This a very thoughtful article written by a conservative who is critical of both the left and the right extremes in the church. Its lengthy but worth the read. Thanks to Bruce Robison for sending this along. This may be a blog worth bookmarking and checking on every so often."Here then is perhaps one road forward for the Conservatives. GAFCON and the Global South should call an immediate moratorium on border-crossing. Yes, that will be painful for many. It will explicitly involve the dying to self that I spoke about above, for in the short term it will leave many abused and attacked in liberal dioceses, believing that they have been abandoned by those who said they would provide rescue. It would also implicitly involve confessing that the act of crossing diocesan boundaries was wrong, for we there would be no need to have a moratorium if crossing boundaries was seen by all as acceptable. But beyond these two things, it would at the same time indicate that we are serious about holding the Communion together, and what it would also do is give TEC, Canada (and Scotland now it appears) a very clear opportunity to also engage in the moratoria that they have been asked to impose, on same-sex blessings and ordaining and consecrating those in sexual relationships outside of marriage."
http://www.peter-ould.net/2008/08/05/lambeth-2008-moving-forward/
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Professor Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College and mmeber of All Souls Anglican Church Wheaton Il reponds thusly
Peter Ould, an English Anglican priest deeply committed to orthodoxy, has written a post about the consequences of the Lambeth Conference in which he makes one very important point and one very disturbing one.
The important, indeed vital point is this:
Unless we as the conservative church are willing to admit that we have sometimes (often?) failed in the call of the Lambeth ‘98 resolution to listen to the experience of gay and lesbian people (and post-gay and post-lesbian, for the conservative church is still shockingly ignorant in how to deal pastorally in this area) then we have no right to ask those whom we disagree with to take such resolutions seriously themselves. What we need at this point then is a serious, critical self-examination. Can we truly say that in all cases we are the ones sinned against? Can we really stand clean in front of the Lord and argue that we have not ourselves sinned in this conflict?
Ould himself is a former gay man, now married and a father, who seeks to minister to people who are attracted to members of the same sex; so his words here have real bite and force. I do indeed think that many theological conservatives need to repent of their our failure to abide by this provision of 1998’s Resolution 1.10.
But on another point I think Ould is mistaken, and dangerously so. In his view, the diocesan “boundary crossings” — like the one that has led to the creation of my church, All Souls’ Anglican, are simply and plainly sinful. They are “acts of sin in response to sin”; “If we truly believe that the Spirit was at work in the Ecumenical Councils of the first millenium, then we have to see these violations of the Nicene principle of diocesan integrity as serious breaches of catholicity.”
I have a number of qualms about the validity of Ould’s reading of the Councils’ “principle of diocesan integrity.” First of all, his reading would have required Christians under the authority of Arian or Donatist leaders to remain under that authority — that is, under the authority of the very people whose vies the Councils were summoned in order to denounce. It is not likely that Augustine or Jerome would have endorsed the principle that Ould articulates here.
But let me address this issue more directly. I left the Episcopal Church and joined a new Anglican church largely because I did not want to have my son instructed in beliefs I do not share. Consider this: the man who is now the rector at the parish I left — a wonderfully kind and generous man, by the way — preached, on Easter Sunday no less, that it does not matter whether Jesus was or was not raised physically from the dead. Now, I happen to think that it matters very much whether Jesus was or was not raised from the dead, and unless I am tragically mistaken, St. Paul did too (see 1 Corinthians 15). I am glad that my son, instead of hearing this sermon, heard a sermon from Father Martin Johnson that joyfully and boldly proclaimed the fact of the Resurrection.
What does Peter Ould have to say to me? He does not believe that All Souls’ Church should exist, at least in its current form, so what options does he think were legitimate and appropriate ones for us? Is it his view that we we obliged to remain at our former church and allow our son to receive false teaching — and not just from the pulpit — which we could then, presumably, correct once we got home? Or would we be allowed to form a new church as long as it had no bishop other than TEC’s — an independent church, say? How about becoming Baptists or Presbyterians or Methodists? If Ould’s concern is the maintaining of catholicity, and catholicity requires bishops whose territories are geographically distinct, then attending any of those non-Anglican churches would violate catholicity just as much as attending a church affiliated with the Southern Cone would.
As far as I can tell, then, Ould is saying that the only way for my wife and me to avoid sin in this matter is to allow ourselves and our son to be instructed in heresy. This strikes me as a deeply strange notion of what it means to be orthodox, and one that my wife and I cannot accept. The notion that violations of traditional ecclesiastical polity, especially in the post-Reformational age, are to be taken as seriously as violations of creedal orthodoxy and Biblical moral teaching — well, that’s just wrong.
So while I think that we reasserters, as we look back on on thoughts and words and deeds of the past few years, indeed have a great deal to repent of, I don’t think that boundary crossing as such needs to be on our list. We may have “crossed” in ways that are uncharitable or even hateful, and for that we should be deeply repentant; but crossing as such — seeking to leave TEC without ceasing to be Anglican — is, I think, not intrinsically sinful.
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