Tom Wright's article is very peculiar. He is very insulting to TEC, evidently writing off the whole Episcopal Church as beyond hope of salvation. It seems to me that the Episcopalians I know are in many ways the truest to traditional Anglicanism as it used to be in England: urbane, moderate, socially-committed people secure enough in their own tradition to not need to continually scream out "string 'em up", contrary to the tabloid rhetoric of some of the current English Church leaders.

The other oddity of My Lord of Durham's article is that he keeps insisting that the C of E is quite different from the North American churches, as if it were not in need of facing the same issues with any urgency. I think he needs to take a bit of a reality check here: read the public's comments on this issue in the UK media websites, and you'll see that he is way out of line with public opinion (i.e. nearly all the 26 million members of the C of E) in England. The C of E must urgently start to treat gay people equally: this head in the sand policy has been a total disaster for its standing in British society, and will have very damaging long-term repercussions.

@Fr Mark:

I suspect a lot of +Tom's criticism of TEC and the ACC is tactical in nature -- by re-establishing his credentials as an "orthodox" (viz.) bishop, it inoculates him against the inevitable charge of treason or surrender that GAFCONites will level against him in their typically black-and-white way of thinking.

"When I hear Peter Jensen say that ‘we are not self-selected; we are God-selected, because we are based on the word of God’; when I hear beloved and respected Jim Packer say that the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ should be the basis of a new covenant to which all English bishops will be required to sign up; when I hear Vinay Samuel, one of the sharpest minds in the whole GAFCON movement, saying (unless he was misreported) that ‘we are not breaking away from the Anglican Communion – we ARE the Anglican Communion’; and when I see Bishop John Rodgers of AMiA saying that ‘we are the true and faithful Anglicans . . . the true representatives of the Anglican Communion’ – then it is time for someone, and it might as well be an old-fashioned Bible-believing evangelical like me, to stand up and say , with usual English understatement, ‘hold on, this seems to be somewhat over the top’"

That is, it's fine for these folks to calumnate and scapegoat and outright lie about TEC, the church in Canada, and the reality of life for gay people, to insult our Presiding Bishop, to scorn +Gene, but, oh no, C of E must NOT be touched.

News for you: sauce for goose is sauce for gander.

If you think your 'English understatement' will have any impact at all on these people, I've got a bridge to sell to you.

Sauce for the goose! When GAFCon bashes the Episcopal Church, +Wright hollers "Bully!" When they turn on the C of E, it's "Foul!" There are no hobgoblins of consistency in Durham!

Keep digging, +Tom. You'll reach Sydney yet.

Your broad brush dismissal of TEC and Canada is as offensive to us as GAFCON's assault on England is to you. If you want to understand us, you will need to spend more time with us than with Stephen Colbert.

Tom Wright is supposed to be a bright fellow.

Unfortunately, he isn't bright enough to move away from the ridiculous caricature of North American Anglicanism spread around by the wilfully dishonest GAFCON crowd.

Just one example:

Jim Packer was NEVER sanctioned for holding to his conservative convictios. To suggest otherwise is a baldfaced lie.

Jim Packer was NEVER sanctioned for his active and determined opposition to the policies of the Bishop and the Diocese of New Westminster. To suggest otherwise is a baldfaced lie.

Jim Packer was ONLY sanctioned AFTER he had effectively declared himself out of communion with the bishop, the diocese and the province from which he held his license. Then and ONLY then did he face any sanction at all - and that was to have his license revoked by a bishop and diocese of which he claimed to be no longer a part.

The fact that Tom Wright repeats this canard about Jim Packer shows him (Wright) to be either a liar or a fool.

Bishop Wright, if a priest of the Diocese of Durham declared that he was no longer a part of the Diocese of Durham, no longer a priest under your jurisdiction and no longer affiliated with the Church of England, would you allow that priest to continue to function as a licensed priest in your diocese?

Tell the truth now.

(Hint, if you say yes, you would be lying.)

Why has no one exposed GAFCON on its duplicity over allowing Anglo-Catholics to sign the Declaration and subsequently ignore the force of the articles?

Why has no one demanded that they come clean on divorce and re-marriage?

Why has no one demanded that they state whether female ordination is unorthodox ,( particularly the women bishops) or not?

Why is it alalowing the Church of England in South AfRICA TO SIGN , WHEN IT ALLOWS LAY PRESIDENCY?

Tom Wright's comments about TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada are more than offensive. They reflect some real emotionalism that is undermining his ability to think in a theologically objective manner. Wright seems unable to understand, or,perhaps, to accept the ecclesiology of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. The "orthodox" clergy that he regards as being wickely persecuted are simply acting in violation of the canons of TEC and Church of Canada. Instead of resigning their orders in their respective churches, or seeking a transfer to another province, they are declaring themselves under the jurisdiction of a foreign bishop and then attempting to assign the property and assets of their parishes, and in Schofield's case, the diocese of San Joaquin, to foreign prelates of other churches, who have declared their churches out of communion with TEC. This in spite of the fact that almost all of these priests have been offered alternative oversight by a bishop that they would regard as "orthodox". Just because Wright prefers their brand of Continental Reformation theology does not justify wholesale violation of ordination vows or the canons of one's church. What is fueling this emotionalism on Wright's part? Perhaps it is the teaching of TEC regarding the inclusion of LGBT persons at all levels of ministry in the church. "What would have been unthinkable" as Wright puts it. From my perspective, this is homophobia, pure and simple. For Wright, apparently, differences as to the morality of war, abortion, divorce,or capital punishment are not at issue. These, perhaps are second order issues for him. But, absolutely not as to the inclusion of gay persons in ministry!

Dr. Wright states that the Ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of gay unions have not been authorized by any Council of the Church of England. Like many others, he refers to the different situation in the U.S. and Canada. Why are the U.S. and Canada targeted? Such blessings and ordinations are common in England. PLEASE NOTE: THE CANADIAN CHURCH'S GENERAL SYNOD HAS NOT AUTHORIZED THE ORDINATION OF GAY CLERGY AND DECLINED TO AUTHORIZE THE BLESSING OF SAME-SEX UNIONS. In the debate surrounding the St. Bart's event, this forum presented the rules concerning such things in England, so they ARE in place. In Canada, only thr diocese of New Westminster's bishop has allowed such blessings. Other Diocesan Synods have voted to allow them (Ottawa, Montreal, Niagara), but the bishops have so far declined. WHY ARE THERE LIES AND MISREPRESENTATIONS CONCERNING THE CANADIAN CHURCH? Our General Synod has not voted for these things we are accused of doing. More lies to allow Venables to try to siphon off parishes.

@Robert Ian Williams:

I don't know why you mean "no one has exposed". I thought that GAFCON's blatant inconsistency and hypocrisy was pretty obvious.

Time for another lightning strike.

Thank you Fr. Mark for your kind comments about TEC.

Malcolm+ you have said everything I was thinking. Apart from adding that Bishop Tom ought to apologize immediately to Bishop Michael for such insultingly worded and ludicrously inaccurate accusations.

Richard, perhaps it is simply that the Father of Lies uses false witness to enact his plan to destroy the Church of God.

If the GAFCON / FOCA episcopi vigilanti had any case at all, they would not find it necessary to root all of their arguments i lies and slanders.

Tom Wright has descended into the gutter in calling another bishop "wicked".

http://pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/07/tom-wright-calls-another-bishop-wicked.html

Re: THE CANADIAN CHURCH'S GENERAL SYNOD HAS NOT AUTHORIZED THE ORDINATION OF GAY CLERGY....

I wrote to Bishop Tom (my bishop) over a year ago, reminding him of the Canadian Church's stand on such issues, and yet he continues to condemn the Anglican Church of Canada again and again. I don't think he's stupid or dishonest, so I can only presume that he thinks that they are deserving of his condemnation. If the Canadian Church has not authorised the ordinaton of practising gay clergy or approved of same-sex blessings, then he is condemning them for something else. I can only presume that he is condemning them for being liberal -- which is the recurring object of his frequent condemnations.

Consider the following from his 6 July 2008 statement on Fulcrum:

'Evangelical bishops . . . are now to be found up and down the country, and they are working closely with orthodox bishops from the Catholic tradition, of whom again there are several.'

I presume that by 'several' he means more than several. But what condescension! It takes my breath away. In judging quite a number of his fellow bishops as unorthodox, he's doing what he accuses Gafcon of doing.

Of course, if he's right about his brother bishops, then GAFCON is perhaps right after all to target the C of E. Tom Wright has already judged it wanting.

And yet...

The thing is: I like +Tom. Get him alone for a serious conversation, and you won't find many better bishops. He does have mounds of integrity, but he says the darndest things now and then -- well, not just now and then! I personally know that, without compromising his own position, he is nonetheless more generously inclusive and tolerant of different points of view than one might imagine, and I respect him hugely for that.

But how to reconcile it all? It sounds to me as though he's doing a St Paul -- trying to show that he is more Orthodox in much the same way that St Paul argued that he was more Jewish than his detractors. It's a rhetorical device used by St Paul to prevent we-they type fragmentization. The thing is +Tom is using the same device while at the same time encouraging a we-they type of fragmentization. What's more, St Paul was arguing against the traditionalists in the early Church: he was the seeming unorthodox one trying to convince the orthodox communities that something else was going on. He bragged, yes, as Tom does, but he also admitted to being unusually zealous in his persecution of Christians -- something that he was not proud of, even if it won him a perverse sort of street-cred. Tom seems to be bragging about his opposition to everything liberal without sensing that this is not something to be proud of. St Paul admitted that his opposition to those first Christians was unfounded, but he was thereby able to say that he knew where the traditionalists were coming from; he appreciated the tug of the old religion; he appreciated the difficulty of letting go of a type of legalism in favour of an untamable commitment to discerning the Spirit. Tom's got the rhetoric down fine, and he's honestly playing on his considerable credentials, but Paul was playing the same cards, but with an ironic, self-deprecating twist that is yet to appear in Tom's public pronouncements -- though, I dare say, he is more than capable of doing so.

What to do? I sometimes wonder whether +Tom thinks he is St Paul's contemporary mouthpiece. I say this in a positive sense, inasmuch as I suspect that he believes that he has really got inside Paul's skin, as it were. But that does not decide matters in the Church: just as Paul had to submit to the authority of the early Church (even though he won), and just as the Pauline corpus has to be interpreted in the light of the whole of the NT, so too Tom has got to realize that asserting a Pauline point or a Tom Wright point of view is not the end of the matter. No matter how one conceives of biblical authority, St Paul was not infallible; nor were his writings the only writings to make it into the canon. Clearly, enunciating a Pauline perspective earns one an important place at the table, but it does not trump everyone else's hand.

Tom's all-too-ready dismissal of other (more liberal) voices is not at all helpful; his use of orthodox-unorthodox categories is lacking in subtlety and Anglican generosity.

Still I know he's better than that....

When I read Wright saying--

"And now to discover that our great Jim Packer is being persecuted by a wicked liberal bishop in Canada"

--I actually thought he was being ironic, and there wd. be a payoff later on. (I even thought it might be clever)

But then I read the whole piece, and I guess he's serious.

I find it off the wall. Packer disavowed the Bp of New Westminster. What Ingram supposed to do? Applaud?

Watching the deliberations of the Canadian General Synod last year on the internet one couldn't (especially an expat Canadian like myself) help but be proud of the degree to which the Canadian Church had wrestled with the issues of sexuality. Whether you're somebody who thought the Canadians went too far or somebody who believes that they didn't go far enough, the deliberations themselves were 'satisfactory' in the sense that matters were fully discussed with a high degree of mutual responsibility. Many of the folks who spoke were known to me a decade or so ago and what was evident was the degree to which these individuals had changed their thinking over time and with serious thought and prayer. The result? Opinions still diverge and a rich variety of opinions - not all of them predictable and produced according to type - still exists. Tom's stark description of a few 'orthodox' individuals/bodies suffering under the ravages of a liberal establishment is simply inaccurate.

Once again we need to credit the internet and the cold and tactical contribution of people who knew better but who chose to describe a varied landscape as if it were simply mountaintops and deep fjords.

"WHY ARE THERE LIES AND MISREPRESENTATIONS CONCERNING THE CANADIAN CHURCH?"

Because the myth is that the good holy "orthodox" remnant is being systematically persecuted by evil faithless world adoring heathens whose goal is to destroy the Church and supplant the Gospel. If they were to acknowledge that aside from a very few, like Don Harvey, who have bought into the myth, the Canadian Church has actually proceeded with caution and respect for all concerned, this myth would be called into question. It is attractive to be persecuted and fighting against an evil power, many on both sides fall prey to it.

The liberal manifestation is not to think of one'sself as persecuted, rather one is standing in defence of those who have been persecuted for centuries by the evil patriarchal MEN who have ruled things for so long and who must now be humbled. Try asserting your humanity to the former group, or your lack of a sense of persecution to the latter. It can be great larks. That said, it is only some in each group that think and behave like this, but it is so easy to tar all hands with the one brush.

The Canadian Primate has issued a statement vigorously denying and repudiating the "false gospel" rhetoric of Gafcon et al. I have never understood what this means. The Gospels themselves have no references on the part of Our Lord to homosexuality. Perhaps they just consider homosexuality to be part of general immorality. But if one considers for a nanosecond that being gay is not a choice, this falls apart. Even if the "conservatives" (an inaccurate appelation if there ever was one) say that gay persons should just "resist temptation", it would assume that their God-given sexuality is really God's mistake or God's curse. How fortunate for heterosexuals to have been so chosen and preferred by God! If the Gospels are mute on homosexuality, then St. Paul's statements in Romans can be their only reference, although he is not referring to any kind of same-sex relationship we would know today. He had no inking that gay people weren't just mistaken or willfully wayward heterosexuals. If the reference is to Leviticus, then what about all the other rules which they ignore? They are willing to use the NT to justify abandoning the OT regulations, with the exception of those concerning same-sex activity. The sad thing is that the homophobia exhibited by these groups-evangelical and anglo-catholic alike-is often rooted in their fear of their own sexuality or even their deep closets or shame for being gay themselves.

In trying to do a sermon on the impasse in the Anglican Communion I have read many of the comments with interest. I am really thankful for Jensen and his ilk clearing up one thing for me. I didn't realise I was preaching a false gospel to my congregations, I had always assumed I was preaching the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.

Take heart people, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall is a gaint with a faith and committment to the Gospel and Jesus that rests on the firm foundation of sound scholarly knowledge, a knowledge that has clearly and deeply been thought through. +Phillip is of the belief that the Gospel of Jesus is a Gospel of inclusion. As long as we have people of such stature leading the church sense will prevail, and God's grace and love will be offered to all, not just some.

"I didn't realise I was preaching a false gospel to my congregations, I had always assumed I was preaching the Gospel of our Lord Jesus."

But that's what Evangelicals have always believed. They were content to let it continue as long as they were in the minority and we didn't actually put our beliefs in practice. Well, things have changed. We now feel called to enact the Gosepl we have always believed. It is essentially what the Church has always believed, though we do have our particular interpretation of it, and may be wrong on some or many of those points. They are in the majority. They have the True, True Gospel. For them, it doesn't matter that their interpretation of that Gospel is an amalgam of innovative Reformation era rebellions against established power structures, a mistaken understanding of what the Bible is for, and retention of much of what was wrong with the Imperial Church. They can "prove" what they believe from Scripture and are petrified of moving outside the printed word to experience the Living God. He has, you see, allowed them to get away with their crime of being fallen humans, but will convict and cruelly punish them if they break His laws again. Since, for them, the only reliable revelation of God is in the printed word of Scripture, we can't deviate from it. Also, it being the word of God, any deviation from it is not merely error, but rebellion against God Himself. Thus, the Church cannot be allowed to contain any who do not accept their understanding of Scripture and its authority. Those people are great sinners merely by their refusal to grant unopposable legal rightness to the words of Scripture. Since what they defend is Divine Law, God sanctions any attempt by them to rid the Church of those who do not venerate that Law as they do.