Thinking Anglicans

FCA: two more items

Updated – make that three items…

Colin Coward has written Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali condemned by The Times.

…Changing Attitude took to task the group of bishops supporting yesterday’s launch back in September 2008 when Blackburn, Chester, Chichester, Exeter, Rochester and Winchester wrote in support of Bishop Bob Duncan in the USA…

…Today’s Times leader says that Michael Nazir-Ali is willing to provoke splits and risk schism within the Anglican Communion and has now signalled insubordination to the authority of Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Bishops of Exeter and Winchester emailed me in anger last September, Exeter saying there was absolutely no reason to assume that any of them were contemplating or would desire the kind of action about which I speculated. Yet at the time, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali said a new Province was needed in England and all six bishops either attended or send messages of support yesterday.

The Bishop of Rochester thinks homosexuals should “repent and be changed.” The Times says he has “inflamed an issue on which social attitudes have changed radically for the better within a generation.”

I have yet to hear any of the other five bishops publicly disown the stance taken by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, either in his comment about needing a new Province or in his attitude to lesbian and gay people which is doing so much damage to ability of the Church of England to evangelise in England…

Jonathan Bartley has written for Cif belief Evangelicals are betraying their heritage.

On Monday a new coalition of evangelical and Anglo-Catholic parishes launched within the Church of England, claiming to uphold the “traditional biblical view” on homosexuality.

But such a coalition was unlikely to be contemplated by evangelicals at many times gone by. For the original evangelical spirit with its reforming zeal and progressive outlook was more often at odds with traditionalists, than aligned with them. The idea of an alliance with those of a conservative disposition would have been an anathema…

Simon Rundell wrote FoCA – the beginning of the end.

…The (few) members of the House of Bishops supporting this schism should be ashamed. If they aren’t ashamed, then they should have the integrity to resign from this Church. This would, of course, leave Chichester without Episcopal oversight, but hey, at least all those gay priests in Chichester would know where they stood. Likewise, I note with sadness the support of the PEVs – they who have in their care a disproportionately high number of gay priests, most not even safely in the closet, but many who have active partners – I went to Mirfield, and that is how I know this to be the case. I wonder how cheated they feel at present. As MadPriest asked yesterday, is it worth the sacrifice of their integrity and their self-worth just simply to keep the girls out? We ordain women because we baptise girls…

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Christopher Shell
Christopher Shell
14 years ago

Although I am unfriendly to ‘conservatism’ as to all other blanket ideologies, it should be said that Jonathan Bartley makes a clear error in not conceding the obvious point that it is perfectly possible for a group or an individual to be conservative in one way and not in another. It is not possible to be radical in activism and ongoing reform/renewal while also sticking by the best of the thought, action and ethos of the last 2000 years? After all, it is (logically) only rarely that we in our day will make an advance on the best of the… Read more »

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
14 years ago

“It is not possible to be radical in activism and ongoing reform/renewal while also sticking by the best of the thought, action and ethos of the last 2000 years?”

I think you’ll find that most “liberals” believe they are doing exactly that. What’s funny is the people who also claim to be doing exactly that while they actually reject much of the “best thought, action, and ethos” that preceeded Luther’s little “You’re not the boss of me” antics.

Göran Koch-Swahne
14 years ago

“.. the obvious point that it is perfectly possible for a group or an individual to be conservative in one way and not in another.”

This is what the Swedish sociologist Sigvard Rubenowitz calls “compartimentalisation” of the authoritarian mind, eg. “all my best friends are Jews”.

Erika Baker
Erika Baker
14 years ago

“that preceeded Luther’s little “You’re not the boss of me” antics.”

Is that dismissive level of conversation really necessary? Can we not disagree with someone without denigrating them or their motives?
I’m getting so so tired of it!

Christopher Shell
Christopher Shell
14 years ago

Hi Ford-
That many be true, but your comments would be more appositely directed to a hot prot than to an ecumenist.

Christopher Shell
Christopher Shell
14 years ago

Hi Goran- Your remark does not make sense. It is better to be radically activist than apathetic. That is a sensible default position. It is also better to treasure and digest the thinking that has preceded our own age rather than think our own age and culture is the only one there has ever been or will be. That is a necesary default position. One of these default positions is radical, the other is conservative. One day people will wake up to the fact that the world is not divided into so-called rightwingers and leftwingers. Such as Tom Wright have… Read more »

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
14 years ago

“Is that dismissive level of conversation really necessary?” Hyperbolic humour to make a point is not dismissive of others, it’s just hyperbolic humour to make a point. Being a Protestant myself, I can’t exactly be dismissive of the whole Protestant movement, leery though I might be of the extremities it went to, and of some of it’s ideas. I can be, and often am, just as hyperbolically humourous of “my side”, so to speak. Self deprecatory humour should be a part of this attitude, after all. Have you seen the website for Frankly Unfriendly Catholics? Something I laugh at regularly.… Read more »

Erika Baker
Erika Baker
14 years ago

Apologies, Ford, I didn’t have you down as a Lutheran Protestant.

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
14 years ago

“Apologies, Ford, I didn’t have you down as a Lutheran Protestant.” Well, I am a member of a Church that took as one of its driving forces the Protestant movement started by Luther. I doubt if Henry would have had such an easy time of it if there were not some acceptance of Luther’s ideas in England. And certainly, the Marian exile and other events brought Protestant (or perhaps we ought to say reformed) ideas into the English, and I accept a good many of them, especially justification by faith. So, scornful dismissal of Luther is a bit silly. But… Read more »

Erika Baker
Erika Baker
14 years ago

Ford Leaving aside the question whether the humour was obvious – and to me it really wasnt – you are a member of the church that is not reformed. It contains at least 3 different strands, liberal, anglo-catholic and evangelical, and the anglo-catholics are much close to Rome in their understanding of everything about faith than they are to the protestants in the reformed churches, of which the Lutheran Protestant church is one. I was brought up a Lutheran Protestant, and I never heard half of the theology and ways of thinking that you have taught me over the past… Read more »

Ford Elms
Ford Elms
14 years ago

“Apologies if I misread you.” Erika, you and I misread each other often. It comes from being passionate. And, while I do think that this kind of sarcastic humour is not necessarily dismissive, I do see how it reads, and how someone not all that familiar with my sense of humour would naturally see that. So, don’t sweat it. I at least have as much responsibility to ask myself how something will read before I push the “post” button. I don’t always live up to that.As to “reformed”, well, we ACs like to think of ourselves as “reformed Catholics”, at… Read more »

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