New province recognized

The reconfiguration of the Anglican Communion continues apace as its largest province, boasting fully a quarter of the world's Anglicans, has now recognized the new Anglican Church in North America: Church of Nigeria Formally Accepts Emerging Anglican Province.

Church news

This report is just in from Moscow: Russian Orthodox Church Leader Dies. The Moscow Times assesses probable candidates to succeed the deceased Patriarch. The BBC recounts the Double life of Russia's patriarch.


Alexii II (1929-2008)

Turning to the fracturing Anglican communion, the GAFCON primates have welcomed the formation of the new Anglican Province in North America, whose first public liturgy, shown below, was held at the Evangelical Free Church in Wheaton, Illinois, whose spacious building I myself have been inside.

And now back to the Anglican crisis . . .

. . . where this development has occurred in my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois: North American Anglican Province Formed As Rival To The Episcopal Church. Canadians are part of this too. That this new Anglican Province overlaps with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada shouldn't pose too much difficulty in light of this: New indigenous province proposed.

Global Anglican Future


What is the world's largest evangelical denomination? If the recent Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) represents the majority of adherents, it may well be the Anglican Communion. Indeed I have just finished reading The Way, The Truth and the Life: Theological Resources for a Pilgrimage to a Global Anglican Future and find it to be an inspiring document. According to GAFCON's Theological Resource Team, the Anglican Church is a confessional church subject to the authority of Scripture and bound by the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies as confessional and liturgical standards.

Here are some especially striking excerpts from the GAFCON document:

[O]ur place under the alien dominion of darkness is no innocent victimhood. Victims and oppression certainly exist in the world, but a victim culture exists too, and its unhealthy nature has been well-documented. The risk, for the person who portrays himself simply in the role of victim, is that he feels justified in manipulating others, including God, while distorting the truth about his own fallenness. By contrast, an accurate account of human subjection to alien dominion must include mention of our own sin. A purely therapeutic view of the human problem is false, because it underplays the wonders of Jesus’ actions for us: he saved us by his sacrificial, propitiatory death while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). . . .

[I]n this obedience that Matthew 28:18 calls for, there can be no competing loyalty. This follows from the scope and the timing of the gift of authority to Jesus. The ascended Christ reigns now in this present age, despite its continuing rebellion, and over all. Thus competing authorities are even now, in reality, subject to Christ. No aspect of human life can claim to be independent of the reign of Christ: all, whether political, economic or artistic, is under Him. . . .

By his enabling, Christians are to read the Scriptures as disciples eager to learn, concerned to have our thinking and behaviour corrected, so that our lives might conform more truly to the ultimate reality of God’s character and purposes. In short, Christians sit humbly under the Spirit-inspired Scriptures, desiring to live holy lives as Christ’s disciples. . . .

Imagine if the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church were to catch the spirit of this document. Two declining denominations would be well positioned to follow their African and Asian counterparts into spectacular growth. Rather than making themselves redundant by reflecting the agenda and priorities of the surrounding culture, they would offer the gospel to a sinful world in need of its life-giving and transforming message. May God grant it!

Questioning everything but me

Writing in the Niagara Anglican, Christopher M. Grabiec says that we know who won in the christological controversies of the 4th century leading to the creation of the Nicene Creed. But can we really know who was right? And does it really matter? Such questioning of core doctrinal formulations makes Grabiec sound supremely open-minded, but it does not prevent him expressing utter confidence in the truth of his own experience. If only the Nicene Fathers had had access to Grabiec's experience.

No more chariots of fire please. . .

It seems that many Britons enjoy singing William Blake's Jerusalem, set to Hubert Parry's rousing 1916 melody. Now the Very Rev. Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark Cathedral in London, has banned the use of this song in his church. My response? Good riddance! I agree with Slee and Tim Footman that Jerusalem is not really a hymn at all and has no place in the church's liturgy. Whatever criteria are used to determine what belongs and does not belong in the liturgy, anything based on William Blake's quirky combination of "mysticism, Manichaeist dualism, anti-industrial pastoralism and Enlightenment radicalism" is highly unlikely to pass muster.

Um, I don't get it. . .

Methinks the Russian news service Interfax hath fallen for ye olde April Fool's joke: The Anglican Church to face a new clerical reform. From its report:

When you a person is hired [sic], especially to a British state religious organization he shouldn’t be discriminated for his confession. The Anglican Church should give an example of fighting against xenophobia in our multicultural tolerant society and give equal opportunities to all people no matter if they believe in God, gods or any other power,” the [Rev Anthony Priddis] stressed.

Priddis has not excluded the possibility of future ordaining atheists in the Anglican Church, the weekly reports.

On the other hand, given recent precedent, maybe there is something to this after all.

Anglican matters

One hates to keep harping on the slow but steady decline of the Episcopal Church south of the border, but these three items are unmistakable signs that all is not well: Bexley Hall to Close Rochester Campus; Seabury Western ceases residential MDiv program; and Episcopal Divinity School enters university partnership.

While we're on the subject of Anglicanism, David Yerushalmi has written an intelligent piece on Archbishop Rowan Williams' now infamous speech on sharia: Why the Fuss About Shari’a Law?

The fuss is about the elephant in the room, or, better yet, the wolf in sheep’s clothing that some Americans fail to acknowledge. Put simply, not all foreign or religious laws are equal. Most foreign laws, be they sourced in secular legal codes or religious ones, are not predicated on a doctrine of world domination and holy war. But what if a legal system is founded upon the goal of conquering the world through holy war when persuasion and subjugation are not immediately successful?

In other words, should a society lend legitimacy to a legal system whose raison d’être is the destruction of that society? Moreover, how should a society treat a legal system that obligates its faithful to use violent jihad to accomplish its goals?

These are, of course, good questions that do not admit of easy answers, although Yerushalmi would do well to acknowledge that there are different interpretations of sharia within the diverse muslim community, some of which may be less bellicose than he assumes.

Finally, Jim Skillen has his own view of the matter, as indicated here: Civil and Religious Laws in England. Skillen writes:

What the Archbishop should be (and perhaps is) trying to argue, it seems to me, is that diverse religious communities, including Muslims, who give allegiance to God beyond allegiance to Crown and Church, should be equally free to live in Great Britain. Moreover, public “secular” law should recognize the right of British citizens, who are members of these different religious communities, to engage in diverse practices in the nongovernment spheres of marriage, private finance, education, and more. However, the foundation of such religious freedom and social pluralism is that all citizens, as members of the same political community, must abide by the public laws of the nation. If they want to change the laws that stipulate the obligations of citizenship, that protect religious freedom, or that articulate the identities and freedoms of nongovernment organizations, they will have to participate in the open democratic process to try to do so.

Acceptance versus redemption

This article by Philip Turner is about the Episcopal Church in the US, but it might just as well be about the Anglican Church in Canada: An Unworkable Theology. Especially relevant is the tendency of those favouring controversial innovations in the church's faith and life to invoke the Holy Spirit as a way of stifling opposition:

Indeed, it is important to note when examining the working theology of the Episcopal Church that changes in belief and practice within the church are not made after prolonged investigation and theological debate. Rather, they are made by “prophetic actions” that give expression to the doctrine of radical inclusion. Such actions have become common partly because they carry no cost. Since the struggle over the ordination of women, the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops has given up any attempt to act as a unified body or to discipline its membership. Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.

Certain justifications are commonly named for such failure of discipline. The first is the claim of the prophet’s mantle by the innovators—often quickly followed by an assertion that the Holy Spirit Itself is doing this new thing, which need have no perceivable link to the past practice of the church. Backed by claims of prophetic and Spirit-filled insight, each diocese can then justify its action as a “local option,” which is the claimed right of each diocese or parish to go its own way if there seem to be strong enough internal reasons to do so.

According to Turner, the Episcopal Church is divided by a theological chasm, "one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption." In such a context it is not surprising that those unequivocally standing for the latter are being vilified as "fundamentalists" by the former.

New Anglican catechism

The Global South Primates of the Anglican communion have been busy: New Anglican Catechism in the works. Here is the interim report released two months ago on the feast of Epiphany: Anglican Catechism in Outline. It is not clear what status this catechism will have in the Anglican communion, but as much as I've read of it thus far looks good.

Colson on Williams

Chuck Colson, who should know better, is too facilely accepting the scaremongering of the media in his response to the Archbishop of Canterbury: The Archbishop and Sharia: What Empty Churches Are Made of. Colson, or rather his writers, would do well to dig beneath the surface and read Goddard and Chaplin on the subject.

A plurality of laws, II

My friend Jonathan Chaplin himself has now weighed in on Rowan Williams' address in an analysis very much worth reading and pondering: Law, Faith and Freedom: a critical appreciation of Archbishop Williams’s lecture. According to Chaplin,

granting ‘legal accommodations’ like this to religious convictions is not at all a breach of the mantra, invoked frequently in responses to the lecture, that there should be ‘one law for all’. That is an affirmation of the principle of equality before the law, and the Archbishop not only affirmed that principle but went further and hinted that it actually had religious origins. Granting legal accommodations to religious conviction is not a departure from the principle of equality before the law, but rather a specification of how it might apply to a diverse citizenry with intensely-held religious loyalties. Legal equality has never meant that every individual must be treated in identical ways by every legal rule, but rather that whatever laws exist should apply to all whom they intend to regulate and that there should be no arbitrary discrimination in the application of the law. The Archbishop himself alludes to this theme in proposing that the point of a regime of universal rights is to ‘underpin’ not to ‘supersede’ our plural identities.

Note further that the principle of equality before the law is not at all compromised by recognising the independent jurisdictions (i.e. spheres of authority) of non-governmental institutions, such as churches, universities, trades unions, etc. Each of these institutions possesses a sphere of internal ‘law-making’ (in the case of bodies like universities and trades unions this is called ‘rule-making’) which is not within the purview of the state. It is an essential feature of a free society that there should be many such self-governing institutions able to resist the tendency of states to exceed their mandate. Of course, the state may and does regulate these institutions where necessary in the public interest but the onus is (or should be) on the state to justify its interventions and not on the institutions themselves to justify their freedom to the state. This is a quite different sense of ‘legal pluralism’ to that mentioned above, and it is not only consistent with the principle of equality before the law but a necessary prop for it. Andrew Goddard is right to observe in the Archbishop’s lecture an ‘anti-statist pluralist social vision’ – one which I think Christians should strongly endorse.

Mid-February snippets

• It's finally happened: Kosovo Declares Its Independence From Serbia. A lot of people will not be pleased over this, especially ethnic Serbs living in the province, but also a number of European Union members with their own separatist movements.


• Here is very good news indeed: Cyprus vote goes to runoff, Papadopoulos out. Tassos Papadopoulos has obstructed a settlement in the island since attaining the presidency five years ago. I would still prefer Nicos Rolandis in office, but either Kassoulides or Christofias will be an improvement over Papadopoulos.


• This makes little sense to me: 5 Anglican primates to boycott Lambeth. Ten years ago it became evident that there is a small-o orthodox majority in the Anglican communion. Why boycott the next Lambeth Conference where orthodox provinces would otherwise carry the day once again?


• This I can understand more easily, given the current confessional disarray in the Anglican Church of Canada: Five Anglican parishes set to separate from Church. Archbishop Fred Hiltz is, of course, appealing selectively to the Windsor Report, thereby demonstrating, once more, that bishops are quite willing to defy any authority except their own.


• The WRF's Comment runs an interview with a south central Upper Canadian political scientist of minor renown. It might be worth taking a peek at.


• Tomorrow is the new provincial holiday, Family Day, instituted by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty upon being returned to office last autumn. My wife pointed out to me that it just happens to fall on what in the US is called Presidents' Day. Our holidays tend uncannily to coincide with American ones. Or are we simply copy cats?

A plurality of laws

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been under a lot of pressure lately, mostly over his handling of the imminent breakup of the Anglican communion. Most recently, however, he has come under fire for suggesting that the coming of Sharia to the United Kingdom is inevitable. However, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Goddard believes that Rowan Williams' remarks have not only been taken out of context, but reduced to a few controversial sound bytes that do not come close to doing justice to his views: Prudence and Jurisprudence: Reflections on the Archbishop's interview and lecture. Though I have not followed this story closely, I find persuasive Goddard's analysis, in which he even cites my friend and colleague, Jonathan Chaplin, as a "leading evangelical political theorist."

Here in Ontario we had a similar controversy in 2005 when Premier Dalton McGuinty ruled out the use of "faith-based arbitrations," proclaiming that "There will be one law for all Ontarians." Yet this is not an adequate account of the plurality of laws governing our lives in their diverse realms. If a child disobeys her parents, the latter do not call the police in to punish the child under the public law of the state. Rather they themselves mete out an appropriate punishment within the context of the particular norms governing that family itself. Similarly, a faculty member is subject to rules internal to the university, while a church institution is governed by canon law or church order. McGuinty must surely recognize this?

To his credit, Williams appears to understand the reality of multiple and overlapping allegiances in a complex, differentiated society better than many of his compatriots, who are echoing McGuinty's somewhat panicked response of two years ago. I understand, of course, that anything having to do with Islam and Sharia in western societies is a touchy subject these days. Yet the full import of Williams' argument is being lost. Here is Williams:

I think at the moment there's a great deal of confusion about this; a lot of what's been written whether it was about the Catholic church adoptions agencies last year, sometimes what's written about Jewish or Muslim communities; a lot of what's written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody; now that principle that there's one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that, so an approach to law which simply said, 'There is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or your allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts'. I think that's a bit of a danger. . . .

It would be a pity if the immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law's function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society.

Of course, there is a difference between what I call the pluriformity of authority and the sort of pluralism rooted in divergent spiritual commitments. Yet these two intersect in so far as one can expect particular religious norms to impact the internal ordering of, say, marriage and family life. To reduce all legality to the public law of the state tends in a totalitarian direction. Fortunately our political leaders, including McGuinty, formulate policies that are better than their expressed commitments might suggest.

While you're reading Goddard's article, you might also read this post by the winsome — and sorely missed — Mr. Brian Dijkema, who alerted me to it.

Wright right about last things

The eminent Bishop of Durham, N. T. "Tom" Wright, has just written a new book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, the publication of which provided an occasion for an interview in TIME Magazine, of all places: Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop. Over against those Christians who speak of their souls "going to heaven" when they die, Wright, by contrast, affirms the biblical emphasis on bodily resurrection in a new heaven and new earth. Here's Wright:

Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. . . . Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do. . . . In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation. . . . God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.

Antipodean Anglican angst

The Anglican Diocese of Sydney in Australia has a rather unique character within the larger Anglican communion in so far as it is almost wholly low-church and evangelical. Its archbishop, Peter Jensen, typically eschews the external trappings of his office, even the clerical collar. Jensen has been vocal in the current controversies dividing the communion, openly supporting the conservative side. Oddly enough, however, on liturgical matters he and his diocese appear to be much less conservative. And this has brought criticism from no less than Peter Philips, Director of the Tallis Scholars, some of whose exquisite recordings grace our own CD library: Archbishop of Sydney 'vandalising' Anglican culture. Jensen apparently has not responded to Philips' charge.

† R.I.P. ECUSA

Now it's our southern neighbours' turn: U.S. diocese votes to secede from Episcopal Church.

A question of authority

The new Primate of the Anglican Church in Canada, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, has ordered this pastoral letter to be read in all ACC parishes tomorrow. This is in response to efforts of conservative Anglicans to set up a parallel jurisdiction under the Province of the Southern Cone. Thus saith the epistle:

The actions by the Primate of the Southern Cone are also inappropriate. They contravene ancient canons of the Church going as far back as the 4th century, as well as statements of the Lambeth Conference, the Windsor report and the Communiqué from the Primates' Meeting earlier this year. Furthermore these actions violate Canon XVII of the Anglican Church of Canada which states that “No Bishop priest or deacon shall exercise ordained ministry in a diocese without the license or temporary permission of the Diocesan Bishop.”

However, as this National Post article reports, the Canadian bishops are appealing to the canons selectively, choosing to ignore their own deliberate defiance of sections 143-144 of the Windsor Report and thus the rest of the Anglican Communion. As Mark Larratt-Smith wrote nearly two years ago, "Something is terribly wrong in a church where all that our bishops seem to be able to do is mutter about insubordination to their episcopal authority — at the same time as they themselves are rejecting the authority and witness of the worldwide Anglican church."

† R.I.P. ACC

The much anticipated split in the Anglican Church of Canada has now come: Anglican Church offshoot launched. The most recent precipitating act came on saturday at the synod of the Diocese of Niagara: Diocese of Niagara “walks apart” from Anglican Communion. The "new" continuing body will come under the episcopal oversight of Archbishop Gregory Venables and the Province of the Southern Cone. The Diocese of Sydney and the Province of the Indian Ocean have expressed support for this effort. It is unclear whether the ACC, the Episcopal Church and the new North American Anglican province can all remain within the Anglican communion. It seems likely that the Archbishop of Canterbury, presiding as he does over one of the fading provinces of the communion, will not be the one to make this judgement.

Anglican views on faith-based schools

I imagine I'm not the only one to find reading the Niagara Anglican a singularly unpleasant experience. Two articles in the current issue are typical in this regard: "Religion in Ontario public schools," by retired Archbishop John Bothwell, and "A religious education," by Peter Wall, Rector of Christ's Church Cathedral here in Hamilton. Both Bothwell and Wall oppose the funding of faith-based schools for all the predictable reasons, favouring instead "religious education," i.e., education about the world's religions, in the public schools. Here is Wall:

[John] Tory's suggestion is that faith based schools are just that — faith based, so we have, rather than religious education, religious indoctrination — potentially narrow and exclusive curricula which promote one religion over another. To my way of thinking, it leads to narrowness, intolerance, a lack of breadth of knowledge and awareness, and a preponderance of religious myopia which has in the past and continues today to cause problems between peoples and groups.

The solution? Keep religious instruction in the churches and religious education in the schools. Notably absent from their remarks is any vision for reclaiming education for the cause of Christ, for bringing the gospel to bear on the whole of life, or witnessing to the coming of God's kingdom. We had best keep our private faith in our churches and out of our schools — "our" evidently referring to Canadians, not Christians. Absent as well is an understanding of the reality that someone's worldview, whether or not overtly expressed, will infuse such teaching about religion.

Sadly, Bothwell and Wall appear to have accepted uncritically the secularizing worldview of the larger society. Accordingly, the church functions as little more than chaplain to that society, affirming it in its prejudices and keeping itself respectable within the eyes of its self-proclaimed opinion-moulders. It shies away from all perceptions of divisiveness, narrowness and intolerance, seemingly vindicating the outsider's cynical assessment of Anglicanism as an establishmentarian church founded to sanction a king's divorce. The offence of the gospel and the exclusive claims of Christ over our lives are obviously not primary considerations.

It is far from coincidental that the same issue of the Niagara Anglican contains this sad article: "Why did St. Philip's close its doors?" A church unable to distinguish itself from the larger culture will eventually become superfluous, as it seems bent on becoming in the Niagara diocese.