Archive for June, 2008
Written by: Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
In 1997 the so-called “Virginia Report” of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission began a rich process of reflecting on the needs of a growing, diversifying, and changing Anglican Communion. This included analyzing and re-thinking in some cases the current structures and relationships among Anglican churches around the world and generally demonstrating the demand for greater explicitness and deliberation in the way the Communion functions. The Report’s opening theological discussion (2.1) sets out the reality of divine “Covenant” as the fundamental means by which God’s purposes are enacted historically.
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June 23 2008 | Articles
Written by: Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
The Society for the Propagation of Reformed Evangelical Anglican Doctrine (SPREAD) recently issued an appeal that the Anglican Communion be split. In particular, the appeal, entitled “Counterfeit Communion and the Truth that Sets Us Free”, has urged that all those committed to the “Anglican Faith” which is “defined by the Church of England’s Articles of Religion, 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the 1662 Ordinal” , “separate from” the Archbishop of Canterbury and form a new and properly orthodox Anglican Communion. This “urgent call to action”, the appeal says, will be presented to the assembled gathering at the upcoming meeting of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) to be held in and near Jerusalem.
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June 10 2008 | Articles
Written by: The Very Revd Dr. George Sumner
Friday, June 6th, 2008
I heard recently that my teacher of New Testament in university, Krister Stendahl, died- though I came to disagree with him on several counts, I am grateful and appreciative of him. He was a scholar’s scholar; after a serious auto accident, he was asked whether he wanted his back fused straight up or at a 45% angle, to which he responded: “give me the slanted one, I read a lot.” He also had his 10 commandments for preachers, prominent among them being “don’t preach on love,” which I find easy to obey. Harder is the following mitzvah: you are responsible not for what you say, but for what they hear! Ouch. And here, my brothers and sisters, is what they hear in this pervasively, tolerant and pluralist and relativist age of ours: Christian words and symbols are powerful and evocative, and lead Christians toward the divine, and yet God is, at the end of the day bigger and greater, and so room remains, for other words and symbols. And there is a way in which of course our God is too small, and a way in which there is value in other orbits of symbol, and there are ways in which the Trinity itself is made to pull freight to make these points in our time. And more importantly for our work, there is a yet greater way in which the Trinity is the prime barricade against this escape route. Still, the tolerant and pluralist and relativist air we breathe makes it hard for ordinary ears in the pews or on the streets to hear. How do we know? Who’s to say? Modern worries, our worries these. In other words, we can be confident that our talk about immanent and economic, about revelation and authority, however rarified it may seem, collides with a deep prejudice of our time. Maybe the 11th law of preaching is gratitude when we hear the sound of impact between stone of stumbling and furniture.
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June 06 2008 | Articles
Written by: The Very Revd Dr. George Sumner
Friday, June 6th, 2008
It was a moment of clarity, and I convey it to you with permission. I was a tagalong at a meeting of Windsor bishops in Texas a year and a half ago, and it was the turn of Bishop Mark McDonald, then of Alaska, now of indigenous Canada, (and I would proudly add, a Wycliffe College graduate), to speak. He began by telling us that, during debates on the same-sex issue, Gwitchen Anglicans would sometimes whisper to one another “white people are crazy.” He went on to explain why. The Gwitchen want to say three things, actually. First of all, in the village we have ways to make room for those who are unusual. Second, the male and the female are the two tentpoles God put up to support his creation. And thirdly, in the frozen western Arctic, to leave is to die. And I would add, editorially, the genius of the quotation is in saying all three at once.
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June 06 2008 | Articles
Written by: Rev. Russell Levenson, Jr.
Friday, June 6th, 2008
If I may, I step ever so gently into this discussion. I rarely visit the blogs, and even more rarely contribute to them; but obviously for those of us who are, at present, committed to the CPP (Communion Partners Plan) this is an important moment to give more fuller expression to the meaning, purpose and hopes of those of us who have gathered around the Plan.
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June 06 2008 | Articles
Written by: Rev. Professor Christopher Seitz
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
The American Episcopal Church has since its inception understood itself to be an integral part of a much broader Anglican reality. Unlike the Methodist Church, for example, it chose not to declare ecclesial independence in the American context, but carefully referred and deferred to the Church of England and to Anglicanism in the wider context of the British Isles. Samuel Seabury sought consecration in the Church of England and when that was not possible for political reasons, he was consecrated in Aberdeen.Though the American Church had functioned without indigenous bishops for many years, when the revolutionary war ended it was deemed desirable and logical for American Bishops to be consecrated, and the oversight that had been exercised from England to be shifted to the New World. That said, matters related to the Book of Common Prayer and even the composition of the General Convention (now with a House of Bishops) were sufficiently weighty that deference to the concerns of the English Bishops was still deemed necessary (place of the Nicene Creed, the descent clause in the Apostles Creed, and so forth).
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June 02 2008 | Articles