Ruth Gledhill of The Times draws our attention to a recent lecture on “Anglicans and the Future of the Communion” by Canon Gregory Cameron, Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.
Anglican Church told ‘unite or risk war’ over gay Christians
A senior adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned Anglicans against making homosexuality a “shibboleth” that could result in the destruction of their church.
She goes into more detail in her blog: Summer of Schism: Gregory Cameron on the ‘dark side’
You can download the text of the lecture here.
Sensationalist journalism.
The camp that wants “war” can make that manifest.
That will lead to criminal charges in “civilized” societies.
Those countries that “allow” their religious leaders to wage “war” without accountability merely prove the bankruptcy of both their priests and their ethos.
Jesus promised gentleness to the Daughter of Zion; and that he was healing the sick, raising the dead and binding up the broken hearted to John the Baptist.
Jesus is a man of his word or he isn’t.
Souls bent on tyranny and global genocide are hardly making manifest the covenant of peace.
I agree this is an issue which needs calming down and debating properly. Arguments based on feelings of exclusion or traditional understandings will not do. We need to return to the Scriptures in prayer and use our minds in submission to the Holy Spirit to find a way forward.
I would love to engage with others in such a discussion, but it always seems to descend into emotive mud-slinging, and those who would argue theologically never get heard for long.
So it’s all that relativism and liberalism that have taught us Americans (at least my generation and the ones preceding it) to do good if we’ve done well. Not all of that money from the U.S. is blameless and the “dark side” as Canon Cameron calls it, knows it (and benefits from it). The liberals may carry about themselves with an air of superiority, but that hardly warrants tearing a church selfishly apart,-e.g. engaging the laity in divisive tactics through separate meetings held across the globe. The liberals may be guilty of some “goofy” liturgical quirks (that can be both… Read more »
What on God’s good Earth has NATO got to do with it?
Hate to be cynical sounding, but. Yes all the complicated and varied intellectual issues need to be debated, most often using best practice tools and frameworks, not the least of which is our considering the slow but sure building evidence from empirical hypothesis testing – in this case about our fav hot button target group, the queer folks. Yet, in fact. That intellectual side of the matter, including quite a bit of theological and ethical work, has been going on in the academy for five or six decades, ever since WWII and right after when the barest glimmers shined out… Read more »
It was good of Gledhill to make the text of Cameron’s lecture available for download. I encourage those interested to read it for yourself rather than rely on digests.
Dear Folks, It is indeed unfortunate, but members of the Anglican Communion are simply undergoing what many of our world’s faith communities have suffered through already. In a word, it’s called “fundamentalism”, which by the way is simply one more form of idolotry. There is nothing inerrant but God. Whether it be my preferred translation of the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah; my preferred edition of the Book of Common Prayer; the Anglican Communion itself; my perception of myself as deliverer of an apostate church; the equation of my political or theological positions as “necessary for salvation” or peace;… Read more »
“Faced with the levels of anger, political subterfuge and almost histrionic rhetoric that seem to swirl about our Communion, I can understand those who say that perhaps the time has come to let the Communion go. If it stands on a precipice already, why not administer that little shove to put it out of its misery?”
Yes, indeed. And the Global South, along with the con evos, just gave it that push.
Thosee who speak of war should be giving thanks that this time, for all the words being exchanged – there are no armies in the field — remember Cromwell and others? — and no one being held in the Tower or in like danger? Columba Gilliss
“the Churches of the West are losing a sense of their identity as they get lulled into the liberalism and relativism which are presumed to be the hallmarks of the modern Western society.” What exactly do the esteemed leaders of the Communion mean when they talk about ‘relativism’? I don’t known any relativists. I don’t know of anyone who maintains that homosexuality is good for Westerners but bad for Africans, or suggests that the Gospel’s attitude to women priests is dependent upon the cultural background of the reader. Tolerance is not relativism; my willingness to join in communion with people… Read more »
Goran:
Canon Gregory was referring to the North Atlantic axis that defined Anglicanism as it grew throughout the world–England on the one hand and America on the other. Two of the more important NATO members, I must add, hence the comparison.
I know. I find it shameful.
“It seems to me that ‘relativism’ is a cheap (and inaccurate) shot fired at so-called ‘liberals’ by the intellectually vacuous.” Interesting, but at the same time there is the idea of “who are you tell me what’s right and wrong?” Relativism, as I understand the conservative use of the term, is precisely what you claim it isn’t, at least in effect. If we cannot know absolute truth, then truth is relative. Now, I don’t fully agree with this. I think the Christian idea that the Spirit will lead us into all truth is acknowledgement that we don’t know it all.… Read more »