, neither thorough-going liberals nor conservatives could allow their consciences to be overthrown in this way as they have already demonstrated by breaching the Windsor moratoria, the former because they are committed to an ideology of radical inclusion, the latter because they see Scripture and the Scriptural teaching distilled in Anglican formularies as the decisive authority for the Church.

 Secondly, it legitimises a form of insidious double mindedness on the part of Christian leaders which inhibits church discipline and means that their preaching and teaching cannot be taken at face value. They can adopt an official persona which is quite contrary to the New Testament expectation that discipline will be based not on keeping certain procedural rules, but according to sound doctrine through leaders of credible character who act out of love with ‘a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.’ (1 Timothy 1:5)

 And thirdly, the suspicion of propositional revelation encourages the identification of consensus with spiritual progress and increases the vulnerability of the Churches of the West to the ambient secularism of their culture. This process is well advanced in England as the Bishop of Southwark recently noted, welcoming the way many people, like him, have changed their minds on homosexuality, just as they had done previously on divorce and remarriage.

 The truth which the GAFCON movement and the Global South have grasped is that the only way to restore order to the Anglican Communion is to address the underlying theological issues and the emergence of the ACNA, for instance, is an example of how that principle is working out in practice. The tragedy of Dr Williams’ leadership is that a formidable theological mind has become preoccupied with establishing the plausibility of the increasing implausible. We may agree with him that there is an ‘obvious problem in putting forward representatives of the Communion who are consciously at odds with what the Communion has formally requested or stipulated’, but unfortunately he is one of them.

 

 Charles Raven

 

2  June 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Next Big Question

Taking stock after the American Episcopal Church has consecrated its second bishop  in a same sex relationship, and doubtless not the last, certain things seem to be clear; the North American revisionists are striking out regardless of the rest of the Communion, the Anglican Covenant has been effectively abandoned by the Global South as a means of restoring order and the Archbishop of Canterbury is an increasingly peripheral figure, as underlined by his silence  on the Glasspool consecration this past weekend and his inaction beforehand.

But these clarifications bring to the foreground a question which many have so far been reluctant to face. According to Archbishop Peter Jensen, reflecting on last month’s Fourth Global South to South Encounter in Singapore, the Communion is now in a ‘post crisis phase’, but where does that leave the  Church of England, the mother church of the Communion? This church is still in what we might call a ‘pre crisis’ phase as one of those western churches which  Dr Jensen  warns ‘have yet to come into their moment of truth’ and for which ‘there can no longer be, ‘A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest…’ (Proverbs 24:33).  Instead they must wield, ‘The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (Ephesians 6:17), if they wish to survive.’ 

So what might it mean to wield ‘The sword of the Spirit’ in an English context? If this is what the survival of the orthodox depends upon, working out what this means in practice is an urgent task.  It would be very interesting if Peter Jensen were to enlarge on his point, but I suspect he might very reasonably believe that it is the orthodox within these churches who need to work things out and in fact a response is already emerging as the theological ‘gathering power’ of GAFCON and the Global South (to use Bishop Bill Atwood’s illuminating phrase ) becomes stronger while the institutional influence of Canterbury declines.

The fundamental need, as always, is for a deep and biblically grounded spiritual awakening, but the freedom of the orthodox in the Church of England to maintain the necessary precondition of faithful gospel witness is now being jeopardised through the  structures themselves. Like Anglo Catholics, although for different theological reasons, Conservative Evangelicals are recognising that the way the Church of England is proposing  to proceed with the consecration of women as bishops forces biblical conscience and confirms that it is no longer a safe place for the gospel.

In a letter signed by 100 incumbents, Rod Thomas, the Chairman of Reform writes   ‘We see nothing but difficulty facing us’. On the key issues of selection for training and succession of parish ministry, there can be no confidence that the integrity of Evangelical witness can be sustained and therefore he warns that  there may well be a need for ‘the creation of new independent charitable trusts whose purpose will be to finance our future ministries’. Such independent trusts would not of course be set up to fund independent churches, but to free orthodox Anglicans to work together as an authentic expression of global Anglicanism in England in accordance with the biblical ecclesiology embodied in the Jerusalem Declaration. Under English law, given the established status of the Church of England, it must be  reckoned unlikely that a congregation  under full alternative episcopal oversight without the permission of the Ordinary could retain the use of the parish church, but these are as yet unchartered waters and there are degrees of irregularity to be explored.

Yet whatever the legal consequences for buildings, this strategy of developing parallel structures seems inevitable. Some Evangelicals may be able to live with women bishops, but we can be sure that once this objective has been established,  the revisionists will move on swiftly to concentrate their energies on applying  the same arguments about rights and inclusion in favour of  openly gay clergy. Recent addresses by the Bishops of Liverpool  and Gloucester   have helped to prepare the ground, both arguing, against the intention behind  Lambeth Resolution 1.10 of 1998, that homosexuality does not touch on anything essential to the identity of orthodox faith. The history of the Anglican Communion over the past twelve years shows that neither side of the debate really believes that to be true, but in England it is enough to get the liberal cuckoo into its next ecclesiastical nest. 

This kind of superficial compromise will no doubt be encouraged by the newly elected Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government which appears to be even more liberal on social issues than its Labour predecessor. Moreover, the Windsor Report made explicit the thinking of the Lambeth establishment  after the crisis provoked by Gene Robinson’s consecration in 2003 when it urged that lessons be learnt from the progress of the debate on women’s ordination within the Communion, claiming in paragraph 21 that ‘Anglicans can understand from this story that decision-making in the Communion on serious and contentious issues has been, and can be, carried out without division, despite a measure of impairment.’   Such a confident claim sounds somewhat hollow in the light of contemporary English experience.

So given the revisionist trajectory along which the Church of England seems set to travel,  the need for parallel structures based on the formation of charitable trusts which give an independent legal identity in law seems to be an essential precaution to safeguard continued Anglican gospel witness.  A large parish church which is financially and socially strong might consider taking such a step unnecessary, but a recent change in the law governing charities in England and Wales has helped to expose how weak the legal position of a parish church really is. 

For readers not familiar with English church governance, I should explain that each parish has an elected Parochial Church Council (PCC) which has responsibility for the financial and administrative life of the local church. In law, it is a charitable trust and its members are trustees – although it is doubtful that most PCC members  realised this in the past – and the requirement for PCC’s with an annual income of over £100,000 pa to register with the Charity Commission from 1 October 2008 has served to clarify something else – that the primary governing document for a PCC is the Parochial Church Councils (Powers) Measure 1956, as amended, includes two very significant limitations which in normal times could be seen as prudent safeguards, but pose a serious handicap to a parish facing a conscientious doctrinal difference with diocesan authorities. 

In the first place, Section 6 of the Measure stipulates that a PCC cannot acquire land and property without the consent of the diocese and such property must be held by the diocese as custodian trustee for the PCC. Secondly, according to Section 2 the PCC is not allowed to make any ‘declaration of the doctrine of the Church on any question’.  So a PCC trying to argue that it should retain control of its property in a situation where a breach with a diocese has occurred on doctrinal grounds, as has happened all too often in North America, could presumably find itself losing in the courts on the basis that  it had no legal competence to make a doctrinal judgement.

The Archbishop of Sydney saw at the global South gathering in Singapore confirmation that the Anglican Communion had ‘passed its tipping point’. For the orthodox in the Church of England there may not be much time left in which to adjust to this new reality which has come about in large measure because of the failure of leadership on the part of their own Primate. 

New structures need to be developed urgently and a good place to start would be with those twenty or more Anglican congregations in England which are already outside the formal organisation of the Church of England and could be recognised fully by GAFCON/Global South Primates without the legal uncertainties and problems which would no doubt arise with a normal parish church. It may be that these few churches could be the particular sign of a missionary and confessing Anglicanism which will wield the sword of the Spirit with a particular freedom,  speaking the better word of the biblical new covenant in hope that the national Church itself may yet return to the ancient paths.

Charles Raven
18 May 2010

Singapore: Shadow and Substance

Bishop James Jones: Liverpool’s Muddy Waters flow towards Africa

The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Revd James Jones, has today shown just what a liability the Church of England is becoming to the rest of the Anglican Communion. Liverpool stands to the north of the estuary of the great Mersey River, now cleansed and restored to life after the pollution of the industrial age, but its spiritual waters are being sadly muddied.

In his Presidential Address to the Liverpool Diocesan Synod, Bishop Jones argues that the Church of England and the Anglican Communion should embrace diversity and accept that those who believe homosexual relationships are morally wrong and those who believe that, within a ‘stable and faithful relationship’, they are right can enjoy a peaceful co-existence.

He is of course by no means the first bishop of the Church of England to put this argument forward, but this is a significant moment because he is a prominent evangelical. In 2003 he was one of those who successfully protested the attempt to appoint Canon Jeffrey John, a high profile advocate of the gay lesbian movement in the Church of England, as Bishop of Reading. Yet in February 2008, he apologised, saying ‘I deeply regret this episode in our common life’ and expressed his sorrow ‘for adding to the pain and distress of Dr John and his partner.’ Today’s address confirms his ‘conversion’.

We are given a clue as to the cause when, referring to his diocese, he comments that  ‘Like the rest of England, ours is a culture of diversity.  One of the positive aspects of a rich ecumenical landscape is that we have a variety of doors through which different people might enter into the Christian faith.’ No doubt, but the deification of diversity by the English political establishment has enfeebled moral discourse by the suppression of both logic and evidence, and the Bishop’s argument suffers from the same malaise.

In fairness, he is as much a symptom as a cause of the Church of England’s confusion. He offers a kind of ‘Rowan-lite’ proposal which proceeds along similar lines to Rowan Williams’ Plenary Address ‘On Making Moral Decisions’  to the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Essentially he tried to persuade the orthodox  that  gay sex should not be seen as a cause of separation since the Church had not disowned those from the past who had practiced slavery and it had not split in the present on nuclear weapons, despite the deeply held convictions against them of those like himself. Similarly, Bishop Jones argues that if we can maintain mutual respect and fellowship while disagreeing about the taking of human life in war, then  

‘Just as Christian pacifists and Christian soldiers profoundly disagree with one another yet in their disagreement continue to drink from the same cup because they share in the one body so too I believe the day is coming when Christians who equally profoundly disagree about the consonancy of same gender love with the discipleship of Christ will in spite of their disagreement drink openly from the same cup of salvation’.

 

As with Rowan Williams’ original presentation, the problem lies in the assumption that all these issues relate to Scripture in the same way, whereas in fact the biblical material on homosexuality is direct and unequivocal, that on slavery less so and on nuclear weapons completely indirect.  Likewise the biblical witness on war is less direct, as reflected in the development of the Church’s theology of ‘just war’ over the centuries, whereas questions about homosexuality have arisen only after some 2,000 years within churches influenced by strongly secularised cultures.

The extent of the influence of this popular thinking on James Jones’ is revealed by the way that he repeats, in the face of overwhelming evidence,   that ‘our sexuality like ethnicity is not a matter of choice’.  This is also a serious misunderstanding of gay /lesbian thinkers for whom, following Foucault, the point is not so much to establish a gay ‘identity’ as sexual freedom.  So the veteran gay activist Peter Tatchell looks forward to a ‘state of greater sexual freedom, where homosexuality becomes commonplace and ceases to be disparaged or victimised’ and in which ‘gayness would no longer have to be defended and affirmed. Gay identity (and its straight counterpart) would thus, at last, become redundant.’

James Jones reflects a way of thinking which is gaining ground amongst English evangelicals and fails to recognise that the deep logic of the gay/lesbian movement is the abolition of the Judaeo-Christian understanding of human identity ( gay ‘marriage’ is a key step). Faced with the very uncomfortable prospect of having to finally challenge the reality of quietly established ‘facts on the ground’ which gay activists by their own admission have been following for years, the temptation to reduce the whole problem to one of ‘go along to get along’ becomes almost overwhelming. It is recast not as an issue of false teaching, as the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement truthfully described it, but as an essentially pastoral problem.

So the ideal becomes ‘diversity without enmity’, and to be ‘a Diocese refusing to allow anything to undermine our oneness in Christ.’ But this only becomes possible by downgrading the clear biblical teaching that homosexual relationships are ‘incompatible with Scripture’, as reaffirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10, to being merely the ‘traditional’ view, an opinion which can coexist with its opposite. So whatever unity exists is not a oneness in Christ because it refuses to be faithful to the Scriptures which authoritatively reveal Christ.

 This has pastoral consequences. Rhetorically, the Bishop asks ‘If on this subject of sexuality the traditionalists are ultimately right and those who advocate the acceptance of stable and faithful gay relationships are wrong what will their sin be?  That in a world of such little love two people sought to express a love that no other relationship could offer them? ‘ Unfortunately no – actually their sin would be that they had acted in a way which Scripture specifically says will exclude a person from the Kingdom of Heaven (1 Corinthians 6:9) and, tragically, they would have had the Church’s encouragement or at least toleration.

But what is particularly arresting about the Bishop of Liverpool’s address is its scope. It presents a vision which does not stop at the boundaries of his own diocese. His plea is ‘that the Church of England and the Anglican Communion must allow a variety of ethical views on the subject as in this Diocese we do’ and he adds ‘This is I believe the next chapter to be written in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.  It is the chapter that is already being written in our Partnership in Mission with the Diocese of Virginia and with the Diocese of Akure in Nigeria.’

A partnership with this aim constitutes a serious challenge to the Church of Nigeria in particular and the GAFCON Primates as a whole who have as a matter of principle withdrawn from sharing ‘the same cup of salvation’ at Primate’s Meetings with those Primates who are sponsoring sexual immorality. It illustrates the subtle reality of the way that false teaching spreads; an evangelical bishop who has learned to accommodate himself to the secular pressures of England nonetheless retains a certain credibility with fellow evangelicals in Africa and then seeks to present partnership as collusion with his compromise.

 In this light we see the wisdom of clause 13 of the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration which affirmed the need to break communion with those who deny the orthodox faith in word or deed. The commentary on this clause (Being Faithful, p64) calls for action which is precisely the opposite of James Jones’ strategy for the Communion when it states ’there is a moral obligation to reject any teaching  that denies or undermines the authority of God as revealed in the Scriptures, to expose its falsity and to break fellowship with those who promote it (Ephesians 5:11, Titus 3:10).’

James Jones’ address today not only marks a further stage of the Church of England’s long drift from orthodox faith, but also serves as yet another warning sign that the Lambeth led Covenant process is a false hope, not least  because  the internal stresses created by the moral and doctrinal incoherence of the Church of England mean that it has a vested interest in encouraging the rest of the Communion to adopt a similar pluralism.  Much more promising is the potential of the GAFCON movement which has restored the Reformers’ high doctrine of Scripture to its central place in Anglican ecclesiology.  Article XIX affirms the treatment for Liverpool’s muddy waters:  ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.’

 Charles Raven

6^th March 2010

 

 

 

 

When will Gay Couples be able to take vows in the Church of England?

One of the most striking features of the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement and Declaration of June 2008 was the formation of a Primates Council which was urged to ‘authenticate and recognise confessing Anglican jurisdictions, clergy and congregations’. The radical nature of this step was reinforced by a corresponding negative – the rejection of  the commonly held assumption that ‘Anglican identity is determined necessarily through the Archbishop of Canterbury’.

Events in England this week have underlined the wisdom of envisaging an alternative focus of leadership for the Anglican Communion. As regular readers of these articles will know, I believe that the current Archbishop of Canterbury is promoting an illusory unity which accommodates false teaching and endangers the whole Communion.

But there is another reason for calling into question the role of Canterbury and the Lambeth institutions which is not so much to do with Rowan Williams himself, but with the relentless erosion of orthodox faith in the Church of England by the deeply secularized culture of the liberal establishment.

A number of leading academics and clergy, including the Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Revd  David Stancliffe, wrote to the London Times this week arguing that it is ‘plainly discriminatory’ not to allow gay or lesbian partners to make vows to each other in church and this was obligingly reinforced in that newspaper’s leader comment yesterday in which it called on the government to ‘resolve the legal asymmetry’ which under the 2004 Civil Partnership Act prevents same sex couples from having a Civil Partnership ceremony in church premises.

The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Revd Michael Scott Joynt, had opposed an attempt to allow such ceremonies in the course of a House of Lords debate on the Government’s Equality Bill on 25^th January while at the same time resisting (successfully as it turned out) the Government’s attempt to severely narrow the freedom of churches not to employ practicing homosexuals. In their letter, the Bishop of Salisbury and his fellow signatories attacked the bishop’s position, arguing that it was inconsistent to seek  ‘spiritual independence’ for the Church of England from anti-discrimination legislation while at the same time denying that  right of independence to other Churches which want to solemnize homosexual partnerships.

This overlooked the fact that the Bishop’s argument against allowing gay couples to have church ceremonies was not based on arguments about freedom, but about the nature of marriage itself. The prohibition on church ceremonies in the 2004 legislation reflected the clear legal distinction drawn at the time between Civil Partnerships and marriage.  Allowing any church to breach that boundary is not simply to bestow a freedom on a minority, it is also to give state sanction to a historic subversion of Christian marriage in which gender is incidental rather than essential. 

Furthermore, the symmetry of freedoms that Bishop Stancliffe and his colleagues call on the Bishop of Winchester to respect is increasingly abstract.  With depressing regularity Christians are finding themselves before the courts or employment tribunals  as victims of a skewed culture which legislates for conscience and tends to flatten all moral and spiritual questions into issues of ‘rights’.  If marriage is redefined in this way, then it is highly unlikely that traditional Christian churches will enjoy the freedom to preserve marriage according to their consciences for much longer.

 If the Church of England continues its pragmatic adjustment to clams of discrimination, it will be continually on the back foot. An example from Holland illustrates: a gay Dutch Roman Catholic is seeking to force the Roman Catholic Church though the courts to admit him to Holy Communion by prosecuting a particular priest. In support of his case he claims that he is able to receive the sacrament at other Roman Catholic churches in Holland and that ‘There is no justification anywhere in the Bible’ for his exclusion.

Compare the situation in England  - already practising homosexuals are commonly admitted to Holy Communion and the Lambeth Resolution 1.10 of 1998 which stated that homosexual relationships are ‘incompatible with Scripture’ is effectively useless, not least because bishops like David Stancliffe can teach the very opposite without any apparent protest or any prospect whatsoever of disciplinary action. So a similar legal action in England would seem to have a strong chance of being taken seriously and would then create a compelling precedent for imposing a legal right for admission to the sacrament of baptism and ‘gay marriage’.

That time may be nearer than many people think. The extent to which the Church of England has acclimatised itself to acceptance of openly gay clergy was revealed by General Synod’s recent vote in favour of the motion that the clergy pension scheme should ‘go beyond the requirements of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 and provide for pension benefits to be paid to the surviving civil partners of deceased clergy on the same basis as they are currently paid to surviving spouses.’ Although clergy entering a Civil partnership are supposed to be celibate, this condition is widely derided and is in any case unworkable.

 The Synod  vote clearly implies  parity between marriage and Civil Partnerships. Colin Coward, one of the Church of England’s leading gay activists, was quick to see this, commenting ‘unless I am very mistaken, our church is learning and changing and this is a cause of real thanksgiving and celebration’.

There are courageous bishops like Michael Scott Joynt in the Church of England, but they are very much the exception than the rule. Tied to a fiercely liberal establishment by bonds of legality and history, the Church of England would need extraordinarily courageous and clear minded leadership to reverse the current trend, but that seems to be an increasingly remote prospect.  Nonetheless, we can thank God that as the dissolution of the historic centre represented by Canterbury gathers pace, in his providence the basis for a new and vital focus of global Anglicanism has emerged in the faith confessed afresh in Jerusalem.

Charles Raven

24 February 2010

 

What Would the ACNA look like in 3D?

Last Wednesday’s vote in the English General Synod to ‘recognize and affirm the desire of those who have formed the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) to remain within the Anglican family’ was a very positive step forward. Although rather reserved in comparison to Lorna Ashworth’s original motion ‘That this Synod express the desire that the Church of England be in communion with the Anglican Church in North America’, it is clearly a setback for TEC’s desire to maintain a monopoly on the Anglican ‘brand’ in the United States and opens up the possibility of formal recognition in the future.

 
But taking part in a BBC television debate yesterday about the future of the Anglican Communion (of which more below) brought home to me that the theological truth of the ‘fork in the road’ embodied in the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement and Declaration of 2008 needs to be kept crystal clear if this process of recognition is going to bear good fruit and not be terminally compromised by institutionalists. Part of the appeal of Rowan Williams’ theology is that he persistently seeks to offer a ‘third way’ which appears to avoid liberal and conservative polarities and his Presidential address to Synod  was one of the clearest statements yet of that Hegelian commitment to synthesis which informs his theology – and provides a rationale for perpetual conversation while ungodly disorder goes unchecked.

 
He used the device of inviting Synod to adopt a ‘three dimensional’ approach, no doubt suggested by the highly popular 3D film ‘Avatar’. However, everyone knows that the film is fiction and the 3D effect is simply that – an effect. It is not reality and likewise what Rowan Williams is offering is a fiction in 3D – that there is a third dimension which will allow everyone to live together without sacrificing their integrity.

 
When standing firm on biblical truth involves going against the grain of wider society and continual abrasion within the Church, it is very understandable that the possibility of a middle way will appeal to many who hold orthodox views and even defend them. Yesterday morning I experienced at first hand both the appeal and the danger of ‘3D’ Anglicanism. I was a participant in the BBC’s Sunday morning  live television show ‘The Big Questions’ which asked ‘Should the Anglican Church Divide?’ Others taking part included Lorna Ashworth, despite her gruelling week in General Synod, the writer and broadcaster Anne Atkins, well known in the UK for her robust defence of orthodox Christian values, and Colin Coward, veteran gay activist and General Secretary of  the Christian gay advocacy network ‘Changing Attitude’.

 
Inevitably, much of the discussion focussed on homosexuality. While Lorna Ashworth, in opposition to Colin Coward, was entirely clear that same sex relationships contradict the Church’s core doctrine, Anne Atkins went out of her way to make it clear that despite their differences she was happy to belong to a church which could also accommodate Colin Coward.  And that in essence is the problem with ‘3D’ Anglicanism – a Church that could embrace both Coward and Atkins could also embrace both TEC and the ACNA.

 
Because of its attractiveness and plausibility, it is important to see that Rowan Williams’ third dimension  is not simply a matter of balance, generosity, or even of studied ambiguity. It is a systematic destabilisation of orthodox belief built on a half truth. The essential point seems to be that

 
 ‘Seeing something in three dimensions is seeing that I can’t see everything at once: what’s in front of me is not just the surface I see in this particular moment. So seeing in three dimensions requires us to take time with what we see.’

 
Now as a warning that beyond simple stereotypes we should take time to understand people in their own terms it would be difficult to disagree with. But in the context of at least twenty years of public debate about homosexuality in the Church on both sides of the North Atlantic, being told there is more than I can see ‘in this particular moment’ is really saying ‘trust me’. It implies that beyond what looks like the ‘yes or no’ (thesis and antithesis) there is something more we haven’t yet seen. And either the Archbishop knows what that unseen thing is, but is not willing to say so, or he himself doesn’t know and is asking us to suspend judgement as an act of faith in his Hegelian ecclesiology.

 
Either way, as time goes on it is clear that less and less of his fellow Primates are prepared to extend that trust, Dr Mouneer Anis being the latest example. However, the heart of the problem for the orthodox is this  – suspending judgement in this context is not to do with their personal opinions, but with what has been held through the centuries and reaffirmed as recently as 1998 by the Lambeth Conference to be the judgement of Scripture (despite Resolution 1.10 being assiduously spun to give a basis for the spurious ‘listening process). This becomes clearer when Rowan Williams goes on to explain the

 

 ‘simpler sense of three-dimensionality which just reminds us that the other we meet is the person he or she is, not the person we have created in our fantasies. The priest from Forward in Faith finds himself going to a woman priest for spiritual counsel because he has recognised an authenticity in her ministry from which he can be enriched…’

 
It is not entirely clear if that specific example is real or imaginary, but be that as it may, ‘the person he or she is’ clearly includes their beliefs and this is where the destabilisation inherent in ‘3D’ Anglicanism becomes clear. If a person who believes that same sex relationships are incompatible with the sovereign authority of Scripture in the Church is called nonetheless to suspend judgement, that person is no longer being recognised  as ‘the person he or she is’.

 
Paradoxically, the plea for ‘three dimensionality’ actually diminishes such a person as it tries to seduce them into a relativistic fantasy in which truth and falsehood can co-exist. The continuing tragedy of TEC illustrates the reality. False teaching has its own dynamic; it drives out the faithful as syncretism subverts the whole Christian tradition. But in Rowan Williams’ version of 3D the ACNA looks like a member of the same family as TEC, even if initially a rather distant relative.

 

 

Charles Raven
15th February 2010

The English General Synod: The Centre Cannot Hold

If Lorna Ashworth’s Private Member’s Motion ‘That this Synod express the desire that the Church of England be in communion with the Anglican Church in North America’  is passed by the Church of England’s General Synod tomorrow,  she will have done  a great service to English Anglicans as well as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) because it is as much about the English Church as the Church in North America.

 

She poses precisely the sort of question that the Church of England’s leadership wants to avoid because the ACNA represents a choice which must be made between two incompatible forms of religion – historic biblical Anglicanism and that pseudo- Anglicanism being promoted by TEC and its allies which derives its energy from the spirit of the age rather than the Spirit of Christ.

 

Unsurprisingly, the English House of Bishops has proposed an amendment, to be put by the Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Rev Mike Hill, which will dilute and delay the original motion by asking Synod to recognise and affirm the desire of ACNA to remain in the Communion with the Archbishops being invited to report back to the Synod in 2011. While such prevarication is no doubt not his intention, according to the Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt   the Bishop of Bristol’s amendment  is simply a recognition of the church constitutional reality that ‘it is not in fact the role of the Church of England to make these kind of decisions, nor is it for Synod to make these kind of decisions’.

 

 But in that case something pretty odd is happening – the Church of England through its Synod has considered itself perfectly competent to change fundamentally the Church’s historic orders by assenting to the ordination of women to the presbyterate in 1992 and then proposing not only their consecration to the episcopate in 2007, but also attempting to force conscience by making no legal provision for those who cannot as a matter of principle accept the validity of female orders. Now the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, as chair of the legislative Steering Committee, has confirmed to Synod that any such provision has been ruled out. And yet it is held that a Synod which can introduce such drastic changes is not competent to express a view on what should be the much less controversial  question of recognising unquestionably orthodox Anglicans in North America who are being systematically harassed by official Anglican Churches with a increasingly implausible  claim to orthodoxy.

 

Such inconsistency  is characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon pragmatism which has reached its most highly developed and intentional form in the Lambeth inspired Anglican Covenant. This illusory middle way uses the language of orthodoxy to serve the interests of the increasingly apostate by postponing any closure to the far distant future. The resignation of the Presiding Bishop of Jerusalem and the Middle East from the Standing Committee of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) on January 30th illustrates the point. Dr Mouneer Anis has been one of the Global South Primates most committed to the Windsor Covenant process, but now loyalty to the gospel has brought his loyalty to Lambeth to breaking point. 

 

In his resignation letter of 30th January  he described how he had been increasingly marginalised from Communion decision making and concluded ‘my voice is like a useless cry in the wilderness’.  He warned that the Anglican Communion Office could not retain the confidence of the Communion if it continued to be ‘an office in the UK that tries to run the Communion in its own Western way’.

 

This sense of unfairness caused by the abuse of ecclesiastical institutions is well illustrated by the background material  to Lorna Ashworth’s motion which details systematic bullying of faithful clergy and laity through the courts in both TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, claiming that ‘An estimated $30 million has been spent on property litigation, and 491 clergy inhibited or deposed across the spectrum of church traditions’.    

TEC has clearly been rattled, but an attempt to discredit  Mrs Ashworth’s evidence has been systematically rebutted by Rev  Philip Ashey, Chief Operating Officer of the American Anglican Council  as ‘a willful and reckless indifference to the facts’.  Tempting as it may be to collude with such evasion, the shameful treatment of Anglo-Catholics by the Church of England, as confirmed this week, is a warning to all orthodox English Anglicans that the ruthlessness of the liberal ascendancy in North America could cross the Atlantic. In those circumstances, it becomes all the more important to establish that being an authentic Anglican is confessional and does not necessarily turn on recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury or the increasingly discredited ACC.  So recognition of the ACNA can be seen as not simply about support for fellow Anglicans in North America, but a mutual solidarity around a new confessional identity to which the ACNA bears witness.

 

This clarity is important because an illusory middle simply encourages more illusion. Hence, in response to this week’s general Synod, TEC’s Public Affairs Officer has produced a list of  ‘talking points’  a briefing for its bishops designed to disarm critics.  It is claimed that ‘The Episcopal Church laity and clergy believe the Christian faith as stated in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. We call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God because God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible. We look to the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church in the understanding of the Scriptures’. Yet TEC is notorious for its syncretism.

 

For instance,  Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori  reduced the Trinity simply to one particular human insight amongst others when she told Time Magazine  in 2006 that ‘We who practice the Christian tradition understand him [Jesus] as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box’. Moreover, TEC claims that it is guided by the Holy Spirit in its interpretation of Scripture, yet promotes an understanding of homosexuality which overthrows the teaching of Scripture as affirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference and has led to profound rupture in the Communion (see also Virtue Online   ‘Presiding Bishop Spins ‘Talking Points’ in Order to Derail Upcoming Synod Motion’).

 

The reality is that the Lambeth centre cannot hold. The English Press is now talking about a ‘mass exodus’  of conservatives and  it is very difficult to see how principled Anglo Catholics or Conservative Evangelicals can have a future in a Church of England with women bishops. And the resignation of Dr Mouneer Anis, following repeated failures to discipline TEC since the consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003, is just one more piece of evidence that neither can the traditional centre hold the wider Anglican Communion together.

 

 Liberals may be inclined to congratulate themselves on a strategy that seems very likely to consolidate their dominance of the Church of England, but the centre they are set to occupy is a centre that cannot hold. If Lorna Ashworth’s motion succeeds tomorrow, it will not only encourage the ACNA, but will also be a significant step towards English Anglicans’ awareness of a new identity to be found in a genuinely global and confessionally centred  Communion.

 

Charles Raven

9th February 2010

Moses Tay: A Prophet confronts Lambeth Pragmatism

In his recent interview with the Christian Post Moses Tay, onetime Archbishop of Singapore, brings a sharp prophetic insight to bear on the Anglican Covenant and warns that it is a ‘whitewash’. ‘It cannot be of God’ he says ‘because if you try to keep the light and darkness together, righteous and immoral together, to say we are a church, it’s disparaging the meaning of covenant’. That the Windsor Covenant process is both superficial and manipulative has been a regular theme of my articles over the past twelve months – see for instance ‘The Anglican Covenant: A House on Sand’ ‘The Anglican Covenant: A House on Sand’ and ‘The Ridley Covenant Draft – Taming GAFCON’ - so I am greatly encouraged that Archbishop Tay has spoken out so boldly.

The essential challenge of his remarks is not to the revisionists and liberals, but those pragmatic conservatives who have managed to convince themselves that, despite its deficiencies, the Covenant can be used to their advantage as a way of marginalizing the American Episcopal Church and other Provinces which are following its lead. Evidence that this mindset now appears to be gaining some traction with the Global South comes from Archbishop John Chew, current Archbishop of South East Asia and incumbent general secretary of the Global South Steering Committee who claims that twenty Global South Provinces are ready to sign on to the Covenant at their next ‘South to South’ encounter in Singapore next April.

A S Haley aka ‘Anglican Curmudgeon’ reflects this approach in a commentary on the final version of the Covenant, published shortly before Moses Tay’s interview. While realistic enough to recognise that the Covenant is powerless to restrain TEC, he nonetheless commends it as a damage limitation exercise because ‘The beauty of the Covenant is that it is self-authenticating. If a majority adopts it, then there will be no issue as to whether or not they are “Anglican”. And if there is a minority that does not adopt it, they will by that act have defined themselves as apart from the majority of the Anglican Communion’.

But the problem with the Covenant is precisely the fact that it is ‘self authenticating’. Its doctrinal content is so generalised and non-binding and the disciplinary element so dependent upon consensus that what is to be held as genuinely Anglican has no meaningful confessional reference. It simply boils down to an interpretation of consensus based on the Instruments of Communion which are already discredited, albeit in the guise of the proposed ‘Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion’ formed by election from the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting.

And while the consensus might be broadly conservative at the moment (although that did not stop Rowan Williams ignoring the deadline for TEC laid down by the Dar es Salaam Primates’ Meeting of February 2007), there is no guarantee that it will remain that way in the longer term as the ‘listening process’ presupposed by the Covenant does its insidious work of desensitising the Communion as a whole to the sinfulness of sin and the need for repentance.

Moses Tay is clearly not interested in debating the pros and cons of short term ecclesio-political tactics. He is asking the deeper question of the nature and necessity of spiritual discernment. While it is true that the final version of the Covenant has been commended as a means of discerning the nature and seriousness of disagreements by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the fact remains that the overriding aim of the Covenant is not faithfulness, but institutional unity. The Archbishop’s own failure to use such powers as he has to discipline the erring bishops of TEC simply illustrates the point. The Covenant represents a rejection of clear confessional standards, in contrast to the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration, and so Moses Tay is entirely right to say that the Covenant is ‘an act of disobedience’ which will ‘paralyse’ the objections of the Global South Churches to the apostasy gaining ground in other parts of the Communion.

In other words, the Covenant process is institutionalised disobedience and from this standpoint the Global South Steering Committee’s statement that ‘provincial and invited participants [to the fourth South to South Encounter] should be unequivocally committed to uphold the spirit and intent of the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10 and the proposed Anglican Covenant (full Ridley Draft)’ appears not only to pre-empt debate on the Covenant, but also embodies a major contradiction. The Anglican Covenant is a systematic attempt to subvert the ‘spirit and intent’ of Resolution 1.10 by wrenching its commitment to ‘listen to the experience of homosexual persons’ out of the context of orientation to that of practice, thereby calling into question the very truth the resolution affirmed, that homosexual practice was ‘incompatible with Scripture’.

There is not the space in the confines of this brief article to chart the evolution of the spurious ‘listening process’, but its beginnings are clearly to be seen in the tentative and provisional tone of the official Lambeth Report’s account of the debate on homosexuality . The vote in favour of Resolution 1.10 was 526-70, but the report merely observes ‘We have prayed, studied and discussed these issues, and we are unable to come to a common mind on the Scriptural, theological, historical and scientific questions that are raised. There is much we do not yet understand’ (The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998, Called to Full Humanity, Section 1 Report, p17). Normally 88% in favour would be taken to be a pretty good indicator of a ‘common mind’.

The Anglican Covenant needs whitewash because its cracks are not superficial; they go right down to the foundations and are not amenable to political fixes. Its promise of a comfortable middle way which sidesteps repentance is illusory and dangerous. Truly prophetic voices are rarely popular and always controversial, but Moses Tay has brought a refreshing dose of spiritual reality to the Covenant debate. Ultimately there are only two choices, the slide into apostasy led by TEC or the recovery of that Anglican confessional identity forged by the sixteenth century Reformers and around which the GAFCON movement has come together to bring unity in truth.

Charles Raven

12th January 2010

Learning from a Liberal Mistake

 

As GAFCON was launched in Jerusalem last year, Archbishop Peter Jensen spoke of the  ‘extraordinary strategic blunder’  by the Episcopal Church of the United States in consecrating a practising homosexual, Gene Robinson, as a bishop in 2003 which awoke the ‘sleeping giant that is evangelical Anglicanism’. 

 

Now liberals have committed a second strategic blunder. Not so much the emergence of partnered lesbian Mary Glasspool as suffragan bishop elect by the Diocese of Los Angeles – such a move was entirely predictable after this year’s General Convention rejected Rowan Williams call for ‘gracious restraint – but their very public hostility towards  Dr Williams following his rather cool and disapproving response .

 

Frustration with the Archbishop’s waning enthusiasm for the gay agenda has been building for some time and is now being voiced very clearly. A coalition of British gay activists, the LGBT Anglican Coalition, contrasted his silence on a rather draconian proposal in Uganda to introduce the death penalty in certain circumstances for homosexual rape with his public rebuke to TEC and  commented  sharply ‘If the Archbishop is to retain any credibility at all he needs to reconsider. This double standard of justice is frankly perverse.  It appears to most people in Britain to be a disgraceful acquiescence in the demands of homophobic pressure groups both in England and in the Communion.’

 

And leading gay activist Colin Coward was equally forthright in a letter to the London Times on 8th December, convinced that ‘The direction that Rowan is taking the Anglican Communion is compromising deeply the position of gay and lesbian people. What he is saying about the bishop in the US and what he is not saying about Uganda is disastrous.’

 

Little wonder than that Ruth Gledhill wrote an article  headlined  ‘Dreams of church liberals are almost dead’. But if the liberal dream of an Anglican Communion acclimatised to the acceptance of same sex unions proves to be just a dream it will not be Rowan Williams’ fault; it will be much more to do with the hastiness of gay activists. By running ahead and disowning their erstwhile champion, they have made it much less likely that the majority of the Communion’s Primates can be brought round. They have made it plain that they are no longer interested in his tortuous process of dialogue and debate when it no longer seems to serve their purposes.

 

This is a major mistake and fails to appreciate an important element of Rowan Williams’ theological method. He has never renounced the views he put forward on same sex unions. Instead, ever since it was evident that he would become Archbishop of Canterbury, he has drawn a distinction between his personal views and the position he is required to uphold in virtue of his office.  This willingness to renounce a ‘campaigning role’ may seem laudable, but it does not amount to repentance in the biblical sense of a change of mind.

 

Instead it reflects Williams’ debt to the nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel. He sees truth merging as opposite ideas are held together in tension in the hope that a ‘higher truth’ will emerge. On this basis, it is perfectly logical that he should respect the current mind of the Communion without having to renounce his personal views. Unfortunately, this process becomes manipulative and frustrating where fundamental theological convictions, especially about Scriptural authority, are no longer held in common.

 

Giles Fraser is another leading liberal who has become impatient with Rowan Williams and was very critical of this approach as the Church of England began to grapple with another very divisive issue, the consecration of women as bishops in June 2006. In ‘Following Hegel’  he wrote ‘the archbishop believes that all oppositions can be nuanced into resolution. It’s a matter of faith for him. The dialectic describes the path a divided humanity must travel if it is to reach the good infinity, the kingdom of heaven’ but ‘What really happens is that you come up with a bodge and a room full of very angry Christians, exhausted by the politics of eternal negotiation’.

 

For liberals in a hurry, dialectic can look very much like a form of sophisticated stalemate, but they overlook the fact that it is a process which is subtly subversive of biblical authority. It does not require that the orthodox abandon their views, but if the dialectic is to work, there must be a willingness to resist closure, to continue talking and embrace a diversity which is incompatible with the gospel .  And for these reasons, the orthodox should not be in a hurry to draw the simplistic conclusion that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend. The agonizingly slow progress of the Covenant process over which Rowan Williams presides is the practical outworking of his Hegelianism.

 

Applied to the struggle over sexuality in the Communion, this means that orthodox biblical teaching is reduced logically to ‘my opinion’ and is in principle provisional, something about which the Communion could change its mind, and Rowan Williams has not been given sufficient credit by his liberal critics for the way in which he has managed to institutionalise through much of the Communion a ‘listening’ or ‘indaba’ process  based on a paradoxical reading of the 1998 Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 1.10. The intention of the bishops at Lambeth was to bring closure by declaring that same sex unions were ‘incompatible with Scripture’, and the commitment ‘to listen to the experience of homosexual persons’ was a pastoral response to those desiring to live their lives by this standard, not a commitment to continued dialogue with the Resolution’s opponents (in fairness it should be acknowledged that his predecessor, George Carey, prepared the ground and was vigorously promoting this revisionist interpretation in the United States just three weeks after the Lambeth Conference closed).

 

With patience, it is not impossible to conceive that in the long run a sufficient number of the orthodox leaders in the Communion could be sufficiently desensitized by this process to enable a widespread acceptance of homosexual practice throughout much of the Communion, especially as this would be given constant encouraging by the prevailing assumptions about sexual rights and expression in the wealthier and historically dominant provinces of the Communion. The GAFCON Provinces have already made their stand, but by attacking Rowan Williams, the liberals have discredited the process which could have been their main hope of turning the waverers.

 

The danger for the orthodox is that the attacks of the liberals could mislead some into thinking that it would be strategically smart to make common cause with Canterbury, but this would be to make the same mistake as the liberals – to look at short term surface appearances, rather than the long term erosion of biblical faith. The liberal criticism of Rowan Williams may be strategically naïve, but it does reflect the underlying reality, that there are two fundamentally different and incompatible forms of Anglicanism within the Communion which cannot be nuanced indefinitely. And Confessional Anglicanism needs to develop new leadership structures which have come to terms with that reality.

 

 

Charles Raven

 

 

14th December 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rowan in Rome:Retreat from Reason

Rowan in Rome; Retreat from Reason

Apparently unabashed by the chaotic state of the Communion he represents, Rowan William’s provocative  address   to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in Rome last Thursday was noted by the media for its strong challenge to the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the ordination of women, but its real significance  is that it reveals an Archbishop who,  far from being discouraged, does really seem to believe his own propaganda, even to the extent that, the recent humiliation of his non-consultation over the Ordinariate notwithstanding, he offers recent Anglican practice as a model for the Vatican to follow in ecumenical relationships.

For an Archbishop with such a strong reputation for thoughtful scholarship and learning, this represents an alarming retreat from reason and will reinforce the concerns of those like Archbishop Bob Duncan who commented earlier this week  ‘In the year 2000, the Archbishop of Canterbury was the second most important Christian leader in the world. In a short space of time that office has utterly been diminished. It shows that the British model of Anglicanism has failed.’

Williams ransacks ecumenical statements since Vatican II to claim that dialogue has led to ‘strong convergence’ on the essential nature of the Church as ‘a community, in which human beings are made sons and daughters of God, and reconciled both with God and one another.  The Church celebrates this through the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion in which God acts upon us to transform us ‘in communion’.’   He then questions whether ‘the issues that still divide us have the same weight – issues about authority in the Church, about primacy (especially the unique position of the Pope), and the relations between the local churches and the universal church in making decisions (about matters like the ordination of women, for instance).’

Each of these three areas which divide Rome from Anglicans  – authority, primacy and the ordination of women – are examined in turn and Williams concludes that they are all open questions in the light of the need to serve the greater goal of ‘filial and communal holiness as the character of restored humanity’ and on this basis calls for greater openness on the part of Rome to practical convergence with non Roman Catholics in a ‘community of communities’ and a ‘communion of communions’.

It is at this practical point that the implausibility of Williams’ position starts to become evident when, presumably without blushing, he commends the Anglican Covenant process, claiming that ‘The current proposals for a Covenant between Anglican provinces represent an effort to create not a centralised decision-making executive but a ‘community of communities’ that can manage to sustain a mutually nourishing and mutually critical life, with all consenting to certain protocols of decision-making together.’ This is seen as a more ambitious approach than the Anglican Ordinariate of which Williams says somewhat dismissively that ‘it does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision-making, but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical culture, as we might say.  As such, it is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground.’

But if the Ordinariate is such a modest step – Williams refers to it as a ‘chaplaincy’ – why was he not able to support the formation of such a structure within the Church of England under his own leadership, as the Anglo-Catholic constituency in the Church of England have repeatedly requested? Instead the Church of England seems set upon a legal framework which will drive them out and foreclose the debate in a way which makes a mockery of the model of a ‘community of communities’ reflecting ‘filial and communal holiness’ which Williams is so keen to commend to the Vatican.

The reason for such a glaring contradiction is of course that what Archbishop Duncan describes as ‘the British model of Anglicanism’ now has no coherent theology and is driven by pragmatism. Williams’ claim for the Lambeth Communion is that ‘a degree of recognizability of  ‘the same Catholic thing’ has survived: Anglican provinces ordaining women to some or all of the three orders have not become so obviously diverse in their understanding of filial holiness and sacramental transformation that they cannot act together, serve one another and allow some real collaboration.  It is this sort of thinking that has allowed Anglicans until recently to maintain a degree of undoubtedly impaired communion among themselves, despite the sharpness of the division over this matter.’

The problem is that ‘the same catholic thing’ which can be expressed in the generalised terms of ecumenical statements rapidly dissolves when exposed to questions of actual practice unless there is a clear understanding and practice of authority within the Church. Behind Williams’ passing concession to reality in his commendation of Anglican practice – ‘until recently’ – lies the unspoken issue which is even more fundamental than that of women’s ordination, the acceptance of clergy in openly homosexual relationships.

The Windsor covenant process is a pragmatic response to this particular problem and over six years and three drafts has failed to restrain the North American provinces who have been setting the pace in promoting the gay/lesbian agenda and developing a syncretistic form of Christianity behind the façade of tradition. Moreover, the Lambeth ‘Instruments of Unity’ are widely held to have failed – most clearly reflected in the non-representation of some two thirds of the Communions’ practising Anglicans at the 2008 Lambeth Conference.

The Covenant process itself is now stalled and the current Ridley Cambridge Draft is still very weak on any form of discipline, the key clauses being liberally peppered with the qualification ‘may’; moreover, it cannot provide a theological basis for the communion because the key theological content of the introduction is explicitly excluded from the Covenant itself as ‘it may provide challenges to some’.  Williams commends the Anglican practice of finding ‘carefully crafted institutional ways of continuing to work together’; the Anglican Covenants have certainly been carefully crafted, but in the interests of short term institutional survival, not long term theological coherence.

So how does the Archbishop find the nerve to commend to the Vatican a model of ‘doing Church’ which is so clearly broken backed? Part of the answer may be in the supportive leader comment of today’s London Times, echoed by other establishment voices, which accuses the Vatican of mounting ‘a direct challenge to the unity of the Anglican Communion’. The liberal British Establishment is rediscovering its anti-papal instincts as it comes to the defence of British Anglicanism.

No doubt Dr Williams takes heart from this endorsement, but it comes with a price tag. The Times comment continues ‘There is every good reason, in theology and natural justice, for the Church to embrace the ministry of women and homosexuals. Anglicanism will be richer for it. Dr Williams will be a bigger man for espousing it unreservedly’. Taking ‘homosexuals’ to mean those actively in such sexual relationships (otherwise the reference would be pointless), this rather overlooks the point that if Rowan Williams were to act as The Times urges him to, he would himself be a direct challenge to the unity of the Anglican Communion, but Rome may quite properly, on the basis of his address this week, wonder whether he has convinced himself that with enough time the agenda of British Anglicanism can still be established in a global communion and even beyond.

Rowan Williams  is creating a myth of unity and it is becoming all the more urgent that orthodox global Anglicans committed to confessional unity do not give credence to such a retreat from reason.
 
Charles Raven

21st November 2009

 

 

 

 

 
  

 

 

Has the Anglican Experiment Really Failed?

 

Last Sunday I was privileged to be present at the consecration of the Revd Canon Dr Festus Yeboah-Asuamah as the new bishop of Sunyani Diocese in Ghana by the Archbishop of the Church of the Province of West Africa, Dr Justice O. Akrofi.  The diocese has only existed since 1997 and the diocese from which it was formed had itself only been inaugurated in 1981, yet here were hundreds of joyful worshippers gathered in a new cathedral to welcome their next bishop. For over five hours there was a glorious weaving together of  liturgy and music, moving seamlessly between solemnity and spontaneity, with a clear and challenging gospel focus in the Archbishop’s sermon.

Yet the day before in London, as Forward in Faith were debating Pope Benedict’s extraordinary offer to Anglicans of a Personal Ordinariate, the Bishop of Fulham, the Rt Revd John Broadhurst  told the conference  plainly that ‘the Anglican experiment is over’.  Well, maybe in England it is, but clearly not in Ghana!

Of course, the Pope’s initiative is a very sobering sign of Anglican failure.  The Vatican has been at pains to point out that its action in offering Anglicans a continuing ‘space’ within the Roman Church is not an attempt to poach, but a response to persistent requests from those in distress and it seems clear from the lack of preliminary consultation with Dr Rowan Williams that confidence in his ability to lead the Anglican Communion has dwindled.

However, what my experience in Ghana illustrates is the truth which GAFCON has so powerfully articulated – that the failure of the Anglican Communion is not an intrinsic flaw in its fundamental theological vision, but a failure to be faithful to that vision. The Anglican experiment is in fact proving to be remarkably successful in many areas of the Global South, undergirded by that recovery of confidence in Evangelical Anglicanism so closely associated with John Stott and J I Packer – even if it may sometimes take liturgical forms which would not be entirely to their taste.

The Anglican Communion crisis is not about Anglicanism in itself, but a crisis of faithfulness. Failure to maintain Anglicanism’s doctrinal and moral  integrity precipitated GAFCON and is the root cause of the Pope’s offer of the Ordinariate. As Bishop Broadhurst bluntly stated ‘Anglicanism has become a joke because it has singularly failed to deal with any of its contentious issues’.

GAFCON and the Ordinariate are both, essentially, calls for a return to roots, but which roots?  Back to the Reformed Catholicism articulated by the English Reformers and powerfully reaffirmed as a global vision in the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration of 2008 or back to Roman Catholicism?

The attraction of Rome is its theological coherence and the same is required for any credible and durable alternative. And herein lies the danger of the Anglican Covenant process –  the Global South Primates Steering Committee’s response to the Personal Ordinariate was to issue an ‘exhortation’   in which they affirmed the Anglican Covenant as a ‘clear and principled’ alternative, but is such optimism justified? There are two as yet unresolved problems with the Covenant, even in its somewhat improved Cambridge Ridley Draft form.

The first is evident from the Primates’ exhortation itself. Who exactly are they exhorting? Principally, it would seem, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself who is urged ‘to work in close collegial consultation with fellow Primates in the Communion, act decisively on already agreed measures in the Primates’ Meetings, and exercise effective leadership’. In other words, to start doing precisely what he has so signally failed to do so far!

It has been commented that the Archbishop is operating with ‘no known ecclesiology’ and seems to have adopted a self defeating institutional pragmatism. One of the ‘three undeniable facts’ of the ‘long and agonising journey’ which led to the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration was the persistent failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline. Sadly, the dysfunctional pattern continues, notably at the last meeting of the Anglican Communion Council in Jamaica where the Archbishop’s intervention had the effect of kicking what many considered to be the crucial Section 4 of the Ridley Cambridge Draft into the long grass, an action widely seen as a move to soothe TEC’s anxieties about anything which could give the Covenant teeth. 

This impression is reinforced by recent correspondence with Bishop John Howe of Central Florida,  His letter   of 10 September 2009 reversed the position he set out in a previous letter of 14 October 2007. The only consistent factor in these two views was that both served the interest of TEC – in 2007 Williams argued that the diocese could sign up to the covenant, which would have discouraged orthodox congregations  concerned with the state of TEC from leaving, whereas in 2009, affirming the same principle would have encouraged North Carolina and other dioceses to fragment from TEC.

The second, and connected, problem with the Ridley Cambridge draft is the ambiguity of the document itself. While it is true that it has much that can be squared with the Jerusalem Declaration, the introduction which sets out the Covenant’s theological basis is specifically excluded from the Covenant on the grounds that ‘it may provide challenges to some’.  So the Covenant lacks an agreed theological foundation without which the ‘unifying task of a common discernment in communion’ referred to by the Windsor report (Section 67) is in real danger of becoming a merely political exercise.

This implicit relativism of the Ridley Draft  is consistent with the ‘two track’ Communion as envisaged by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his response to TEC’s Anaheim Convention in July. It allows for two different ‘styles’ of Anglicanism to co-exist while excommunication is effectively ruled out as ‘apocalyptic’. This calls into question ‘passive discipline’ strategies favoured by some orthodox supporters of the covenant process who envisage revisionist Churches effectively opting out of communion through failure to sign up to the Covenant.  If there is no binding process by which recognition can actually be removed, a two track communion implies the acceptance of parallel ‘truths’, with one track being provisionally privileged over the other simply because of the weight of institutional opinion.

The Anglican experiment has not failed. In many parts of the Global South it has been wonderfully transformative, but there are failing Churches within the Communion of which the Church of England is one, as the Bishop of Fulham has recognised.  The Global South Primates Steering Committee looks for a ‘clear and principled way forward’, but if the Anglican Covenant is ever to fulfil this purpose, the Communion will need the ‘new wineskin’ of clear and principled governance. As the Church of England unravels, it seems increasingly clear that we must look to Jerusalem – the Jerusalem Declaration – rather than Canterbury if we are truly to return to our roots as a Reformed Church of the Western Catholic tradition.

Charles Raven

28th October 2009

Burying the Bad News – a Response to Stephen Kuhrt

This week a spokesman for Fulcrum, the ‘open’ evangelical’ grouping the in the Church of England, has claimed that the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans will fragment the Church of England, weaken its structures and polarise debate. Many might think that as far as the first two charges are concerned, the Church of England has been managing to bring these about quite effectively on its own without any help from the FCA in Great Britain and Ireland, but Kuhrt claims that the FCA needs to  ‘bury good news’ and to substantiate this he buries the bad news.

As far as the third charge is concerned, the FCA is not polarising debate, but its existence inevitably brings issues to the surface. And this is what happened at a meeting of the Church of England’s Evangelical Council last week as the Revd Stephen Kuhrt represented the Fulcrum position on the FCA. An alternative view was given by the Revd Vaughan Roberts in his address ‘Why I Praise God for the FCA’. Both are published side by side in this week’s Church of England Newspaper, but this is not simply a Church of England matter. The FCA in these islands is part of the global GAFCON movement  and much as some would want to deny it, the problems which have engulfed the Anglican Churches of North America are inexorably  manifesting themselves in England.

Vaughan Roberts is an excellent advocate for the FCA and there is no point in repeating him. My focus is on Stephen Kuhrt’s critique of the FCA in which he unintentionally draws attention to the very reasons  why we need it.

First, we are told that what the FCA and Article 13 of the Jerusalem Declaration ‘opens up are the grounds for pretty much any parish or grouping with a grudge against authority appealing to FCA UK and receiving its support.’ This is a parody. ‘Being Faithful’, the GAFCON Theological Resource Group’s commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration, makes it clear that ‘the breaking of communion between churches is only to be applied in extreme circumstances’ and ‘should be exercised with due process and over time’ (p65) and commends the eight step pattern of discipline recommended in ‘To Mend the Net’, the 2001 proposal for restoring order in the Anglican Communion by Archbishops Maurice Sinclair and Drexel Gomez (which was shunted into a siding by one of Stephen Kuhrt’s favoured ‘Keele Evangelicals’, former Archbishop George Carey).

The Jerusalem Declaration recovers the principle of church discipline, which for the Anglican Reformers was a mark of the true church, along with the faithful preaching of God’s Word and celebration of the sacraments. What the FCA has done is not to encourage fragmentation, but to reveal the fragmentation that already exists. Doctrinal discipline is virtually non-existent in the Church of England today, as Vaughan Roberts notes, and irrespective of the formal status of the Church of England doctrinally as defined in Canon A5, in practice pretty well anything goes. One cannot enter a Church of England parish church with any certainty that orthodox Christianity will believed and preached simply because it is part of the Church of England.

It is this reality which Stephen Kuhrt has to bury, because it calls into question the assumption of evangelical success which underlies his second criticism of the FCA, namely that the it will encourage cynicism about the Church of England’s structures ‘at just a time when these structures need encouragement and endorsement’. He claims that evangelicals in the Church of England have ‘never had it so good’ and that the Church ‘has never had more evangelical bishops than it has now.’ Assuming charitably that all bishops who identify themselves as evangelical do actually still hold to distinctive evangelical beliefs, we need to ask why, in that case, is the Church of England, taken as a whole, so manifestly a failing institution – without an agreed agenda, with declining numbers and with some dioceses facing serious financial difficulty?

The answer seems to be that despite the superficial success of the ‘Keele’ strategy of engagement with the structures, those evangelicals in positions of leadership continue to duck the key question of discipline, and as long as they do that, in practice they collude with the liberal agenda of non-scriptural inclusion and by silence give plausibility to false teaching.

To take a current example, Stephen Kuhrt cites Steve Croft, now Bishop of Sheffield, as one of those who has been able ‘to  build a mission shaped agenda right into the heart of the Church of England’. It is not being cynical about his positive achievements to point out that nonetheless,  Bishop Jack Spong, who was once rebuked even by Rowan Williams for his extreme scepticism, is next week visiting St Marks’s Broomhall in Sheffield as part of a lecture tour without, it appears, any censure from the Bishop of Sheffield. A diocesan spokesman told me that the Bishop was aware of the event and as long as Bishop Spong was ‘just speaking’ this would not be a problem.

The Progressive Church Network which is organising the lecture tour tells us  that  ‘Bishop Spong never fails to inspire and encourage those who, like him, believe it’s time to jettison some of the worst dogma which has attached to the Christian tradition’. And included in those ‘worst dogmas’ are the incarnation and atonement. Even if Bishop Spong had simply hired a secular venue for his lecture, should not such views be met with more than silence from an orthodox bishop?

In contrast, when I invited Bishop Howell Davies, a retired Uganda bishop, to conduct a confirmation service in 2000 in place of the then diocesan bishop Dr Peter Selby, who was actively promoting the gay lesbian agenda, Bishop Davies was issued with a ‘letter of unwelcome’ by Peter Selby albeit, somewhat bizarrely, after the event.

And coming right back to the present, would the Bishop of Sheffield  be willing to open one of his churches to a bishop of the Anglican Church of North America? According to the Archbishop of Canterbury their orders are irregular and therefore their ministry cannot be recognised in England so we have a neat illustration of how dysfunctional church structures have become – the hospitality of a parish church is given to the most outspoken heretic  of the Anglican Communion while godly orthodox bishops would, presumably, be excluded.

What is true at the local level in England is also reflected in the dysfunctionality of Lambeth initiatives at the international level. Stephen Kuhrt believes that the FCA have had a very negative take on, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement after TEC’s Anaheim Convention in July, but is it plausible to believe that the Archbishop would have been willing to issue a statement setting out views on homosexuality quite the reverse of his own – to the chagrin of many revisionists – if it had not been for the determination and courage of the GAFCON Primates in being willing to take practical steps to confront false teaching?

One of those upset friends was, unsurprisingly, Peter Selby. The former Bishop of Worcester has sometimes been described as a maverick, but does have a knack of saying the right things for the wrong reasons. In his address to Inclusive Church   on 7th October, he sharply criticised the increasingly personalised and ad hoc leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, arguing that ‘when it comes to sexuality, he has taken on an exclusive concern with finding ecclesio-political answers to the current panic. Out of the systemic malaise we seem to inhabit has come an apparently overwhelming false consciousness: a place where the thoughts he thinks arise from the role that has been pressed upon him by others.’

So the GAFCON movement is not the only group to have serious questions about the Archbishop’s leadership of the Communion. Fulcrum evangelicals are like investors in denial, unable to admit they have made a mistake and cut their losses when everyone else can see the business going down the drain. Peter Selby’s analysis is spot on. The Lambeth inspired Covenant process is driven by pragmatism. It refuses to deal honestly with profound underlying theological differences and this lack of integrity makes the whole process vulnerable to the clearly worked out ideology of TEC and its allies. Peter Selby’s address was entitled ‘When the Word of the Street is Resist’ and perhaps it is no coincidence there are already voices in TEC calling for its ample funds to be used for the encouragement  of  revisionist Anglican congregations and structures in England and the UK.  It is unlikely that John Spong’s lecture tour in England will be his last.

So Kuhrt’s third concern, that the FCA ‘will encourage an unhelpful standoff with more liberal groupings and work to increase rather than resolve polarisation on the issue of homosexuality’ expresses an attachment to a  status quo which systematically puts the orthodox on the back foot, encouraging them to treat basic Christian doctrine and morality as matters for ongoing debate rather than that to which we hold firm.

At the international level, it became increasingly clear to those who eventually founded the GAFCON movement that the ‘listening process’ initiated after the 1998 Lambeth Conference had become a technique for delay and assimilation. The openly expressed frustration of ‘liberal groupings’ now that they perceive the process is not going all their way (thanks to GAFCON) simply underlines the point. The FCA has brought a much needed theological clarity into a process which had been dominated by an unholy alliance of TEC money and Lambeth hierarchy. It is to be hoped that the emergence of GAFCON means the game is over for the revisionists as far as the Global Communion is concerned, but it is certainly not ‘game over’ in England. The Church of England is going to find itself in partnership for the future – the question is which partners?  Any hope for the long term integrity and mission of the Church of England must lie in partnership with that biblical integrity and vitality which the FCA represents; otherwise the future may well be with TEC.

Charles Raven

16th October

Marinated -The Accidental Subversion of the Evangelical Mind

Andrew Marin is a new name in the evangelical firmament. His book Love is an Orientation has been recently published by Inter-Varsity Press, the flagship evangelical publisher in the USA. It has been warmly welcomed by some sections of evangelicals in Britain as well as some sections of the gay activist community. It is also clear that Andrew Marin will increasingly be invited to share and shape Christian attitudes on homosexual behaviour and practice in the UK.

Andrew Marin is not another Gene Robinson. He seeks to build bridges rather than stoke controversy and his project can be seen as something much more gentle, a kind of ‘marination’ process (my term, not his) in which the Christian faith is flavoured and tenderized so that it is palatable to the gay community, yet without altering its substance.

How can this ‘marination’ be achieved? His Chicago based organisation, the Marin Foundation describes itself as ‘the very first organization that works to build a bridge between the religious and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) communities in a non-threatening, research and biblically oriented fashion’. The guiding principle at the heart of his recently published book, ‘Love is an Orientation – Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community’, (with a foreword by emergent church theologian Brian Maclaren) is the Marin Foundation’s strapline ‘“Love is not just a word. It is a measurable expression of one’s unconditional behaviors toward one another.” It is a call to cease the culture wars and, without necessarily changing one’s moral or doctrinal beliefs, to build non-judgemental relationships.

It is an ambitious and attractive project. Here, I think for the first time, is an evangelical responding systematically to the gay phenomenon in terms of mission, rather than focusing on biblical interpretation or the nature versus nurture arguments about identity. Marin sees the gay community as a distinct cultural group which the Churches have been woefully ineffective in reaching and he is passionate that the gospel should be seen by them as acceptance and not rejection.

The force of Marin’s commitment to this ministry seems to flow from his experience of three close college friends ‘coming out’ as gay. Unambiguously heterosexual himself and brought up within a bible believing evangelical church, he was deeply shocked. But commitment to his friends led him to immerse himself in the GLBT subculture of Chicago.

As a result, he came to see that the same-sex sexual behaviours which evangelicals held to be sinful were so central to the self–identity of people in this culture that they could only see Christianity as a radical rejection. Effective mission therefore must begin with building relationships of trust and demonstrating unconditional acceptance, something for which Marin clearly has a gift as the many anecdotes in his book illustrate. In fact, he found himself as the token ‘straight’ in the gay clubs of Boystown, Chicago, known affectionately as ‘Straighty Straighterson’.

Out of this experience, Marin has built – or to be more precise, adapted – a theology of mission which relies on dialogue. The key to building this bridge is to ‘elevate the conversation’ by avoiding the closed questions which polarize e.g. ‘is homosexual sex sinful?’ and instead establish common ground on the basis of the unconditional love of God, with behaviour that reinforces the words.

This has not been ineffective. Marin writes of his puzzlement (Love is an Orientation p105) that two gay men should leave their gay affirming church and make his bible study group their church instead. The answer he found was ‘because I didn’t focus on their sexuality at all; instead I unapologetically focused on how to have a better more intimate relationship with God apart from any GLBT issues’. This acceptance of people as people rather than as gays or lesbians creates a space in which there is the potential for them to hear the gospel for what it really is.

Does this lead to people then leaving the gay lifestyle? If the three personal testimonies from the gay community in the books’ appendix are typical then the answer would seem to be ‘sometimes’ at least, since two out of the three clearly are not in same sex sexual relationships. In fact one has experienced a change in sexual orientation. However, one lesbian testimony is ambiguous, referring to a strong subjective sense of God’s validation trumping biblical interpretation and throughout the book there is a laboured reticence about addressing the fundamental question of the whether or not same-sex unions are necessarily sinful.

In the story of Rob (p111) Marin writes that ‘As clearly as Rob heard God tell him that is was OK for him to be [actively] gay, he heard God tell him “that it was time for you to come back to me”…Heeding God’s call, Rob started a new path and now is living a solidified life again focused on God – not on what he feels he needs to be sexually’. Here again is the reliance on subjective (and contradictory) feelings and a retreat into confusing ambiguity as we ponder what a ‘solidified’ life might possibly look like.

Questions are emerging as to just how much weight Marin’s bridge can take. It is a bold and gracious project, but can it really do the job?

The design flaws come to light when Marin claims that an elevated conversation needs an elevated hermeneutics, taking what he describes as ‘The Big Five’ key biblical passages on homosexuality – Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1:26,27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and 1 Timothy 1:9-11, finding in them ‘an emerging set of eternal principles’ so that ’the same old “gay bashing” passages can instead build a bridge that allows GLBT people to draw near to God’.

So Marin sets out to show us what the ‘Big Five’ really mean, 2,000 years of biblical scholarship and the exhaustive exegetical work of contemporary evangelical scholars like Robert Gagnon notwithstanding.

The first passage tackled is the judgement on Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. Marin’s interpretation is controlled by Jesus warning about Lot’s wife who looked back (Luke 17:32-33) and the ‘greater point’ is the tragedy of ‘a person turning her back on God to yearn for things manmade (p121). While this is clearly the particular point Jesus is making, it does not nullify the direct link between immorality and judgement found in the Old Testament and which the New Testament also acknowledges (Jude 7).

The passages in Leviticus forbidding homosexual sex are held to represent a basic value of living counter culturally – the ‘crossroads’ principle’. So the Church relates counter culturally to the GLBT community by opting out of the ‘culturally conditioned’ response of argument and debate. This is dangerously naïve. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in his recent Oxford Sir Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture (Standpoint Magazine October 2009 p68) spoke of the Western world ‘living in the void that Christianity has left behind’ and of a culture now ‘ruled by the gods of olden time, only with new names’ including Ashtoreth (Astarte or Ishtar), the god of sex and fertility. In our time, though, it is no longer the goddess of fertility but only of pure sex.’

The promotion of homosexual lifestyles is just one element in a whole spectrum of sexual practices which are emerging with the demise of a Christian world view and to suggest that Christians should opt out of debate and argument in the public square is the high road to assimilation by an increasingly aggressive secularism. The question surely is not whether one should debate, but what is a Christlike and godly form of debate.

Similarly, Paul’s description of pagan humanity in Romans chapter 1 and its sexual practices becomes for Marin an illustration of the need to do all we can to promote a ‘Oneness Principle’ of relationship with God and that will involve Christians in a responsibility to ‘learn about gays and lesbians’ and facilitate their relationship with God in which they can hear him ‘personally and individually telling each of his beloved children what he feels is best for their life’ (p129).

A pattern is emerging of the specific teaching about same sex relationships being relativised by the arbitrary application of a claimed underlying truth. The exegesis of 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 becomes even more contrived to avoid the very direct reference to the Greek ‘arsenokoites’ translated by the NIV as ‘homosexual offenders’ (v9). Rather than focus on ‘disputed words’ we should see the bigger issue, that no-one inherits the kingdom of God without belief and for a GLBT person ‘if a belief exists, the starting point has been reached and the Holy Spirit will then call people to tangibly express that belief in Jesus Christ within their everyday lives’ (p132) and we should trust ‘in God’s ultimate power to continue to shape their journey of faith – just as Paul did with the Corinthian Church’ (p134). No doubt Paul did trust God for the Church at Corinth, but his warning to ‘Flee from sexual immorality’ (1 Corinthians 6:18) is a far cry from the very tentative and subjective conclusions which Marin draws.

Finally, Marin turns to the last of the ‘Big Five’, 1 Timothy 1:9-11 which includes another reference to ‘arsenokoites’ , but skips over discussion of the word itself in favour of drawing out a general point about the ‘patience God is calling his church toward today with gays and lesbians’ based on Paul’s patient encouragement to Timothy in the pastoral letters as he, Paul, approaches the end of his life.

Marin’s hermeneutic has been overwhelmed by his context. We look in vain for any clear statement on the fundamental issue of whether or not same sex unions are consistent with Christian faith. It seems that in this case, the specific content of the Bible can be effectively disregarded, looking instead at what can be claimed as underlying biblical principles. Behind this form of hermeneutics is the implication that Scripture is not authoritative in the classic evangelical sense of verbal inspiration.

It may be that Marin has not followed this logic through, but it is this assumption which enables Rowan Williams, for instance, to speak positively of same sex unions and to say that the New Testament’s language challenges us to think of sexual ethics not in terms of ‘‘Am I keeping the rules?’ nor ‘Am I being sincere and non-hurtful?’ but ‘How much am I prepared for this to signify?’’ (‘Is there a Christian Sexual Ethic?’ in ‘Open to Judgment’ p167). The biblical ‘language’ or ‘grammar’ then takes precedence over the plain meaning of the not necessarily inspired text.

I do not believe that Marin set out to undermine the authority of Scripture. By his own account he desperately wanted to retain the friendship of his gay friends and remain faithful to the evangelical faith in which he had been nurtured. Unfortunately he has resolved this tension in a way which has generated a form of liberal Protestantism while retaining the label ‘evangelical’. There could have been a different way, but the fact that he has overlooked it reflects another weakness of contemporary Western evangelicalism, a reticence to talk about the cross as atonement.

One of the clearest examples of this trend was British evangelical leader Steve Chalke’s book ‘The Lost Message of Jesus’ (2003) which represented a systematic attempt to minimize the themes of sin, judgement and divine wrath, repudiating the idea of substitutionary atonement and seeing the cross as a rather one dimensional demonstration of God’s love. So perhaps it is not surprising that the cross should play such a small part in Marin’s theological thinking.

But this is a tragedy. Throughout Marin’s writing there is great stress on the need for measurable, tangible and unconditional behaviour, yet the ultimate act of unconditional love is seen in the cross of Christ as God deals with our sin by showing himself both just and justifier. There is no trade off between grace and sin in the biblical message of the cross. We do not have to choose between a message of unconditional love or a message of judgement because God’s unconditional love in Jesus Christ only makes sense and has transforming power when the reality of God’s judgement is acknowledged. It is this grace of God which enables us to face the full reality of sin without despair.

This does not mean that we have to begin on a one-to-one level with a message of judgement. Marin is surely right in saying that Christians must develop relationships with the GLBT community – as with any community we try to reach – which express unconditional behaviours and allow a bridge of relationship to be built. In the early stages of building a friendship, it may also be right to ‘elevate’ a direct question about the sinfulness of same sex relationships where that would be open to serious misunderstanding, just as it might in other ethical areas, but unconditional love cannot simply take sin – or particular types of sin – out of the equation or postpone straight answers indefinitely. Without repentance we deny the possibility of transformation and trivialise the atonement.

Despite its theological weaknesses, Marin’s ministry is clearly generating much interest. He is an attractive personality with a gift for friendship and his passion for mission to the gay lesbian community is a refreshing perspective for those tired of the arguments which have been running in society and the Church for the past twenty or more years. There are undoubtedly things to learn from Marin and Spring Harvest, the evangelical and inter denominational UK based organisation which claims to be Europe’s largest Christian event and attracts thousands of people over consecutive weeks during the Easter holiday for teaching and worship at two holiday centres in England has invited him to speak next year. He may well be a very popular speaker, but not necessarily for the reasons intended – Marin has mission in mind, but paradoxically some of his theological assumptions are likely to have just as much appeal as the rationale for an evangelical comfort zone .

The question which will pressing more and more insistently on Western evangelicals is this – how can I maintain my integrity as a biblical Christian yet live as a normal citizen and stay on the right side of the law as gay culture and rights are increasingly privileged through equality and anti-discrimination legislation? Marin will have unwittingly come to their rescue because the dilution of the clear teaching of Scripture and a stress on unconditional acceptance which minimizes the cross, and so desensitizes to sin, neatly eases the Christian conscience in conforming to ungodly or immoral legislation, not to mention accommodating to false teaching in the Church itself. More than that, it is not difficult to see how Marin’s concept of love could be used to criticize those who do make a stand as unloving, even people of ‘hate’.

Energised by these cultural pressures on the Church, I expect that Marin’s project will be very popular, but it will increasingly diverge from biblical Christianity. This attempt to flavour and tenderize the Christian faith will eventually cause it to disintegrate, but because it bears the label ‘evangelical’ the truth may take a long time to dawn.

So despite his noble vision and fine qualities, Andrew Marin poses a much more serious and subtle danger to evangelical life and witness than did Gene Robinson at Greenbelt this year. Just as the pace of secularization in the surrounding culture is quickening, thousands of evangelical Christians will be immersed in Marin’s mindset, thinking that they are being equipped for biblical mission, while being inadvertently set up for assimilation by a culture increasingly under the sway of the malign ‘gods of olden time’.

Charles Raven
2 October 2009

Defending the Faith

This week, rather than write an article, I am sending out the text of a letter to the Church of England Newspaper (CEN) which has been published today. It is a response to an article by regular columnist Bishop Paul Richardson, assistant Bishop of Newcastle, (which can be accessed as a free download from here) rebuking what he sees as Bishop Michael Nazir Ali’s preference for confrontation. He also questions Nazir Ali’s recent claim in Standpoint magazine that Archbishop Rowan Williams’ criticism of those who uphold marriage as intrinsically and necessarily heterosexual has contributed to the breakdown of the family unit (for comment on the Standpoint article see http://www.anglicanspread.org/?p=209).

To have published this rather negative assessment last weekend as Michael Nazir Ali gave up the See of Rochester to pursue God’s continued call on his life seems ill judged. It reflects a chronic failure among much of the Church of England’s leadership to recognise the extent to which the ‘Christian mind’ of their Church has itself been softened by accommodation with secular values. They are likely to find that the faithful will look increasingly to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans for effective spiritual leadership in England and the British Isles.

Paul Richardson’s portrayal of Bishop Michael Nazir–Ali as confrontational (Defending our Values Today, September 11) in contrast to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ more constructive preference for dialogue betrays a misunderstanding of both.

The real issue is not about a choice between dialogue and confrontation, but discernment, exercising the Christian mind in an aggressively secular society. Concluding his July/August Standpoint article, Michael Nazir Ali actually calls for a ‘grand assembly’ in the hope that ‘a national consensus may emerge’ on how to respond to the collapse of Judaeo-Christian values.

This call to dialogue flows from a strong grasp of the apostolic Christian faith rooted in the biblical revelation to which he has demonstrated a courageous commitment. The kind of dialogue favoured by Rowan Williams is much more slippery. His writings, such as ‘The Body’s Grace’ and ‘Is there a Christian sexual ethic?’ in ‘Open to Judgement’ have done much to provide theological respectability for the dissolution of the fundamental Judaeo-Christian concept of marriage as exclusively heterosexual over the past twenty years, yet last month he was willing to affirm orthodox teaching on same sex unions, completely contrary to his personal views, in order to maintain some semblance of unity through a ‘two track’ Communion.

It would be easy to conclude that the Archbishop was simply being pragmatic, or worse, but his willingness to split his personal judgements from the views required by office points to a deeper difficulty. Paul Richardson observes, as an example of the merits of dialogue, that Christians have learnt from Marxism about structural injustice, while rejecting much else, including the ‘dialectical process’ of class warfare. Unfortunately, our Archbishop has not rejected Hegel’s underlying dialectic. He is strongly attracted to the idea that the best protection against self serving theology is to allow it to emerge tentatively through the holding together of opposing ideas in what he sometimes refers to as the ‘hermeneutical spiral’.

Faced with the current concerted assault upon Christian faith in the public square, this approach to dialogue, for all its sophistication, is dangerous because it dulls the sensitivity of the Christian mind to the authority of Scripture. Michael Nazir Ali has repeatedly spoken of the need to ‘go against the grain’, at significant personal cost. For the future perhaps he will be able to help develop a greater sense of partnership with our brother and sister Anglicans of the Global South. This would no doubt be a much better guard against self-serving interpretations of Scripture than the interminable conversations which the Archbishop still seems to hope will put his own house in order.

Rev’d Charles Raven

Bewdley, Worcestershire.

ENDS

Tea or Tanks on the Lambeth Palace Lawn?

 This week, seven ‘Communion Partner’ bishops from The Episcopal Church  made a private visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury. We might well imagine them enjoying a cup of tea in the Lambeth Palace gardens and little more imagination is needed to guess the reason for their call. Dan Martins, a priest whose Bishop, Ed Little of Northern Indiana is one of the seven, speculates with some confidence in his blog, spotted by  Stephen Sizer  that they are anxious  to have their dioceses fully integrated into the Communion  as part of  ‘track one’ in the ‘two track’ structure proposed by Rowan Williams after their Church’s effective rejection of the Covenant process at General Convention in July. 

 

By allowing individual TEC Dioceses to sign on to the Covenant, which Martins believes TEC could never do,  the idea is that a realignment will happen by default within TEC, with the revisionist majority finding themselves in ‘track two’ on the outer fringe of the Communion.

 

This kind of thinking , which is mirrored by Fulcrum on the other side of the Atlantic, has obvious appeal because it seems to enable bishops and clergy to maintain a reasonably clear conscience without the sacrifices that so many in the newly formed Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) have had to make.  But this is almost certain to turn out to be an exercise in wishful thinking for two reasons.

 

Firstly, it ignores the capacity of revisionists to bend words to their own ends. For instance. Giles Goddard of Inclusive Church writes  ‘unless it [the Ridley Covenant Draft] contains radical strengthening of any judicial measures, it seems to me that TEC would be able to sign it, as a sign of its mutual commitment and in the context of its present policy of ensuring that it is open to LGBT people both single and in relationships. Result; a Communion strengthened and affirmed in its breadth and diversity and once again bearing a global witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.’  In other words, ‘as long as we can get away with it we will interpret the Covenant as we want’. So the Communion Partner Bishops could find that TEC does sign up and the Covenant is thereby effectively rendered meaningless.

 

More importantly – and this is the focus of my concern in this article – it ignores the fact that revisionists on both side of the Atlantic are throwing caution to the winds and seem determined to put their tanks on the Lambeth Palace lawn.

 

The trigger was Rowan Williams’ clear articulation of orthodox teaching on sexuality in his reflections on General Convention “Covenant, Communion and the Anglican Future”  – coolly stating the very opposite of his personal views. This was a serious setback for the revisionists because his writings had given theological respectability to their case for treating committed same sex unions as on a par with heterosexual marriage for over twenty years.  So previously friendly commentators took on a bitter tone.

 

 For instance, Giles Fraser writes in the  Church Times   ‘Another kick in the teeth from the Archbishop of Canterbury comes this week in his reflections on the US General Convention’ and Jonathan Clatworthy , General Secretary of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union  describes  the Archbishop as a dogmatic authoritarian, criticising his ’hierarchical, hieratic and dogmatic doctrine of the church, with no interest in what the laity think and no real place for change.’

 

It has to be said that these comments seem designed  simply to be as vicious as possible and bear very little relation to the Archbishops’ actual manner or theology. In fact much of the criticism of his theology is that it is insufficiently dogmatic and too open to change – precisely the opposite of Clatworthy’s charge.

 

These personal attacks on Williams presage a more aggressive strategy, even if not entirely consistent. So Giles Fraser, somewhat unconvincingly for a prominent ‘progressive’, goes on to argue the merits of  a ‘little Englander’ attitude in the Church of England, distinguishing between being ‘Church of England’ – which means being tolerant of difference – and ‘Anglicanism’ as an alien post colonial ideology which other parts of the Communion now want to impose. For him, the real two tiers are not to do with the Covenant as Williams thinks, but ‘One tier is called the Church of England; the other is called Anglicanism. Ordinary people in the pews are members of the former; those with “representative functions” — bishops and the like — are often of the latter’. And the clear implication is a call to renewed Synodical activism, with those laity and clergy who agree with him doing their best to increase their representation vis a vis the bishops.

 

Sharing the same sentiments, but with a somewhat contradictory thought process, Giles Goddard of ‘Inclusive Church’ writes   of his ‘sense that in many ways the Episcopal Church (TEC) has a clearer understanding of what it means to be Anglican than the Church of England’ and sets out a strategy of closer co-operation with TEC in England (thereby doing what they have condemned the orthodox for doing in relating to the Global South)  and seeking deliberate confrontation with the English bishops by raising the profile of clergy in same sex unions through a survey covering the whole of the Church of England.

 

This is the thinking behind  a statement issued by thirteen liberal groups in the Church of England on 4th August, which prompted  Ruth Gledhill of the London Times to  comment  that ‘Liberals in the Church of England’ had ‘declared war on conservatives including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.’

 

Bishop David Anderson subsequently wrote an open letter to Rowan Williams in which he warned ‘This is a strategy that TEC has been working on, and it is diabolically brilliant – use TEC money to pull in additional dioceses offshore from the United States and make them part of TEC, then call TEC an international organization. Next, link up with or plant TEC churches in England, right under the Archbishop of Canterbury’s nose, and bring the TEC heterodoxy and chaos all the way up to the wall surrounding Lambeth Palace’. 

 

In this context, the presence of Gene Robinson at Greenbelt is no surprise. His case  for same sex unions, based on ‘appropriate vulnerability’ and with its pseudo-traditional rejection of ‘anything goes’echoed Williams’ own writings. The unspoken message seemed to be ‘If you won’t lead, I will’ and the standing ovation he received will have given him every encouragement to carry on in that role.

 

So there are good reasons to think that  Mrs Jefferts Schori’s tanks are heading for the Lambeth Palace lawn, supported by willing recruits from the Church of England itself. And this is why Rowan Williams’ two track proposal will not work. It relies upon a willingness to accept mutual co-existence, but it is becoming increasing obvious that there is a fundamental theological flaw.

 

The Archbishop’s ideal ‘is that both ‘tracks’ should be able to pursue what they believe God is calling them to be as Church, with greater integrity and consistency’, but for ‘being Church’ to have any meaning at all, there must be a framework of fundamental presuppositions held in common. As events unfold, this is clearly not the case, especially over what constitutes authority –  is the biblical revelation decisive or not?

 

 Under the pressures of international leadership since 2002, he has split off his personal – and well publicised – opinions from the affirmations required by his of office on the key question of sexuality. The aggression of TEC and its allies is therefore not just a political threat to the Archbishop; it is also an existential threat because he holds within himself the contradictions upon which the crumbling institutional unity of  the Communion is based.

 

He cannot wholeheartedly withstand the liberal agenda because he himself has done so much to inform  and shape it; and by the same token, he cannot with conviction promote unity based upon the orthodox position because as I have demonstrated , elsewhere  his doctrine of revelation undercuts any workable notion of biblical authority. It is essential to him personally as well as for the institutional unity of the Communion that closure is avoided, but that is precisely what the liberals on both sides of the Atlantic are now seeking to bring about.

 

In this context, nuance is a vice not a virtue. ACNA Archbishop Robert Duncan saw this immediately and  commented   on Williams’ two track model that “the archbishop of Canterbury has given us another nuanced statement in the midst of a crisis” and  “The Communion needs clear leadership at the moment and sadly, others will fill the void.”

 

 In rather sad contrast, Nicky Gumbel of the Alpha movement during an interview  just a week ago expressed the complacency of many English Anglicans when he opined “Rowan is very nuanced, he is brilliant, and I am personally a great fan of Rowan Williams. Jane, his wife, is on our staff here. They both teach at the theological college. I think he’s absolutely brilliant. He is very nuanced, but not everyone can be in the Rowan Williams league – he’s probably one of the greatest brains in the country.”

 

It is unlikely that this great brain will enable Williams to give the leadership the Church of England needs, let alone the wider Communion.  This becomes clearer if we imagine that the plan by Inclusive Church and others to raise the profile of clergy in same sex unions leads to calls for such clergy to be subject to formal disciplinary procedures, as would clergy involved in a heterosexual relationship outside marriage.

 

Is it tenable to think that Rowan Williams could support such action when he himself has admitted to once ordaining a man he knew to be in a same sex union? And if he did, would it not be argued by liberals that church legislation was being used to force conscience by imposing a morality that he himself admitted had no clear biblical ground, but was simply the majority opinion in very different cultural settings? And how effectively would he as Archbishop defend the Church’s position before a UK parliament, from which General Synod derives its legal powers, if that parliament were minded to challenge clergy discipline on the basis of equality legislation?

 

Under the pressure of events, Rowan Williams’ ecclesiology, as revealed in his two track model, is ultimately one of ungrounded optimism in a process. Confronted with two visions of Christianity which are fundamentally opposed to each other, paralysis sets in. One of the ‘Lambeth seven’ is  reported  to have said that as a result of their meeting with the Archbishop they will have “something forthcoming soon” but it is difficult to see how that could be more than a temporary breathing space which enables them to live with false teaching, in contrast to the ACNA which has given solid institutional form to orthodoxy.

 

That is not to say that the orthodox should give up on seeking to encourage the Archbishop to articulate the apostolic faith. In this they have met with a measure of success, but it is to recognise that as England itself becomes the battle ground for the future of Anglicanism, spiritual leadership of the Communion must come from elsewhere. GAFCON in Jerusalem last year broke new ground in recognising a GAFCON Primates Council not dependent upon the Archbishop of Canterbury for its authority and it is to be hoped that the publication of the Commentary on the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration later this month will give new impetus to that vision.

 

Charles Raven

4th  September 2009

 

NT Wright on GC09 and the Archbishop of Canterbury: Unpacked or Repackaged?

 It has been said of the great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth that his was ‘a maverick ego that never lost the sense of continuity with itself’.  Whether the Bishop of Durham, one of Anglicanism’s most heavyweight theologians, has a maverick ego could be an interesting debate, but a strong ego is undoubtedly an asset to any theologian. In his ‘unpacking’ of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reflections  on TEC’s recent General Convention, he clearly demonstrates continuity with himself, but there is a worrying discontinuity in the image we are given of Rowan Williams.

Tom Wright welcomes the Archbishop’s recognition that TEC have chosen to ‘walk apart’ and his clear reaffirmation of the Church’s official teaching on same sex unions and the bar on ordination – at all levels – for those in such relationships.  The problems begin to emerge when he expands upon the Archbishop’s thoughts about the way forward, particularly the central role which the he thinks Rowan Williams himself should play, writing in his introduction ‘the Archbishop is himself not only an Instrument of Unity but the one which has to hold on to everything at this moment. Lambeth 2008 didn’t say much (apart from what the ABC himself said); the status of ACC and Primates are under question in various quarters; it is up to him.’

It is instructive to see how Tom Wright handles the unresolved tension in the Archbishop’s  ‘two-tier’ or ‘two-track’ model for the future of the Communion.  He notes ‘To say ‘two-tier’, as some have done at earlier stages in the discussion, implies that the two are still ‘tiers’ of the same thing, whereas ‘tracks’ may be going in quite different directions. And it is one ‘track’ rather than the other which will possess the coherence to work together in full solidarity, not least in ecumenical relationships.’

However, this rather ignores the fact that Rowan Williams concludes that the ‘two tracks’ are ‘two styles of being Anglican, whose mutual relation will certainly need working out but which would not exclude co-operation in mission and service of the kind now shared in the Communion.’ Tom Wright admits that such mission would be ‘fraught with frustrations’, but can’t bring himself to say that such mission is simply not possible, which would seem to be the  obvious conclusion if the two Anglican ‘tracks’ are going in different directions as he believes.  While it would be encouraging if his commentary on the ‘two tracks’ turned out to be right, the fact that ‘style’ is normally contrasted to ‘substance’ must raise the possibility that Rowan Williams still hopes in the longer term for an indaba induced synthesis in which the tracks will merge.

So it looks as if we are being given a conservative spin on the Archbishop’s comments  by someone who is nonetheless determined not to be critical of the Archbishop himself. The reason for this becomes clearer when Tom Wright develops the principle affirmed by the Archbishop, that ‘the decision as to which things can be decided locally is not itself one that can be taken locally’. As a global Communion, Anglicanism needs global leadership, but where is this to come from? It is admitted that the other existing institutions (Lambeth Conference, Primates Meeting and Anglican Consultative Council) have been shown to be ineffective, so the Archbishop of Canterbury himself must act. By taking personal leadership of the Covenant process, he can ensure ratification as soon as possible, bringing coherence by allowing the orthodox provinces to coalesce around the Covenant, even if only sections 1-3 can be adapted at present.

Such personal leadership is recognised as being less than ideal, but necessary until new or reformed Communion wide structures can be formed. In the meantime Rowan Williams should act because , we are told ‘as Archbishop of Canterbury, he carries within the whole Communion immense moral and pastoral authority, rooted in his exposition of scripture and articulation of the whole Christian tradition; and this, as he himself has insisted, is the real heart of all authority within the body of Christ. Too often in recent times legal and juridical ‘authority’ has been used, and perhaps abused, in the place of the genuine apostolic authority of the word of God and prayer.’

This is tending to the surreal. This ‘repackaged’ Rowan has a pretty tenuous link with reality. Quite apart from the fact that there are 37 other Primates in the Anglican Communion who might feel thay are entitled to some consultation, his moral and pastoral authority has in fact been greatly diminished in the Communion. This is evident in the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement respectfully but firmly recognises this when it states ‘While acknowledging the nature of Canterbury as an historic see, we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ He is being marginalised not only because of an essentially spurious distinction between his personal views and the moral teaching he is now trying to uphold, but also because he himself is deeply implicated in the misuse of authority, albeit not in quite the same way Tom Wright has in mind.

 If the Archbishop had exercised his apostolic authority to restrain TEC earlier, to enforce the Dar es Salaam deadline of 30th September 2007 and to bar those TEC bishops from Lambeth who had supported the consecration of Gene Robinson, it is doubtful that the GAFCON movement would have come into being. It was a response to doctrinal and moral disorder in the Communion for which Rowan Williams through his earlier teaching  and especially his failure to discipline bore much responsibility. And his critical intervention in favour of TEC at the last Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Jamaica will still be fresh in the minds of many.

In Rowan Williams’ leadership there has been a persistent pattern of appeasement towards TEC, so why is Tom Wright so anxious to present him in a much more robust light? The answer seems to lie in the disproportionate space he devotes in his conclusion to the plight of the ‘Communion Partners’, a group within TEC which now needs urgent rescue. It has positioned itself along the same lines as Fulcrum in England, but now finds that loyalty to TEC and loyalty to the wider Communion has placed it in an impossible position, a surprise, no doubt, to no-one but themselves.

In fact, Tom Wright is now asking that his friends in the US have the very support which he has been so opposed to for those who now form  the ACNA, urging that ‘Those within TEC who sign it [the Covenant] need appropriate Communion recognition and relatedness – if bishops, a Primatial relationship, if parishes or individuals, an episcopal relationship.’ It is difficult to avoid the impression that previous ecclesiological principles have been shelved for pragmatic reasons.

Certainly, what is being proposed by Tom Wright for the Communion Partners is in direct contradiction to the policy of  the English House of Bishops. Their report on the Covenant  prepared for the February 2009 General Synod was quite clear that the Covenant could only be signed at Provincial level, stating  ‘As far as the Church of England is concerned an individual diocese has no power to issue a statement that purports to declare the doctrine of the Church and could not sign the Covenant.’ 

That such an able and respected theologian has to stretch both credulity and church polity so far is symptomatic of the inherent contradictions, increasingly difficult to suppress,  in trying to be loyal to the historic Anglican faith and operate within the old wineskin of Lambeth orientated structures. As those contradictions become ever more obvious – as they will on this side of the Atlantic as well as in North America – it must be hoped that while the ‘two tracks’ of Global Anglicanism diverge, there will be grace extended between the ‘two tracks’ of Anglican evangelicalism so that they can converge. An Anglican Covenant which adopted the Jerusalem Declaration might be a good start.

 
Charles Raven
SPREAD
www.anglicanspread.org

31st July 2009

Two Tiers, One Cheer – Rowan Williams’ Reflections on the Future of the Anglican Communion

After having taken a rather long pause for thought, the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday released his considered response to the decisions of the Episcopal Church at its General Convention, which rejected his personal plea for moderation and pressed ahead to officially authorise liturgies for the blessing of those in same sex unions  and the ordination of those in such partnerships. 

Despite a deeply unconvincing  attempt by the Presiding Bishop to claim that the moratorium on such steps is actually still in place on the basis that the resolutions were descriptive rather than prescriptive (so why bother passing them?), this action was rightly seen as having destroyed any hopes of maintaining the unity of the Anglican Communion and has elicited from the Archbishop an unusually lucid damage limitation exercise, helpfully presented in twenty-six numbered paragraphs set out like theses.

 At first reading, those who hold to classical Anglican teaching might be inclined to give ‘three cheers’ since the Archbishop appears to give a strong affirmation of  traditional biblical teaching on sexuality and accepts that some form of institutional distance from revisionist Churches may be necessary.

 Specifically, he recommends that the Anglican Communion should now accept the likelihood that it  will have to operate as a two-tier body, a core made up of those Churches which can coalesce around the Anglican Covenant and a less ‘intensely’ engaged cluster of Churches for whom local autonomy takes priority.  On the specific  presenting issue of sexuality he unambiguously aligns himself with the orthodox core and it is encouraging to find the erstwhile campaigner and theologian of the gay lesbian movement writing :

8. …a blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole. And if this is the case, a person living in such a union is in the same case as a heterosexual person living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond; whatever the human respect and pastoral sensitivity such persons must be given, their chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church’s teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires’

and :

 9. In other words, the question is not a simple one of human rights or human dignity…

In an English context, this is a remarkable statement from someone so close to the liberal establishment and may help to restrain a government in its dying days increasingly determined to promote gay rights at the expense of the rights of conscience and free speech.

So it is very much to be welcomed that Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury has now managed to so distance himself from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales and advocate of ‘gay ordination’ (one cheer!), but the two-tier strategy will not work because it reflects the deeper problem of the Archbishop’s flawed theology of revelation. His characteristic reticence to speak of the Bible as God’s Word is symptomatic of a persistent theological difficulty in speaking about the authority of Christian doctrine (see my article ‘Shadow Gospel’ , which only the GAFCON movement has begun to address seriously at a Communion wide level.

It is in this area of authority, ultimately Scriptural authority, that the Anglican Communion struggles when confronted by the ‘new religion’ of TEC and its associates. The Anglican Church of North America’s  (ACNA) Presiding Bishop Robert Duncan made it clear in his recent open letter  ‘Two Cities, One Choice’  that the Communion’s difficulties arise through trying to hold together fundamentally opposed visions of Christianity. Reflecting on the ACNA launch in Bedford, Texas,  and TEC’s General Convention in  Anaheim , California, shortly afterwards he observed that:

 ‘In the last month, the contrasting behaviors and values of the religious leaders who met in these two small cities made each a symbol of Anglicanism’s inescapable choice. The two Anglican Churches in the United States represent two cities. Jerusalem and Babylon come to mind as the Scriptural cities which are enduring symbols of choices to be made by God’s people.’

In contrast, for Rowan Williams the issue is not primarily about faithfulness to apostolic truth, but the willingness to intensify relationships within the given institutional structures. So he writes:

22. … For those whose vision is not shaped by the desire to intensify relationships in this particular way [The Anglican Covenant], or whose vision of the Communion is different, there is no threat of being cast into outer darkness – existing relationships will not be destroyed that easily. But it means that there is at least the possibility of a twofold ecclesial reality in view in the middle distance: that is, a ‘covenanted’ Anglican global body, fully sharing certain aspects of a vision of how the Church should be and behave, able to take part as a body in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue; and, related to this body, but in less formal ways with fewer formal expectations, there may be associated local churches in various kinds of mutual partnership and solidarity with one another and with ‘covenanted’ provinces.

The Archbishop’s new found commitment to orthodoxy in sexual matters does not therefore flow from an understanding of the difference between teachings which are intrinsically right or wrong, but is to do with his understanding of proper process: 

23. This has been called a ‘two-tier’ model, or, more disparagingly, a first- and second-class structure. But perhaps we are faced with the possibility rather of a ‘two-track’ model, two ways of witnessing to the Anglican heritage, one of which had decided that local autonomy had to be the prevailing value and so had in good faith declined a covenantal structure. If those who elect this model do not take official roles in the ecumenical interchanges and processes in which the ‘covenanted’ body participates, this is simply because within these processes there has to be clarity about who has the authority to speak for whom.

This emphasis on process rather than substance has been a weakness of the Windsor Covenant strategy from the start. It can only deal with symptoms. It cannot deal with the underlying chronic infection of false teaching. What Presiding Bishop Bob Duncan sees as ‘Babylon’ – the realm of those who reject God’s rule – becomes in Rowan Williams’ ecclesiology simply an alternative  style:

24. It helps to be clear about these possible futures, however much we think them less than ideal, and to speak about them not in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication but plainly as what they are – two styles of being Anglican, whose mutual relation will certainly need working out but which would not exclude co-operation in mission and service of the kind now shared in the Communion. .. The ideal is that both ‘tracks’ should be able to pursue what they believe God is calling them to be as Church, with greater integrity and consistency.

At this point, I’m beginning to have doubts about the title of this piece. Should I have even given one cheer? It now becomes clear that what appeared to be surprisingly unambiguous statements by Rowan Williams on sexuality actually open up a deeper level of ambiguity. He affirms them not out of personal conviction (this would be an astonishing reversal), but because he is committed to an institutional process and adapts accordingly. If the clear teaching of Scripture can simply be reduced to a matter of style and the biblical discipline of excommunication is dubbed ‘apocalyptic’, where could the ‘intensifying’ of Anglican Covenant relationships eventually lead under Rowan Williams’ leadership?

Depressed revisionists who believe that Rowan has betrayed the cause should read Susan Russell’s perceptive  comment  on behalf of the pro-gay Episcopal group Integrity USA and cheer up. She takes the long view and argues  ‘we recognize that those who have been waiting for the casting-out-of-TEC-into-outer-darkness are not getting what they want. And as we continue to move forward in mission and ministry with those who embrace historic Anglican comprehensiveness, we believe those “outer darkness” threats are going to ring more and more hollow until they fade away altogether.’ Some pieces on the chess board may have to go, but this will be in order all the more thoroughly to subvert the orthodox in the long run.

There is a subtle trap for the orthodox here. The Archbishop is speaking their language, but not for their reasons. If they support this proposal for a two-tier Communion they will have implicitly abandoned the claim to guard apostolic truth and will be progressively neutralised through interminable indaba.  Only the GAFCON movement has the theological backbone to rescue the Communion because the Jerusalem Declaration is willing to state not only the positives, but also the necessary negatives – of the reality of false teaching and the need to reject the authority of those who deny the faith, in word or deed.

Charles Raven

28th July 2009

Canterbury in a Corner

I clearly recall being told by the previous Bishop of Worcester, Dr Peter Selby,  that I and my congregation had painted ourselves into a corner because of our refusal to receive his episcopal ministry following his public denunciation of Lambeth Resolution 1.10 in 1999. It did not seem to have occurred to him that there could possibly be an Anglican future independent of his oversight – which the formation of GAFCON and the FCA has now wonderfully confirmed.  Some ten years on the same theological tensions have led to a momentous week in which TEC has blatantly rejected the Anglican Covenant process and now it is clear that the Archbishop of Canterbury has painted himself into a corner.

TEC’s decision to overturn the moratorium on gay bishops and to push ahead with ‘gay marriage’ liturgies, not to mention the Presiding Bishop’s description of personal salvation as a ‘heresy’, coming so soon after the formation of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) underscores the fact that profound underlying differences within the Anglican Communion are now institutionally embodied in North America.

Once ideas take on institutional expression, it is much more difficult to sidestep them.  Since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has desperately tried to avoid coming to a point of closure, but there is now a general recognition that he must now act decisively if he is not to be overtaken by events since the fault line in North America runs through the whole of Western liberal Anglicanism, not least in England itself.

The reality of this fault line has been somewhat obscured by the existence of those who identify themselves as ‘centrists’ such as  Fulcrum in England, who have tried to hold together the  institutional status quo and doctrinal orthodoxy. As Anglican Churches on both sides of the Atlantic have, in their different ways, come progressively under the sway of secular liberalism, this synthesis has become increasingly unconvincing and this week Fulcrum bishops Tom Wright and Graham Kings have finally acknowledged that TEC has effectively put itself out of the Communion.

This will increase pressure on Rowan Williams to take a similar line with TEC and, as a corollary, recognise the ACNA, but it will be very difficult for Williams to do so because it presents him with a personal dilemma in a way which it does not for Wright and Kings.  Kendall Harmon notes that in the debate on D025, the resolution affirming the right of those in same sex relationships to be ordained, ‘speakers insisted “This is who we are!”’.  Dr Williams’ problem is that he is not being who he is; in this debate he cannot say ‘This who I am’. Having protested about the need to ‘come clean’ and accept practicing homosexuals for ordination shortly before his appointment to Canterbury, it is hardly surprising that TEC’s General Convention humiliated him by ignoring his personal plea for restraint. He is asking them not to act on the very teaching which his writings and public statements did so much to legitimize for over twenty years. His repeated attempts to distinguish between his personal views and those he must uphold as Archbishop of Canterbury carries little weight with a TEC leadership which clearly holds its ideology of inclusion with great conviction.

Although in a corner, there is a tactical way out . Rowan Williams is a resourceful dialectician, on paper and in practice.  So it would be unsurprising if he were to bend to orthodox pressure and at least put the wheels in motion for a process to recognise the ACNA, thus regaining the initiative and garnering the goodwill of the orthodox, while continuing to recognise TEC. Superficially, this would look like a win for the ACNA, but there would be a price. It would be a step back into the murky world of Lambeth politics, so thoroughly discredited at the last Anglican Consultative Council in Jamaica, and the interminable TEC funded ‘indaba’ process which can only serve to give plausibility to those with whom the orthodox should not be in fellowship. It would be tragic if those who have made such a costly stand were to undercut their position in this way.

The point becomes clearer when we think of the impact in England, which must now be Rowan Williams’ main concern. If both TEC and the ACNA have official recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury, then it lends plausibility to those who would set back reform by arguing that both ‘extremes’ have their place in an Anglican mixed economy  which may one day settle down into a new synthesis. The attraction of such an argument should not be underestimated given the English tendency to compromise and the particular pressures to cultural conformity which come with the Church of England’s establishment privileges.

Archbishop Peter Jensen, speaking of the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration, reminded delegates at this month’s launch of the FCA in Britain and Ireland that ‘the mark of a Christian statement, a statement which professes the true faith, is that it also says ‘No!’…. Its affirmatives take strength from its negations.’ A real ‘yes’ to the ACNA must also involve a clear ‘no’ to TEC (and of course the similarly minded Anglican Church of Canada) and with the present Archbishop of Canterbury this possibility must belong more to the realm of the miraculous rather than the probable.

So if Canterbury is in a corner, what is the way forward for the Communion in general and the Church of England in particular? At its most essential, it is to gather around the Jerusalem Declaration as a contemporary statement of authentic biblical Anglican faith which gives a confessional rather than institutional focus of unity. Canterbury may be painted into a corner, but the Anglican Communion is not. The Bishop of Worcester was not essential to my Anglican future; the Archbishop of Canterbury is not essential to the Anglican Communion’s future.

Charles Raven

18^th July 2009

 

 

 

On Being Moderately Faithful: Why Fulcrum is wrong about the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans

Monday, 6th July,  sees the launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) in Britain and Ireland at ‘Be Faithful’ in Westminster Central Hall as orthodox streams of Anglicanism unite together around the historic Jerusalem Statement and Declaration celebrated by the GAFCON delegates just over twelve months ago. For those who long for the Anglican Churches of these islands to become safe places for the gospel of Christ, this is profoundly hopeful. ‘Be Faithful ‘ is a very apt title for the day because it captures the same sense of urgency which brought so many to Jerusalem a year ago, convinced that the Anglican Communion had come to a fork in the road as historic as the sixteenth century reformation.

 Although the GAFCON movement is firmly rooted in the apostolic faith and the historic reformation formularies of the Church of England, this very clarity has been very unsettling for those whose instincts are first and foremost to preserve the Church as an institution and the whole system of power and patronage which goes with it, formal and informal. The most unsettled are evangelicals who want to preserve the status quo, because, unlike liberals, they have to continually convince themselves, in the face of ever more inconvenient facts, that the Church understood theologically in terms of classic Anglicanism is more or less the same thing as the institutional Church.

 This tension is clearly in evidence as Fulcrum seeks to discredit the FCA in advance of Monday’s launch, notably in Andrew Goddard’s recent article ‘Should we all join the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans?’followed up by Bishop Graham Kings Church of England Newspaper article, prepublished on the Fulcrum website, entitled ‘Glacial Gravity or Opportunistic Autonomy’.  

Goddard’s response to ‘Be Faithful’ is essentially ‘Be Moderately Faithful’. He acknowledges considerable common ground theologically and says that he will be turning up on the day, but that he will not join, setting out his reasons as a series of questions.

 Before getting to the core issues, it is necessary to deal briefly with some of the minor objections Goddard raises. For instance, he speculates on where the FCA’s funding comes from and suggests that there is manipulation. This is scurrilous. In my experience, the FCA is more interested in raising money for others than for itself and runs on the proverbial shoestring. Its events are self funding, paid for by those who attend. As one who was at the Jerusalem Conference, it was very clear that no attempt was made to manipulate or pressurise. Pre set agendas were put on one side and there was a genuine consensus borne out of worship, prayer and biblical reflection. 

 If Goddard is concerned about money and manipulation, he should ponder instead the implications of the American Anglican Council’s  recent revelation  of TEC’s hand behind the huge donation announced at the last Anglican Consultative Council in Jamaica for  a communion wide ‘indaba’ project.

 It is also suggested that women will be marginalised in the FCA, despite the fact that three women are speaking at ‘Be Faithful’. It is of course no secret that there are different views of women’s ministry within the FCA as there are within the newly formed Anglican Church of North America and protocols will need to be formed, but everyone can have the confidence that these will be developed within a shared biblical framework s that the question of women’s ministry will not become a kind of softening up exercise for the acceptance of homosexual practice as happened in The Episcopal Church in America.

 However, Goddard’s central objection to the FCA is simply that it is not actually needed in the Church of England and what really energises it is a schismatic agenda.

 Here we approach the core  problem of Fulcrum, its attachment to the status quo and the consequent denial which deepens as the gap between the picture its members need to paint and the reality on the ground becomes wider and wider. We know from the Cost of Conscience survey of 2002 that from a half to a third of the Church of England’s clergy did not believe core doctrines such as the physical resurrection, the virgin birth and Christ as unique saviour. It is not good enough to take refuge behind the claim that there has been no formal shift in Anglican doctrine; the score may still be there, but many of the orchestra are making it up as they go along and will continue to do so in the absence of any effective discipline.

 There is a clear liberal bias in the Church of England’s institutions. For instance, evangelical ordinands are typically made to work with people of liberal views to ‘broaden their perspective’, but it is very rare to hear of the reverse happening. This is most evident with regard to the promotion of gay relationships which is  at the sharp end of what the philosopher Roger Scruton has called the ‘culture of repudiation’,  systematically dismantling the Judeo-Christian tradition which has sustained English and Western culture for the past millennium and beyond.  Gay organisations openly advertise in official publications, including Crockfords and the Church of England Yearbook and a number of diocesan bishops are patrons of homosexual advocacy organisations without any significant challenge.

 In fact it is virtually impossible for the Church of England to take any kind of stand on this issue as the Roman Catholic Church did when its adoption agencies were threatened with being legally obliged to place children with homosexually active partners. If it did, it would be immediately undermined by its own acquiescence with the Civil Partnerships legislation of 2005 and the House of Bishop’s subsequent Pastoral letter which has jeopardised sacramental discipline by directing that enquiry should not be made about Civil Partnerships for those seeking baptism, confirmation of Holy Communion.

 The Archbishop of Canterbury has reinforced this sense that the Church of England has lost its biblical rootedness, not only by his writings on sexuality, but more recently by remarks which caused widespread dismay, being understood to be a call for the incorporation of some aspects of  Islamic Sharia law into the English legal system.

 Not only is Fulcrum in denial about the Church of England, but it is also in a degree of denial about itself. A brief glance at its own history shows how the movement had its origins in supporting the current Archbishop of Canterbury when his controversial views on sexuality were questioned at the time of his appointment, views which have added hugely to the influence of gay campaigning groups in the Church of England and beyond. Yet Goddard quite unselfconsciously includes Fulcrum as a group ‘committed to orthodox faith and morals’ along with Reform, Church Society, Forward in Faith and others.

This is difficult to square with the evidence. In practice, Fulcrum’s position seems to be rather ambiguous. When Christina Rees, one of the founders of Fulcrum , was asked in an  interview  in 2006 about what she thought Jesus’ attitude to various groups within the Church today would be, in answer to the question ‘And actively gay bishops like Gene Robinson, would he have minded them? ‘ she replied “No, not if they were in a faithful relationship, of course not.”

 And while in May 2006, Goddard  wrote  ‘The official position of the Church of England, the Anglican Communion, and Fulcrum (“In the much-contested area of sexual ethics this means that the proper context for sexual expression is the union of a man and a woman in marriage”) clearly makes it impossible for them to support IDAHO (International Day Against Homophobia)’,  the gay lesbian pressure group Changing Attitude saw things rather differently, claiming in its annual report of December 2006 that ‘At a meeting held with a view to creating a church IDAHO (International Day Against Homophobia) day, those present agreed that a distinctive church movement would be more appropriate. Leading evangelicals from Fulcrum have joined members of CA, the Clergy Consultation and the European Forum to develop the proposal.’ (emphasis added)

 It should be very obvious that there is therefore a need for a Confessing movement in the Church of England. It’s primary purpose must be prophetic, holding up the mirror of God’s Word to a deeply compromised Church and while structural separation should never be an end in itself, it may be a consequence if there is not repentance and reform.

 Unable or unwilling to recognise the depth of the crisis, Andrew Goddard has however to look for an alternative explanation for the GAFCON movement and the launch of the FCA. He finds this by confusing core intention with possible consequence. He interprets the FCA as schismatic because he cannot see any other interpretation of the need to align spiritually, even if not formally, with the global GAFCON movement. But if the Church of England and the existing Instruments of Unity are discredited and failing, then this is the obvious course of action to maintain spiritual integrity.

 It is also claimed that the FCA will be ‘separatist’, setting up parallel structures, because it includes ‘separatist’ clergy. I can write with some authority on this as I am one of them! In fact only two of us are mentioned, the other being Tony Jones of Christ Church Durham, and we appear to be the tail which will wag the officially non-separatist FCA dog. It is flattering to have such influence attributed, but perhaps Goddard is reluctant to acknowledge how many others are in a similar situation because that actually adds weight  to the case that the Church of England is in serious trouble. Without having to think too hard I can bring to mind nine more ‘separated’ Anglican clergy leading congregations and rather more in impaired communion.

 The idea that we set out with the primary purpose  of separating from the Church of England really does not stand up to examination, especially when it is borne in mind that to leave the institutional structures means financial insecurity and losing your home and church building. 

 In my own case, my congregation was in impaired communion with the previous Bishop of Worcester because of his outspoken rejection of Lambeth 1.10 and we acted in accordance with the principle recognised formally at last year’s Reform Conference in Resolution 2 which stated ‘This conference recognizes that when bishops accommodate themselves to heretical teaching they deny the faith and therefore abandon their sees.’ We no longer recognized the bishop’s spiritual authority, but did not abandon the parish church and the Church of England. I only left the building after receiving a letter which threatened me with prosecution under the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860 if I continued to minister in the parish church. It was then quite clear that the Church of England had abandoned me, rather than me abandoning it!

 Goddard’s charge of separatism – somewhat implausible on a practical level in any case – reveals again the underlying assumption that matters of faith and matters of church order do not come into serious conflict. But the institutions of the church cannot simply be assumed to be apostolic and bishops do not exercise an authority which is independent of the authority of the Scriptures and the Church’s own historic teaching. The schismatic are  the ones whose teaching or actions cause the schism, not the ones, like myself, who stand in the place that Anglicanism has always stood. The FCA as a confessional body recognises this truth and that does not make it schismatic – it simply reveals who the true schismatics are.

 

 

It is encouraging to see that Andrew Goddard has adopted a very different tone from that of Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, who last year  castigated  the GAFCON leadership as ‘super apostles’, using the Apostle Paul’s designation for the false teachers of 2 Corinthians chapters 11 and 12. Yet the underlying problem remains. Fulcrum is ultimately a distraction because it defines itself politically, as holding the centre ground. But preoccupation with this kind of ‘centre’ means that the gospel itself is no longer central since the Church’s chronic inability to go against the grain of the surrounding culture leads to the centre being  pushed continually in a revisionist direction.  

This is well illustrated in Graham Kings’ article ‘Glacial Gravity or Opportunist Autonomy’, echoing Goddard’s central themes, in which he sees the Anglican Covenant process as glacial – slow, but ‘reshaping the landscape’. What he seems to have missed is that this glacier is rapidly melting back and another very large chunk fell away at the last Anglican Consultative Council in Jamaica. It is going nowhere. And the reason it is melting is not because of GAFCON’s ‘opportunist autonomy’ but because too many in the Covenant process want the autonomy to reinvent Christianity behind the façade of Anglican validation.

 Paradoxically, although he thinks he can detect forward movement in the Covenant glacier, he seems oblivious to the movement of  a much larger glacier, that of the secular humanism which is so effectively reshaping the moral, spiritual and cultural landscape of the West and which Fulcrum seems powerless to resist. So yes, we should all join the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans because quite simply this is the  body made up of those wiling to  make a stand and they can do so in partnership with the great majority of Anglicans around the globe.

 

 Charles Raven

 2nd  July 2009

 

 

 

‘Telling it like it is’? Standpoint, Michael Nazir Ali and Rowan Williams

A year after ‘Breaking Faith with Britain’, written for the launch of ‘ Standpoint’ magazine  (www.standpointmag.co.uk) Bishop Michael Nazir Ali again sets out the case for a return to Judaeo-Christian values in  another powerful critique for the July/August issue, noting that both the financial crisis, which has intensified over the past twelve months, and the recent Westminster expenses scandal, so hugely destructive of public  confidence in Parliament, are further evidence of a nation seriously adrift from its historic values.

However, the Bishop’s illuminating line of reasoning may be overshadowed by controversy because the article, entitled ‘Only God Can Save Us From Ourselves’ is splashed on the magazine cover as ‘Michael Nazir-Ali: Why Rowan Williams is wrong’ supported by a somewhat doctored quotation, claiming ‘Rowan Williams and others…treat with contempt or actively oppose any attempts to uphold a normative view of the family’. This is misleading, but as I will show, the editorial instinct is nonetheless on to something.

 A careful reading of the article shows that Standpoint has been unable to resist the temptation to stretch for a headline. Michael Nazir Ali recognises that those who want to subvert our national  institutions do so primarily by dissolving the core institution, that of  the family,  by promoting relationships which are entered into and maintained on an entirely voluntary basis, without social sanction or coercion. He then observes that ‘Criticism by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and others of those who regard heterosexual marriage as “absolute, exclusive and ideal” is based on such views of “pure relationships” which are about mutual desire and fulfilment’. The reference to  ‘contempt’ appears in a subsequent paragraph and if Michael Nazir-Ali has any individual in mind  as someone who would have ‘contempt’ for the traditional family,  his mention of  British sociologist Anthony Giddens seems to present a more plausible candidate than the Archbishop.

 Nonetheless, the Bishop is right to highlight the role of Rowan Williams in this process of dissolution. Williams’ 1989 lecture ’The Body’s Grace’ has been hugely influential and, buttressed by other writings, notably ‘Is there a Christian sexual ethic?’ in ‘Open to Judgement’, provided theological respectability for the gay lesbian movement. The thrust of his thinking is that what really matters is the quality of the relationship within which sexual acts occur, not the nature of the sexual acts themselves. In this way gender is relativised and the ground is cut from underneath those who want to stand publicly for the preservation of Christian marriage and family life.

 Others have taken their cue from Rowan Williams and are willing to speak more controversially, such as the newly appointed Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dr Giles Fraser, who, in response to proposals to force churches to employ workers in same sex relationships under the terms of its Equality Bill,  warned recently  ‘We must not allow homophobia to disguise itself as any sort of legitimate religious belief – it isn’t! Homophobia is a sin and its eradication from churches, mosques and synagogues is one of the most urgent challenges for people of faith in the 21st century.” And with this pronouncement, Fraser  inflates the term ’homophobia’ to include not only the historic teaching of his own Church and Communion, but that of Islam and Judaism too!

 Such statements only begin to get traction in the public mind when its collective memory has become dim and this leads us to Michael Nazir Ali’s second cause of social breakdown, ‘an all-pervasive historical amnesia’ which cuts people off from their cultural roots and reduces the tested framework of an historically Christian society into just one option among others.

 In this situation people are easily persuaded by what the Bishop calls ‘procedural secularism’ the assumption that there it is possible for a consensus to develop through open debate. However, this is illusory, because in any society there are predominant cultural worldviews which will shape the debate. The Church therefore has to recover its prophetic role and be ‘in the business of forming consciences and “telling it like it is.”’

 Although Rowan Williams is not mentioned at this point, I could not help but think of the discredited Windsor Covenant process which itself well illustrates a form of ‘procedural secularism’ within the Church, an attempt to reach consensus by debate when actually what is needed is prophetic leadership. The Archbishop has been unable to give truly prophetic leadership within the Anglican Communion as it has slid into increasing chaos and confusion – and so GAFCON is moving to fill the gap – and he has been equally unable to provide it within the nation – and so this gap too has had to be filled by others, not least by Bishop Nazir Ali himself.

 ‘Where Williams is wrong’ (to refer back to Standpoint’s title) is not just on his views on sexuality; these are symptomatic of a whole theology which has lost touch with Scripture as authoritative revelation and instead looks for a consensus which is collapsing into pragmatism and naked church politics.

 Michael Nazir Ali’s article coud be said to speak of a  people becoming homeless – the rising generation emerging in the British Isles could be characterised as the ‘homeless’; many grow up in homes which due to family breakdown are not places where they feel truly ‘at home’ and in society as a whole they are cut off from their inheritance so that the very history which should enable them to feel  ‘at home’ is either denied or appears as something distant, even alien. Hence the paradox that it takes those with the experience of cultural distance, such as Bishop Michael, to remind us of what home really is.

 There has been a great sense of ‘coming home’ across the Atlantic this week as the ACNA has come to birth. The launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans next month here in the British Isles, whatever the precise structural outcome, similarly offers an opportunity for Anglicans to ‘come home’. And this home is not just a place of sanctuary. Like any strong family it will look outward. We have a gospel to proclaim, for men and women to come back to the Father’s house and for a fragmenting society to rediscover all that it is life giving in its privileged history.

 

Charles Raven

 30th June 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Anglican Church in North America – Hidden Reefs Ahead

The launch of the Anglican Church in North America this week should be a cause of great thanksgiving to God for all who long to see the Anglican Communion united in the gospel, rather than a  counterfeit unity engineered through endless ‘conversation’ and artful ambiguity.

However, we can be certain that this new stage of the global Anglican realignment will be opposed. The most dangerous form of attack is not aggressive legal action, which, despite the stress and financial pain, tends overall to energise the faithful and clarify the issues, but stealth strategies which seem to offer rewards, but lead to confusion and co-option. 

Just twelve months ago at GAFCON in Jerusalem, Bishop Wallace Benn drew attention to this characteristic of false teachers in his insightful address on Jude, ‘The Authority of God’, subsequently published in ‘The Way of the Cross’ series of bible studies. He writes ‘These false teachers are ‘blemishes at your love feast’ (v12a). Literally, they are like ‘reefs’ which cause spiritual shipwreck! They share ‘communion’, but actually they are out of communion.’ (p77)

 The great ‘hidden reef’ within the Anglican Communion is the so called ‘listening process’ derived from a systematic misinterpretation of the commitment to ‘listen to the experience of homosexual persons’ in Lambeth Resolution 1.10 of 1998. Part of that reef was uncovered just last week by Ralinda Gregor’s excellent investigation for the American Anglican Council (AAC) ‘Money, Sex, Indaba: Corrupting the Anglican Communion Listening Process’   in which she revealed the radically permissive values of those behind the $1.5 million donation announced at last month’s Anglican Consultative Council (ACC)  in Jamaica to fund Communion wide ‘indaba’. 

As many commentators have already recognised, the indaba process is a way of resolving conflict within an accepted framework of values and a common identity, but it is precisely these fundamentals which are in dispute. It is therefore pretty shocking to find that the source of the ‘indaba’ funding is the Rev Marta Weeks, a retired priest of TEC committed to ‘a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts’ and funding is to be overseen by the Satcher Institute’s ‘Center of Excellence for Sexual Health’ (CESH) with which Week’s and other members of TEC have  close connections. CESH has highly permissive values which are clearly not compatible with Lambeth 1.10 and one its staff, Dr. William Stayton pushes the logic to the extent that he advocates liberalising laws on pederasty and bestiality.

This is a stealth programme and it suffers from the weakness of all stealth strategies – the more ambitious it becomes, the more difficult it is to disguise it – and $1.5million dollars is bound to attract attention and CESH’s claim that there are no strings has been somewhat undermined by the admission by Canon Philip Groves of the Anglican Communion Office that  CESH will have an unspecified ‘monitoring role’.  Sarah Hey of Standfirm  was sufficiently alarmed to begin a campaign to alert bishops throughout the Communion to this news. Questions are also being asked by journalists – as yet not answered – including Ruth Gledhill of the London Times  about responsibility for this decision in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is inevitably implicated.

And mention of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role brings us to explore another part of the reef, which is perhaps not so much hidden as forgotten and can be posed as a question: Why is it not acceptable to have a process funded with tainted money while for many it seems nonetheless acceptable to participate in a process overseen by tainted leadership? Does it make sense to want the ACNA to be recognised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who personally introduced ‘indaba’ at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, when he has persistently shown himself to be sympathetic to – at times an advocate even – of values which significantly overlap with those advocated by Weeks and CESH?

Of course, since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has repeatedly tried to draw a distinction between his personal views and the Church teaching which he is obliged to uphold by virtue of his office.  So just as we are asked to believe that money can be given by Weeks/CESH without undue influence, we are also asked to believe that personal institutional power can be used without undue influence. In the former case there is an outcry; in the latter case, by and large, many Anglican Communion leaders seem prepared to live with it, despite the fact that at crucial points, such as the Dar es Salaam Primates meeting deadline for TEC of 30th September 2007 and the voting on Section 4 of the Ridley Covenant draft at the last ACC meeting, the Archbishop has intervened personally in a way which has clearly aided the revisionist cause.

All this goes to illustrate the truth of David Holloway’s warning at the time of Dr Williams’ appointment to Canterbury in ‘A Line in the Sand; Reform and Rowan Williams’  ‘Would anyone ever ask a believer in fox hunting to head up an anti-hunting campaign? He may say, “I can and do state what your views are (when asked) and, for the time being, will not hunt myself.” Of course, he would not be appointed. The campaigners want someone who believes in their cause…’ 

It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Williams’ drawing back from being an advocate of the homosexual agenda when he became Archbishop of Canterbury was simply tactical. His contribution to the movement previously had been immense, not least through his seminal lecture ‘The Body’s Grace’ of 1989 which lent the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) theological respectability. At the time of his appointment, the Rev’d Richard Kirker, then  General Secretary of the LGCM,  issued a press statement  noting that ‘For over 20 years Rowan Williams, a noted theologian, academic and author, has eloquently advocated that Christianity and homosexuality should be viewed as wholly consistent with each other.’

This observation was well founded. Even when he became  Archbishop of Wales in 2000 he did not feel that his new status as a Primate made it necessary to distinguish between personal and official views.  On 22 July 2001 the London Sunday Telegraph, under the headline ‘Archbishop hits out at ban on gay clergy’ reported ‘Dr Williams said that the Church’s acceptance of stable homosexual relationship among the laity but not the clergy  was a “contradiction” that could not be sustained’ and  that this ‘“unwillingness to clean can’t last.”’

But once Williams appointment to Canterbury was mooted as a possibility, his enthusiasm for coming clean began to wane.  On May 30, 2002, the Church of England Newspaper reported on a lecture he gave at the Uganda Christian University. According to the report, to reassure students who questioned his approval of homosexual relationships ‘Williams drew a distinction between conclusions he came to as a theological professor and what the Church officially says.’  He also began to distance himself from commitments which he had felt able to sustain previously as Primate of Wales In October 2002 cancelled an arrangement to speak at a 2003 conference of the LGCM.   

Despite this new reticence, when his appointment to Canterbury was announced Roman Catholic commentator Damian Thompson described it as ‘in some respects, a very English coup. Using the instrument of the Crown Appointments Commission, the establishment has squashed the ambitions of an evangelical lobby which reflects the prejudices of the developing world, not cosmopolitan London.’(‘Rowans Rule’ Rupert Shortt, p241).

In order to keep ‘cosmopolitan London’, not to mention New York and Toronto, within the same Communion as the ‘developing world’, it would now be essential to at least gain tolerance by the Global South for same sex relationships elsewhere in the Communion and hence the ‘Listening Process’ got under way in the hope that debate and discussion would lower the sensitivity of global south leaders to revisionist innovations.
However, it has become increasingly obvious that there are really no common and stable confessional commitments around which the orthodox and revisionists can come together. After GAFCON in Jerusalem last year, it was clear that the Anglican Communion as an institution is actually two Communions, those who find their unity in the apostolic faith and the historic Anglican formularies and those who see the institution as the given framework within which fluid theological insights emerge and evolve. In these circumstances, ‘indaba’ is an exercise in manipulation and control through which false teachers gain a plausibility and acceptance which is quite unscriptural; the only effective way to be heard for those who disagree with the dominant ideology is by staying away.

And this is why the Anglican Church of North America needs to steer a course which avoids the ‘indaba’ stealth strategy, a reef all the more dangerous now that it combines  American Episcopal money with the status conferred by Lambeth tradition. But one of the great achievements of GAFCON last year was a breaking of that now sadly misplaced  sense of enchantment that attaches to the See of Canterbury, recognising that Anglican authenticity is essentially confessional and that no institution, however ancient and hallowed, is above the sovereign authority of Scripture.

The ACNA is the clearest manifestation we have yet of the underlying spiritual reality of two Anglican Communions and, appealing though it may be to the ACNA’s lawyers when seeking to defend property against the predations of the TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, to seek recognition by this particular Archbishop of Canterbury would muddy that clarity and jeopardise the gospel freedom and integrity these newly united Churches have paid such a high price to secure.

Charles Raven

22nd June 2009

New Westminster – New Gospel; the ANiC trial

Court cases between orthodox parishes and revisionist dioceses have, sadly, become something of a commonplace in North America, but the current court battle in the Supreme Court of British Columbia between four Anglican Network in Canada parishes, including St John’s Shaughnessy, and the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of New Westminster led by Bishop Michael Ingham is proving to be very revealing.

This is the first time a Canadian court has been asked to rule on the question of overall control of Anglican church property. The trial itself began on 25th May and has some time to go, with judgement not expected until late summer, but whether they win or lose, the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) has already done orthodox Anglicans – if they take notice – a great service by this bold decision to take a legal stand.

The ANiC parishes’ case is essentially very simple; that the Diocese of New Westminster under Bishop Michael Ingham no longer holds to the central doctrines of the Christian faith; it has reinvented the gospel and the presenting issue, the blessing of same sex unions, is simply a symptom of this deeper malaise. In evidence at the trial on day three , a member of one of the ANiC congregations spoke of her shock as far back as 1994 when Bishop Michael Ingham  denied the uniqueness of Jesus as the only saviour and in 1997 he subsequently enlarged on this theme in his book ‘Mansions of the Spirit’. As members of the ANiC, they are aligned with the orthodox majority in the Anglican Communion through the GAFCON movement and see that they have a duty to ensure that historic assets are protected and held in trust for orthodox Anglican ministry. In essence, their argument turns on a confessional understanding of the church – that a valid Anglican Church is one which is faithful to historic and orthodox Anglican doctrine and practice.

While Michael Ingham does not deny that the authorisation of  blessings for homosexual partnerships is a major departure from mainstream Anglican teaching – in fact he sees himself as something of a prophetic figure in this regard – he strongly maintains that a Church can change core doctrines so long as the correct procedures are followed. In essence, his argument turns on an institutional understanding of the church and this takes us to the heart of the division in the Anglican Communion – does unity – being ‘in communion’ – depend primarily upon shared doctrine or shared institutional history?

The revisionist agenda thrives on ambiguity and confusion, but this legal action has forced Michael Ingham to state the revisionist position with an uncommon degree of clarity, not only under cross examination, but also in the Diocese of New Westminster’s Submission to the court released on June 1st.
 
Here it is stated quite directly that ‘what underlies their [the ANiC parishes] entire case is their insistence that the blessing of same-sex unions is inconsistent with “historic, orthodox Anglican doctrine and practice”. The [Canadian] General Synod, however, has affirmed that such blessings are not in conflict with the core doctrines of the Church’ (p.3, emphasis as original). 

It might be thought that if the General Synod can authorise such a fundamental departure from historic Anglican teaching, its right to continue holding historic assets could be questioned. The New Westminster Submission recognises the point and acknowledges  the precedent set by General Assembly of Free Church of Scotland v. Lord Overtoun [1904] in which it was ruled that  ‘the property of a religious institution must be held and applied to the original purposes for which that institution was founded, that is, for the original “trust”’, but then argues that in a Church where there are mechanisms for changing doctrine (as there were not in the Free Church of Scotland), the principle no longer applies and Churches can change doctrine without historic assets being at risk.

It would appear that this understanding contradicts the Anglican Church of Canada’s (ACoC’s) own constitution. The Solemn Declaration of 1893, adopted by the first General Synod and part of the Declaration of Principles in the Handbook of the General Synod of ACoC, commits the Church to ‘hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments and Discipline of Christ as the Lord hath commanded in His Holy Word, and as the Church of England hath received and set forth the same’  with specific reference to the Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal and the  Thirty-nine Articles ‘and to transmit the same unimpaired to our posterity’ (emphasis added).

But now it seems, we know better and are no longer bound to pass on these things ‘unimpaired’. Under questioning on day six  of the trial, Bishop Ingham said that he viewed the Solemn Declaration as ‘an historical document’  Likewise, the Diocese’s submission argues that an interpretation of  the Solemn Declaration ‘as a requirement for the Anglican Church of Canada to maintain “historic, orthodox Anglican doctrine and practice”’ is an outdated and static understanding of doctrine, whereas Anglicanism is a ‘dynamic faith tradition’ in which ‘interpretation is an ongoing project’ (p19).

On the previous day, Michael Ingham  had referred  to the Archbishop of Canterbury in defence of this ‘dynamic’ view.  When asked to define orthodoxy, he said “I am greatly persuaded by Archbishop Rowan Williams saying “he describes (it) as the conversation of the Church… broad and not narrow… and includes many streams of thought.”

It is not entirely clear if Ingham is actually quoting the Archbishop at this point, but even if he is not, it is a fair summary and entirely consistent with what Williams has written; to take but one example ‘If we had to choose between a Church tolerably confident of what it has to say and seeking only for effective means of saying it and a Church constantly engaged in internal dialogue and critique of itself, an exploration to discover what is central to its being, I should say that it is the latter which is more authentic.’ (Women and the ministry: a case for theological seriousness’, in Monica Furlong (ed.), Feminine in the Church, 1984, p12).

In its defence, the Diocese also cites the Archbishop of Canterbury’s continued recognition of ACoC as part of the Anglican Communion following the intervention of Archbishop Greg Venables on behalf of the ANiC congregations. The New Westminster Submission quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter of 4th February 2008 to the ACoC Bishop of Brandon assuring him that ‘this office and that of the Anglican Communion recognise one ecclesial body in Canada as a constitutive member of the Communion, the Anglican Church of Canada’ (p80). So however much historic doctrine, teaching and morality may be up for questioning, that clearly does not include the territorial jurisdiction of bishops and, with unblushing canonical fundamentalism, the Submission supports its prelatical claims with an appeal to the ‘ancient canons of the Church going as far back as the 4th century’ (p78).

So what is being revealed in this case is that the Diocese of New Westminster’s defence gives rise to a line of argument which leads inexorably to the conclusion that Anglican Churches do not in principle have any doctrine which cannot be changed, but its essentially pragmatic motivation   becomes obvious when it is maintained that the institutional structures of episcopacy which arose to preserve this doctrine are beyond debate. 

This position is being given plausibility by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, not only by his theological writing, but also by his refusal to use the powers of his office to exercise any form of effective discipline.   And it is clear that what is evolving in New Westminster is a ‘new gospel’. Its Submission is not at all apologetic about innovations which have helped to precipitate a global spiritual crisis, claiming in prophetic terms that ‘The blessing of same-sex unions is very important to a great many people within the Diocese, as the evidence shows. The blessings advance Christianity’s ideals of love, acceptance and inclusion. They are a legitimate expression of Anglican belief within the social context of Vancouver and its surrounding areas’ (p46).

So for the future, The Churches in the increasingly secularised cultures on both sides of the North the very clear lesson emerging from this case is that moratoria and incremental negotiation over covenant clauses are futile strategies. The revisionist aim is not, initially, to exclude orthodox ministry, but to neutralise it through defining the church institutionally. If it can be generally accepted that doctrine is provisional and can be changed by a Church following due process– even if it hasn’t yet – then the legal ground has been conceded and the defences against false teaching are undermined. Atlantic will then be extremely vulnerable, even in England itself where establishment has meant that the Church has been heavily conditioned by the state since the sixteenth century and the present Archbishop of Canterbury’s theology of ‘conversation’ only serves to downgrade the Church’s capacity to discern truth from error.

A more radical approach is necessary which builds on the GAFCON initiative to realign the Anglican Communion  as a confessional body and give it solid expression by some form of Conciliar accountability. Since the reformation, the lack of any kind of magisterium – a central teaching authority – has been a besetting weakness of the Church of England and by extension,  the Anglican Communion  as a whole. That vulnerability is now being painfuly exposed. Though some evangelical Anglicans might be nervous about Conciliar leadership, it is likely that court cases such as that of the ANiC parishes will become increasingly common and for their sake it is vital to have a clear and authoritative voice for global Anglicanism, not a vacuum that gives plausibility to error, placing historic resources and the visible landmarks of the faith in jeopardy.

Do pray for the ANiC parishes and their lawyers as the trial continues. Updates can be found at http://anglicannetwork.ca/legal_updates_0509.htm. And for readers in the British Isles, this is a very good reminder of why you need to take a stand and book for ‘Be Faithful’ at Westminster Central Hall on 6th July to support the launch here of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans!

Charles Raven

5th June 2009

The Odd Couple – Faith and Disorder

History was made in the UK this week when Michael Martin became the first Speaker of the House of Commons to be forced to resign for some 300 years, a casualty of the expenses scandal which is engulfing the British Parliament.

He is a former sheet metal worker who cut his political teeth in the hard school of Glasgow machine politics and the Scottish Labour Party, inhabiting a very different world from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, once described by one of his friends as ‘mainly monk’ and whose ministry has been profoundly shaped by the academic culture of Oxford and Cambridge. Yet they have this in common, that both Speaker and Archbishop preside (only until 21st June in Michael Martin’s case) over ancient institutions – the British House of Commons and the Church of England respectively.

Sadly, the similarity goes further, not only are these institutions ancient, they are also manifestly failing and the political crisis over expenses, exposed in all its excruciatingly embarrassing detail by the press (public money used for an astonishing array of claims, from make-overs to moats,  pornography to property portfolios) helps shed light on that usually more sedate but nonetheless serious spiritual crisis which is overtaking the Church of England and threatens the wider Communion.

The core of the case against Speaker Martin was that he had presided over a ‘gentlemen’s club’ culture when the members were no longer behaving as gentlemen. Privileges had become a pretext for systematic and widespread abuse, but rather than reforming the system he had sought to protect it from scrutiny.  It is clear that a kind of self deception had taken root in the thinking of many MP’s who were pushing claims to the limit, unable – as some still are – to see that while something might be procedurally lawful, it could nonetheless be morally unacceptable.

I do not want to imply in any way that the bishops and clergy of the Church of England are abusing their positions financially. The parallel lies elsewhere, not with money, but with truth. Just as for many MP’s the ideal of public service had become so marginal that they exploited expense claims to the limit of legality almost as a right, so the call to preach the gospel and discern truth from error tends to be faintly embarrassing to much of the Church of England’s leadership, especially when that call goes against the grain of its natural instinct to accommodate with the surrounding culture and thereby preserve its privileged status as the established church.

Examples are manifold, but two of the most outstanding  come from the Church of England’s own ‘gentleman’s’ club’, the House of Bishops. Its report ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ of 1991 was widely interpreted as sanctioning active homosexual relationships for the laity, although not the clergy, and the House of Bishops (with a few honourable exceptions) supported the UK’s Civil Partnerships legislation of 2005 which gave specifically homosexual relationships a status in law mimicking marriage.

A further illuminating similarity between Michael Martin and Rowan Williams is that both appointments were widely perceived as partisan. Whereas precedent would have indicated that the successor to the former speaker would have been drawn from the Conservative benches, Labour broke that pattern with Martin’s election in 2000, leaving a legacy of mistrust.  The partisan nature of Dr Williams’ appointment was recognised by commentators at the time. The Roman Catholic writer Damian Thompson described it as ‘ in some respects, a very English coup. Using the instrument of the Crown Appointments Commission, the establishment has squashed the ambitions of an evangelical lobby which reflects the prejudices of the developing worked, not cosmopolitan London.’(Rowans Rule’ Rupert Shortt, p241)

Rowan Williams own comments would have supported this perception. Only twelve months previously, on 22 July 2001, the London Sunday Telegraph, in a report entitled ‘Archbishop hits out at ban on gay clergy’ Dr Williams, then Archbishop of Wales, claimed that the 1991 ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ report’s bar on the ordination of active homosexuals was incoherent and “this unwillingness to come clean can’t last. It is a contradiction.”

However, on his translation to the See of Canterbury, Williams’ enthusiasm for ‘coming clean’ seemed to be much dampened. He minimised his commitments to the gay lobby and wrote to reassure the Anglican Primates, saying ‘I have to distinguish plainly between personal theories and interpretations and the majority conviction of my Church.’. He has continued to emphasise this distinction between his personal (and in fact widely disseminated) views on the one hand and his official responsibility on the other. Superficially, this may seem generous, even sacrificial, but the consequences for the Church’s commitment to truth are serious. As Gerald Bray has observed, ‘Not to believe the teachings he is expected to defend is not a sign of superior holiness, as some have alleged, but the very opposite – it is deceitfulness taken to a higher level of deception.’ (Churchman Vol.122 No.4 2008 p293)

This ‘higher level of deception’ is serious because, as a principle, it has the potential to downgrade Christian truth across the board. If the Archbishop of Canterbury himself can publicly treat the upholding of the plain teaching of Scripture as a formal duty rather than a personal commitment, the door is open to a kind of institutionalised hypocrisy in which it is acceptable to observe the formalities of orthodoxy while at the same time dissolving the substance of orthodoxy by conceding its provisionality. It is not difficult to see where this is leading; for instance Richard Holloway, former Primus (Primate) of Scotland cheerfully described himself in yesterday’s  Sydney Morning  Herald as an agnostic and yet can see no reason why he should stop ministering in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

And this is why the Anglican Covenant will not work. Its minimal doctrine and diluted disciplinary provisions are simply inadequate in a Communion where we can no longer be certain what people mean by the words they use and whether they believe the words they use. Dr Williams by no means bears sole responsibility for this culture, but he presides over it and has lent it respectability.

It is said that the partisan nature of his appointment contained the seeds of Speaker Martin’s downfall and this week he has suffered the sudden death of his political career. The partisan nature of Dr Williams’ appointment also contains the seeds of his downfall, but his is likely to be a slow death as the confusion he has sown theologically gradually manifests itself in practice, as most recently in Jamaica. And in this light, we can see that GAFCON’s great contribution to the Anglican Communion has been to begin the process of restoring confessional confidence so that, as one body, Anglicans can speak of God and the gospel truthfully and clearly.

 

Charles Raven

21st  May 2009

 

 

 

 

 

Tipping Point in Jamaica

Last week I questioned Professor Stephen Noll’s proposal  that the GAFCON Primates should ‘move to the front of the queue’ to sign up to the latest Ridley Draft being presented to the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in Jamaica, not only because in my view the Covenant still lacked teeth, but also because there were strong grounds for thinking that it could turn out to be a vehicle for co-opting the orthodox.

My anxiety about co-option now looks like being of only academic interest since the Ridley draft foundered through the objections of the American Episcopal Church, but the way  that this happened  illustrated much more vividly than I had expected the underlying concern I set out  last week – ‘ that the real problem the Anglican Communion faces is not so much the apostasy of the revisionist North American provinces, but the failure of the Instruments of Communion in the face of this challenge’ .

So while I have to concede that Professor Noll may have had a stronger point than I realised about the disciplinary potential of the draft, set out in Section 4 – because of the opposition it attracted – my sense that the existing Instruments of Unity are not safe for the orthodox was amply demonstrated. During the voting on the key resolutions, it became clear that when push comes to shove, Rowan Williams will support the revisionist interest. Until his strategic intervention, overruling the chair and reintroducing wording which the delegates had rejected, it seemed that the draft would be accepted. But now the wording of Section 4 will  be reviewed by a ‘a small working group’ appointed by Dr Williams and Anglican Communion Secretary General Kenneth Kearon, delaying the Covenant process even further and with every expectation that what emerges will be a serious dilution of what was already a minimal form of discipline.

Despite his enthusiasm for the Covenant process, Stephen Noll is now quite clear that it has run its course.  In his review  ‘The Anglican Communion Covenant: Where Do We Go from Here?’, he writes ‘So my immediate conclusion is that the Anglican Communion Covenant is dead. More precisely, it has been etherized while one of the Instruments performs vital surgery on its vital parts….Our Lord said: “For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men” (Matthew 19:12). The Covenant is to be numbered among the latter.’

Throughout the Jamaica meeting it was clear that the revisionist leaning Lambeth leadership was determined to control the outcome. For instance, Philip Ashey, a Ugandan representative resident in the United States was not allowed to take his seat despite being validly selected under existing ACC rules and precedent, causing Archbishop Henry Orombi to write in protest to the Archbishop of Canterbury, describing the decision to reject Ashey as ‘nothing short of an imperialistic and colonial decision that violates the integrity of the Church of Uganda.’

The impression of arbitrariness was reinforced when Dr Williams used his position as Archbishop of Canterbury to frustrate an attempt  to insert the ‘fourth moratorium’  on the increasing vengeful pursuit of legal action against orthodox congregations in North America, despite this having been unanimously agreed by the Primates Meeting at Dar es Salaam in 2007.

 So it is not surprising that another GAFCON theologian, Mark Thompson, writing as President of the Anglican Church League of Sydney is similarly forthright when he  states “We have once again been shown how firmly apostasy and deception is embedded in the international structures of Anglicanism. There is no hope for the future there.”

The sense that this meeting has become a tipping point for the future of the Anglican Communion is not simply to do with the failure of the Covenant, it is also to do with the way in which it has failed; there is a widespread sense that trust, already at a premium, has been further undermined. For instance, Bishop  Ikechi Nwosu  of Nigeria  comments ‘We may as well have gone to the Archbishop of Canterbury and asked him what do you want.   We have gathered here – at great cost – but why not go to Lambeth and ask him?  The chair was taking the direction from the observations of the ABC.’

So the ‘devastating conclusion’ of the Jerusalem Statement ‘that we are a global Communion with a colonial structure’ has been shown to be accurate yet again. The only positive proposal to come out of the ACC meeting was to extend  the discredited ‘indaba’ process used at Lambeth 2008 throughout the Communion, made possible by a US$1.5 million grant from the liberal leaning Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, but in the absence of an effective covenant to provide a common confessional framework, indaba becomes a tool of manipulation. As Vinay Samuel shows in his powerful  critique of the abuse of indaba,  in Lambeth hands it becomes ‘the badge of oppression.’

Jamaica is not only the end of the Covenant process, but is also likely to mark a decisive shift of confidence away from the Lambeth based Instruments of Unity. Some three years ago, Stephen Noll wrote an insightful essay  ‘Look Not to Cantuar‘ and after Jamaica, it is to be hoped that the Global South as a whole will come to recognise that an Anglican Communion which looks for leadership from this Archbishop of Canterbury and the existing Instruments of Unity will descend into deepening chaos.

These ‘Instruments’ are aptly named because are they are seeking to manipulate a unity which does not exist. There are two irreconcilable religions being hosted within the Anglican Communion and  as they contemplate the opportunism and power play on display in Jamaica, it may be that Fulcrum and other evangelicals in England itself who have tied themselves so closely to Rowan Williams and the Covenant process will see this reality more clearly and come to a more positive assessment of GAFCON and the UK & Ireland Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans as it is launched in London this summer.
 
Charles Raven

9th  May 2009

The Ridley Covenant Draft – Taming GAFCON

 

In today’s Church of England Newspaper (1st May 2009), Bishop Michael Nazir Ali asks ‘Is the much debated Covenant fit for purpose?’ Clearly not he answers. However, the Revd Professor Stephen Noll, a leading GAFCON theologian and American missionary  Vice Chancellor of  Uganda Christian University, in a recent article  urged that GAFCON Churches should now be much more positive about the Windsor Covenant process and ‘move to the front of the queue and sign on to the Covenant’.

 
So how can two very able theologians, both strongly committed to the GAFCON movement, come to such different conclusions?

The clue is in their context. Stephen Noll’s surprisingly positive assessment of the Ridley draft  has been welcomed by Fulcrum,  the English liberal leaning evangelical Anglican group, with its Theological Secretary Graham Kings, the newly appointed Bishop of Sherborne,  describing  Stephen Noll’s  proposal  as ‘very encouraging indeed’.

Yet only twelve months ago, Fulcrum’s leading bishop,  Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham,  controversially  denounced  the GAFCON leadership as ‘super-apostles’  using St Paul’s designation for the false teachers of 2 Corinthians chapters 11 and 12. So praise from the same group should give pause for careful thought.

The Fulcrum response is a very significant  because it illuminates the English context in which the Windsor covenant process needs to be understood, a context which is much more immediate and pressing  for Michael Nazir Ali than for Stephen Noll.  So when Michael Nazir Ali concludes that the Ridley Draft ‘leaves us exactly where we have been these last six years’ and fears that ‘it may even be worse’ the question arises as to what is really energising the Covenant process after years of fruitless discussion. Could it be that it has become a strategy for taming of the GAFCON movement?

Whatever our working assumptions about the wider context, it is only right that the new draft should first be taken at face value. Stephen Noll helpfully notes that ‘the two essential ingredients of an effective Anglican Covenant involve both ‘doctrinal substance and disciplinary efficacy’  and claims that the essential weakness of the St Andrew’s and Nassau drafts was that while tolerable on the former, they failed on the latter.

He is not unaware of the shortcomings of the Ridley draft, admitting that the ‘absence of an exclusion clause’ akin to the specific commitment of the Jerusalem Declaration ‘to reject  the authority of those Churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith’ is a ‘lost opportunity’. He also recognises that the Covenant does not make any direct reference to the key issue of homosexuality. 

Notwithstanding these difficulties, Stephen Noll argues  that ‘the plain sense of the oblique references to a “pattern of moral reasoning and discipline that is rooted in and answerable to the teaching of Holy Scripture and the catholic tradition” is surely consonant with norm in 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10’, but if we are having to make inferences from what is already oblique, there can be little hope that the covenant could  function as a normative document in this most contested area, all the more so  when we recall the capital that revisionists have made out of the ‘listening’ clause of Resolution 1.10.

Professor Noll finds particular encouragement in a reading of the Ridley draft which suggests that , unlike its predecessors, it is stronger on disciplinary efficacy. In  Section 4:2 it is recognised that a point may come where an erring Province might find itself in broken communion. However, as he recognises, the whole process is governed by the word ‘may’.

Furthermore, as Michael Nazir Ali notes, even if the Joint Standing Committee (of the Primates and Anglican Consultative Council) did get to the point of declaring a province to be acting in a way incompatible with the Covenant, this is only a ‘recommendation’ and it is not binding (or even, as I understand  4.2.5, binding upon the other Instruments of Unity – so a Province could be declared as acting incompatibly with the Covenant, yet still be invited to the Lambeth Conference!)

So this is still essentially a voluntary covenant and it is difficult to see how any Province could be stripped of its recognition if it chose to ignore advice. The impression of a document shaped by pragmatism rather than by biblical principle becomes even clearer by reference back to section 4.1.5 which specifies that while adoption of the covenant by a ‘Church’ – there is no attempt to define ‘Church’ in this context – will not carry with it an automatic right of recognition as part of the Anglican Communion, adoption may be ‘accompanied by a formal request to the Instruments for recognition.’

Here there is a certain asymmetry – if it is possible for a Church to be formally recognised and accepted into the Communion by the Instruments, does it not follow that it should be equally possible for a church to be formally stripped of its recognition and ejected from the Communion by the Instruments?

This inconsistency suggests that whatever claims the Ridley Draft may have to be confessionally based, the real concerns are those of  institutional realpolitik. For instance, on this basis, while it would be  virtually impossible to eject The Episcopal Church of the United States (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) on the basis of covenant non-compliance, it would be possible to recognise the emergent province of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), no doubt in the hope this would effectively draw ACNA into the Lambeth orbit and wrong-foot those in the Church of England itself who are bringing the GAFCON  vision and critique to bear on their own Church and the  Archbishop of Canterbury himself.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that despite his long experience of the trials of the orthodox in TEC and around the globe, Stephen Noll is being remarkably optimistic. Why should that be? Perhaps the answer lies in a preoccupation with the particular problems of North America as he perceives them now.  By signing up quickly to the Covenant, the GAFCON Primates would marginalise the North American revisionists within the Communion. They would, he hopes, be effectively selected out. He  writes : ‘Given the premise that GAFCON churches and the revisionist Provinces of North America cannot as they now stand simply come together in a genuine communion relationship, the following permutations seem set for the adoption of the Covenant:

Scenario A. GAFCON churches adopt the Covenant and TEC/ACoC refuse to adopt.
Scenario B. TEC/ACoC adopt the Covenant and GAFCON Churches refuse to adopt.
Scenario C. Both GAFCON churches and TEC/ACoC adopt the Covenant.
Scenario D. Both GAFCON churches and TEC/ACoC refuse to adopt the Covenant.

If my analysis above is correct, it should be logically and theologically easier for the GAFCON Churches to adopt the Covenant than for the revisionists. Therefore scenario A is one that the GAFCON churches should consider carefully and certainly not reject out of hand.’

The problem is the ‘therefore’. The conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. While it is indisputable that the GAFCON Churches are better placed theologically to sign up to the Covenant than the revisionists, it by no means follows that they should.

From an American perspective to do so might look like shrewd politics, the revisionists suffering  a kind of passive ejection as GAFCON Churches set the tone and make the Communion increasingly inhospitable for them. However, this does not take into account the extent to which revisionism is embedded on the other side of the Atlantic, even if its voice is somewhat muted. It is not  shrewd to run the real risk of  being co-opted by an Archbishop of Canterbury who demonstrably falls well short of orthodoxy and being drawn back into the ‘interminable conversations’ which Archbishop Peter Akinola rightly criticised after the Primates meeting in Alexandria.

In fairness to Stephen Noll, his GAFCON  resource paper  of March 2008 ‘the Global Anglican Communion and the Anglican Orthodoxy’did recommend for ‘strategic and tactical reasons that a statement of Anglican orthodoxy keep in close touch with the idea of a Covenant’ but added ‘ It seems unlikely that a final Covenant from Canterbury, filtered now through the Anglican Consultative Council, will be sufficiently crisp to deal with the present crisis.’  It is difficult to see why he is less cautious now and the global context of the Anglican Communion would seem to demand a much more robust defence of orthodox Anglicanism than the Ridley Draft can provide, even on a resolutely optimistic reading. 

The Jerusalem Statement recognised that the existing Instruments of Unity were not fit for purpose and described ‘the manifest failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy’  as an ‘undeniable fact’ . This ‘undeniable fact’ has not changed since those words were written and if anything last year’s Lambeth Conference with its deliberate avoidance of decision making underlined the truth of the Statement’s ‘devastating conclusion that ‘we are a global Communion with a colonial structure’’.

Along with a colonial structure goes a colonial mentality which is instinctively controlling and it is this which Professor Noll seems to have underestimated. It is a commonplace to observe that despite the large number of self-identified evangelical clergy and bishops in the Church of England, very few are willing to act or speak in ways which challenge the liberal/permissive consensus in society of the Church itself and instead tend to reserve their strongest criticism for that minority of fellow evangelicals who are prepared to speak and act more prophetically.

This so called ‘open evangelicalism’ coheres around Fulcrum, formed some six years ago  as a reaction to the publicly expressed concerns of some English evangelicals about Rowan Williams’ theology and ethics. Although it has stopped short of directly endorsing Dr Williams’ views on homosexuality, it has remained  fiercely loyal to the Archbishop and the Lambeth institutional processes.

Fulcrum now illustrates a particular danger for the GAFCON movement  – to be welcomed by an historic and prestigious establishment may seem like an opportunity to exert influence, but sooner or later the price is co-option by an institution much more sensitive to the pressures of the predominant culture than the claims of historic biblical faith.   Michael Nazir Ali’s courageous resignation as  Bishop of Rochester and the appointment of Fulcrum’s Graham Kings as Bishop as Sherborne both seem to be recent manifestations of the same dysfunctionality.

This is not simply an internal English problem. The institutional challenge for Rowan Williams is to hold together a Church of England deeply embedded in secularised English society with a wider Anglican Communion which, numerically, is overwhelmingly orthodox. To try and resolve this growing tension theologically simply exacerbates the institutional problem because it highlights irreconcilable differences, so the solution has to be political and the tactic of co-option which has been so effective within England is now being applied to the Communion as a whole through the Covenant process (which is why Michael Nazir Ali attracts such particular hostility as a non co-opted leader).

This may seem somewhat abstract, even farfetched, but consider for a moment an unconsciously  revealing incident in Rupert Shortt’s biography of Rowan Williams.  Professor Oliver O’Donovan, a personal friend of Williams and subsequently Fulcrum’s leading academic, invited three Primates, Donald Mtememela of Tanzania, Drexel Gomex of the West Indies and Yong Ping Chung of South East Asia to an ‘evidently lavish’ dinner at his Oxford college in early July 2002 since they were considered to be the most likely critics of  Williams’ possible appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. The dinner turned out to be surprisingly congenial and afterwards O’Donovan wrote to his friend giving a full report and assured him that if the burden of the See of Canterbury were to fall on his shoulders, he should ‘not forget that even the fire – breathers can sometimes be tamed, and that there are one or two determined and skilful tamers out there in the field, on whose good will you can count.’ (Rowan’s Rule, Rupert Shortt, p243).

Subsequent events would demonstrate that in this particular instance, O’Donovan was not quite as skilful a tamer as he thought, especially in the case of  Archbishop Yong who courageously continued his  personal sponsorship of the Anglican Mission in America, even at considerable personal cost in his own backyard.

In this light, we can see that the real problem the Anglican Communion faces is not so much the apostasy of the revisionist North American provinces, but the failure of the Instruments of Communion in the face of this challenge, for which the Archbishop of Canterbury with his presiding role must carry special responsibility.

The specific danger of the Windsor Covenant process is therefore that it becomes a process of co-option, of taming the ‘fire – breathers’ and drawing the GAFCON movement back into the orbit of a Communion which, with no real defences against a counterfeit gospel, ends up as a counterfeit Communion,  implicating the godly in its ungodliness and confusing the gospel they seek to proclaim.

 The great promise of the GAFCON movement was that it would bring godly order to the Communion through a genuinely conciliar and confessional leadership wholeheartedly committed to the historic Anglican faith. To focus now on the Covenant process would cloud its vision and threaten its global future.

Charles Raven

1st May 2009

Dean Slee and the English Sect – the Global Anglican Rift Widens

The Very Rev’d Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark, has alleged that the Bishop of Rochester’s recently announced resignation is the first step in setting up an alternative church. According to last weekend’s  London Sunday Telegraph he also declared that, together with Bishops Wallace Benn and Pete Broadbent,  Dr Michel Nazir-Ali’s status as a bishop in the Anglican Communion,  ‘must be open to some debate’ because they had declined invitations to last year’s Lambeth Conference.

Although he is one of the more outspoken liberals in the Church of England –  in 2003, he described  Archbishop Peter Jensen’s involvement with English conservative evangelicals as ‘reprehensible’  – these remarks cannot be dismissed as the unrepresentative prejudices of one man.  He is a member of the Crown Nomination Commission, which has a key role in the appointment of the Church of England’s bishops, and Southwark Cathedral is the most ancient cathedral church in London. 

This is the voice of comfortable liberal establishment religiosity made uncomfortable by GAFCON’s challenge to its hegemony, already expressed in the crude epithet applied to Michael Nazir Ali in a letter from Lambeth Palace in December last year and judged sufficiently offensive for a member of Rowan William’s staff to have to resign.

As Dean of a cathedral which traces its history back to 604AD, Colin Slee is remarkably uninhibited by the weight of centuries and vigorously advocates overturning the Church’s historic teaching on sexuality.

Taking his cue from Rowan Williams, he argues that same sex relationships can be equivalent to marriage. However, unlike Dr Williams, he is willing to be quite blunt about the incompatibility of his position with the Bible. During the controversy over the attempt to appoint Dr Jeffry John, a leading advocate for the homosexual movement, as Bishop of Reading in 2003 he remarked  “Jeffrey has always been incredibly honest and frank and has never ever tried to fudge. We’ve all got to have the courage to say some of the Scripture is complete rubbish”  and “gays have been excluded from the church for a very long time and what is that if not schism?”

Dean Slee’s attack reveals just how necessary is the confessionally based reformation which the GAFCON movement and its Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans seeks to promote within England itself. What to earlier generations of English Anglicans – and the majority of global Anglicans today – would be considered to be biblical discipline is now termed ‘schism’ . So theological language and morality can be turned on its head, but church procedure is sacrosanct.

The fixed point of reference is the Church as an institution, not the authority of Scripture and the classic formularies which express that commitment. In practice this means that Dean Slee’s real definition of Anglican authenticity turns on recognising the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. By failing to show up at Lambeth, Dr Nazir Ali and his colleagues were not playing by the rules and, Slee claims, “’live like a cuckoo’ in the ‘nest of a generous and accommodating Anglican tradition.’”

Clearly, there are limits to Anglican generosity as the Dean amply demonstrates and the reason for the vitriol is not hard to see. The  GAFCON movement has demonstrated that his ‘Anglican tradition’ is not really Anglican at all, but a liberal mythology which is now being exposed.

The real pretender in the nest is parasitic liberal Anglicanism which has no energy of its own, but draws life in two ways -  negatively from orthodoxy, by attacking it, and positively from the surrounding culture, by imitating it. But this cuckoo is doomed because it is being recognised for what it really is, a minority liberal sect, except of course by those who are within it. In June last year Dean Slee dismissed the GAFCON movement in a BBC interview   as ‘a very small group which is intent on breaking away from the Church’  whereas it actually represents 70% of the world’s 55 million active Anglicans.

 Moreover, rather than break away, it has offered leadership to the whole Communion through the affirmation of  Anglican confessional identity as articulated in the Jerusalem Declaration, in contrast with Rowan Williams’ Lambeth Conference which deliberately avoided any attempt at clarification. As a consequence, the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury is fast eroding as demonstrated by last week’s recognition by the GAFCON Primates of the Anglican Church of North America, effectively relegating TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada to the status of ‘rogue’ Provinces.

So Colin Slee’s outburst has a certain air of desperation about it, a reaction of instinct rather than reason. Michael Nazir Ali’s resignation is not going to be the cause of schism, but it is a symptom of that realignment of the Anglican Communion which the has become so pressing  because for too long the Anglican credentials of leaders sharing Dean Slee’s persuasion have been treated as closed to debate. That must change, otherwise England itself will need a new Anglican wineskin.

Charles Raven
20th April 2009

Shadow Gospel: Revelation in the Theology of Rowan Williams

 

Introduction

If the reformation set in motion by the GAFCON movement is to be genuinely global and sustained, the question of whether or not Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is to be counted as orthodox cannot be avoided. It is now obvious that two different forms of religion are taking shape within the Anglican Communion as they giving rise to new structures. This is most clearly seen in the United States where The Episcopal Church of the USA and the Anglican Church of Canada are developing what is effectively a new syncretistic religion behind a traditional façade while the emergent province of the Anglican Church in North America gives expression to the GAFCON movement’s reaffirmation of the historic Anglican faith. As Canon Vinay Samuel wrote in preparation for GAFCON in Jerusalem last year ‘We see a parallel between contemporary events and events in England in the 16th century… now, after five centuries, a new fork in the road is appearing. Though this fork in the road may present itself publicly as a choice in relation to aberrant sexuality, the core issues are about whether or not there is one Word, accessible to all, and whether or not there is one Christ, accessible to all.’ [1]

This process is not limited to North America. The same cultural forces are at work in the Western world as a whole and Dr Michael Nazir Ali’s recent resignation as Bishop of Rochester is a symptom of how far advanced this process is within the mother church of the Communion itself. Commenting on his decision he writes ‘I have resigned as Bishop of Rochester after nearly 15 years. During that time, I have watched the nation drift further and further away from its Christian moorings’ and this has ‘occurred while the Church has either looked on impotently or, sometimes, been complicit in bringing about the change it has subsequently regretted.’ [2]

Powerful opposing forces therefore bear in upon the Archbishop of Canterbury.

As Primate of All England, he is expected to articulate the residual spirituality of an England which is increasingly secularised and expects  its Church, in the words of Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor to be ‘in tune with some of the times here’ rather than being ‘more and more hemmed in by foreign Anglican churches’[3]. And of course this expectation can be backed up with the threat of disestablishment.

As titular head of the Anglican Communion, a role which if anything he has sought to enhance as shown by his highly personalized leadership of last year’s Lambeth Conference,  the majority of global Anglicans have very different expectations  (as Lord Falconer recognised), wanting the Anglican Communion to return to its confessional roots, to that biblical and apostolic faithfulness as articulated by GAFCON which happens to be so very much against the grain of the UK’s ambient secular relativism.

It is therefore vital for the GAFCON movement to have a clear understanding of the Archbishop’s theological commitments. His refusal to exercise effective discipline in the aftermath of Gene Robinson’s consecration as the first actively and openly homosexual bishop in the Anglican Communion led directly to the formation of GAFCON. Was this simply weakness, or did it stem from theological convictions? Could it possibly still be right for the GAFCON Primates to seek to work with Rowan Williams and the Windsor Covenant process, encouraging him to use his powers through the instruments of unity for the reform of the Communion? Or is that hope now futile, in which case the GAFCON Primates and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans have a gospel mandate to focus on the radical realignment of the Anglican Communion under new Conciliar leadership?

 

Shadow and Substance

So clarity about Rowan Williams’ theology is essential, but it is also notoriously difficult and no consensus has yet emerged amongst orthodox Anglicans.

While serious concerns were expressed about Williams’ appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury Church Society, REFORM, Latimer House and the leaders of some of England’s largest Anglican congregations, some even concluding that in New Testament terms he was a false teacher, other evangelicals welcomed the appointment and have been happy to receive his ministry.  He was warmly welcomed at the fourth National Evangelical Anglican Congress in 2003 and when letters from 2000 came to light in the press shortly after last year’s Lambeth Conference in which Williams repeated his view that same sex relationships could have the same quality as heterosexual marriage, nineteen diocesan bishops wrote to the Times, saying that, although not necessarily agreeing  with his views on the matter, nonetheless ‘He has our full and unqualified support in his magnificent leadership both of the Church of England and of the Anglican Communion’. [4] Williams also has a growing profile within the worldwide Alpha movement centred on Holy Trinity Brompton, London.

This diversity of response serves as a warning against simplistic criticism which would see the Archbishop as essentially a more sophisticated proponent of North American revisionism. My proposal is that a more accurate way of understanding Williams’ position – including its dangers – is to recognise that we are dealing with a shadow theology, a body of thought which has the shape of orthodoxy, but lacks solidity because his understanding of the doctrine of revelation persistently mutes and even distorts the voice of Scripture. And in current  circumstances, that is a fatal flaw.

In this way, it is possible to affirm and not downplay those elements of Williams’ theology which are in continuity with received Christian faith. He is a decided theological realist and was uncharacteristically blunt in his criticisms of John Spong’s ’12 Theses’ published in 1998, a sweeping denial of all the key elements of creedal belief, including the virgin birth, the empty tomb and the ascension.   ’I believe’, he responded, ‘that these theses represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find astonishing.’ [5]

For Williams, belief in the incarnation and trinity is fundamental, not as a triumph of heroic human intellectual achievement but through the recognition of our radical dependence upon a God revealed in Jesus Christ who holds us in disarming acceptance. In the course of his largely positive assessment, Mike Higton explains that Williams understands the basis for knowledge about God to be not the autonomous human intellect, but God himself as ‘the only one who can tell us who we are. Among all the competing claims which others make on us, seeking to dictate to us who we shall be, we discover our proper identities not by struggling for an illusory independence, but by turning to our purest, deepest dependence – the undistorting dependence of creatures upon their Creator.’ [6]

This God-centredness means that Williams has a basis for resisting the pressures of a godless culture. Criticising Spong for smuggling back into his ‘demythologised’ theology a commitment to humanity as made in the image of God, Williams says that this is ‘bland because ungrounded and therefore desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more robust ideology. It is impossible to think too often of the collapse of liberalism in 1930s Germany.’ Here he clearly has in mind Karl Barth and the other signatories of the Barmen Declaration of 1933, those very few  who protested against Nazi anti-Semitism.

In a similar vein, Williams is a strong opponent of abortion and nuclear weapons, yet on the key issues which are threatening the fabric of the Communion he leads – homosexuality and, to some extent connected, the Christian response to radical Islam, he has been notably reluctant to swim against the tide of liberal opinion, in fact in the case of the former he has done much to reinforce it and his recent encouragement of Sharia law in England has caused widespread dismay.

To understand this anomaly, we need now to focus on how Williams’ understanding of revelation actually works, because this question of how we know truth about God is fundamental to all theology. Part of his appeal, despite the rather agonized tone of much of his writing, seems to be a sense of relief that it is possible to hold on to what appears to be orthodox Christianity without the more embarrassing and awkward bits.  And this alerts us to a problem.

For instance, in ‘Tokens of Trust’, while the reality of heaven and the bodily resurrection is winsomely affirmed, an uncertain note is sounded on hell. It is difficult to see any biblical support for the claim that ‘The most truthful image we can have of hell is of God eternally knocking on a closed door that we are struggling to hold shut.’ It seems that ‘What matters is that we are as aware as we can be of all those things that might bring us to such a state of terror and deception’[7]. The purpose of the language of hell is not so much to point to something which actually exists, but to keep us repentant and aware of our capacity for self deception.

 

The Word of God – possibly…

We are beginning to move into the shadows and the reason becomes clearer when Williams discusses the nature of the Bible; ‘It is, we often say, the Word of God: but it is the Word of God not because it is the primary and central witness in history to God – Jesus Christ is that – but because it is the primary witness to Jesus Christ’[8] Commenting on this passage, his sympathetic biographer Rupert Shortt writes ‘The Bible is not a Christian Koran. It does not itself purport to be divine revelation – Jesus Christ is that – but the revelation’s primary witness. The inspiration of Scripture resides in ‘its capacity to be the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, making Jesus vividly present  to our hearts and minds…’[9] The reference  to the Koran is mischievous with its implication of fundamentalism; unlike the Koran, the Bible is of course the work of many different human authors, but traditionally the Bible has nonetheless been held to be primary and authoritative divine revelation as ‘God’s Word written’ [10]. This is how Jesus himself understood the Old Testament and it was this quality which the Church came to recognise in the books which comprise the New Testament.

The contrast with Clause 2 of the Jerusalem Declaration is instructive; ‘We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.’ To describe the Bible as ‘God’s Word written’, would therefore not seem to be a description Williams could assent to in any straightforward sense.

So whereas historic Anglican teaching sees a direct correspondence between God as revealer, supremely in Jesus Christ, and the witness of Scripture as authoritative inspired revelation, now the relationship is indirect and uncertain. The wedge between revealer and revelation was quite explicit in Rowan Williams’ recent Hulsean Sermon. [11]  In answer to the question ‘What might a defence of the significance  and authority of revelation look like today…?’  Williams reveals his debt to Karl Barth who ‘insisted…that the claim about revelation was initially and decisively a claim about the nature of the revealer rather than about the content of revelation’.[12]

But can the content of revelation – which is of course Scripture itself – be given a subsidiary role? While it is obviously the case that biblical revelation is not comprehensive in telling us all that we could possibly want to know, the historic Anglican understanding has been that God’s Word written is real revelation containing  ‘all things necessary for salvation’.[13] It is also true that biblical revelation comes to us as personal knowledge of a God who knows us far more truly than we know ourselves and reconciles us through Jesus Christ, but revealed in this sermon is the potentially lethal error of downgrading the content of revelation while maintaining the concept of revelation.  Thus revelation is ‘the drawing of the mind into a place where it is overwhelmingly aware of being acted upon and thus of its own secondary and vulnerable character’. In fact, revelation has more to do with asking questions than having secure knowledge and so,  ‘We are stuck with the difficult task of negotiating how to say “This is true”, sensing the accumulated weight and tracing its imprint on other believing lives, without saying, “This is a truth that needs no more questioning.”’

Although the language is Christ-centred this distancing of Christ from Scripture actually serves to place Christ in shadow.  Williams does believe that Scripture is ‘the unique touchstone of truth about God’[14] because at its heart is the apostolic witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus which we could not know in any other way, but the human authors of Scripture were as prone to error as we are. Williams writes ‘The revelation of God comes to us in the middle of weakness and fallibility… We read with a sense of our own benighted savagery in receiving God’s gift, and our solidarity with those writers of scripture caught up in the blazing fire of God’s gift who yet struggle with it, misapprehend it, and misread it.’[15] So at issue is not just our fallibility, but that of the writers in apprehending the revelation they were given. The danger is that we will appropriate the Bible as a means of establishing power over others through our systems of thought. So not just our thinking, but the Bible itself needs to be ‘brought to the cross’ of continual questioning.

This shadowing of revelation makes it possible to venture, without adopting a liberal reductionist reading of Scripture, that we may have a better understanding than the biblical writers themselves. For instance, Williams claims that the parable of the unjust steward is `a story which St Luke does not seem to have understood particularly well’.[16]

The classic example is of course the case Williams made for same sex relationships as an expression of grace in his essay ‘The Body’s Grace’ of 1989 which gave the Lesbian Gay Christian Movement theological respectability. Mike Higton helpfully comments ‘The heart of Williams’ argument about homosexuality… is an attempt to look at sex in the light of the gospel, and to understand how sexual relationships might be part of lives caught up by the Spirit into God’s life.  That provides him with a biblical and theological basis on which to begin asking what kind of sexual practices are in line with the Gospel and what kind of sexual practices are wrong.’[17] The wedge between revealer and revelation has allowed ‘the Gospel’ to be set in opposition to Scripture and so ‘The weight of his argument does not fall on his analysis of Romans 1 or of texts like it; he undertakes that analysis only in the wake of his attempt to bring the core of the biblical witness – the Gospel of God’s disarming acceptance – to bear on his understanding of sex’[18]

If the Bible is fallible and we are to insist on questioning what we think we know in the light of some abstracted ‘gospel’, there is a real risk that that the clear teaching of the Bible will be overwhelmed by the force of our own context.

A more recent  example of precisely this problem is Williams’ Canadian  lecture of 16 April 2007 ‘The Bible Today; Reading and hearing’[19] in which he sought to establish that the context for Paul’s negative assessment of same sex relationships in Romans 1 is the subsequent warning not to judge in Romans 2:1-3, so even if Paul is right, the overall point – directed against Global South leaders’ response to developments in North America – is that they should not break communion with Churches which accept homosexual practice. In a careful analysis of the speech, Robert Gagnon[20] points out that Williams has mistakenly substituted his own context for the context of Paul’s teaching in Romans  ‘There is a big difference between, on the one hand, Paul chastising a non-believing Jew for using his sense of moral superiority to consign unbelieving Gentiles to hell while exempting himself from the need to receive Jesus as Savior (Rom 2:12-29) and, on the other hand, Williams chastising some in the church today for regarding the institutional affirmation of sexual immorality … [as] a problem for ongoing institutional affiliation.’

More radically, this downgrading of Scripture even opens the door to the possibility that it can be rewritten and the Canon modified.  So when John C. Henson’s ‘Good As New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures’ was published in 2004 it carried an enthusiastic foreword in which Williams, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed the hope that it would spread in ‘epidemic profusion’, notwithstanding that this so-called ‘Bible’ includes the gnostic ‘Gospel of Thomas;’ omits Revelation and seven other books of the New Testament, eliminates the masculinity of God the Father and God the Son, makes the Holy Spirit feminine, removes reference to same gender sexual relationships as sin and refuses to acknowledge the existence of demons.

So it is not unreasonable to ask where this process of dissolution would end. What in Rowan Williams’ theology prevents it from following the same road to new age religiosity which is being pursued in North America? The emerging tension in Williams theology is between theoretical objectivity on the one hand and its practical subjectivity on the other. Because of its fallible human component, Scripture cannot hold the two together propositionally, but it does teach us an underlying theological grammar, a way of thinking and living, which can enable us to encounter Christ and of which Holy Communion is a sign and reminder.

Even this language has to be exposed to the silence of God, God beyond words, as a check upon the human tendency to make idols out of our systems of thought. This awareness of the apophatic tradition has its place, but in Williams’ hands it tends to deepen the shadow in which Scripture lies. He has notoriously written of ‘the solitude of truth, the solitude, finally, of God; God as a spastic child who can communicate nothing but his presence and his inarticulate wanting’.[21]  In context, this is an observation about the experience of loneliness and seems to have  as much to do with our inability to understand as God’s to speak, but it reveals something of the caste of Williams’ mind that he is willing to use a metaphor which so easily gets out of hand and reinforces a sense that Scripture is opaque.

 The instinct to be suspicious of the human tendency to build systems is good,  but  where is the coherence necessary for a common life to be found? Without the anchor of authoritative Scriptures, the hope for unity in the Church begins to look more like sentimentality than faith. Williams’ proposal is that the Church’s unity should be found more in the type of questions it asks than the answers it gives: ‘If we had to choose between a Church tolerably confident of what it has to say and seeking only for effective means of saying it and a Church constantly engaged in internal dialogue and critique of itself, an exploration to discover what is central to its being, I should say that it is the latter which is more authentic.’[22]

So on this view, what prevents the Church from dissolving into an amorphous religious debating society is the discipline of asking the right questions and persevering in the internal conversation as an act of trust that God is at work in a continuing process of revelation through the ecclesial community as a whole. While it is of course true that Christian faith will develop varied forms through time, this tentative process is a very long way from the world of the New Testament with its confidence in the gospel and dynamic missionary vision and we might add, from the world of many Global South Anglicans to whom the New Testament world is much more immediate. So it is not surprising that for all its theological sophistication, Williams’ doctrine of revelation begins to look rather naïve when applied to the Church, and reduces down to a gloss for ad hoc institutional politics. No doubt this is the very opposite of what he wants, but the last few years have been a kind of road test for this theology and it is increasingly found wanting.

 

The Confessional Deficit

The central problem is what we might call the ‘confessional deficit’, the difficulty of talking clearly and truthfully about the gospel.  Rowan Williams is not the most liberal occupant of the See of Canterbury, but he has come into office at a time when the Church in the UK and North America is being scoured by fierce currents of secularism. Doctrinal and ethical issues which had formerly been debated in the  abstract now have to be confronted practically and the reality of the confessional deficit has been painfully revealed.

And so the Archbishop himself is forced to maintain a kind of public pretence on the presenting issue dividing the Communion by trying to maintain a distinction between his personal and unrepented views on homosexuality and his commitment to maintaining the opposite in his official capacity. Ironically this seems to be importing a public –private distinction from the secular world in a way which is entirely alien to the New Testament’s understanding of the integrity of conviction required for a Christian leader.

Rowan Williams’ doctrine of revelation is simply not substantial enough to do the job. Lambeth Anglicanism has increasingly taken on a ‘shadow’ quality and is therefore going to have to get used to living in the shadow of the GAFCON movement which has stepped in to make good that deficit.

Indeed, the rise of the GAFCON movement can be attributed  to the way the Archbishop’s understanding of the doctrine of revelation as it works out in the Church shaped his responses. The Jerusalem Conference of June 2008 was a direct consequence of Williams’ decision to pre-empt the Primates meeting of February 2007 in Dar es Salaam by inviting those bishops of  the Episcopal Church of the USA who had supported the consecration of Gene Robinson ahead of the 30^th September deadline for it to clarify its position on homosexuality. It was already becoming clear that the Lambeth Conference would be structured around ‘indaba ‘ groups without provision for clear decision making and his Advent letter seemed make boundary crossings by Global South Primates in North America equivalent breaches of discipline to the breaches of biblical teaching on sexuality which had occasioned the interventions, so it is hardly surprising that this unwillingness to deal with doctrinal substance led to the formation of GAFCON as a self styled ‘rescue mission’ to provide the leadership and order which had been lacking from the traditional centre.

Williams is still doggedly pursuing the Windsor Covenant as a means of holding the Anglican Communion together, but this too shows the deficiency of his theology. During the course of debate at February’s meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali said “The main purpose of the Covenant is inclusion rather than exclusion”, but added “ We cannot forget, nevertheless, that these questions have arisen for us because of the need for adequate discipline in the Communion on matters which affect everyone.” Not surprisingly,  the Archbishop of Canterbury disagreed, responding “We mustn’t have excessive expectations of the Covenant” and “It’s part of an ongoing inquiry of what a global Communion might look like. At every stage it is something which churches voluntarily are invited to enter into.”

So here are two very different understandings of a Covenant and the Church – one which sees unity as based on apostolic and biblical truth, the other hoping for truth to emerge from a given institutional unity. It is very difficult to see how a Covenant acceptable to Williams could ever in practice move beyond the ‘empty tolerance and endless conversation’ so roundly criticised in Archbishop Peter Akinola’s recent reflection on the Primates meeting in Alexandria  [23] The ‘deeper communion’ envisaged by the Primates in Alexandra cannot happen without deeper agreement and the continued determination of TEC and the Anglican church of Canada to push forward with heretical innovations renders  the pursuit of a Covenant without discipline not only futile, but actually dangerous because the revisionist agenda is restless and know that time is on its side.

Some see a hidden agenda behind this determination to keep talking. Paul Edie, a commentator well disposed to Williams, writes ‘Rowan Williams … seems to be asking God, or the forces of history and culture, to make straight the paths for gay people in the Anglican Communion—but not yet.’ Whether or not this is in his mind, it will certainly be the effect. A shadow theology may be ineffective for orthodoxy, but it can provide cover, intentionally or not, for revisionism. Paul Edie questioned the Archbishop, ‘Did he think there would be openly gay bishops in the Church of England in 10 years? Was it just a matter of time?  “I highly doubt it,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll have progressed that far in our discernment process.”’  Edie reflects ‘It was not a no, just a not yet. Even as he declined to endorse the ordination of gay bishops, with that roundabout phrase about progress he left the possibility open—the possibility that it would come to pass eventually, and that he would think it a good thing, too.’ [24]

 

Conclusion

The increasing pace of secularisation in the West has pressed the question of orthodoxy on the Church of England and the Anglican Communion with much more urgency in recent years.  Rowan Williams’’ theology does mark a step forward from the reductionist liberalism which was popular in academic circles in the 1970’s and 80’s, but it is clearly not ‘fit for purpose’ in the current crisis. It has the shape of orthodox faith and to that extent does bear witness to something which is real and true, but only as a shadow does to the real object – and in the shadows, teachings which are actually in opposition to the biblical gospel can take root. In William’s theology there is little sense of confidence that the Scriptures do give us reliable propositional knowledge of God. The coherence of the church relies instead on discovering gospel patterns in dialogue  with Scripture, discerning unfolding truth as a community.

When we turn to recent experience, we find something deeply paradoxical – despite a very strong commitment to dialogue, the Lambeth Communion headed by Williams is still very far from coming to agreement and as noted above, Williams still expects to be talking about the gay issue in ten years time. Yet over a short period of time in Jerusalem, the GAFCON movement did experience a genuine coming together of discernment in community among over 1,000 delegates, drawn from very different cultures but united in their conviction that the Scriptures are indeed God’s Word written.

 In a further paradox, Williams, who warned John Spong that ungrounded Christianity is ‘desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more robust ideology’ finds himself leading a Church which, as Dr Michael Nazir Ali has warned, is facing precisely that fate and his unwillingness to accept the reliability of as revealed truth  prevents him from taking the radical action necessary, whereas the GAFCON movement has found that ground on which to stand because  it stands on the clear convictions about Scripture of the Anglican formularies.

Just as the sixteenth century indulgences controversy marked a fork in the road, but was essentially a question of the authority of Scripture, so also the current controversy over sexuality is a defining moment as to our loyalty to Scripture as God’s Word written. As long as Rowan Williams remains as Archbishop of Canterbury, GAFCON and Lambeth will be travelling on very different roads.

 

 Charles Raven

8th April 2009

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Bishop Michael Nazir Ali – ‘Enough is Enough’

Two very different interpretations of Bishop Michael Nazir Ali’s resignation have emerged in the British press today.

Melanie Phillips   offers a careful assessment based on the facts of Dr Nazir Ali’s ministry and sees it as a shocking indictment of the Church of England that a bishop should have to resign in order to defend the teaching of the Church and its members effectively.

 In contrast the Daily Telegraph’s George Pitcher   speculates that the bishop mistakenly gambled on GAFCON becoming predominant and his departure signifies its demise as an effective movement in the Anglican Communion. “The traditionalist schism” we are assured “has fizzled out”.

While I have no privileged access to the thinking behind Bishop Nazir Ali’s decision, in retrospect we can see that even some two years ago he gave a strong hint that he might take such action, and for reasons which seem to have totally eluded George Pitcher.

In an address of 2nd April 2007 (subsequently published by Latimer trust as ‘Truth and Unity in Christian Fellowship’, Latimer Briefing 7),  well before GAFCON was under consideration, he warned of a point where it would be no longer possible with integrity to work with the grain of the Church of England because of its chronic tendency to capitulate to the surrounding culture.  There will come a time when “we will have to say ‘Enough is enough. We need now to bear prophetic witness to the culture around us, to the state, even within the church.’” (Latimer Briefing 7, p12)

It seems that Dr Nazir Ali has himself now come to that point where ‘Enough is enough’

And that means we should say ‘Enough is enough’ to George Pitcher and that myopic brand of liberal little-Englander attitude to the Church of England he represents. Claiming that Dr Nazir Ali has ‘abandoned his important foothold in the English Church’, he implies that the bishop and the values he stands for are a foreign intrusion, whereas it is this bishop who has pre-eminently taught and applied the biblical and historic doctrine of the Church of England in England, not shrinking from counter cultural positions on homosexuality and ideological multiculturalism or being intimidated by the death threats triggered by his refusal to accommodate radical Islamic ambitions.

No doubt  it was this inability to think outside the institutional box which led George Pitcher to be much too quick off the line in describing GAFCON in Jerusalem as a ‘circus’ and ‘a shambles’, whereas in fact it went on to produce an historic and united call to spiritual reformation, with specific commitments, and was solvent. In contrast, the Lambeth Conference a few weeks later was boycotted by some 230 bishops, failed to provide any sense of direction, and turned out to be seriously insolvent.

Likewise, George Pitcher is now much too eager in claiming that GAFCON has ‘fizzled out’. The fact that a new Province, the Anglican Church of North America, is now emerging as specifically urged in the Jerusalem Statement is not mentioned and we are told that at Alexandria ‘the Archbishops of Uganda and Nigeria were present and correct.’

They were present, but not ‘correct’ in the Lambeth sense because they withdrew from sacramental fellowship with Katherine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the US Episcopal Church. And Archbishop Peter Akinola reinforced his ‘incorrectness’ immediately after the Primates meeting by issuing a statement which spoke of the ‘irreconcilable differences’ now existing in the Anglican communion.

But for George Pitcher, his comfortable Anglican world of a mythical Church of England writ large has now been restored and we are reassured that ‘the Anglican Church has returned to what it is best at, ‘accommodating the richest diversity of Christian witness without any one faction imposing its authority on those who demur’; not, unfortunately, a picture that those sixty or so orthodox Anglican congregations being sued for their property and assets by TEC in the United States could recognise.

Even in the Church of England itself, one only has to recall the General Synod of July last year and its refusal to accommodate the consciences of those opposed to the consecration of women as bishops to see that this image is increasingly illusory.

Dr Nazir Ali’s resignation is highly significant, not because it indicates that the GAFCON movement is a spent force, but because it seems to show that one of the most courageous and insightful bishops of the Church of England has come to the conclusion that ‘enough is enough’, that he can no longer work with the grain of a Church so compromised by its attachment to an increasingly secularised establishment.

Although George Pitcher refers to the bishop’s ‘retirement’ it is highly unlikely that someone of Dr Nazir Ali’s ability and resolve will settle quietly into obscurity. For Melanie Phillips ‘the question now arises whether he will become the effective leader of the church in the Third World, which is on the edge of schism over gay rights and women priests. If that were to happen, he could become a formidable adversary of the current craven church leadership and the prevailing doctrine of appeasement and religious submission.’

In other words, Michael Nazir Ali, freed from the constraints of the English House of Bishops, could now emerge as a global Anglican leader. His resignation, far from signifying GAFCON’s demise, could be the prelude to a new level of global effectiveness for a movement which is giving coherence to the deep fault lines which have been emerging in the Anglican Communion over the past ten years. GAFCON is committed to the reform and renewal of the whole Communion and needs to say ‘Enough is enough’ to the Church of England of George Pitcher with its chronic habit of accommodating itself to a secularised culture.

Charles Raven

30th March 2009

Rowan Williams’ Haunted House

Rowan Williams’ Haunted House

As any preacher knows, striking verbal images can sometimes get out of hand and this is precisely what happened to the Archbishop of Canterbury after he claimed in a speech  last Sunday that Britain is ‘uncomfortably haunted by the memory of religion.’ It was widely reported in the UK press and one commentator’s reaction  was to say  “Yes we are haunted, I thought, and if only we could find a way to lay the ghost.”

This was not what the Archbishop had in mind. He was attempting to claim that there is still a residual awareness of religion in British society which provides an opportunity for the Church, but here again, there are unintended consequences. Who wants to embrace a ghost?

This is a sound bite running out of control, but nonetheless illuminating. I imagine it unlikely that Dr Williams is a devoted reader of SPREAD ‘trackers’, but a glance at last week’s article could have saved him some trouble. I referred to Archbishop Peter Akinola’s description of Churches which have traded the apostolic faith for institutional unity as the ‘living dead’ and this is the real reason that the Archbishop’s words were so striking – if our society is haunted by the memory of religion, it is in large part due to the fact that the Church of England itself is taking on a ghostly quality.

In 1981, leaders from what we would now call the Global South joined with Church of England counterparts to produce the Partners in Mission report entitled ‘To a Rebellious House’, echoing the prophetic ministry of Ezekiel. It included a warning about doctrinal drift and evangelistic complacency within the English Church which was very largely ignored, and so the Rebellious House is now well on the way to becoming the Haunted House.

Some will immediately counter that this is far too bleak an assessment and point to examples of parishes and dioceses in England where faithful and godly ministry flourishes, but even this good work will be at risk if its existence blinds us to overall trends.

A ghost is something which has a semblance of life, but lacks substance, and it is hardly surprising that Britain is haunted by religion, because the deeper truth is that the Church of England is itself displaying too many symptoms of the ‘living dead’.

For instance, in his lecture the Archbishop went on to claim that ‘the piles of flowers that you see on the site of road accidents are the most potent sign of a society haunted by religion and not sure what to do about it. The church is still a place where people have got the emotions that won’t go anywhere else’. But this practice demonstrates the precise opposite; a generation ago, such wayside shrines were virtually unknown and the focus of grief would be the burial place, often a churchyard.

And when people do turn to a parish church in bereavement, all too often they hear a message of false assurance which lacks any gospel substance. This in turn reflects the Church of England’s practice of maintaining a ghost membership, claiming over 25 million baptised members whereas actual Sunday attendance is now less than one million.

Another symptom of the ‘haunted house’ was on display yesterday as Dr Williams delivered a 
lecture warning of an ecological doomsday. Left to itself, he said, humanity would be “gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity”, using direct and passionate language in marked contrast to the carefully measured tone of the endless conversation he encourages in order to avoid closure on the issues which lie at the heart of the Anglican Communion’s identity crisis.

 Every spiritual leader needs to be prophetic, but when the substance of the gospel has been so nuanced for the sake of pragmatic institutional ends, the prophetic focus is displaced and takes its energy from the concerns of society at large, such as climate change, Zimbabwe and millennium development goals. That is not to say that church leaders should not speak about these things, but that if they do not have at least an equal passion for the truth of the gospel itself, they invite the conclusion that their words are simply the semblance of Christian life, diverting attention from the Church’s hollow centre.

The first step in dealing with a haunted house is to repent of being a rebellious house. The prophetic voices of 1981 may have been ignored, but now the same message is being brought again to the whole Anglican Communion by the GAFCON movement, setting in motion a process of profound reformation which cannot be ignored. New leadership is arising which is no longer prepared to stay silent as secularism establishes itself in the Anglican House, and of  whom it can be said, as it was of Jesus himself, “Zeal for your house will consume me” (John 2:17).

Charles Raven

26th March 2009

The Anglican Credibility Crunch

Lessons from Little Rock

On the 6th April 1998 TJ Johnston, an Episcopal priest and senior pastor of an unofficial church plant in Little Rock, Arkansas, became a missionary priest of the Province of Rwanda under the oversight of John K. Rucyahana, Bishop of Shyira. St Andrew’s Little Rock had been formed only some two years previously out of a sense of calling to start a faithful missionary congregation in a revisionist diocese and now Johnston was within days of being deposed by Larry Maze, the Bishop of Arkansas.  

Though growing, the church was small and did not have much in the way of financial or social muscle, but this courageous stand set off a chain of events which was to lead to the formation of the Anglican Mission in America and create the precedent for other African jurisdictions which are now coming together in the emergent Province of the Anglican Church in North America with over 100,000 regular Sunday worshippers. At an early stage, Chuck Murphy, later to become the lead bishop of the Anglican Mission in America, saw clearly what was unfolding, saying “David took on Goliath with – a little rock! In God’s hand, that little rock was all he needed.”  (1)

It is now increasingly clear that the same struggle for the gospel is being played out on the other side of the Atlantic, in England itself. In a recent post, ‘Suddenly it’s all over for the Anglican Communion’  John Richardson has persuasively argued that the old Lambeth based Communion is essentially finished and the main question still to be resolved is which way the Church of England will go. Will it, like Wales and Scotland, move towards TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, or does it have an orthodox future?

Unlike John Richardson, I think the answer to that question is important for more than just England itself. The fact that the old Anglican Lambeth based Communion is clearly dying on its feet could more optimistically be seen as a necessary stage in the transition to a confessionally based Communion and the moral momentum of history means that what happens here in England can very significantly help or hinder that transformation.

It is highly unlikely that an orthodox future for Anglicans in England will be achieved without some boundary crossing by overseas Primates, at least as a short term measure. The need for alternative oversight is becoming more pressing as missionary congregations outside official structures continue to grow yet not infrequently find themselves aggressively opposed at parish and diocesan level, often by clergy and bishops who have succumbed to the prevailing cultural drift from orthodox Christian doctrine and morality.

While the most obvious and positive lesson of Little Rock is the great potential under God of the obedient action of a small number of people, there was also an early warning of the darker side of the Anglican Communion. Larry Maze accused St Andrew’s and the Rwandans of politically motivated ecclesiastical trespass, as if the only issue was one of power. 

He seemed unable or unwilling to understand that the integrity of ecclesiastical boundaries ultimately depends on the maintenance of spiritual boundaries, of faithfulness to biblical doctrine and morality.  The real politicisation of ecclesiastical authority occurs when it is no longer subject to God’s Word, but is pressed into the service of merely human authority. In such a Church, sooner or later those who uphold the apostolic faith will be presented with the same challenge to which the apostles replied ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29).

This institutional mindset had become deeply entrenched even amongst those considered orthodox. Bishop Rucyahana was shocked to find himself being told to ‘quickly disentangle yourself’  from Little Rock by none other than the then Archbishop of Canterbury himself, George Carey, despite his reputation as an evangelical. (2)

Although closely identified with the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10 which reaffirmed biblical teaching on sexuality, the Archbishop maintained a pragmatic attitude towards doctrine when institutional unity was threatened, encouraging revisionists at Lambeth by commending further debate on homosexuality with reference to the commitment to ‘listen to the experience of homosexual persons’ phrase in the resolution.

More recently, Dr Carey has said  “A more pragmatic approach would say at the moment it is clear [that] to ordain practicing homosexuals would divide the church greatly, so let’s wait and see. In a way I take the pragmatic approach on this … we simply have to wait and see how the Holy Spirit is going to lead the Church in this.”  So when the point is reached at which principled unity in the truth is no longer sustainable, the reality of evangelical commitment is tested. It will separate those whose ‘evangelicalism’ is primarily sociological – about relationships and personal history – from those whose evangelicalism is primarily theological, a passion for truth, as it should properly be. 

Of course, the great difference between the 1998 and 2009 is that the principle which Bishop John Rucyahana acted upon – that the Anglican Communion’s integrity rests ultimately on its confession of biblical faith, not on institutional allegiances – has now been embodied in the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement and Declaration.

Dr Carey’s successor is also a pragmatist, albeit in a more sophisticated form,  and the lessons from Little Rock warn of the challenges ahead in England, but we also have the huge encouragement of seeing how much, by God’s grace, can be achieved through the stand of a few.

 

 

Charles Raven

[1]‘Never Silent’ Thaddeus Barnum, Eleison Publishing p306

[2] ibid p122

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

England; the Final Frontier?

To many, the idea that overseas Primates should sponsor alternative episcopal oversight in the England is both shocking and unnecessary. After all, it is hardly likely to be welcomed and is not being in communion with Canterbury constitutive of what it means to be Anglican? And surely the Church of England is not to be compared with TEC or the Anglican Church of Canada?

One of the great achievements of GAFCON was that by returning the Communion to its confessional roots, it gave orthodox Anglicans worldwide the confidence to challenge unexamined assumptions. The Jerusalem Statement and Declaration cut institutional claims based on history down to size and stated that ‘we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury’.

And in answer to the second question, while it is clear that the Church of England is not in the same place as the officially recognised Anglican provinces of North America, there are many signs that it is on the same trajectory and some twenty five Anglican congregations in England now find themselves either in impaired communion with a diocesan bishop or having to function entirely outside the official structures of the Church of England as ‘extra mural’ Anglicans.

For some, this is a matter of conscience, finding that they can no longer receive the ministry of a bishop who denies biblical teaching – usually on the issue of homosexuality – while for others this is a matter of mission, where institutional obstacles have blocked the planting of new churches. Almost by definition, they represent some of the most faithful and committed Anglican congregations in England and should surely qualify for the protection and encouragement that godly oversight can bring.

However, there is a deeper and even more pressing reason for intervention in England. The greatest threat to the gospel in the Anglican Communion is not the new religion which is emerging in North America behind the façade of Anglicanism, but the systematic blurring of truth for church political ends. 

While he is by no means the only practitioner of the art, a typical and significant example comes from Rowan Williams’ Lambeth Concluding Presidential Address. “Our unity” he claimed “is not mutual forbearance but being summoned and drawn into the same place before the Father’s throne… that’s the unity which is inseparable from truth. It’s broken not when we simply disagree but when we stop being able to see in each other the same kind of conviction of being called by an authoritative voice into a place where none of us has an automatic right to stand.”

Within the context of a local church with clear convictions about the authority of Scripture, this might offer some helpful insights. But at the Lambeth Conference, with bishops present from Provinces who have persistently rejected or marginalised the clear teaching of Scripture on core Christian doctrine and ethics, what this statement actually does is to substitute a subjective and mystical concept of truth for that which is objectively revealed, rather cleverly robbing the ‘authoritative voice’ of Scripture of any effective authority in the Church. It provides the basis for endless conversation while continuing to drift with the surrounding culture.

The fact that the Archbishop’s commitment to unity does not stretch to the doctrinally orthodox ‘extra mural’ Anglican congregations of England, who find themselves on the outside  for reasons of church procedure while underlying doctrinal issues have been ignored or minimised, inevitably reinforces the sense that words are being pressed into service for political ends.

Perhaps one of the most powerful lessons of George Orwell’s classic exploration of totalitarianism in his novel ‘Nineteen Eight-Four’ is that language controls thought, a principle practiced systematically and with great precision by the Party as it redefines words and disconnects them from objective reality. While in Orwell’s nightmare scenario the discipline of subverted language is enforced through the thought police, open societies and organisations within them are not immune to a more informal but nonetheless insidious process.

As Dr Lisa Nolland shows in a current series of articles ‘What is happening in the evangelical world today?’, a growing number of evangelicals in the UK are moving to acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships because of the way that their understanding of the meaning of ‘love’ and ‘grace’ has changed. And the agenda moves on; referring to a post by the UK based Anglican gay /lesbian pressure group ‘Changing Attitude’  (which includes a number of Church of England bishops among its patrons) she writes “It challenges the whole concept of sexual exclusivity and affirms that ‘brief and loving sexual engagement’ with other people can be ‘occasions of grace’.”; the latter phrase of course echoes Rowan Williams’ theological  justification of same sex relationships  in his essay ‘The Body’s Grace’.

So the case for intervention in England is not just to support particular orphan congregations, but also to make a stand for the reform of the whole Anglican Communion in accordance with the gospel,   demonstrating the clarity of biblical truth by principled action. 

If the Church of England is recovering its confidence in orthodox Christianity as some have claimed after the affirmation of the uniqueness of Christ in last month’s General Synod, then the presence of local churches under godly Anglican oversight from those grounded firmly in shared historic formularies should be a great encouragement to the orthodox, and overseas intervention will prove temporary.

If the Church continues its spiritual decline, then a group of churches aligned with the globally orthodox could form the nucleus of a revitalised Anglican Church in England.

Either way, there is a need for godly Primates to boldly go where no Primate has gone before – and for leaders in England to be bold enough to invite them.

 

Charles Raven
5th March 2009

The Anglican Covenant: A House on Sand

As the March 9th deadline approaches for Provincial responses to the Covenant Design Group, an odd but telling paradox is emerging; in order to stabilise the Anglican Communion, it seems essential that the Covenant’s biblical foundations should be weak. During debate at the Church of England’s General Synod earlier this month, the Archbishop of Canterbury articulated a view which resonates with many in the liberal leaning Churches of the Communion when he stated that the Covenant is ‘part of an ongoing inquiry of what a global Communion might look like.” and “At every stage it is something which churches voluntarily are invited to enter into.”

But how is this weakness? Is it not simply a commitment to listening with a generous spirit? Experience of the ‘listening process’ over the past ten years has taught the orthodox to be wary as in practice it has served to subvert discipline and lend credence to false teaching. And this persistent impression can’t be waved aside as the suspicious interpretation of those opposed to the revisionist agenda. Paul Elie in his March Atlantic Monthly article ‘The Velvet Reformation’ praises Rowan Williams for ‘prodding the communion toward acceptance of gay clergy’ as he doggedly persists in trying to keep everyone at the table.

The particular danger of this emphasis upon relationship and process rather than confessional integrity is that the orthodox become acclimatised to a church culture which dulls their biblical awareness. GAFCON clearly represents a significant break with that culture, but resisting it is a continual discipline and a recently released video of an interview with Dr J I Packer helps to keep  things in proper context.

In a discussion about the difference between first and second order issues, he says that the closest parallel with the current crisis in the Anglican Communion is not even the Reformation, but the Arian controversy of the fourth century which threatened to undermine the whole Church through the denial of the incarnation. Even more striking than this parallel however is the strength of Dr Packer’s feeling; when asked how he feels about the situation, he says he is sick at heart, deliberately echoing the distress of the prophet Jeremiah (8:18) at the rebellion of God’s people and its destructive consequences.

The reference to Jeremiah is instructive because he was especially grieved by the failure of Judah’s spiritual leadership “…from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace’, where there is no peace” (Jeremiah 8:10b, 11). For Jeremiah, false prophets were a potentially lethal threat to God’s people, yet it is very difficult to detect any reflection of this biblical seriousness in the proposed Anglican Covenant – even if it were possible to recognise false prophets, it seems clear that there are no means of enforcement, an impression reinforced by the Lambeth Conference Commentary which states that there should be no ‘juridical impositions’.

In fact this has to be the case if the Covenant is to find institutional acceptance and not be rejected by revisionist leaders. As Idris Jones, the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, who is inclined to speak more directly than some,  said in September 2007  “Actually I can suggest the wording of a Covenant like this – ‘As sisters and brothers in Christ we pledge ourselves to remain together in spite of any differences that arise.’ We really do not need anything more structured in order to facilitate what began and remains in essence a relational experience.”

This of course begs the question of what it is to be ‘in Christ’, a question which lies at the heart of the present crisis  of which sexual ethics are essentially a symptom.  We cannot assume that everyone who speaks for Christ is ‘in Christ’. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus himself alerts his disciples to false prophets who ‘come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves’ (Matthew 7:15). 

These are counterfeit leaders within the church and we are given a strong hint from the context of the previous verses (13, 14) that they will be those who are on the broad road of destruction – uneasy with moral and doctrinal boundaries – yet claiming to be on the narrow road of salvation. Although they build behind the façade of the trappings of religion, the true nature of their teaching will inevitably reveal itself and the longer the crisis of doctrine and authority continues in the Anglican Communion, the clearer the fruit of counterfeit religion becomes – something Dr Packer has experienced firsthand through his deposition from the Anglican Church of Canada despite his many years as one the world’s leading evangelical theologians.

After the Primates meeting in Alexandria Rowan Williams was invited to  comment on Dr Packer’s treatment, and the similar action taken against Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan, and it was reported that ‘he declined to answer, but noted the communiqué “deplores actions that deepen division or give rise to suspicion or hostility.” Dr Williams and Dr Packer live in different spiritual worlds. The one is practised in measured ambiguity and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that he loves the Church as an institution; the other is passionately clear and there is no mistaking that he loves the Church as the bearer of saving truth.

Jesus’ warning about false prophets comes near the end of the Sermon on the Mount and he concludes with the parable of the two houses, one built upon the rock of obedience to his words, which will stand, the other built in disobedience on the shifting sands of other words, which will fall. The paradox of the Covenant is that in seeking to find a secure foundation for the Anglican Communion, it entails a practical rejection of the very thing that can give it security, the Word of God.

Fortunately, the future is not one of inevitable and wholesale collapse. The GAFCON movement has faced up to the reality of false teaching and it has re-established the confessional foundation of God’s Word in the Anglican Communion. Now there is a choice for those willing to see it and with the courage to take it.

Charles Raven

26th February 2009

Testing Times -The Church of England and the challenge of Islam

It is little more than a week since the Church of England’s General Synod gave a clear signal that it wished to maintain its belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, yet already there have been some sharp reminders that the reality of that commitment is going to be tested by the continuing acceptance of Islamic values and practices in British society.

Following requests by Muslims that library copies of the Koran should be placed on the highest shelves as a mark of respect, UK libraries have now been given official advice that in order not to give offence, the Koran and all books considered as holy texts, including the Bible, should be dealt with in the same way even though this will tend to make them less accessible.

Canon Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream was quick to see how this reversed a basic value of the Reformation inheritance, saying that the move appeared “to be a reversion to medieval times, when the Bible could be read only by priests in Latin and was not to be defiled by ordinary people reading it”.

Sensitivity to those perceived to be members of disadvantaged and minority groups can take an extreme form which becomes amoral. Just today, it has been reported  that  a teaching pack produced by a local authority in West Yorkshire  has  been withdraw as a result of public protest; it involved children writing a presentation in which they imagine themselves as the extremists who perpetrated the suicide bombings in London on 7th July 2005 and left 52 innocent people dead. Despite the obvious dangers to young minds, it had been adopted by the Government and used by a number of other local authorities and police forces.

Other current news stories illustrate the paradox of a nation which has had Christian faith at its heart for centuries giving special protection to Islam while undermining the rights and freedom of Christians.

The headteacher of a Sheffield primary school was effectively forced out of her job earlier this month when she sought to end the irregular practice of allowing separate religious assemblies for Muslim children and the controversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders suffered a last minute ban from entering the UK on 12th February to attend a meeting at the House of Lords called to expose Islamic extremism. Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of the House of Lords, subsequently claimed that his threat to mobilise a demonstration of 10,000 Muslims was instrumental in securing the ban. 

Meanwhile, the Christian Institute www.christian.org.uk   has taken up the case of a Christian foster mother who has been struck off the fostering register because she allowed a 16 year old girl in her care to convert to Christianity and last April officials ordered that the girl should stay away from church for six months. 

The reality which these and a steady stream of similar news stories reveal is of a society in which Christianity is being weakened by growing secularisation while at the same time there is an institutional bending towards Islam. Behind this apparent contradiction is the simple truth that in a culture which has lost confidence in its historic Christian inheritance and morality, public values become the result of social negotiation. So in the public square, whether or not the teachings of Islam are benign or malign is somewhat beside the point; growing social and financial strength is what ensures that its voice is given increasing weight.

So if the Church of England is to pursue its rekindled commitment to the uniqueness of Jesus, it is going to meet serious resistance. It will be running counter to two very powerful and, for the time being, mutually reinforcing social trends – secularisation and an increasingly confident Islam. This will take a major adjustment because the Church of England has for centuries been used to being an integral part of the political and social establishment. But now it must start going against the grain. So perhaps it is not surprising that two of the most powerful contributions at last week’s General Synod came from bishops who have lived in church cultures very different from that of the Church of England.  It was Bishop Michael Nazir Ali who articulated a robust and courageous Christology in the debate on the uniqueness of Christ, and in a later debate Archbishop John Sentamu asked Synod to turn to silent prayer immediately after Synod was urged not to forget the persecuted church in the UK itself, those Asian British people who are shunned and labeled as traitors when they convert to Christianity

Against this background, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s claim earlier this week  that there was now ‘a drift of understanding’ in public opinion towards  his controversial proposals made twelve months ago for the incorporation of parts of Sharia law into the English penal code seems particularly inappropriate.

In the current context this is a message of surrender. At home it will cause confusion and dismay, but overseas the consequences could well be direct and brutal. As Dr Tudor Griffiths, Rector of Hawarden and Canon Chancellor of St Asaph warned “Many will simply hear that the Archbishop has reiterated his support for sharia law and it will be used as propaganda and will feed violence in some areas of the world.”

To respond with integrity to the rise of Islam in England is a massive task for a Church whose privileges have so far served to protect it from the consequences of ingrained doctrinal indiscipline. To meet this challenge, the Church of England needs the vitality and biblical grip of the GAFCON movement, together with the humility to recognize that while the See of Canterbury has occupied an honoured place in the history of the Anglican Communion – and could do so in the future – Islam is a global phenomenon which needs a properly global response. The Windsor Covenant as proposed is Lambeth Anglicanism writ large – ambiguous, open ended and unenforceable. Only the GAFCON Primates have come up with a form of governance which is robust enough for the tests ahead.

Charles Raven
20th February 2009

Is the liberal tide in the Church of England beginning to ebb?

In contrast to the bad natured meeting of July last year, this week’s General Synod of the Church of England has passed off not only peacefully, but also with a significant step forward for those who want to see the Church of England recover its confidence in the gospel. A motion (1) by lay member  Paul Eddy affirming the uniqueness of Christ  was agreed with 283 votes in favour and only 8 against.

Its significance was not lost on journalist Ruth Gledhill of the London Times  who was quick to claim, under the headline ‘Anglicans called on to convert non-Christian believers’, that  ‘The established Church of England put decades of liberal-inspired political correctness behind it in a move that led one bishop to condemn in anger the “evangelistic rants”. ‘

There was much resistance to this motion even coming to Synod, which is hardly surprising bearing in mind that in a 2002 poll of nearly 2,000 of the Church’s 10,000 clergy by Cost of Conscience, only half believed faith in Christ to be the only route to salvation. Paul Eddy himself in an interview shortly before the debate said ‘’there is good evidence to suggest that in many dioceses they [the diocesan bishops] say all faiths lead to God, therefore leave them [members of other faiths] alone.’ 

The success of the motion is all the more remarkable in that it goes against the grain of the general culture. Official attitudes to Christian witness in the UK are hardening and,  to take one example of many, only today the London Daily Telegraph carries the story of a  primary school receptionist now facing dismissal for seeking support from her church after her five-year-old daughter was reprimanded  for talking about Jesus in class.

So are we seeing a turn of the tide? Only time will tell, but if such a process is indeed underway in the Church of England, sadly it will be inhibited by the influence of Archbishop Rowan Williams. It is not of course that he would oppose the idea of the uniqueness of Jesus, but that it would lose its force and clarity in the broad delta of Dr Williams’ mind. For instance he has written ‘the Jewish people, as victims of Christian and post-Christian ideological closure, speak for Christ to Christians in the name of God who is not a Christian’(2).  This elasticity in who may represent Christ, not to mention the notion that God can be considered apart from Christ, flows naturally from a theology which, having no secure basis in biblical revelation, has a deep resistance to making judgments which may lead to any sense of exclusion.

Exclusion from the Church is always a cause of pain and as the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, said in the debate earlier today on the latest draft of the Covenant, “The main purpose of the Covenant is inclusion rather than exclusion”. However, he also went on to add “ We cannot forget, nevertheless, that these questions have arisen for us because of the need for adequate discipline in the Communion on matters which affect everyone.” Not surprisingly,  the Archbishop disagreed, responding “We mustn’t have excessive expectations of the Covenant” and “It’s part of an ongoing inquiry of what a global Communion might look like. At every stage it is something which churches voluntarily are invited to enter into.”

So here are two very different understandings of a Covenant and the Church – one which sees unity as based on apostolic and biblical truth, the other hoping for truth to emerge from a given institutional unity. It is very difficult to see how a Covenant acceptable to Rowan Williams could ever move beyond the ‘empty tolerance and endless conversation’ so roundly criticised in Archbishop Peter Akinola’s recent reflection on the Primates meeting in Alexandria.

The ‘deeper communion’ envisaged by the Primates in Alexandra cannot happen without deeper agreement and the continued determination of TEC and the Anglican church of Canada to push forward with heretical innovations renders a Covenant without discipline futile and irrelevant.
So where lies the future? GAFCON and the proposal for Conciliar leadership of the Communion were precipitated by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unwillingness to exercise godly discipline and act with the Primates as a whole. That reluctance was not for lack of courage, but was simply consistent with his basic theological commitments, so it makes little sense to look to Canterbury for solutions now.

And what of England? Wednesday’s vote in the General Synod should be a cause of thanksgiving, but many leaders remain much more comfortable with questions than with convictions. Sustained renewal within the Church of England will mean changing many deeply ingrained attitudes and it is in this that the GAFCON movement and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans have such a vital part to play, establishing partnership with the spiritually dynamic Churches of the global south and revitalising  the Church in the riches of its Anglican doctrinal inheritance .

Charles Raven
12th February 2009

[1] ‘That this Synod warmly welcome Dr Martin Davie’s background paper ‘The witness of Scripture, the Fathers and the historic formularies to the uniqueness of Christ’ and request the House of Bishops to report to the Synod on their understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in Britain’s multi-faith society, and offer examples and commendations of good practice in sharing the gospel of salvation through Christ alone with people of other faiths and of none.’

 

[1] ‘On Christian Theology’ p102. I am indebted to the Rev’d John Richardson’s talks on Rowan Williams’ theology for this quotation

‘Out of Egypt I called my son’

 

Hosea’s reminder (chapter 11, verse 1) to God’s wayward people of their birth as a nation through the exodus from Egypt challenges the Church today to live true to the new birth that we have in the gospel and not be pulled back into captivity by the spirit of the age. The gathering of the GAFCON movement last June and its Jerusalem Declaration represented a decisive rejection of the spiritually compromised control of the Anglican Communion by the Lambeth based instruments of unity.  Yet there seems to be little sign of the GAFCON Primates asserting their new found authority and some might even question why they are at Alexandria at all. Are they going back to an ecclesial Egypt?

There may yet be fireworks and the Archbishop of Sudan has boldly restated his view that Gene Robinson should resign, but it is clear from reports so far that there is a strange and unnatural calm at the Primates’ Meeting in Alexandria. Gone are the heavy handed attempts to restrict press access which were such an unattractive feature of the Lambeth Conference and the Dar es Salaam meeting two years ago, but gone too are many of the journalists, bloggers and activists eager to follow the latest twists of the Anglican ‘agonising journey’.

Philip Aspinall, the Australian Primate and Lambeth’s official spokesman would have us believe that this more relaxed atmosphere indicates a willingness to return to the project of a Covenant for the Anglican Communion, but one that is devoid of any effective sanctions.  In a report on the Anglican News Service website (http://www.aco.org/acns/news.cfm/2009/2/3/ACNS4567) entitled ‘Primates Meeting Questions Language of Sanctions’ Archbishop Aspinall writes ‘I sense a pulling back from language of ‘sanctions’ and ‘teeth’ and there was a discussion on whether that is appropriate language for the body of Christ.’ 

Even if we were to grant the manipulative assumption that the Anglican Communion as institutionally defined can be equated to ‘the body of Christ’, surely what is truly inappropriate is to adopt a Covenant which, based on its most recent draft, has no clear definition of biblical teaching on primary issues to which all can be held accountable and has neither the means nor the will to discipline false teachers.

Behind this attempt to spin the meeting after only one full day of business, one can sense the unspoken thought that GAFCON has simply been a safety valve; now that the more excitable have had an opportunity to let off steam, we can return to business as usual.

However, we can be hopeful that there is a very different reason for the relative calm in Alexandria. While it is true that there was a sense of excitement at GAFCON, this was not irrational exuberance, but the joy of those who know they are being set free. As the Jerusalem Statement itself states ‘The primary reason we have come to Jerusalem and issued this declaration is to free our churches to give clear and certain witness to Jesus Christ (italics added). And it establishes this freedom in the Jerusalem Declaration not only by clear confessional statement, but also by the willingness to do what the Windsor Continuation group is incapable of doing, exercising authority based on those confessional commitments.

Accordingly, Clause 13 states ‘We reject the authority of those churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed. We pray for them and call on them to repent and return to the Lord.’ This authority is vested in the Primates Council, to which that of Canterbury is ultimately secondary as the Jerusalem Statement makes clear with the claim that ‘we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury’.

So it is not surprising that the GAFCON Primates should come to Alexandria in a relatively relaxed frame of mind. They now have a separate place to stand. Their authority no longer depends upon recognition by an Archbishop of Canterbury whose doctrine and leadership are both deeply flawed. But there is still a puzzle.

 If this is the case, where are Pharoah’s chariots? Why are the GAFCON Primates not being brought to heel? The Archbishop of Canterbury appears to be conciliatory. In answer to press questions on 2nd February, Archbishop Aspinall in his role as official spokesman said “He is very sensitive to the limits of his authority and role in provinces outside his own, [but] the See of Canterbury is pivotal.” Here we have the answer. The plan to halt this exodus is not one of frontal attack. As yet, there are no dust clouds from Pharaoh’s chariots appearing on the horizon of the Egyptian desert. Sometimes passive aggression can be much more effective then active confrontation; the See of Canterbury is still ‘pivotal’ and there is a remarkable  determination to carry forward the discredited ‘listening’ strategy of interminable conversation designed to numb the sensibilities of the orthodox while the advocates of TEC’s ‘new religion’ continue to push forward their agenda. And if Robert Mugabe’s despicable regime and fears about climate change can be used as bonding and distraction activities, so much the better.

Clever press statements and nuanced drafting cannot turn the clock back. The underlying reality to which GAFCON bears witness is that the Anglican Communion contains two religions, one which is biblical and apostolic, the other an expression of the spirit of the age which clings to the outward forms of the faith it has rejected.  The GAFCON Primates have committed themselves to radical reform, to free the whole Communion from ungodly forms of control for the sake of the gospel, and we must pray that they continue to meet passive aggression with active determination, pleasing God rather than men.
Charles Raven
5th February  2009

Rowan Williams and Revelation Wrapped Up

Last Sunday, 25th January, the Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a sermon at Great St Mary’s Church, Cambridge, England as the Diocese of Ely launched its 900^th anniversary celebrations. Although barely noticed by the press, it was an event which brought a lamentable truth into sharp focus – that despite centuries of Christian heritage, what now passes for Anglicanism in England has drifted far apart from the faith which GAFCON reaffirmed last year in the Jerusalem Declaration.