Archbishop of Canterbury: Reaction to General Convention of the Episcopal Church

The full text of ++Rowan, Archbishop of Canterbury’s, reflections on the recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church can be found here.

I think Rowan makes a number of good points.  Here’s what I get out of his message:

• He believes that the Episcopal Church does not want to cut ties with the wider Anglican Communion, and he encourages them to stay.  At the same time he says resolutions passed at the convention will not repair broken bridges with other parts of the communion, and he acknowledges there is still “a significant minority” of bishops within the Episcopal Church who honor the consensus of the wider Anglican Church.
• He is very clear in condemning prejudice against LGBTs and in defending their civil liberties and human dignity.  However he says the issue to address in the church is whether or not same-sex unions are the same thing as Christian marriage, and he says this is not the way the Church has interpreted scripture for the past 2000 years.  He states: “a blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority of the Church Catholic” without major changes in the church’s beliefs and teachings, and because of this same-sex unions (at least for now) stand essentially on the same ground as any sexual relationships outside of marriage.
• Ordination is not a question of human rights — it is a question of being able to represent the church and its teachings accurately.  The church cannot be guided by what popular society as a whole believes.
• By “pressing ahead” with local changes, the Episcopal Church has made itself “unrecognizable” to other local churches around the globe.   He points out that “local pastoral needs” have raised other potentially divisive issues such as laypeople being able to preside at communion.  He writes, “an acceptance of these sorts of innovation in sacramental practice would represent a manifest change in both the teaching and the discipline of the Anglican tradition”.  He continues:  “To accept without challenge the priority of local and pastoral factors in the case either of sexuality or of sacramental practice would be to abandon the possibility of a global consensus among the Anglican churches…”
• He addresses what he sees as a “federalist” viewpoint – certain groups essentially wanting autonomy within a loose federation of Anglicanism – and says that the Covenant he is proposing is “emphatically not about centralisation but about mutual responsibility”.
• He acknowledges that “there is at least the possibility of a twofold ecclesial reality” at least in the foreseeable future: one with “a ‘covenanted’ Anglican global body” and the other “related to this body, but in less formal ways with fewer formal expectations”.  He warns against “apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication” but rather would describe them as “two styles of being Anglican” and he discourages “competitive hostility” between the two.

I very much appreciate Rowan’s words re: opposing prejudice within the Church – a message conservative Christendom needs to not only take to heart but act on.  At the same time he is quite right in pointing out that ordination has nothing to do with rights.  Speaking as one who is contemplating ordination, the closer one comes to it the clearer it becomes that ordination is a calling, and no human being is worthy of it let alone has a right to it.

While I’m disappointed by the weakness of Rowan’s appeals to Scripture, I think his appeals to unity — the unity of believers and the unity the Church — is something that shouldn’t be brushed aside lightly.  Protestants in general and American Protestants in particular tend to take a very individualized, independent approach to faith and church membership.  While I could never be Catholic (or even Anglo-Catholic) there is something to be said for 2000 years of church teaching.  To ignore it or dismiss it out of hand displays an intellectual arrogance that mistakenly believes our generation and our American culture knows better than anyone else, past or present.

The two weaknesses I see in Rowan’s message are that there seems to be no addressing of the questions of church discipline or Scriptural authority… and these are two of the major theological issues of our day, not only in the Anglican Church but throughout the body of believers.  But I’m glad to see that he has the ability to accept and work with a “twofold ecclesial reality” — it gives me hope that the new American Anglican province won’t be left out in the cold but will have some kind of recognition from Canterbury.