Tag Archives: Archbishop of Canterbury

The Vultures will be circling! The ABC to step down?

Posted on by
1

Tomorrow’s Telegraph will run the story, predicting that Archbishop Rowan Williams will resign next year, after the legislation to permit women bishops passes General Synod. He would be required to retire at 70, and he’s only 61.

No doubt many Episcopalians will be glad to see him go, but they should remember the joy with which many of us greeted his elevation. We should also remember that with a Tory government in power, the possibilities for his replacement might not be any more agreeable to us than Rowan was, and will definitely not be as gifted a theologian.

It’s said that he wants to return to academe and that Trinity College, Cambridge is preparing a chair for him. In other words, he may have decided to follow Bishop Neil Alexander’s example–the Bishop of Atlanta announced his resignation to take up a teaching post at Candler School of Theology.

Stephen Hawking says heaven is a fairy tale–why is anyone surprised?

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps the only thing more surprising than his rejection of heaven is that it continues to get press. More interesting is why someone who is obviously brilliant lacks the imagination to explore the human quest for meaning and purpose.

Hawking:

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,”

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s response in Huffington Post seems to emphasize that it is impolite for someone to denigrate another’s beliefs; although he also makes the distinction between knowledge and belief.

Mark Vernon reports on a rather more interesting exchange between Rowan Williams and A.C. Grayling. The atheist and the ABC agreed on a great deal in their debate:

  • – that an engagement with life begins with wonder;
  • – that there is a natural law which reveals a minimal amount required for our flourishing;
  • – that happiness is not a feeling but has to do with entering deeply into the relationships that surround us;
  • – that the passions need educating, not least passions like anger;
  • – that the stoic aim of becoming attuned with life is key – even or especially when it demands of us a noble response to suffering.
  • Grayling was even content to use a word that comes naturally to Williams, spirituality, when spirituality has to do with the remarkable sense that we owe something of ourselves to life because of all life has given us.

But there were differences. Apparently someone asked about love:

Williams was at last on territory he would have chosen. Religion is not like obeying a code of conduct that governs the relationships between a high god and subservient human beings, he explained. Rather, it is about coming to see yourself in a radically fresh way, as a result of seeing yourself as made in the image of God. We are all alienated from this truth, but can be brought back to it, he continued, explaining he’d witnessed as much just the other day in a prison, when a man who had committed terrible crimes had come to a moment of repentance and had been surprised at seeing ‘me as me’ for the first time.

Here’s Vernon’s account of Grayling’s response:

Grayling responded that the ancient injunction to know thyself is certainly vital, and that caring for even the most violent of our fellows in prisons is a profoundly hopeful mark of the humanity of our civilisation. Absolutely. But that didn’t quite seem to capture the hope of being drawn by love back to love which came through in Williams’ answer.

Sermon Follow-Up: The ABC on “Doubting Thomas”

Posted on by
Reply

From Mark Vernon:

So clearly there’s a pattern emerging. This is a sceptic and the gospel says it’s quite important that in the balance of personalities around Jesus there is somebody who asks the awkward questions who is not a kind of Pollyanna optimist and who eventually will only be convinced by the confrontation of a relationship. At the end of the day, in fact, he says ‘I need to touch the risen body.’ But when Jesus appears to him as a risen body, Thomas doesn’t touch. He says ‘now, I see enough.’

Hauerwas on the church–local and universal

Posted on by
Reply

Several weeks ago, I came across this essay by Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School: The place of the church: locality and catholicity – ABC Religion & Ethics – Opinion.

It begins with Constantinianism, post-Constantinianism and John Howard Yoder. Yoder argued that with the rise of Constantine, something important was lost in Christianity. It’s often assumed that Yoder viewed the church in the centuries after Constantine as completely fallen. That’s not the case. Hauerwas cites Yoder’s views concerning faithfulness in the Middle Ages, but he also thinks Yoder’s analysis went deeper than that:

For him the alternative to Constantinianism was not anti-Constantinianism, but locality and place. According to Yoder, locality and place are the forms of communal life necessary to express the particularity of Jesus through the visibility of the church. Only at the local level is the church able to engage in the discernment necessary to be prophetic.

Hauerwas’s essay is actually a review of Bruce Kaye’s Conflict and the Practice of Faith: The Anglican Experiment, in which Kaye uses the controversies in Anglicanism to explore the tension between locality and universality (catholicity) in the Christian faith.

Kaye is building on ideas of Rowan Williams. In defending the Church of England’s unique role in English society, Williams (according to Hauerwas) argues that:

the New Testament testifies to the creation of a pathway between earth and heaven that nothing can ever again close. A place has been cleared in which God and human reality can belong together without rivalry or fear.

For Williams, “the role of church is to take up space in the world, to inhabit a place, where Jesus’ priesthood can be exercised. Such a place unavoidably must be able to be located on a social map so that it does not have to be constantly reinvented.”

Hauerwas’ final sentences are provocative:

The culture that inhabits us – and by us I mean Christians – is a subtle and seductive one. It tempts us to believe we are free of place. It tempts us to believe that we do not have the time to do what needs to be done, so we must constantly hurry. These temptations are often assumed to be congruent with the gospel imperatives to have no permanent home.

But in the process we lose the visibility necessary to be witnesses to the One who made it possible to be Christians.

There’s something quite interesting here–and important for us to reflect on as we think about the role of the church in contemporary culture. But it’s more than that abstract question that I find interesting. It’s the concrete question: What is Grace Church’s role in our community?

We occupy a unique space that offers opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities. What does it mean to be church on Madison’s Capitol Square?

Back in the 1980s, Richard John Neuhaus wrote a book entitled The Naked Public Square. I don’t recall the gist of his argument (it’s been over 25 years!) but the image of a public arena in which religion had no role is a powerful one. We don’t live in a completely secular world, and religious voices continue to clamor for attention and influence policy. But at the same time, the church as an institution plays a much smaller role in our society than it did even a half-century ago.

But there’s something to be said for the reality of place. For what it’s worth, Grace Church still occupies a corner of Capitol Square. Whatever mission and ministry we do at Grace, part of what we do has to involve nurturing that space where heaven and earth meet, as Williams put it, “to inhabit a place where Jesus’ priesthood can be exercised.”

The dust settles on the Primates Meeting

Posted on by
Reply

It didn’t take long, for there wasn’t much dust. It seems little happened, or in ABC-speak, “conversations took place, relationships were deepened, yada yada yada.” George Conger, Paul Bagshaw, and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church comment.

There seem to have been some important developments, not least the recognition (finally, what took so long) that the role of the primates differs widely from local church to local church, that their power and office are often structured quite differently, all of which make unified action impossible.

Bagshaw makes two comments which seem on target, and which reflect on ongoing development in the Anglican Communion. One is that “it is an ever more clerical communion.” It’s not clear to me why, and given the enormous cultural shifts throughout the world, a narrowing of the power and role of the laity seems both wrongheaded and against the tide of history. The second comment is that, given the changes in roles for the Lambeth Conference, the Primates Meeting, and the sidelining of the Anglican Consultative Council (all of which I think are taking place and have been taking place for the last decade), power is centralizing in the Archbishop of Canterbury and in the Anglican Communion Office–as Bagshaw terms it, an international bureaucracy. This, too, seems odd to me, and somehow roughly parallel to developments in the European Union, where power has centralized in the bureaucracy, not in any deliberative bodies.

But more important than any of this may be the absence of a significant number of Primates, for whatever reason. For many of them, what the Archbishop of Canterbury does, the meetings he calls, are meaningless. Conger and Bagshaw agree that “the Anglican Communion as we knew it no longer exists,” what isn’t clear is what precisely is coming into existence. And so long as there is no lay voice at the highest levels of international meetings, I don’t think the Episcopal Church should spend time, energy, or money, trying to remain a part of it.

The Anglican Communion’s “consistent condemnation” of anti-gay violence

Posted on by
Reply

David Kato, a prominent Ugandan Gay Rights activist, was brutally murdered this week. While police officials chalked the motive up to robbery, most observers suspect his death was the result of the ratcheting up of anti-gay rhetoric and violence in Uganda in the last few years, much of it spurred on by American evangelicals.

Kato’s death came as the Primates of the Anglican Communion are meeting. The meeting is smaller than usual with a number of national church leaders staying away, some because of the Episcopal Church’s openness to gay and lesbians. In the course of the meeting, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori released this statement:

At this morning’s Eucharist at the Primates Meeting, I offered prayers for the repose of the soul of David Kato. His murder deprives his people of a significant and effective voice, and we pray that the world may learn from his gentle and quiet witness, and begin to receive a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone. May he rest in peace, and may his work continue to bring justice and dignity for all God’s children.

The Archbishop of Canterbury released a statement of his own this morning, two days after Kato’s death. It reads:

“The brutal murder of David Kato Kisule, a gay human rights activist, is profoundly shocking. Our prayers and deep sympathy go out for his family and friends – and for all who live in fear for their lives. Whatever the precise circumstances of his death, which have yet to be determined, we know that David Kato Kisule lived under the threat of violence and death. No one should have to live in such fear because of the bigotry of others. Such violence has been consistently condemned by the Anglican Communion worldwide. This event also makes it all the more urgent for the British Government to secure the safety of LGBT asylum seekers in the UK. This is a moment to take very serious stock and to address those attitudes of mind which endanger the lives of men and women belonging to sexual minorities.”

The ABC says violence against gays “has been consistently condemned by the Anglican Communion worldwide.”

Later today, we learned that violence broke out at Kato’s funeral. The BBC reports that the priest presiding said from the pulpit:

“You must repent. Even the animals know the difference between a male and a female,” he said, before warning that they would face the fate of residents in Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical cities destroyed by God.

Gay rights activists then stormed the pulpit and prevented the priest from continuing.

An excommunicated priest who has in the past called for people to respect the rights of homosexuals then presided over the rest of the service.

Apparently, some Anglicans worldwide haven’t received the message sent “consistently by the Anglican Communion.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury on the Bible

Posted on by
Reply

In his New Year’s message this year, the ABC used the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible as a starting point:

Perhaps someone some time has said to you that you shouldn’t hide your light under a bushel. Or told you to set your house in order. Maybe you only survived a certain situation by the skin of your teeth. Perhaps it’s time you listened to the still small voice within.

All those everyday phrases come from one source – a book whose four hundredth anniversary we celebrate this coming year, the King James Bible – or the Authorised Version as it’s sometimes called.

He points out the important role the KJV had in shaping the language and the vision of the English-speaking world; that it provided generations with a story in which they could locate themselves. It may not play that role any longer, but Archbishop Williams went on to say that we all need some such story with which to orient our lives.

The full text of his message is here: Scroll down below the video and the summary for the full text.

A couple of things to point out. First, he acknowledges that the language of the KJV was already somewhat archaic by 1611 and purposely so; to add gravitas, no doubt. What he doesn’t point out was that the translation was both a political and religious act. King James VI, recently crowned king of England, wanted a version that would supplant the “Geneva Bible” preferred by Puritans.

 

Walking Apart: The End of the Anglican Communion

Posted on by
2

So, it turns out it wasn’t the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada forced out of the Anglican Communion by the Global South Primates, but rather the Global Primates who have walked away. And they chose to do it on the same day that the Church of England General Synod voted to send the Covenant to dioceses for discussion.

For all the criticism of the Archbishop of Canterbury, on this blog and elsewhere throughout the last weeks, criticism that continues even today, the effects of his statements and years of effort, however futile, seem to have preserved something of Anglicanism, in spite of it all. Oh, there are apparently those who are leaving, the GAFCON Primates who signed the statement yesterday that they will not attend the Primates Meeting in Ireland in January. But as others have observed, it’s never quite clear whether all the signatories of GAFCON statements have actually signed or even agree with the statement. They have also made clear that they are having nothing of the covenant. The full statement from that group is here.

Mark Harris’ comment on this development is spot on:

GAFCON is on its way to forming an alternate way to be Anglican in the world, one which the Covenant does not support and the existing unifying elements in the Anglican Communion are irrelevant.

His full commentary is here.

Here is what Tobias Haller has to say.

Oh, I have no doubt that this is not the end of efforts to keep things together. But the Covenant was the last best shot from Williams, et al, to hold things together, and with the GAFCON folks not playing along, I see no way forward. Unless something radical happens, the Primates Meeting will be a rump; the conservative Primates not attending, or forcing the ABC to disinvite our Presiding Bishop, which would also lead to others pulling out, I suspect.

Whatever they will say about the Archbishop of Canterbury down the line, they won’t be able to criticize him for not trying hard enough to keep the Anglican Communion together. In my view, the timing of the GAFCON statement was a direct attack on Rowan and on his vision for Anglicanism.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s address at General Synod

Posted on by
Reply

The ABC’s address to General Synod today is available.

He talks about the Anglican Covenant and decision facing Synod concerning the ordination of women bishops. Here is the heart of his defense of it:

The Covenant offers the possibility of a voluntary promise to consult. And it also recognises that even after consultation there may still be disagreement, that such disagreement may result in rupture of some aspects of communion, and that this needs to be managed in a careful and orderly way. Now the risk and reality of such rupture is already there, make no mistake. The question is whether we are able to make an intelligent decision about how we deal with it. To say yes to the Covenant is not to tie our hands. But it is to recognise that we have the option of tying our hands if we judge, after consultation, that the divisive effects of some step are too costly. The question is how far we feel able to go in making our decisions in such a way as to keep the trust of our fellow-Anglicans in other contexts. If we decide that this is not the kind of relationship we want with other Anglicans, well and good. But it has consequences. Whatever happens, with or without the Covenant, the Communion will not simply stay the same. Historic allegiances cannot be taken for granted. They will survive and develop only if we can build up durable and adult bonds of fellowship. And in this respect, the Church of England is bound to engage in this process as one member of the Communion among others. The fact is that the mutual loyalty of the Communion needs work, and the Covenant proposals are the only sign at the moment of the kind of work that has to be done.

The ABC is rarely clear in his writing but the key sentences seems to be these: “The question is how far we feel able to go in making our decisions in such a way as to keep the trust of our fellow-Anglicans in other contexts. If we decide that this is not the kind of relationship we want with other Anglicans, well and good. But it has consequences.” One might turn the question back on him, because clearly the decision to ordain women bishops has led to the breaking of trust with some groups within the Church of England. He would undoubtedly say that he wants to keep the trust of those fellow-Anglicans, but they had no desire to do the same. So then what?

More interesting still is his decision to build his essay around John Wesley. A good Anglican, certainly, but when it became necessary, he took actions that led to the creation of the Methodist Church in the USA. That wasn’t an action taken lightly, but it certainly broke the trust with the Church of England and with Episcopalians in the US. And those actions had enormous consequences for both denominations, impoverishing each in some ways, but at the same time creating structures that would contribute to the enormous growth of Methodism in the US.

One might conclude that Rowan wants us to follow Wesley’s lead and go our separate way.

 

Will the Primates meet?

Posted on by
Reply

Quite the hubbub over this question. The primates of the Anglican Communion are scheduled to meet in Dublin in January 2011. A report by George Conger puts this meeting in question, and indeed raises issues about the Primates Meeting itself. It is important because it is one of the “four instruments of communion” so often discussed in the last 10-15 years. The meetings have at times been acrimonious, and recent ones have featured, if not outright boycotts, then pointed refusals on the part of some, to participate in joint Eucharists.

According to Conger, who tends to be a reliable source, the Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed smaller meetings of “like-minded” archbishops before the Dublin meeting itself. This report received confirmation from a number of sources. Conger goes on to say that Williams is proposing a restructuring of the meeting itself:

suggesting that an elected standing committee be created and the powers and responsibility of the meeting of the communion’s 38 archbishops, presiding bishops and moderators be delineated.

The problem here is two-fold. How can the primates be an “instrument of communion” if they cannot gather together? The second problem is an ongoing one as the ABC attempts to tinker with Anglican structures and create a more cohesive body. An elected standing committee would seem to further narrow and centralize powers within this group and decrease democratic representation. One can see similar attempts at work in the proposed restructuring of the Anglican Consultative Council–which would increase representation from the Primates, at the expense, as always of the laity.

The structures of the Anglican Communion, the “instruments of communion” are unwieldy. The alternative is to create a centralized bureaucracy that holds all power and makes the decisions. That sounds a great deal like the Vatican to me.

According to late reports, the Anglican Communion Office vehemently denies that the Primates Meeting has been canceled or postponed.

As always, you can follow the discussion on Thinking Anglicans and the Episcopal Cafe.