The word from Clonmacnoise

The Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Reverend Alan Harper, preached at Clonmacnoise on the Feast Day of St Mary Magdalene 2007:

I have somewhat to say on the present madness of the Anglican Communion and the Christian quest to appropriate and to live the life of resurrection. All here.

He identified two 'boulders' to the resurrection life: bibliolatry and division and disunity in the Church.

While both are undoubtedly boulders the first is historically specific; the second is endemic.

He regards as simplistic the notion the thesis that unity may be sought at the cost of truth, arguing that no single group can hold all truth while division actively discourages us from seeing the mote in our own eye.

It is not then the case that unity is maintained at the expense of truth, but rather that disunity guarantees that access to a fuller knowledge of the truth is consciously inhibited.

I might want to ask he understands truth and our perception of it, and also how truth is apprehended if our disunity and division are not ephemeral to Christian faith but inherent and integral to it.

On his observation of the Covenant, however, I am with him all the way (emphasis added):

Archbishop Drexel Gomez, addressing the General Synod of the Church of England on the issue of an Anglican Covenant, [full speech here] said recently:

Anglican leaders are seriously wondering whether they can recognize in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation. While some feel there will be inevitable separation, others are trying to deny that there is a crisis at all. That is hardly a meeting of minds. Unless we can make a fresh statement clearly and basically of what holds us together we are destined to grow apart.

I doubt if anyone believes that there is no crisis. Rather, in the context of Archbishop Drexel’s key test, that is, recognizing in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation, a spirit of arrogance on both sides is causing people of genuine faith and undoubted love for the Lord Jesus to bypass the requirement for patience and for making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

I have yet to meet any “leader” who does not treat with the utmost respect and indeed reverence the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. I have heard no one in this crisis deny the fundamental tenets of the faith as Anglicans have received them. Yet I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not believing precisely as they themselves believe. Equally, I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not attaching the weight they themselves attach to this biblical text compared with that.

This is not the way of Christ; it is the way of fallen humanity. It is a boulder of our own creation and I do not know who will help us to roll it away.

Some fear, and I am among them, that an Anglican Covenant, unless it is open and generous and broad, may simply become a further means of obstruction: a boulder, rather than a lever to remove what obscures and impedes our access to the truth that sets us free.

Through a Glass, Darkly, Jeff Sharlet

This article was published in Harper's magazine, though I first saw it on the Revealer.

I found it a fascinating and well-written and disturbing account of US fundamentalist attitudes which both help show some of the differences between US Christian fundamentalists and other species of fundamentalisms, and some of the features common to the genus.

The article is part of a forthcoming 'narrative history of fundamentalism'. Sharlet seeks to set fundamentalism in American history, and also shows how the fundamentalists re-tell history to ground their own account of the present.

Two (separate) quotes:

'Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god?'

His thesis is that fundamentalists are not newcomers but 'the natural temperature of the nation'.

Later in the article he recounts,

'Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. "Child sacrifice"-by which he meant abortion-"and sodomy. Any nation that condoned those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble."

'He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the "blueprint of God's Word." '

Those who know God's blueprint are the most dangerous: they are scarcely containable by what other people would call rational means. Nor can they see that they have set up an image of God, a limited version of the Bible, and have made that their God; technically idolatry.