Archive for June, 2010
Written by: Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Over the past few weeks, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (TEC), Katharine Jefferts Schori, has responded pointedly to the removal of TEC’s members from Anglican Communion commissions dealing with ecumenical relations and matters of the Communion’s “faith and order”. The removal itself was announced at the end of May in a letter to the Communion by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It was later explicated by the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Canon Kenneth Kearon, during visits to the Canadian church’s General Synod, and TEC’s Executive Council. At issue, of course, is TEC’s decision earlier this year, to go forward with the consecration of a partnered lesbian, Mary Glasspool, as a bishop in the Diocese of Los Angeles. And this decision, according to Achbishop Williams and Canon Kearon, is one that goes counter to a consistently articulated position by Communion councils. These councils have, over and over, insisted that church affirmations of same-sex partnerships are, on the basis of Scriptural teaching, contrary to the “mind of the Communion”, and therefore that e.g. the consecration of partnered homosexual bishops and church-administered same-sex blessings should cease among member churches.
Presiding Bishop Schori’s response has criticized Archbishop Williams’ decision on several grounds. Here, let me address just three of her objections: first, that the Archbishop’s actions represent a move towards “centralization” within the Communion, viewed especially in terms of the application of “sanctions” against member churches; second, that in removing TEC members from the Communion commissions in question, the Archbishop has somehow acted as if the proposed Anglican Covenant now before the Communion’s churches were already in effect when it is not; third, that a proper understanding of the Communion’s life would entail the maintenance of diversity among Anglican churches, rather than the (punitive) pursuit of “uniformity”.
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June 29 2010 | Articles
Written by: Mr. Mark McCall
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
It has become commonplace for The Episcopal Church to proclaim itself an international church of sixteen countries. For example, the minutes of the October 2009 Executive Council record that:
The Presiding Bishop gave Opening Remarks. She asked for a moratorium on use of “National Church” and enumerated the countries in which The Episcopal Church [hereafter, TEC] works.
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June 22 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Friday, June 18th, 2010
The Episcopal New Service has announced that Bishop Ian Douglas of Connecticut was elected by the Executive Council on June 18 to succeed Bishop Catherine Roskam as the episcopal representative from TEC on the Anglican Consultative Council. In addition, a presbyter, the Rev. Gay Jennings, was elected to the clerical seat on the ACC formerly held but since vacated by Bishop Douglas.
We note that until recently Bishop Douglas also held a presbyter seat on the Executive Council as well but he formally resigned that position in February in light of his anticipated consecration to the episcopate. He noted in his resignation letter that:
The reason for my resignation is my “translation” to a new order as a result of being elected to the episcopate in the Diocese of Connecticut. I thus can no longer serve as a presbyter elected by the General Convention to the Executive Council.
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June 18 2010 | Articles
Written by: Rev. Dr. Philip Turner
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
In the brief time since first it appeared, the recent pastoral letter to the Episcopal Church by its Presiding Bishop has brought forth a voluminous and heated response. If, however, this letter is to be assessed adequately, it is not enough to celebrate its boldness or decry its inaccuracies and half-truths. Before assessing the moral and spiritual worth of the letter or picking apart its various claims, it is necessary to ask just what purpose this letter is meant to serve. Once an examination of this sort is complete, it will become clear that the argument put forward by the Presiding Bishop is a stark example of the tail wagging the dog.
Clearly the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral was written in response to the Pentecost letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In that letter the Archbishop made it clear that the recent actions of TEC raise questions about the suitability of members of our church to represent the Anglican Communion in conversations with the Communion’s ecumenical partners. He also indicated that he, as Archbishop of Canterbury, has authority to determine the status of the Presiding Bishop in respect to the meeting of the Primates. He said as well that he intends to consult with the Primates about the most prudent course for the exercise this authority.
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June 10 2010 | Articles
Written by: Rev. Professor Christopher Seitz
Sunday, June 6th, 2010
The central teaching of Jesus Christ in John’s Gospel concerning the Holy Spirit is found in chapters 14 and 16 of the Fourth Gospel. The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church is representative of the view that the Holy Spirit (or “the Spirit”) is responsible for endorsing a new understanding of sexual relationships as appropriate for members of the same gender. The warrant for this view more widely held is John 16: God the Holy Spirit is ‘leading the church into a truth’ the church has not known until now, and continues not to know elsewhere, as God has spoken this to The Episcopal Church (“The Spirit does seem to be saying to many within The Episcopal Church that gay and lesbian persons are God’s good creation, that an aspect of good creation is the possibility of lifelong, faithful partnership, and that such persons may indeed be good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the Church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones”). This could either be a matter of timing – so technically God the Holy Spirit speaks only one truth on this matter, and so those who have not heard the Holy Spirit will hear the Holy Spirit leading them into new truth eventually (“Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” [John 16:12-13]) – or it could be that the Holy Spirit endorses diversity of hearings (“That growing awareness does not deny the reality that many Anglicans and not a few Episcopalians still fervently hold traditional views about human sexuality”) . This latter understanding seeks grounding in the Presiding Bishop’s understanding of the Pentecost event of Acts 2 (“Pentecost is most fundamentally a continuing gift of the Spirit, rather than a limitation or quenching of that Spirit”) as contrasted with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reading of Pentecost as a “single understanding of gospel realities”(as she puts it) in a letter to which she is responding in defense of her own position.
We note in passing that: 1) John’s account of the Holy Spirit involves several aspects, explained in the narrative movement of his Gospel, and that any reading of John needs to be able to integrate all of these if Christ’s teaching is to be coherent as intended (hence Christ’s concern with truth); 2) the Holy Spirit can only with difficulty be seen as ‘inspiring diversity’ in Acts; the tension in the account is between a gift of foreign languages that are heard as intelligible by Jews from the widest geographical reach in their first or native tongues (so Calvin et al); or the gift is of a single tongue language that all these gathered Jews are inspired to hear as intelligible in their native languages; the history of interpretation is not uniform here. But in neither case is the point that the Holy Spirit inspires diversity, but the opposite: the Gospel is heard and received with power because the Holy Spirit overcomes the diversity that has hindered such a reception (the fact that the recipients are all Jews – with some proselytes – who have come to Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks to hear the marvelous single account of God’s giving of Torah is also missing from her account); and finally 3) an account of John as inspiring a new truth that all will in time come to hear and acknowledge cannot be squared with an account of the Holy Spirit as inspiring or endorsing diversity of hearings.
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June 06 2010 | Articles