Posted on 12/28/2006 5:33:01 PM PST by sionnsar
It's getting kind of funny to read the Episcopal left these days. Mr. Bryan Taylor of Fort Worth is ready to dump some British tea in the harbor:
When will the Archbishop of Canterbury figure out that what the Network types want more than anything is recognition by him as having equal standing with the legitimate structures and duly chosen Primate of The Episcopal Church, and that every time he does something like this he both insults our church and undermines our polity? Inviting other representatives besides the Presiding Bishop to Tanzania just feeds their resistance to resolving their conflict with the legitimate authority of this Province. It does not encourage them to seek compromise; rather, it encourages them to believe they will eventually get what they want: full recognition of an Anglican body, either parallel to The Episcopal Church or replacing it. It inflates their egos and their appetite for status far beyond the small minority they actually represent in our church.
Bryan? You do know that TEC is one of smallest provinces in the Anglican Communion, don't you? And that you were completely outvoted at the 1998 Lambeth Conference? Awfully Episcopal of you to start going on about "minorities" now.
True, he hasn’t yet said who will be invited, although one of the Network’s bloggermouths says it will be one or more of Bishops Duncan, Iker, or Schofield. Someone else has said it might be Don Wimberly of Texas, who organized the Camp Allen meeting, by invitation only, of others he thought of as "Windsor-compliant." It’s also true that they aren’t being invited to the Primates’ Meeting itself. But none of those particulars really matters much. While Bishop Wimberly is at least in good standing in TEC, his actions mirror Canterbury’s fallacious "consensus by subtraction" (I am indebted to Tobias Haller, BSG, for that apt phrasing) and foster factionalism rather than unity. It is just as inappropriate for Rowan Williams to endorse a party leader like Wimberly within the House of Bishops as it is for him to grant status to the others who are in open rebellion against the church who made them bishops. And it is still an insult to imply that they have a right to such access to the Primates while he is being generous in "not withholding an invitation" to our duly chosen Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori!
<Darth Vader voice>You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor!</Darth Vader Voice>
Moreover, the Archbishop’s approach is fostering the same kind of rebellion in his own back yard as we have had brewing in the U.S. far longer than the stated provocation of General Convention 2003. The Church of England can now look forward to the same kind of divisive wedge politics, and rival pre-schismatic structures like the Network in the U.S., since a group there has made demands for circumventing bishops they deem too liberal. Her Majesty’s Government had better wake up to the fact that Rowan Williams is leading the Church of England right over a cliff, emboldening reactionaries at home with his meddling in the affairs of provinces abroad. If he keeps this up there won’t be a single Anglican Communion for him to play with very much longer.
Bryan? The only way to lead a corpse over a cliff is to throw it. Have you actually seen C of E attendance figures lately?
This is bullying. This is abuse. This is tyranny. It is time for our Executive Council to tell the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest of the Anglican Communion, as the American colonists once did: Don’t tread on me! What is going on is a complete distortion of the Windsor Report. We cannot possibly begin discussing an Anglican Covenant under such conditions of duress--indeed that whole idea is about conformity and control, pure and simple, and ought to be rejected now. We can no longer agree to meetings about us that don’t include us. We cannot tolerate intrusions by foreign bishops in our jurisdictions any longer. All these things have proceeded despite our efforts to be conciliatory, our willingness to accept criticism, our efforts to remain open to peaceful resolutions and compromises.
Writes a proud member of the "church" that unilaterally imposed Gene Robinson and the spurious theology behind him on the entire Anglican world without so much as a by-your-leave. Bryan? We'll believe that TEC is "conciliatory" and is "open to peaceful resolutions and compromises" when it actually demonstrates those traits.
Last I checked, Gene Robinson still had a pointy hat, TEC didn't specifically respond at GenCon to Windsor's request to stop consecrating homosexual bishops and it didn't respond to the same-sex marriage ban at all. But when you petulantly refuse to do what the rest of the Anglican world asks you to do, I guess it's necessary to turn the Windsor Report into a "process," an Anglican word meaning endless talking that leads nowhere.
You liberals are going to have to get used to something. Being Anglican will soon require you to believe certain things; you will no longer be able to make up the Christian religion as you go along, claim you did nothing of the kind and continue to call yourselves Anglicans. And you're going to need a lot more substantive theological justification for your innovations than "God is doing a new thing. Because I said so, that's why!"
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. That's some major mirroring going on there. When leftists whine so loudly, we know they're feeling the heat of spotlights on them. And fearing that light.
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