Friendly Fire
This week the Taliban tendencied Hierarch of Nigeria attempted to de-throne the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a crude letter to the Archbishop allegedly signed by 17 ‘Primates of the South’, these ornaments of global Anglicanism wrote to Archbishop Rowan Williams in disturbingly discourteous and confrontational terms. The Archbishop recently spoke to the Southern Primates at their meeting in Egypt, and the letter takes him to task for having an inadequate understanding of the Bible, and particularly for his failure to treat biblical texts literally. As we have come to expect from these men obsessed by sexuality but apparently oblivious to the poverty of their people, or justice for those of them who are oppressed, the bulk of the letter focuses on the ‘sin’ of homosexuality. It goes on to upbraid the Archbishop for failing to tell the churches of the global north that they will not be invited to the Lambeth Conference of 2008 unless they truly repent The tone and implication of the letter is that Archbishop Williams is unfit to lead the Anglican communion. Even cruder than the letter itself however, were the gutter political tactics the Southern Primates employed by releasing the text of their letter through various conservative websites before the Archbishop of Canterbury who was presiding over the Church of England’s General Synod, had even received it, let alone had time to consider its contents.
I was distressed to see amongst the signatories to the letter, the name of the Most Revd Clive Handforth, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in the Middle East. Now, Clive was British Chaplain in Beirut when I was British Chaplain in Haifa and although the political situation made it impossible for us to visit one another directly, we met at regional clergy conferences in Cyprus. I found him to be a modest man of great integrity, qualities which I encountered again in the United Kingdom when we had both returned to work there, and Clive held senior posts as Archdeacon of Nottingham and later, Suffragen Bishop of Warwick. Clive’s endorsement of the Primates’ letter on behalf of Arab Anglicans struck me as being so out of character that I was minded to immediately put pen to paper and write him a stern letter chastising him for his action and challenging his integrity.
Fortunately before I could complete the letter, Clive himself posted a general response which appeared on the Internet. “It is most regrettable”, Clive wrote, “and in no way helpful to the Church’s mission, that a personal letter, which should have been confidential, was broadcast in this way”. He affirms the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions to the discussion in Egypt as positive and constructive and goes on to express further concerns about the way the Primates' letter was drafted, the fact that he did not give permission for his name to be associated with the letter, and also suggests that some of the other Primates had similar misgivings. What is needed now is for some of these men to also publicly declare their dissent but in the case of the African Archbishops, none has thus far demonstrated the ability to stand up to the bullying tactics of the Hierarch of Nigeria. But Clive has at least done us all a service by alerting us to the scheming, manipulative, abusive and undemocratic world these men inhabit.
The Guardian newspaper was concerned enough to devote an editorial to the event. Under the title Anglicanism: Sex and Schism, this editorial claimed that the terms of the letter to the Archbishop “challenge him to break either with their own brand of conservative Anglicanism, or with that of the liberals of the north. Is Anglicanism to be a responsive, culturally sensitive and expressly inclusive religion, or a universal and fundamentalist church?” Three cheers! This for me, is the heart of the issue. The editorial concludes citing C S Lewis, a hero of the evangelical right, who averred that sexual sins were the least important; “If Dr Williams is to safeguard the Anglican communion, then it is time to insist that a doctrinal point about sexual orientation cannot be allowed to threaten it with extinction”, sentiments with which I and most of my friends concur.
On Saturday in its Review Section, the Guardian offered a number of people the opportunity of commenting on the UK Government’s controversial plans for legislation to curb incitement to religious hatred. This may appear to have little bearing upon the current tensions in the Anglican Communion, but one of the invited commentators manages to make the connection. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and hailed as the twenty-first century Tolkien, was a colleague of mine at Westminster College Oxford. He taught children’s literature, I taught applied and community theology. In his article, Philip explores the problem of ‘identity’ and asks whether identity is a function of what we do, or of what we are, or both. He then offers a series of eight propositions including What we are is not in our control, but what we do is; What we do is morally significant, what we are is not; and Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.
Philip Pullman comments that the Anglican Church has been characterised throughout its history by its broad-mindedness and tolerance, and that this extended to those of its members, lay and clerical who were homosexual, so that this was not an issue “of public discussion, denunciation, exposure, justification, confession, condemnation, punishment”. But the issue suddenly after all this time now looks like splitting the Anglican communion in two because “the zealous faction has been feeling its power and is beginning to exercise it” with the stress on being rather than doing. "Believers", he says, "can become addicted to the gamey tang of the absolute, the pungency of righteousness, the furtive sexiness of intolerance". Thus the celibate Jeffrey John was prevented from becoming Bishop of Reading because “it was what he was that matters, not what he did. If you ‘are’ homosexual, then even if you live an entirely celibate life, you will still be tainted and abominable and unfit to belong to the clergy”. Such an attitude, he believes, leads to a cognitive dissonance, with people claiming an inner identity which is quite unrelated to their actions.
I’m grateful to Philip for this reflection because it goes some way towards explaining the behaviour of the Hierarch of Nigeria and his acolytes who lay claim to some kind of moral high ground in terms of ‘being’, while exhibiting a total lack of Christian morality in the matter of ‘doing’.
I was distressed to see amongst the signatories to the letter, the name of the Most Revd Clive Handforth, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in the Middle East. Now, Clive was British Chaplain in Beirut when I was British Chaplain in Haifa and although the political situation made it impossible for us to visit one another directly, we met at regional clergy conferences in Cyprus. I found him to be a modest man of great integrity, qualities which I encountered again in the United Kingdom when we had both returned to work there, and Clive held senior posts as Archdeacon of Nottingham and later, Suffragen Bishop of Warwick. Clive’s endorsement of the Primates’ letter on behalf of Arab Anglicans struck me as being so out of character that I was minded to immediately put pen to paper and write him a stern letter chastising him for his action and challenging his integrity.
Fortunately before I could complete the letter, Clive himself posted a general response which appeared on the Internet. “It is most regrettable”, Clive wrote, “and in no way helpful to the Church’s mission, that a personal letter, which should have been confidential, was broadcast in this way”. He affirms the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions to the discussion in Egypt as positive and constructive and goes on to express further concerns about the way the Primates' letter was drafted, the fact that he did not give permission for his name to be associated with the letter, and also suggests that some of the other Primates had similar misgivings. What is needed now is for some of these men to also publicly declare their dissent but in the case of the African Archbishops, none has thus far demonstrated the ability to stand up to the bullying tactics of the Hierarch of Nigeria. But Clive has at least done us all a service by alerting us to the scheming, manipulative, abusive and undemocratic world these men inhabit.
The Guardian newspaper was concerned enough to devote an editorial to the event. Under the title Anglicanism: Sex and Schism, this editorial claimed that the terms of the letter to the Archbishop “challenge him to break either with their own brand of conservative Anglicanism, or with that of the liberals of the north. Is Anglicanism to be a responsive, culturally sensitive and expressly inclusive religion, or a universal and fundamentalist church?” Three cheers! This for me, is the heart of the issue. The editorial concludes citing C S Lewis, a hero of the evangelical right, who averred that sexual sins were the least important; “If Dr Williams is to safeguard the Anglican communion, then it is time to insist that a doctrinal point about sexual orientation cannot be allowed to threaten it with extinction”, sentiments with which I and most of my friends concur.
On Saturday in its Review Section, the Guardian offered a number of people the opportunity of commenting on the UK Government’s controversial plans for legislation to curb incitement to religious hatred. This may appear to have little bearing upon the current tensions in the Anglican Communion, but one of the invited commentators manages to make the connection. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and hailed as the twenty-first century Tolkien, was a colleague of mine at Westminster College Oxford. He taught children’s literature, I taught applied and community theology. In his article, Philip explores the problem of ‘identity’ and asks whether identity is a function of what we do, or of what we are, or both. He then offers a series of eight propositions including What we are is not in our control, but what we do is; What we do is morally significant, what we are is not; and Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.
Philip Pullman comments that the Anglican Church has been characterised throughout its history by its broad-mindedness and tolerance, and that this extended to those of its members, lay and clerical who were homosexual, so that this was not an issue “of public discussion, denunciation, exposure, justification, confession, condemnation, punishment”. But the issue suddenly after all this time now looks like splitting the Anglican communion in two because “the zealous faction has been feeling its power and is beginning to exercise it” with the stress on being rather than doing. "Believers", he says, "can become addicted to the gamey tang of the absolute, the pungency of righteousness, the furtive sexiness of intolerance". Thus the celibate Jeffrey John was prevented from becoming Bishop of Reading because “it was what he was that matters, not what he did. If you ‘are’ homosexual, then even if you live an entirely celibate life, you will still be tainted and abominable and unfit to belong to the clergy”. Such an attitude, he believes, leads to a cognitive dissonance, with people claiming an inner identity which is quite unrelated to their actions.
I’m grateful to Philip for this reflection because it goes some way towards explaining the behaviour of the Hierarch of Nigeria and his acolytes who lay claim to some kind of moral high ground in terms of ‘being’, while exhibiting a total lack of Christian morality in the matter of ‘doing’.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 1:38 PM
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