Only Traditionalist Archbishop of Canterbury Can Save Anglican Church, Warn Primates

Jackie is quite correct in stating that only God can save the Anglican Church.  While human assistance is not required, a traditionalist Archbishop can’t hurt.

David Katzakian

Of course you are assuming that God wants to save the Anglican Church.

To be Orthodox would mean that the AB must confront the Prime Minister (read his speech here for context) and essentially come out in a very strong way against all that is happening in the UK. Unfortunately, church and government in the UK remain yoked, and I don’t see the AB doing what needs to be done, but rather giving some vague nicety about needed dialog. Otherwise he might have to answer for hate speech.

eulogos, yes, I’d say that we are assuming just that, as a simple matter of faith. Just as God wants to save the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, etc. No difference.

God doesn’t want Anglicanism to flush itself down the toilet - but, he’s willing to let it happen, just as he allowed Israel to fall into apostasy more than once.

It’s the devil who wants Christianity to be destroyed.

If I stand on my head, will I be able to read my comment in the right order?  But hey, at least I will be able to be commenter number one for a bit.

I am not sure that God has finished with the Anglican Church just yet, but we definitely have a problem.  Thank God for Bishop Mouneer.  Some clever minds in the English, and Welsh bureaucracies have gone to considerable lengths to try to fix the appointment of the next Archbishop of Canterbury. 

What the English and Welsh establishment have not taken on board is that a large chunk of the liberal overseas church does not care who the Archbishop is because they don’t believe in us as anything other than a disconnected set of churches, where they can do whatever they want.    At the other end a large chunk, perhaps the bulk have had it up to the neck with the scheming, dishonesty and manipulation which has marked the current incumbent and don’t think Canterbury can be trusted with any role in the future.

It is those of us in the dwindling group who believe Canterbury at its best does have a role who are watching in dismay as these shennanigans go on with the likely result that even we will not care.

I am grateful that the Global South Primates have spoken up and called the bluff of the English and Welsh establishment.  God bless them for it.

Not only that, but you also have to contend with fellow Anglicans who seek any excuse to post a comment that will knock you out of number one position… 

LOL, Michael     Now hear this- you too are bumped from being number one.

On a serious note, I do agree with what has already been expressed so well by David, Festivus, Ralph, and Pageantmaster.

Nobody should underestimate either the bias or the insularity of those ecclesiastical bureaucracies.

It is years now since my gentle learned spouse and I sent this to the Lambeth Commission:–

A Brief addressing the Key Questions 1(b) and 2(b), i.e. the theological implications of the consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire and the blessing of same-sex unions in New Westminster.

It is never wrong to love another human being; but we all know that particular expressions of that love may be wrong, and that the wrongness is independent of the depth, intensity and permanence of love. That some kinds of genital expression, for instance between parent and child, two siblings, close friends of the same or different sex, are displeasing to God is the united witness of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Old Greek version (which adds an allusion to lesbian relations in Ez. 16), the Intertestamental literature, the Fathers, the Reformers and all Jewish and Christian ethicists until perhaps thirty years ago. The differentium of same-sex ‘unions’ and of Gene Robinson’s relationship with his close friend is a case in point. In biblical Greek and language derived from it (for instance in Philo) such kinds of physical expression are frequently called porneia (rendered “fornication” in older English versions): at least twice in the Lord’s teaching according to Matthew, in I Cor. 6-7 and in Gal. 5 (where it stands at the head of the list of the ‘Works of the Flesh’) it is made clear that porneia in all its forms is gross sin, persistence in which has transcendental and eternal consequences. Abstention from mild forms of it, probably transgressions of stricter Jewish conceptions of prohibited degrees, was at issue at the Council of Jerusalem; incest at Corinth provoked the strongest possible apostolic reaction. No argument for the goodness and beauty of same-sex physical relations can be made on Scriptural grounds which does not apply equally to, say, child-molestation, incest, adultery and so forth.

Absolutely pivotal are Our Lord’s own teaching and example. That the Lord both taught and lived fully within the Old Testament sexual ethic is certain. We may indeed know His attitude to same-sex genital relations. No case can be made for the modern notion that there was or could have been any Dominical silence or ambiguity about them. His attitude is actually quite plain from the porneia references in Matthew, where His teaching is represented by the Evangelist as Jesus-Torah, and Himself as the new Moses. It is certain that if anyone in His time and place had had the temerity to produce a challenge to Him as teacher along the lines of that about divorce, He would most certainly have replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”. By analogy, He would if anything have sharpened the moral demand for His disciples. There would have been no qualifications at all, no mention of pastoral provision for failure, there being none in Leviticus or elsewhere. This was a closed question: it is not open to us to attribute to Him historically impossible attitudes.

Not only is the language unambiguous, we must also come to terms with Jesus as our pattern, here as elsewhere. Any compromise on His part would have produced an immediate challenge to the validity of His ministry, and that challenge must have left some trace in the record. Some want to ignore Him as example of perfect First Century Jewish sex-ethics, while using Him as a stick to beat the rest of us into other more fashionable attitudes. The idea of Him as the best of husbands and fathers, even (just about) as the best of wives and mothers, is possible; but not the idea of Him curled up in bed with John the Beloved Disciple at any stage. The man in Melbourne who has just got a PhD for arguing that case deserves at least one for ingenuity, but none at all for scholarship.

Many things may be Christian but not Anglican. But unless something may be Anglican which is not Christian, we must understand that to call right what the Lord Himself called wrong, and to do what appalled Him, is to part company with essential Anglicanism, endangering not only the souls of those who teach this untruth and wickedness, but in many cases the very lives of little children, young girls, young men, women and all the sexually weak and vulnerable wherever they may be, now and for the foreseeable future. It is to say that the right to the physical expression of love trumps all the obedience we may owe to the one we call Lord. As ethicists we know that there is no human right to orgasm at any cost. We need to hold onto the subtler truth, that there is no Christian right to redefine love in the face of the God Who commands and supplies it.

This brief comes from Professor C.J.G. (BA, MA, PhD Cantab, MA, MPhil Oxon) & Dr. P.D.M. (BA, MA Cantab, MA, DPhil Oxon) TURNER, of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The central and pivotal point about Our Lord, which I as a biblical philologist was the first to make in public scholarly discussion, was ignored absolutely; and as for our domicile, in the Diocese of New Westminster and the Canadian province of BC, it was rendered as “British Colombia”!!! (Presumably some banana republic somewhere in Latin America, the views of whose denizens might be safely ignored?)

Thank you Dr Turner.  No witness goes unheard, even if we don’t see the results.  I am sure this has had an effect, but we may not know what it was until we are in glory and all is revealed to us.

Well, MichaelA, thanks for the thankyou!

We did at the time hope for some immediate effect on our beloved church, but I fear that this Brief was suppressed by prejudiced people with an axe to grind.

#8, I don’t think that the brief got wide publicity at the time it was submitted to the Lambeth Commission. It’s well-written and concise. No empty rhetoric. It skillfully weaves together multiple aspects of the traditional response to claims that Scripture is somehow silent or neutral on this.

I think it ought to be posted somewhere that the homosexual activists might attempt to critique it, point by point, thus exposing their vacuity for all to see.

“It skillfully weaves together multiple aspects of the traditional response to claims that Scripture is somehow silent or neutral on this.” Thanks, Ralph, for those few kind words. However, the Commission claims to have got plenty of Briefs along those lines. What I was after above all was the historic Dominical position, in the face of swarms of Marcionites and “Silly old St. Paul"ers in and out of Anglicanism.