The Seminar on Conflict Ecclesiology

I have been invited to join the blog Seminar on Conflict Ecclesiology. I feel quite chuffed.

It's rules are firm: start with a question without expressing one's own opinions. This is a hard discipline. I'm keen to tell, rather than to ask, it's why I'm such a bad teacher. And on the whole a blog is about telling the world - or the invisible unknowable other - who I am and what I think. It will be good to learn.

Bounced by the Bishop

I've been bounced off Bishop Alan Wilson's blog.

Correction: no I haven't. A misunderstanding based on my hypersensitivity to the cryptic comments of bishops.

And he very kindly enquired and cleared up my misapprehension. For which I am grateful, and my apologies to Bishop Alan for ever suggesting such a thing.

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.

Weeping ash in a churchyard

Weeping ash in a churchyard

A century keeping vigil over

those who need no vigilance, concealing

the sweeping shadows, the day’s declension,

the tolling year’s irrecoverable

loss from Easter through a bitter Friday,

one leafless limb yearning sunwards with no

expectation, one arm consoling the stones –

their names uninscribed, loving memories

invalidated – slowly curling down

to the patient, all-embracing earth.

I slip in step with the dying and dead

in sad processions, like tides which reach no

further than the edge and turn away, and,

for the short, wordy, retrospective path,

my forehead smeared with penitential ash.

After a long gap:

The Draft Anglican Covenant is still wandering around the world. Critical comments (in some detail as well as summaries) are on the MCU site: http://www.modchurchunion.org/Covenant.htm. Progress in the General Synod can be followed through Thinking Anglicans.

There's also a paper on the way in which the Powers That Be are trying to bounce the decision through Communion by giving no-one a public voice on its contents (and therefore enabling a few people - whoever they are - to draft versions in private).

I believe this is wrong in principle and ineffective in practice. It will simply create a legal system which no-one cares for and, possibly, will ignore as soon as it makes a decision that is disliked.

David

When he was in his teens he lined up

his money in columns

and on his bedside table

to keep him warm at night.

At twenty he strode around

the globe keeping his feet

firmly on the ground and

his eyes fixed on the future.

And at thirty he turned to study

stately homes and old gravestones,

the archaeology 

of penury and wealth.

Forty felled him with passion:

he threw order out the window

drowned in bed and said

in that moment he was happy.

But fifty found him

meditating on the stream,

on the fluid transience

of loss and permanence.

So sixty saw him in the garden

cultivating roses and

reflecting on the delicacy of life,

its beauty and its thorns.

Seventy was sweet: the body

stumbled a little but beer

was good and the food

they cooked tasted of love.

Eighty was a slow decade

spent contemplating death

and curating peace

in the storehouse of his soul.

At ninety he recalled

he had once been a child

so invited himself to parties

and was rowdy.

Anglican Divorce

An excellent and brief summary of TEC's divisions from the New York Times:

LAURIE GOODSTEIN

A Divide, and Maybe a Divorce

[Extract]

In many American churches, the divide on homosexuality is neither generational nor geographic, unlike the North/South split over slavery. Homosexuality is not the cause of the divide, just “the last straw,” said John L. Kater, a lecturer in Anglican Studies, at the Church

Divinity School of the Pacific, in Berkeley, Calif., a liberal-leaning seminary. The underlying differences are over the basic understanding of tradition and Scripture. The conservatives say they are something sacred and fixed, while the liberals say they can be open to interpretation and responsive to new information.

That approach has shaped their responses. The liberals insist that what defines Anglicanism is theological diversity, and the conservatives claim Anglicanism requires a commitment to doctrine. The liberals are saying, “Can’t we all just get along,” while the conservatives are saying, “Can’t we all just get in line?”

Hardly a Christian spectacle, the rivalry has been more like a log-rolling contest where the conservatives and the liberals are battling to push each other off a spinning log, while trying to make it look as if their adversaries voluntarily jumped. Now, with the ultimatum, the liberals may need a lot of deft footwork to stay on the log.