The Truth Shall Set You Free: Global Anglicans in
the 21st century
Charles Raven, editor
The Latimer Trust £7.99
(978-1-906327-16-3)
Church Times Bookshop £7.20 (Use code
CT522 )
How the Anglican Communion Came to be and Where it
is Going
Michael Nazir-Ali
The Latimer Trust £3.99
(978-1-906327-18-7)
Church Times Bookshop £3.60 (Use code
CT522 )
THE Truth Shall Set You Free is a manifesto for an
alternative Anglican Communion. It consists of material produced
for the leaders' conference of the Global Fellowship of Confessing
Anglicans (GFCA), preparatory to the second GAFCON (Global Anglican
Future Conference) in Nairobi, 2013.
Most readers of the Church Times would probably not
naturally gravitate to this milieu. But we need to acquaint
ourselves with what this movement of dissent and regrouping stands
for, and to assess its implications for the Anglican Communion.
Some writers are avowedly "disaffiliated" clergy, who have
either left or been expelled from what they see as persecuting
liberal Churches. On the other hand, the Jerusalem Statement, the
foundation document of the movement, is generally unexceptionable.
There is, however, a strange short piece, "What is the Gospel?". It
deals in a biblical way with atonement and conversion. But its
understanding of salvation is confined to the individual. The
Church is mentioned only as a witness to the gospel; the sacraments
are ignored.
The presenting issues are policies regarding human sexuality and
"liberal theology" in the Episcopal Church in the United States and
parts of the Anglican Church of Canada which are accused of
preaching a "different" or "false" gospel. But, as these documents
point out, the underlying issue is the authority of scripture. What
they do not explicitly admit is that behind the question of the
authority of scripture is the question of the interpretation of
scripture (hermeneutics). This question is not addressed, except
for one unfortunate remark by the editor which takes a swipeat
"biblical criticism", as though "criticism" were meant in a
negative, destructive way rather than by analogy with the
disciplines of "literary criticism" and "musical criticism" - that
is to say, understanding, explanation, and appreciation.
A rigidly conservative stance on the Bible is here equated with
"orthodoxy", implying that those who do not share it are
unorthodox, heterodox. Some of these writers talk about "God's just
and holy wrath" and "the awful reality of hell" - for others, of
course.
The authors sit in judgement on their fellow members of the
Anglican Communion. The US Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church
of Canada are the prime culprits, but the Church of England is not
unscathed, and the office of Archbishop of Canterbury is
castigated. There is a rather paranoid conspiracy theory about the
Anglican Communion Office (ACO), which is characterised
mistakenlyas an arm of the Lambeth Palace "bureaucracy" that has
"marginalised the Primates and sought to supplant their
decision-making role" (did they ever have one?).
The report also shamelessly plays the "colonialist" card, as
though Lord Williams could be seen as an imperialist adventurer, or
theACO, whose senior staff is mainly non-British, as a colonialist
threat. But the central accusation is that "the troubles of the
Anglican Communion flow from a rejection of the uniqueness and
sufficiencyof the Lord Jesus Christ." This accusation, that
Anglican Chris-tians in the West generally do not accept Christ as
their one Saviour and Lord, is completely unjustified.
The authors repeatedly affirm that they have no intention of
departing from the Anglican Communion, but simply want to
restructure its conciliar polity. They argue that the Instruments
of Communion (the Lambeth Conference, the Primates' Meeting, the
Anglican Consultative Council [ACC], and the ministry of the
Archbishop of Canterbury) have failed and remain dysfunctional.
In his otherwise balanced and useful booklet on the Anglican
Communion, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali says the same. In his chapter
in the report itself, he calls the Instruments what they have never
been: "instruments of decision-making". The report tends to reify,
objectify, the Instruments of Communion as things "out there" that
can function irrespective of who is taking part. But the
Instruments are made up of people: they are organic and relational
entities. They have no existence without their members. Like
musical or surgical instruments, they need skill, dedication,
practice, and wisdom to enable them to do their job
effectively.
As the significant boycott of the Lambeth Conference 2008
showed, the GFCA constituency feels so strongly in conscience about
the views of some Western Churches with regard to sex that they are
not willing even to talk to them. In that case, how can the
Instruments be expected to work well?
Except for the constitutionalpart played by the ACC, the
Instruments are not decision-making bodies. They are instruments of
consultation with the capacity to offer guidance and make
recommendations to the member Churches of the Communion, who must
then consider that advice through their own synodical-episcopal
channels. The GFCA will discover for itself the limits of central,
global "decision-making"if it attempts to legislate for its member
Churches and groups. It will, it says, construct alternative
structures of consultation and oversight, beginning with the
Primates' Council. The claim to wish to remain within the Communion
is a smokescreen: what seems to be intended is an alternative
Communion, the real Anglican Communion.
The lack of momentum of the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant
is not regretted, and the Covenant itself is assimilated to
"managerial and organisational strategies". It is dismissed as
"institutional" rather than "spiritual". In fact, the Covenant is
intended as an instrument of mediation and reconciliation,
requiring ongoing spiritual conversion of the participants if it is
to realise its potential.
Ashley Null contributes a helpful exposition of the ecclesiology
of the English Reformers and Richard Hooker, while Arthur Middleton
puts the cat among the pigeons with an apologia for the High Church
17th-century divines and the Oxford Movement, which gave the
visible Church and its tradition a rather different place from any
that this report generally does. Middleton suggests in a friendly
way that the Anglican Catholic and Anglican Evangelical approaches
are "complementary", but the editor seeks to pre-empt this idea.
The report leaves us still asking what it means as Anglicans to be
"Catholic and reformed".
The Revd Professor Paul Avis's latest book on
Anglicanism, In Search of Authority: Anglican theological
method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, is reviewed
here.