"Include new province," by the Rev. D. Stuart Dunnan

an interesting (challenging/provocative/controversial/humble) opinion on our Anglican Soap Opera...(from Episcopal Life Online)...

Include New Province
By D. Stuart Dunnan, February 17, 2009

Click image for detail

[Episcopal News Service] As I watch the sad saga of our bishops' legalistic and punitive response to 'traditionalist" bishops, dioceses and parishes who are attempting to leave the Episcopal Church in order to form a new North American Anglican province, I am reminded of the defensive and dismissive response of the Church of England bishops to the Methodist Movement in the 18th century. The result, of course, was the founding and development of a separate Methodist Church, which is now much larger than the 'Anglican" Church (at least as we are now constituted) on this continent.

Imagine the strength and witness of Anglicanism today if the Methodists were welcomed as a preaching order within the Church of England. Surely, they would be more 'orthodox" and we would be more 'vibrant," and together we would be much larger and much more effective for the gospel in the world than we are divided. This, by the way, is exactly what Innocent III achieved when he embraced St. Francis and welcomed his friars into the ministry of the Catholic Church at the beginning of the 13th century, despite the fact that they were preaching such a dangerous 'new" doctrine.

Now, what I wonder is this: What would happen if the Presiding Bishop with the support of the House of Bishops were to welcome the formation of a new province for 'traditionalists" within the Episcopal Church, allowing every diocese, parish and church institution to join this province with a two-thirds vote by the appropriate parish meeting, convention or governing body? She could even stipulate an acceptable window of a year during which this vote would be required to happen.

In this way, both 'sides" of our church could continue in dialogue from protected positions of mutual respect without the present feelings of distrust and fear. Both also would be encouraged to grow by teaching the doctrines and practicing the liturgies they believe in, which they could proceed to do with conviction and enthusiasm. We could, for instance, continue to share the Church Pension Fund and Episcopal Relief and Development, and our primates and bishops could continue to meet on a regular basis to look for areas of agreement, common witness, shared costs and joint projects, but in a way that is more representative, more conducive to collegiality and more focused on results than our present General Convention.

I also wonder if it would not be appropriate for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Consultative Council to ask us to do this in one final attempt at unity and civility before they are forced by our actions to actively establish or passively recognize a permanent state of schism between us.

I would hope that the traditionalists would find such an arrangement better than what now is proposed, as it would allow clergy, parishes and dioceses to reorganize without the loss of their properties and the cost of legal action. The risk for the Presiding Bishop, of course, is that too many will want to leave, but at least they will not be completely leaving, and no one will remain because they have been bullied and threatened into submission.

There is also the obvious advantage that such an action on her part and on the part of the rest of the House of Bishops would show true Christian humility and a more genuine openness to the power of the Holy Spirit to build the church and thus to lead the church in his, if not necessarily our own, direction.

-- The Rev. D. Stuart Dunnan is headmaster at Saint James School, St. James, Maryland.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Responds to the Gafcon Declaration

Our Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams can be criticized for many things, but this response to the GAFCON final declaration is excellent, and points to several problems with the recent declaration. I echo Tobias Haller at In a Godward Direction by giving the Archbishop a hearty "hear here" for this response. Have a read...

from the Anglican Communion News Service...

Archbishop of Canterbury responds to GAFCON statement

Posted On : June 30, 2008 5:04 PM |
ACNS: ACNS4417
Related Categories: Lambeth

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has responded to the final declaration of the Global Anglican Future Conference with the following statement:

The Final Statement from the GAFCON meeting in Jordan and Jerusalem contains much that is positive and encouraging about the priorities of those who met for prayer and pilgrimage in the last week. The ‘tenets of orthodoxy’ spelled out in the document will be acceptable to and shared by the vast majority of Anglicans in every province, even if there may be differences of emphasis and perspective on some issues. I agree that the Communion needs to be united in its commitments on these matters, and I have no doubt that the Lambeth Conference will wish to affirm all these positive aspects of GAFCON’s deliberations. Despite the claims of some, the conviction of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as Lord and God and the absolute imperative of evangelism are not in dispute in the common life of the Communion

However, GAFCON’s proposals for the way ahead are problematic in all sorts of ways, and I urge those who have outlined these to think very carefully about the risks entailed.

A ‘Primates’ Council’ which consists only of a self-selected group from among the Primates of the Communion will not pass the test of legitimacy for all in the Communion. And any claim to be free to operate across provincial boundaries is fraught with difficulties, both theological and practical – theological because of our historic commitments to mutual recognition of ministries in the Communion, practical because of the obvious strain of responsibly exercising episcopal or primatial authority across enormous geographical and cultural divides.

Two questions arise at once about what has been proposed. By what authority are Primates deemed acceptable or unacceptable members of any new primatial council? And how is effective discipline to be maintained in a situation of overlapping and competing jurisdictions?

No-one should for a moment impute selfish or malicious motives to those who have offered pastoral oversight to congregations in other provinces; these actions, however we judge them, arise from pastoral and spiritual concern. But one question has repeatedly been raised which is now becoming very serious: how is a bishop or primate in another continent able to discriminate effectively between a genuine crisis of pastoral relationship and theological integrity, and a situation where there are underlying non-theological motivations at work? We have seen instances of intervention in dioceses whose leadership is unquestionably orthodox simply because of local difficulties of a personal and administrative nature. We have also seen instances of clergy disciplined for scandalous behaviour in one jurisdiction accepted in another, apparently without due process. Some other Christian churches have unhappy experience of this problem and it needs to be addressed honestly.

It is not enough to dismiss the existing structures of the Communion. If they are not working effectively, the challenge is to renew them rather than to improvise solutions that may seem to be effective for some in the short term but will continue to create more problems than they solve. This challenge is one of the most significant focuses for the forthcoming Lambeth Conference. One of its major stated aims is to restore and deepen confidence in our Anglican identity. And this task will require all who care as deeply as the authors of the statement say they do about the future of Anglicanism to play their part.

The language of ‘colonialism’ has been freely used of existing patterns. No-one is likely to look back with complacency to the colonial legacy. But emerging from the legacy of colonialism must mean a new co-operation of equals, not a simple reversal of power. If those who speak for GAFCON are willing to share in a genuine renewal of all our patterns of reflection and decision-making in the Communion, they are welcome, especially in the shaping of an effective Covenant for our future together.

I believe that it is wrong to assume we are now so far apart that all those outside the GAFCON network are simply proclaiming another gospel. This is not the case; it is not the experience of millions of faithful and biblically focused Anglicans in every province. What is true is that, on all sides of our controversies, slogans, misrepresentations and caricatures abound. And they need to be challenged in the name of the respect and patience we owe to each other in Jesus Christ.

I have in the past quoted to some in the Communion who would call themselves radical the words of the Apostle in I Cor.11.33: ‘wait for one another’. I would say the same to those in whose name this statement has been issued. An impatience at all costs to clear the Lord’s field of the weeds that may appear among the shoots of true life (Matt.13.29) will put at risk our clarity and effectiveness in communicating just those evangelical and catholic truths which the GAFCON statement presents.

© Rowan Williams

Richard Hooker, Presbyter and Theologian, 1600

Todd Granger at the Confessing Reader has posted the following entry in commemoration for Richard Hooker, the great Anglican theologian and presbyter (priest) who was a large mover in the construction of the Elizabethan Settlement that bought England time between the 'warring' factions of the Calvinists and the Roman Catholics... he is an important giant of a theologian and Todd Granger has done a fine job of posting some of the essentials of his life and work. I've posted Mr. Granger's entire post below:

Born c. 1554 near Exeter, Richard Hooker was admitted at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, though the influence of Bishop John Jewel. He became a Fellow of the College in 1577, and in 1579 he was appointed deputy professor of Hebrew. Vacating his fellowship on his marriage, in 1584 he was name rector of Drayton Beauchamp and in 1585 Master of the Temple, where he controverted with the Calvinistic views of the Reader, William Travers. In 1591 he became rector of Boscombe in Wiltshire and in 1595 rector of Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, where he died in 1600.

Hooker was par excellence the apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 and is perhaps the most accomplished advocate that Anglicanism has ever had. He developed his thought in his treatise, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, five of whose eight Books were published during his lifetime. (The other three Books were published several decades later.) In conception the Laws was a livre de circonstance, designed to justify the constitutional structure of the Elizabethan Church, but it embodied a broadly conceived philosophical theology. His opposition to the Puritans, who held to a literal following of the Scriptures as an absolute in the sense that whatever was not expressly commanded in Scripture was unlawful, led him to elaborate a whole theory of law, based on the absolute fundamental of natural law, whose “seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world” (Laws, 1.16.8). This natural law, which governs the universe and to which both ecclesiastical and civil polity are subservient, is the expression of God’s supreme reason, and everything, including the Scriptures, must be interpreted in the light of it. “Laws human must be made according to the general laws of nature, and without contradiction unto any positive law in Scripture. Otherwise they are ill made” (Laws, 3.9.2). The Puritans were wholly mistaken in regarding the Bible as a mechanical code of rules; for not everything that is rightful finds precise direction in the Scriptures. In a similar way the permanence of law does not preclude development of detail. The Church is an organic, not a static, institution, and the method of Church government and ecclesiastical administration will change according to circumstances. Hence the Church of England, though reformed, possesses continuity with the medieval Church. Further, the visible organized Church is a political society, “a court not temporal merely”, yet able to control its own legislation in a way analogous to that in which the civil state through parliament makes its laws.

In particular matters, Hooker has been less universally acceptable to Anglicans. In his unreadiness to condemn the orders of the Continental Protestant churches, he denied the necessity of episcopal ordination. (It should be pointed out that this was a mainstream view in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England, and even such a Caroline Divine as John Cosin, made Bishop of Durham after the Restoration, was unwilling to deny the efficacy of the orders of the Reformed Churches on the Continent.) Hooker’s doctrine of the Eucharist closely approximates in many places to receptionism. His argument on points of detail is not infrequently difficult to grasp and not wholly clear. But Hooker remains one of the greatest theologians that the English Church has ever possessed; and he conveyed his beliefs in a masterly English prose.

Taken from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited.

The Collect

O God of truth and peace, you raised up your servant Richard Hooker in a day of bitter controversy to defend with sound reasoning and great charity the catholic and reformed religion: Grant that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The propers for the commemoration of Richard Hooker, Presbyter and Theologian, are published on the website of the Lectionary Page.

Some reflections on Anglicanism from the Seabury-Western Dean

Some helpful and interesting reflections on Anglicanism (in response to a letter in The Living Church) from the Very Rev. Gary Hall, the dean and president of Seabury-Western Seminary...

Welcome at the Table
7/23/2007

In his Guest Column, “Careless Communion” [TLC, July 8], the Rev. Ian Montgomery described a commencement he attended at “one of our seminaries” where, from his point of view, everything seemed to go wrong. The eucharistic bread crumbled and fell to the floor, the presider made an open invitation to communion, and the preacher seemed to endorse what the article called the “new Episcopal religion.”

It didn’t take me long to realize that the event Fr. Montgomery described was, in fact, the commencement of the seminary of which I am the dean, Seabury-Western in Evanston, Ill. While Fr. Montgomery ably expresses his reaction to some elements of our liturgy that day, I would like to address a few of his concerns.

Fr. Montgomery writes that “the bread used crumbled badly and was dropping to the floor during the administration of the sacrament.” Nobody who knows Seabury and its liturgical traditions well could seriously think that we are intentionally lax in our treatment of the sacrament. What Fr. Montgomery experienced was the unfortunate consequence of our new policy of using gluten-free bread at all celebrations of the Eucharist. The Seabury community now has several members with Celiac disease (gluten intolerance), and so we have started using only gluten-free bread as an expression of our inclusive hospitality. If you have ever tried to bake gluten-free bread, you know how tricky it can be. I regret that the recipe used at commencement produced friable bread, and we will work to make sure that the experience is not repeated.

While crumbly bread might seem an apt metaphor for Anglicanism, in reality it’s an expression of a community trying to react pastorally to a new situation — which, in a sense, is what so much of the current conflicts over sexuality, open communion, and inclusive language is about in the first place.

Read the rest of this fine article HERE.