“It is more attractive to go in quest of the real Church than to seek for the pattern of Cross and Resurrection in the heart of where we happen to find ourselves. But Ramsey implicitly warns us that the quest can be a way back to the self-defining and self-protective religious institution that always distorts or stifles the gospel. Somewhere in this is a very substantial paradox — that the harder we search for a Church that is pure and satisfactory by our definition, the less likely we are to find it.” (Rowan Williams, “The Lutheran Catholic,” in Glory Descending: Michael Ramsey and His Writings, p. 221)
This comment from Rowan Williams identifies a thread that caught my attention in my latest reading of The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Covenant bloggers were reading and discussing it together at Nashotah House Theological Seminary as a prelude to the recent Living Sacrifices conference. Readers of Covenant will be very familiar with the lines at the end of Ramsey’s book, where he claims vindication for Anglicanism only in that it points to something beyond itself, of which it is a mere fragment:
More here-
http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/06/19/where-are-we-looking/
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