Rowan Williams's Excellent Lecture

It is said that Archbishop William Temple reflected the time in which he lived, and this lecture September 11th - Lessons from History for Faith and Civil Society does the same for Archbishop Rowan Williams. It does follow a theme which was present in his lecture on Freedom and Slavery, on 24th April 2007 , in Hull, for the Wilberforce Lecture Trust, which is the impact of the religious - the Christian - message on the social and the political. I did not like it for its underlying false opposition, I felt, to the secular, even if the people of the Enlightenment failed to see the rather huge blind spot in their equalitarian statements when it came to slavery. This lecture, coming on September 11th, six years after the atrocity in the United States, has no such oppositional sentiment. It is about people of difference making contributions to the social and political whole, against oppression and for liberation. It is particularly good in how it draws on the Bhagavad Gita and the Qur'an, as well as the form of fellowship amongst the early Christians.

Some sections I highlighted on my contribution to the Fulcrum website, and I can discuss them here. There are further points to make too, which, honestly, have to be made in the light of the other matter of September 2007.

First of all an issue is what kind of theology has relevance outside the holy huddle? It is, surely, theology that relates to the nature of relationships in wider society. It is social theology, of course, but what happens here is that Williams applies his understanding of text and narrative from three sources - the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible and the Qur'an. These sources are not unambiguous in their rejection of violence, but they do relate to the non-violent approach to resisting oppression, and therefore the form of fellowship of people one with another when in a complex pluralist social world like ours.

Here is what Williams states about how Gandhi read the Bhagavad-Gita:

Gandhi is reflecting on the emphasis in the Bhagavad-Gita on detachment: our natural or instinctive way of operating in the world is to imagine ourselves as controlling both our own destiny and the conditions in which we live, so that we struggle for the conditions that promise us such control. But the divine imperative is that our actions should be determined not by this but by the fixed resolve to act in accordance with the truth – that is, with the truth of who and what he actually are both in society and in the universe itself. When we have learned to act in this way, we are free from fear; we give up the anxious effort to master our circumstances by force.

Gandhi's treatment of the Gita as a spiritual struggle has, of course, been criticised by a number who give it a plain reading. The drama of the book (part of the Mahabharata) is two armies facing one another, and Arjuna does not know what to do. Krishna says be truthful and fight. This is a bit like Islam and the Qur'an, then - well, it could be. But in the scripture is this essential matter of detachment, and therefore no what can be called the Will to Power. This makes the crucial turn from the physical to the spiritual. It is a fight then about truth.

Williams refers to Satyagraha: but Gandhi combined this with Ahimsa. Gandhi learnt from Jainism and its non-violence (the two go together in the same way Mikhail Gorbachev coupled Glasnost and Perestroika - one being the philosophical commitment to truth and the other a commitment to a form of action). So there is a direct connection then between the text and the action involved.

Also the quest for an action that does not simply mirror the action of the oppressor does find allies across divides, and of course Gandhi was murdered by a nationalist Hindu and not by anyone across the divide.

Thus it is relevant that Williams also states:

surely what any religious believer wants is to have the voice of faith heard within the pluralist debate, to have a guaranteed place at the table? Surely that’s why we are discussing the whole question of faith and civil society and why we want to answer once and for all the reproach that religion is a dangerous and destabilizing presence in our culture?

A pluralist society is not necessarily divided, but it is a complex set of overlapping people (and some ghettoes of defensive ethnic similarity) that believe different inspirations, and either clash but tolerate with their respective truths or understand them as stories or narratives to live by. Society looks for means to be functional, and this does not just mean an economic functionality but an ethical drive. Hans Kung has written about a global ethic, for example. Sometimes this implies a universalism of the message, via a syncretism or secularising, but Williams stays with the various narrative texts without a theological universalism. His universalism is about the worth of the human being (incidentally this was a repeated core message of the late Ernest Penn, Unitarian minister at Hull, but he made the assumption as a base message, whereas I used to think on what basis - well here the basis is the interpreted, inspiring, religious text.

In the criticisms of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (Rowan Williams was reading the Hitchens book during his break), these attacking the supernatural and superstitious and the ethically awful, Williams pleads for the positive contributions of the religions to the fundamental worth of the individual and the contribution to the social good. When reorientated religions are about having all people at the table, all able to make a positive contribution to peace between each other.

Williams clearly is no Durkheim even if the social good sounds functionalist: religion is not equated with social functionalism, nor simply with law and politics (comments made about Islam in particular). Nor is the human contribution ever quite finished:

– a condition that can be partially realised in the life of the community around Jesus but waits for its full embodiment in a future only God knows.

Religion then generates and motivates, it reads into, the social. It offers, but whilst humble and without will to power, cannot be less than the social:

Islam, like Christianity, refuses to make faith either subservient to the social order or simply an aspect among others of social life: it is something that offers transformation to the entire range of human activity.

It can of course be evil, nasty, violent, as it was on September 11th 2001. What Williams does is to reflect on interpreted text - important this, as text needs to be read and spoken about. The pluralist nature of todays world suggests that jihad should be non-violent (otherwise in such a world it will be destructive), and about the person. Thus the individual and social are connected.

The reason I use the Internet identity "Pluralist" is because I identified with the progressive side of that small Unitarian denomination, not just with religious humanism but with insights of the faiths. It was always an institutional shame that Christianity was divided off from the pluralist side and that it was associated with maintenance of identity in appearing to be a church and performing appropriately. My pluralism included Christianity, and its radical expressions. My social gospel, was that people could come together, to worship in difference, and not expect to be the same and not have to agree. My view did not prevail, as congregations sought agreement, identity and then the denomination decided to "uphold liberal Christianity" (whatever that meant). One may as well be postliberal then in a richer, theologically deep, institution.

It must be obvious why I warm to this lecture. I know, this is what Williams also states:

Jesus himself in his trial before Pilate says that his royal authority does not derive from anything except the eternal truth which he himself embodies as the incarnate Word of God; only if his authority depended on some other source would his servants fight (Jn 18.36-7). Earthly authority needs to reinforce itself in conflict and dominance; if the community of Jesus’ followers reinforced itself in such a way, it would be admitting that its claims were derived from this human order.

This is typical Rowan Williams: Williams is not saying there Jesus himself in his trial before Pilate says ... he himself embodies ... the incarnate Word of God. This latter point is a reflective on the eternal authority on which Jesus draws, that this relates to the text of John's gospel, that this is about how the early Christians had to behave - and did they behave according to eternal truth or, by suggested contrast, human order? Is this Rowan Williams just making clear his own badge of membership, or adding it into the issues he presents for good effect? He knows as well as anyone that Jesus did not claim his own divinity, and of course this does not say that - it just appears to do so. On the substance of the point, my view is there is a growing exclusivity in the early proto-orthodox Church not present in Jesus himself, even though Jesus focused on the Jews and the end time. Jesus did it with an open generosity and a social-health-salvation radical reversalism that defied the definitions of sin and understood beneficiaries of the day.

Rowan Williams knows that he states this section as he does, not just because he believes it, but with an eye to the inevitable tribal critics who will jump on his generosity to not just Gandhi but to the Gita as source and the Qur'an as scriptural sources. I think this lecture is as important as Jonathan Sack's 2001 book The Dignity of Difference, and both book and lecture respond to September 11 2001 in New York. Sacks' book also draws on texts, this time both written and oral in the traditions of Judaism to uphold not a theological or Enlightenment universalism but a divine basis for difference. Again, I don't care for the rejection of Enlightenment insight and universal (about which progressive Jews were so important) but it shows a religious contribution to the plural nature of the world: via the dignity of the individual to the complexity of the social.

And what of the inevitable tribalisms? Sacks had to travel to Manchester to meet Orthodox rabbis who criticised his book. He rewrote a chapter, taking out the most contentious points but keeping the central message. This is September 2007, where there are many basically homophobic types waving Bibles and demanding selective literalist readings from it, and who want to throw out a Church that includes those who do theology not unlike Rowan Williams, and replace that Church with an authoritarian alternative (one that recently has felt the censorship of offending the Rwandan presidency).

Come on! This archbishop surely cannot produce material like this, and participate with Episcopalians in New Orleans, and open an interfaith based centre there, and behave like some sort of institutionalised cane-wielding headmaster of old? If he comes anywhere near this, he would appear to be so ridiculously inconsistent that it would be laughable and tragic at the same time.

This lecture is closely-worded and complex material, and hardly reaches the masses, but it does speak of religion and society today, and is a positive reflection from three scriptural texts and their interpretation. It is the way to do relevant and connecting theology.

Performing Identity

One of the key features of postmodernism is that there is no objective truth, truth that can be fixed in this world. Structuralists said there was (because what is, is not what it is not) and so there is a binary nature to truth. When poststructuralists pointed out that binary opposites contain something of their opposite, then the whole truth thing went into a meltdown, and someone like Baudrillard took the meltdown into liquid and gas form. The virtual became the real, and the real virtual, and there was neither objectivity nor subjectivity: just meaning of signs where the emphasis was on the signifier and the unreliability of anything the signifier actually signified.

What this allows is the creation of spaces for all sorts of fantasy creations. Of course the fantasy is real, just as the real is fantasy. You can live inside such fantasy reality. The problem is that they do not fix very well, are very leaky and bubbles are just,well, bubbles - they can collapse and get very wet.

Yale postliberalism in theology (articulated by George Lindbeck) tries to fix an ecumenical definition of Christianity, and because it cannot be fixed as a Truth, it is expressed as a drama. Hans Frei did the same before this with how the Bible is to be understood - it is "history-like" rather than history and gains its identity through expression by being read (it actually has to be read by a community to have its particular expression - in this sense Lindbeck on the ecumenical doctrine comes before Frei on the Bible). John Milbank went further than Linbeck, creating a premodern content of some sort of Catholic Christianity (but not Roman as such) inside the postmodern bubble. It is a way of peace. He further thinks that, inside this space, this perspective can rule all other perspectives, and opposes vigorously sociology by calling it secular theology. It also opposes the Enlightenment.

Now there are these so called "communion conservatives" in Anglicanism wanting to preserve a single, collective, and orthodox Church - orthodox meaning keeping the whole package interrelating without these pesky nuisance liberals importing their Enlightenment (modernist) heresies. So they do it via this Lindbeck/ Milbank type stuff, especially Milbank as he is an Anglican.

One of these is Craig Uffman (right), who therefore promotes conservatism in theology and makes frequent references to John Milbank. He writes an essay on Fulcrum consistent with its communion conservatism as promoted by Graham Kings.

I think its second part, calling the Enlightenment as heresy, is the sort of twaddle that can be expected from the whole package people. It's as if they want to be in the Middle Ages - but none of these people think like they did in the Middle Ages. The whole point about postmodernity is that it is post modern. It is not chuck away the modern, it follows on from it. There is the work of empirical primary sources history, of philosophy, of social science research on human groups and causality, and on semiotics that also related to social anthropology, and there is the scientific falsifiability method and indeed working hypotheses of understandings along the lines of paradigms. There has been the logic of maths. All these matter. These now become, in postmodernity, intensely deconstructed. What are these primary sources and what do they represent to readers? Is every culture to be understood only from within? What does it mean to have language express changing scientific paradigms (plus the impact of common sense defying quantum variation)? What is the impact of maths that is no longer a sufficient, closed and adequate system to itself and cannot handle extremities?

Postmodernity is not some dive into a romanticised past. Of course it takes on board romanticism, and the fantasies of the poetic. It is about eclectic mixing, as in architecture. Daniel Liechty wrote a postliberal book, Theology in Postliberal Perspective, 1990, SCM, but it is overshadowed by the Yale book, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, of 1984 (Liechty's book was started earlier, he told me). This is indeed post-liberal, it understands that there was a liberal phase that it is post about. The book understands different faiths and is driven by ethics. Quite so.

Liberals are all to some extent postliberal, as I say in my paper that might be read out in the local church In Depth Group (see the previous post here). This is because there has to be a package of some sort. But it is no excuse for ignoring other methodologies in other subjects, or calling an important phase in intellectual development a "heresy". This is junk.

It is now a romanticised, rather pathetic hope that somehow an institution can stay loyal to a complete inherited package (from when, precisely - culture changes all the time) and that can be maintained so that it keeps an American Church away from its ethical mission and can keep the Africans on board. The ethical price is just too high. Institutional unity for the sake of unity is just not worth the price of lack of inclusion, when what it seems to be about is some really premodern text that has nothing to do with loving relationships between people who fancy someone else of the same sex.

And this is the point: it is a lot of theological verbage when the ethical question is really quite simple, set against a book that tells us nothing about science, nothing about philosophy, that is not history, that does not employ critical methods - a book which is mythological, that does have ethical insight from Jesus and his expectation of the moment wrapped up within that culture, that is about early Churches written from a Paul dominated path that came to be proto-orthodox and involves an awful lot of arguing in an early charismatic and fluid period. Christians might find great inspiration in the Bible, but are not its slaves.

Bishop Spong's Necessary Letter

On reading this letter by John Shelby Spong, as called An Unfortunate Letter here, I just conclude I agree with it.

This is it (if you don't need to read this, scroll down to the cartoon):

Dear Rowan,

I am delighted that you have agreed to meet with the House of Bishops of the American Episcopal Church in September, even if you appear to be unwilling to come alone. It has seemed strange that you, who have had so much to say about the American Church, have not been willing to do so before now. Your office is still honored by Episcopalians in this country, so our bishops will welcome you warmly and politely. We have some amazingly competent men and women in that body, many of whom have not yet met you.

There is clearly an estrangement between that body and you in your role as the Archbishop of Canterbury. I want to share with you my understanding of the sources of that estrangement. First, I believe that most of our senior bishops, including me, were elated, at your appointment by Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Most Americans are not aware that yours is an appointed, not an elected position. Those of us who knew you were keenly aware of your intellectual gifts, your openness on all of the great social debates of our generation andindeed of your personal warmth. We also believed that the Lambeth Conference of 1998, presided over by your predecessor, George Carey, had been a disaster that would haunt the Communion for at least a quarter of a century. An assembly of bishops hissing at and treating fellow bishops with whom they disagreed quite rudely, was anything but an example of Christian community. The unwillingness of that hostile majority to listen to the voices of invited gay Christians, their use of the Bible in debate as a weapon to justify prejudice, the almost totalitarian attempt made to manage the press and to prevent access to the wider audience and the dishonest denial of the obvious and blatant homophobia among the bishops made that Lambeth Conference the most disillusioning ecclesiastical gathering I have ever attended. The Church desperately needed new leadership and so many of us greeted your appointment with hope. Your detractors in the evangelical camp both in England and in the third world actively lobbied against your appointment. The hopes of those of us who welcomed your appointment were, however, short lived because in one decision after another you seemed incapable of functioning as the leader the Church wanted and needed.

It began at the moment of your appointment when you wrote a public letter to the other primates assuring them that you would not continue in your enlightened and open engagement with the moral issue of defining and welcoming those Christians who are gay and lesbian.

We all knew where you stood. Your ministry had not been secret. We knew you had been one of the voices that sought to temper the homophobia of your predecessor's rhetoric. We knew of your personal friendship with gay clergy and that you had even knowingly ordained a gay man to the priesthood. You, however, seemed to leap immediately to the conclusion that unity was more important than truth. Perhaps you did not realize that your appointment as the archbishop was because you had different values from those of your predecessor and that your values were exactly what the Church wanted and needed in its new archbishop.

In that letter, in a way that was to me a breathtaking display of ineptitude and moral weakness, you effectively abdicated your leadership role. The message you communicated was that in the service of unity you would surrender to whoever had the loudest public voice.

A leader gets only one chance to make a good first impression and you totally failed that chance. Unity is surely a virtue, but it must be weighed against truth, the Church's primary virtue.

Next came the bizarre episode of the appointment of the Rev. Dr. Jeffrey John, a known gay priest, to be the area bishop for Reading in the Diocese of Oxford. He was proposed by the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries. The nomination was approved by all of the necessary authorities, including you, the Prime Minister and the Queen. The fundamentalists and the evangelicals were predictably severe and anything but charitable or Christian. They and their allies in the press assassinated Jeffrey John's character and made his life miserable. Once again you collapsed in the face of this pressure and, in a four-hour conversation, you forced your friend and mine, Jeffery John, who is not only a brilliant New Testament scholar, but also one who gave you his word that he was living a celibate life, to resign his appointment to that Episcopal office. The message went out for all to hear that if people are angry enough, the Archbishop will always back down. Your leadership, as well as our trust in your integrity, all but disappeared.

Shortly thereafter, you concurred in a "guilt" appointment by naming Jeffrey Dean of St. Alban's Cathedral. It is a strange church and a strange hierarchy that proclaims that a gay man cannot be a bishop but can be a dean. Your credibility suffered once again.

When Gene Robinson in the United States was elected the Bishop of New Hampshire and, more particularly, when his election was confirmed by a concurrent majority of the bishops, priests and lay deputies at the General Convention (read General Synod), you appeared to panic. You called an urgent meeting of the primates of the entire Anglican Communion and allowed them to express enormous hostility. No one seemed to challenge either their use of scripture, which revealed an amazing ignorance of the last 250 years of biblical scholarship, or their understanding of homosexuality. By acting as if homosexuality is a choice made by evil people they violated everything that medical science has discovered about sexual orientation in the last century.

Just as the Church was historically wrong in its treatment of women, so now as a result of your leadership, we are espousing a position about homosexuality that is dated, uninformed, inhumane and frankly embarrassing. No learned person stands there today.

Then you appointed the group, under Robin Eames' chairmanship, that produced the Windsor Report. That report confirmed every mistake you had already made. It asked the American Church to apologize to other parts of the Anglican Communion for its "insensitivity." Can one apologize for trying to end prejudice and oppression? If the issue were slavery, would you ask for an apology to the slave holders? That report got the response it deserved. Our leaders were indeed sorry that others felt hurt, but they were not prepared to apologize for taking a giant step in removing one more killing prejudice from both the Church and the world. Those angry elements of the church were not satisfied by the Windsor report, inept as it was. They never will be until they have bent you and this communion into a pre-modern, hate filled, Bible quoting group of people incapable of embracing the world in which we live.

Next came threats issued by the primates of the excommunication of the American Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion, as if they actually had that power. Ultimatums and deadlines for us to conform to their homophobia were treated by you as if that were appropriate behavior. When the American Church elected Katharine Jefferts-Schori to be its Presiding Bishop and thus the Primate of our Province, your response to that major achievement was pathetic. You did not rejoice that equality had finally been achieved in our struggle against sexism; your concern was about how much more difficult her election would make the life of the Anglican Communion. Once again, institutional peace was made primary to the rising consciousness that challenges what the Church has done to women for so long. When Katharine took her place among the other primates, she underwent with dignity, the refusal of some of those bishops to receive communion with her. Is that the mentality required to build unity?

Later you issued a statement saying that if homosexuals want to be received in the life of the Church, they will have to change their behavior. I found that statement incredible. If you mean they have to change from being homosexual then you are obviously not informed about homosexuality. It is not a choice or a sin, anymore than being left handed, or male or female, or black or even transgender is a choice or a sin. All of us simply awaken to these aspects of our identity. That truth is so elementary and so well documented that only prejudiced eyes can fail to recognize it. No one in intellectual circles today still gives that point of view credibility..

Next you declined to invite Gene Robinson to the Lambeth Conference of 2008. All of the closeted homosexual bishops are invited, the honest one is not invited. I can name the gay bishops who have, during my active career. served in both the Episcopal Church and in the Church of England? I bet you can too. Are you suggesting that dishonesty is a virtue?

You continue to act as if quoting the Bible to undergird a dying prejudice is a legitimate tactic. It is in fact the last resort that religious people always use to validate "tradition" over change. The Bible was quoted to support the Divine Right of Kings in 1215, to oppose Galileo in the 17th century, to oppose Darwin in the 19th century, to support slavery and apartheid in the 19th and 20th centuries, to keep women from being educated, voting and being ordained in the 20th and 21st century. Today it is quoted to continue the oppression and rejection of homosexual people. The Bible has lost each of those battles. It will lose the present battle and you, my friend, will end up on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of morality and the wrong side of truth. It is a genuine tragedy that you, the most intellectually-gifted Archbishop of Canterbury in almost a century, have become so miserable a failure in so short a period of time.

You were appointed to lead, Rowan, not to capitulate to the hysterical anger of those who are locked in the past. For the sake of God and this Church, the time has come for you to do so. I hope you still have that capability.

John Shelby Spong, 8th Bishop of Newark, Retired

The issue is its apparent impolite language and also its suggestion of a lack of welcome to The Episcopal Church House of Bishops meeting in New Orleans on September 21 and 22. Well, there is a sense that the letter is about tragedy, and the person it addresses may end up as a tragic figure given the Anglican situation of such chronic division. Whatever one might think about linguistic ways and means, the substance of this letter is surely right, however, in the use of the Bible to maintain unethical positions has failed every time - and will fail this time. The common culture is shifting, and intellectually the homosexual debate in the Anglican Communion leaves the Anglican Communion looking as if it is lost in its own world and in its own unethical stew. The ethical argument was always there, and now Western society is recognising this argument. Unity for the sake of unity is pointless, but to maintain unity on the grounds of some appalling statements coming out of parts of Africa is ridiculous given the changes taking place. Ethically, as ever, the Churches are slow to catch up, but to introduce a process by which they can be even slower when they could be faster is worse than retrograde. The only way forward, I believe, is a loose confederation of Churches where there is then a series of recognitions and lack of recognitions between Churches, a set of specific agreements for social, welfare and education projects between them, and an argument ongoing on the central ethical issue: of the full humanity of people who are just trying to get on in life with a significant other, giving one another mutual support in fully expressed relationships. It is time for Anglicanism to grow up.

Computer Dies: New Creation Writes

I am currently setting up a new computer, a build that contains the old drive as a slave and had data left on. What a job it is building it in the fashion needed to run interconnecting programs and have them laid out in start menu folders according to my preferences and not trade names and general desktop chaos. In the course of setting up and loading the operating system, the drive renamed itself leaving the operating system unfound and a blank screen. I had to learn a lot very quickly.

I'm up and running now, with so much more to do however, and mistakes and problems along the way. My first actual output is a paper for the St Mary's Barton-on-Humber In Depth Group about non-exclusive spirituality, to be incorporated into another presentation, read out or ignored by the effective leader of the group. Non-exclusive Christianity is his own bias, one that I share.

The work was typed and text processed on this computer, but hand-made into HTML and uploaded on to the website from the other computer that has been running nicely since 1998. The one that went pop was purchased from a crook, as I discovered earlier, and who shut down his shop some time back but carries on trading from a pick up and set down point. So I was back there last week, pointing out the details of his crookery.

Quizling

This is probably one of the better belief quizzes (one question, however, had an inadequate choice that did not allow a sufficient workaround):

http://www.beliefnet.com/section/quiz/index.asp?sectionID=10002&surveyID=83

and the result I obtained was 141:

60 - 149 You are a Bishop Spong Christian (a.k.a. "Biblical Revisionist").

This next one is more behavioural, but also daft:

http://www.gotoquiz.com/how_christian_are_you

I scored 66% on that. It tells me that I don't know what I am talking about andI am neither one thing nor the other. Wrong on both counts, then.

Then with this one I scored as a "moderate evangelical", when I am not an evangelical at all, plus its blurb was stupid.

What Kind of Evangelical Are You created with QuizFarm.com

I have seen the above one before, but used all three as used by the ornamentalsheep, as this rather higher scoring ordinand in Wales reports. To be called a Jerry Falwell Christian and respond to the following text that "this is nice" would not exactly be my response. I regard him and what he stands for as anything but nice.

I suppose I ought to compose my own quiz, but then it might not communicate very well and would be puzzling. I regard theology and faith to be too qualitative for a quantitative output quiz.

ITMA - A

This is by way of a follow-up to later matters in the last entry.

It seems that Chris Sugden, having been visiting Jamaica, has been feeding the Jamaican Gleaner with his viewpoint, and the word "feeding" is used by me only because of how journalists, being generally lazy, reprint the contents of press releases or take whatever is offered (the dictum being the more you provide,the more likely they are to accept your contribution); of course, on pet subjects they offer their own ever continuing bias, so let's allow for that as well. I know nothing of the Jamaican Gleaner, so it is a case of following the text of the report. The report in full is here, from 1 September 2007:

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070901/news/news5.html

It's another case of a referring to the best bits.

Archbishop Peter Akinola, being the leader of the largest Anglican diocese is seen by many in the church as a natural replacement for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams.

Well this is quite a development. Who came up with that one, that Akinola is a "natural replacement" for Rowan Williams? Is this Chris Sugden's view?

Sugden is suggesting that the Episcopal church missed an opportunity to take a middle path, and is trying to label it as extreme: after a simple assertion that the Episcopal Church did not fulfil the wishes of the Windsor Report in June 2006 there is then Sugden's own explanation of the dynamic of that meeting:

According to Sugden, "Bishop Peter Lee of Diocese of Virginia an effort to create a kind of middle ground that would satisfy the pro-homosexual lobby and the orthodox Anglicans." "First, people were saying that there are 15 per cent of the Anglicans who are the activists for gay inclusion. Second, there are 15 per cent who are biblically convinced that while people with gay orientation are welcomed like anybody else, there can be no gay practice. And third, there were 70 per cent in the middle who are saying that there is a plague on both your houses - we want to get on being Christians and will that 70 per cent please stand and be counted."

These figures are purely imagined, but let's see what is the argument:

"Bishop Peter Lee was arguing that the average person in the pew just wanted to get on, so let's have something that accepts the Windsor Report with certain caveats. But there was a very strong opposition to that. Peter Lee's argument was we can do nothing and we should do nothing that gives any signal to our active gay and lesbian members that they are anything else but fully members of this church and fully open to all the senior positions in the church - priests, bishops. Therefore, any agreement you come to with the rest of the Anglican communion, should not be at price these people who we fully accept with all their gay practices as being perfectly acceptable members of the Anglican community." But, Bishop Lee's argument, Canon Sugden said, was crushed because that sort of middle of the way view - was acceptable to neither the gay lobby nor the conservative lobby. So the idea of a solid middle ground collapsed.

In fact, that proposal, of Peter Lee, to keep faith with active gay and lesbian members, would have satisfied those very people. It is unclear how this relates to the supposed 70%, if it does. The account just seems odd. What happened is then returned to, despite the biased comment earlier in the report (The 2.3-million member Episcopal Church in the United States, which is led by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, convened the general convention in June of 2006 but did not fulfil the wishes of the Windsor Report.)

So the report goes on, in thus contradictory style:

Following the general convention of the Episcopal church in the United States, the Archbishop of Canterbury created a panel to consider the way forward. The panel drew from the Primates Committee and the Anglican Consultative Council. This group met in September 2006 but they kept their report secretive until a meeting with all primates in Tanzania last February. The report delivered at the Tanzania meeting by the Archbishop of Canterbury was that the Episcopal Church in America had, as their polity allowed, substantially met the recommendations of the Windsor Report.

This does not exactly equate with a simple statement that the Windsor Report sub-group (the 'panel') found that The Episcopal Church had passed on two recommendations and was neutral about the third. There is then this reference to particularly Archbishop Drexel Gomez:

Canon Sugden reported that Archbishop Gomez rejected the Canterbury clerics position, arguing that panel's report was unacceptable and was not an accurate or fair representation of the positions of the Episcopal Church in the United States. The primates gave the Episcopal Church seven months to clarify their reaction to the Windsor Report. That seven month expires on September 30.

Now they are not exactly waiting for September 30, due to these continuing consecrations of Americans under the Kenyans and Ugandans, that follow on from the Nigerians and the Rwandans. This inability to wait is being made clear:

Canon Sugden said it seems the mood of the primates is that gay issues have rocked the Anglican Church long enough and it was time to forge ahead. He cited the response of Archbishop Akinola in a recent speech to the House of Bishops, who said that the matter has dragged on long enough and there can be no semantic appeasing of the various factions in the church. Hence, Akinola stressed, the time had come for the church to choose.

Later on the report states, again with a loaded view:

Though public gay scandals have been rocking the church since 2003, there has hardly been even a feeble mumble out of the Archbishop of Canterbury in defence of the orthodox position in the United States, which is the view of Bishop Duncan of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.
"In other words, since the Archbishop of Canterbury has not provided for the safe oversight of the orthodox in the United States, he has forfeited his role as the one who gathers the Communion. This has become further obvious with the refusal of the invitation to the Lambeth Conference by the leaders of over half the Anglicans in the world and the questioning by some English bishops as to whether they will attend".

The text of the report then begins to look close to that posted on the Anglican Mainstream website in Chris Sugden's own writing (use of such phraseology as dumbed-down Lambeth Conference which will not address this issue decisively), as discussed in the previous entry here. It throws in at the end, as well as a mention of the September 30 deadline (one wonders how that is relevant given the stance of the boundary crossers like these particular African Churches) the fact that the Episcopal diocese of Chicago on Tuesday included a lesbian priest among five nominees for bishop.

Drexel Gomez was present at the consecrations on September 1, and yet he chairs the Covenant Design Group that is supposed to created a process that guides change in the Anglican Communion to the slowest according to resistance to change from some of its Churches. So it seems he is at once guiding the Anglican Communion towards some sort of solution, including The Episcopal Church (which it isn't, because it won't work) whilst at the same time involving himself with those who are undermining The Episcopal Church and the present condition of the Anglican Communion. It seems that he is batting in both teams, rather like Bishops Duncan and Iker. Chris Sugden is also batting in both teams; he is one of those by his own words who clearly wants Rowan Williams replaced as Archbishop and wants the Communion to have a different basis of operation - in practice will mean an alternative and competing communion. There will be no rush to join Akinola's Communion, even if he is seen as a "natural replacement" by some people, presumably including Chris Sugden.

ITMA

It's that man again. A certain Rev. Dr. Chris Sugden never denied that he was involved in the creation of a document sent out in the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) Archbishop's name (Peter Akinola), but the Archbishop's Communications Officer, The Venerable AkinTunde Popoola, who was at the centre of writing and overseeing this document and sending it out for comment, stated this:

I would have believed the ‘computer software’ story were it not for the allegation of ‘minor amendments’ by the Canon Chris Sugden who had nothing to do with the document.

http://www.anglican-nig.org/main.php?k_j=12&d=94&p_t=index.php?

Also see http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/002573.html#comments

Well he did have something to do with the document, because the Word file is available for all to see. Perhaps Tunde Popoola should take some advice: if you are going to lie, make sure you do not leave documentary evidence so that you are found out. Or, better still, don't lie.

It might be difficult to see the authorship of changes, but with the Track Changes displayed, conversion to a web page within MS Word and then viewing the source brings out all the authors. Here is an example that shows that said people worked on the document:

datetime="2007-08-13T08:39"prediction/ins/span span class=msoInsins

cite="mailto:Martyn%20Minns" datetime="2007-08-15T09:52"a/ins/spanspan

class=msoInsins cite="mailto:Chris%20Sugden" datetime="2007-08-15T14:44"span

class=msoDeldel cite="mailto:Martyn%20Minns" datetime="2007-08-15T09:52"A/del/spanspan

class=msoInsins datetime="2007-08-15T14:44"t /ins/span/ins/spanspan

class=msoInsins cite="mailto:Martyn%20Minns" datetime="2007-08-15T09:59"t/ins/span

http://episcopalchurch.typepad.com/episcope/files/A_Most_Agonizing_Journey.doc

The main question however is what is Chris Sugden up to in a more strategic sense; approving as he is of recent consecrations of Kenyan bishops to operate in the United States. He has now come out with a personally penned piece that is simply very significant for the future intentions of not just Anglicanism in the USA but also in the UK.

It is called Not Schism but Revolution

These are texts from it that I have highlighted and extracted, and on which I add comment:

the Communion has been increasingly under the dominance of leadership which is over-influenced by the assumptions of western intellectual culture through the dominant role of the Church of England and ECUSA. People are now saying publicly that this unrepresentative dominance must end.

Some people also say that Churches should relate to the culture they are in, and this is the case with the United States and the United Kingdom, otherwise they become uncommunicative sects. The Communion should be flexible, not centralised or going in a centralising direction. It is why there is opposition to the Covenant; it is a huge error by Rowan Williams that the Covenant can govern a process of change when the Communion is so bipolar. Relevant to the article and what it states is Chris Sugden's coupling of the Church of England and The Episcopal Church (TEC). Simply, the boundary crossings in the USA could come to the UK, especially if the leadership of the Church of England, the Church in Wales and the Scottish Episcopal Church is deemed equally heretical - and the latter two do have a more consistent liberal identity than the Church of England. So what does Chris Sugden state?

In other words, since the Archbishop of Canterbury has not provided for the safe oversight of the orthodox in the United States, he has forfeited his role as the one who gathers the Communion.

This is about an absence of oversight structures being set up for dissident congregations in the USA. It was against TEC polity, and to decide upon it takes its General Convention to do it, if it so decides, in 2009. It is hardly the Archbishop of Canterbury's fault, but he is being increasingly targeted by the schismatics, especially as the border crossings intensify.

refusing to attend a dumbed-down Lambeth Conference

The reference to dumbing down is another attack on the Archbishop. He has made it clear that invitations are for discussions, Bible study and working parties, and not for passing resolutions. Perhaps Lambeth is being intellectualised up, not dumbed down: he wants no repeat of rowdy meetings and railroaded resolutions. However, attacking it in advance is preparation for alternative gatherings which, no doubt, will pass resolutions.

the old leadership gets increasingly out of touch with reality. The Archbishop of York

Now the Archbishop of York has stated that these sexual questions that obsess the likes of Anglican Mainstream and others are not a primary doctrinal issue, whereas they say from a biblical literalist point of view that they are. The Archbishop has also stated that those who set up a Not the Lambeth Conference meeting are being schismatic. So obviously they don't like him.

The Communion will remain, but the form and the leadership will change.

This is obviously a reference to a different centre for the Anglican Communion and a different organising principle. However, it will not "remain", it will be another, and new. It is important to note here that the conservative faction has already split, so that the likes of Ephraim Reader retain contact with the Anglican Communion through the Archbishop of Canterbury, whereas his once pal Bishop Robert Duncan are with the people who intend (obviously from this piece) a new Communion.

This is another tract by Chris Sugden, one of the organisers of the new Communion, and surely he is not going to be a principle organiser in England. Oh and watch out for the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, a lonely episcopal sender of greetings to the recent Kenyan consecrations in the USA (a few others would join him).

Let's be clear, now. When the Anglo-Catholic traditionalists lost the vote about ordaining women back in 1993 their backs were broken as a movement within the main body of the Church of England. A different kind of Affirming Catholicism took their place. When Chris Sugden and others create the new Communion, the effect on evangelicals could well be the same - divided, weakened and taking the weight of evangelicalism to the more liberal Open Evangelicals. The effect of the new Communion could be precisely the opposite of what Chris Sugden intends. Such is often the case in the history of institutionalised religion.

I recall different times and events, but those Presbyterian Puritans set out in 1662 to produce a pure Church in their own image, and ended up being the backbone of liberal Unitarianism. I wonder what Chris Sugden may produce, indirectly if not directly?