Anglicans should welcome a schism

Daily Telegraph ^ | 19/06/2006 | Damian Thompson

[fgoodwin]

Anglicans should welcome a schism

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/06/20/do2002.xml
http://tinyurl.com/gfwwa

By Damian Thompson
(Filed: 19/06/2006)

After a wretched couple of decades for the Church of England - catfights over the ordination of women and homosexuals, the tumbling of weekly church attendance to below a million - there is finally a glimmer of hope in the headlines.

The Anglican Communion seems to be falling apart. As The Daily Telegraph's religion correspondent, Jonathan Petre, reported yesterday, the election of a woman bishop as leader of the American Anglican Church "could hasten the break-up" of the worldwide body.

For this relief much thanks, to quote the sentry in Hamlet. Not only is the Anglican Communion wasteful and self-regarding even by the standards of international quangos; it has also contrived, over the past 30 years, to rip apart the fine theological stitching that has held together the Church of England for centuries.

Its looming demise is excellent news for members of the C of E, irrespective of their "churchmanship". To celebrate, Anglo-Catholic ritualists should pour themselves an even stiffer gin than usual; liberals should break open the organic chardonnay; evangelicals should treat themselves to a nourishing mug of Horlicks. But the people who have most cause to rejoice are those ordinary, middle-of-the-road English worshippers who just wish that fist-shaking Nigerians and politically correct Canadians would shut up.

Archbishop George Carey once described the Anglican Communion as "a major player on the international scene". (I was there when he said it, and even his aides had problems keeping a straight face.) It is also routinely described as a "worldwide Church". That, too, is wishful thinking.

The Communion is a federation of national churches bound together by British imperial antecedents, strands of Anglican theology and the nominal leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Until a few years ago, these ties just about enabled the Communion to present itself as the Anglican equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church; Archbishop Carey, in particular, adopted a hilarious quasi-papal manner on his trips abroad.

The reality is, however, that after the American Episcopal Church ordained women priests and then bishops - ignoring pleas for caution from Lambeth Palace - the Anglican Communion ceased to be a "Church" at all.

The lowest common denominator of any mainstream Christian Church is that its ministers accept the validity of each another's orders and therefore sacraments: that is the essence of "communion". Now that Anglicanism encompasses women and gay bishops (and, come to think of it, gay women bishops), roughly two thirds of its provinces do not recognise the ministry of bishops and priests ordained by the other third. That is not a Church: it is an ecclesiastical car crash.

How should the Church of England respond? The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, implies that all the fault lies with one side, the "unbiblical" gay-ordaining American radicals. He is wrong about that.

While it is true that some bishops of the Episcopal Church have more in common with a crystal-gazing Californian housewife than George Herbert, it is also true that "Anglican" dioceses in the developing world have been hijacked by poisonously bigoted Bible-bashers.

And not just in the developing world, either: many parishes in Australia have fallen into the hands of Protestant iconoclasts whose hatred of Popish practices makes Ian Paisley look positively ecumenical. None of which would matter very much if it were not for the appalling effect these distant eruptions are having on churches in this country.

Since the 19th century, the Church of England has managed to hold together what might appear to be incompatible Protestant and Catholic conceptions of the Church by allowing carefully limited diversity. High, Broad and Low churchmen took turns to be Archbishop of Canterbury, but representatives of each wing's militant tendency were rarely promoted. Calvinists, agnostics and Anglo-Papalists knew that, if they were to command influence, they would have to tone down their views. Which, of course, they did.

But now, thanks to the Anglican Communion, English extremists - who these days consist of rainbow-coalition activists and hate-filled fundamentalists - are able to draw moral support and large sums of money from Anglicans abroad. Hard-line evangelicals, especially, have exerted terrific pressure on English bishops who, terrified of offending millions of anti-gay Africans, have adjusted their views accordingly.

Unexpectedly, it was the current Archbishop of Canterbury who caved in first. Early in his term of office, Dr Rowan Williams yielded to the African evangelical lobby and forced the resignation of the Bishop-designate of Reading, Canon Jeffrey John, a celibate gay man whose cause he had previously advanced. Perhaps it was a mistake for Dr Williams to permit Canon John's name to go forward to Downing Street; but allow it he did, and his subsequent somersault destroyed his reputation among his natural supporters, while doing nothing to impress his enemies, who still regard Lord Carey of Clifton (as he now is) as the real Archbishop of Canterbury.

Outmanoeuvred by back-stabbing colleagues, Dr Williams no longer possesses the time or the confidence to speak directly to the man and woman in the pew. So preoccupied is he by the prospect of "schism" in a non-existent global Church that his already convoluted discourse has turned into an incomprehensible parody of itself.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and the ideologues continue with their plans for a Lambeth Conference of the world's bishops in 2008 that promises to be even more unpleasant than its predecessor in 1998, while sucking a couple of million quid out of the Church's coffers.

Perhaps the conference will bring about the dissolution of the Anglican Communion; perhaps the final collision will be delayed by a few years. Either way, the Church of England must summon up the nerve to pick itself out of the wreckage and walk - if necessary, alone - down its historic via media.

[wideawake]

This joker is basically blaming the Bible-believing traditionalists for the incipient schism.

[xzins]

The guy is kidding himself.

99% of historic Christianity sides with the traditional views on both the sinfulness of homosexuality and the inappropriateness of female ordination.

Even in our era, a tiny percent of Christianity ensconced in small, dying western denominations buy into these errors.

[RobbyS]

Of course he is. If cultural Catholicism is a thin brew, cultural Anglicanism is water with a little gas.
water