Jeremiah and the GAFCON gospel
By Craig Uffman | May 16, 2008
A reader at Covenant, noting my strong opposition to the GAFCON movement, asked if I believe the GAFCON organizers are “a cause of the division we are seeing in the church, as opposed to a symptom of the division.” His question is, I think, the wrong question to ask. The right question is, ‘what is the path of faithfulness?’ In what follows, I suggest that the counsel of many of the GAFCON organizers echoes that of another group who called for battle in Jerusalem, the princes of Judah whom Jeremiah opposed.
I think of Judah, as we find her in Jeremiah 38, just before the fall of Jerusalem. The geopolitical situation is important in that part of the story. Josiah cleansed the land of idols and reclaimed the old lands of the northern tribe during the waning days of the Assyrian-Egyptian empire. In other words, good king Josiah was against Assyria-Egypt in the old Empire’s battles against the rising new Empire, Babylon. Josiah was “for” Babylon. But when he died, his sons switched sides, and allied with Egypt. As a result, in Jeremiah’s time, there was a constant political battle within Judah between those who favored alliance with Egypt and those who favored alliance with Babylon. Like us today, those who shared a common life as Jews were divided over what to do.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 1 Comment »
Archbishop Neill: “It may well be our vocation to pioneer a way forward”
By Craig Uffman | May 16, 2008
The Anglican Communion New Service has published an article about a sermon given by the Archbishop of Dublin, John Neill.
I am struck by how his remarks about our Anglican vocation echo the remarks of Ephraim Radner in his The Fate of Communion in trying to describe the vocation of Anglicanism. We turn our backs on this vocation when we create structures aimed at division rather than expressing our union in Christ.
…the crisis that Anglicanism faces has “enabled us to discover more of what it means to wrestle with the recognition of diversity and the call to unity which is of the very nature of the Church” adding “To settle too easily for one at the expense of the other is to miss something of the challenge of the Gospel.” Continuing he will say “Members of other Christian World Communions have commented that the issues that we are facing as Anglicans are there for all Christians, even if below the surface, and it may well be our vocation to pioneer a way forward. Indeed it is only together that Churches today can really make a difference and seize the opportunities for service and mission that are there.”
Concluding the Archbishop said “The Church of Ireland, side by side with other churches on this island, has a task to fulfil – opportunities to be grasped – and grasped when they present themselves. The call of the Scriptures through which God speaks to us as we worship reminds us of the priority of abiding in Christ, growing through worship and prayer. We are to express the urgency of being called together to unity whilst maintaining the richness of diversity. We are to proclaim the joyful hope that is at the heart of our entire ministry, lay and ordained – to bring good news, to offer a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.”
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John Watson - Doctrine: Resource or Obstacle?
By Craig Uffman | May 16, 2008
John Watson, a fellow member of the Fulcrum leadership team, provides a helpful survey of thought on the nature of and rationale for doctrine. Somehow he manages to quote John Sentamu, Kevin Van Hoozer, George Lindbeck, Rowan Williams, and Walter Brueggemann in one article. The bibliography may be helpful to many.
When human beings behave cruelly or fail to act on the behalf of the suffering it can suggest a catastrophic failure of imagination has occurred – the inability to see things from another’s experience. Doctrine enables this to be challenged and corrected for as Brueggemann writes ‘numbness robs us of our capability for humanity’[63]. Doctrine restores the potential for it by engaging our imaginations to what can be.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 1 Comment »
California Supreme Court Overturns Gay-marriage Ban
By Craig Uffman | May 15, 2008
The California Supreme Court overturned a state gay-marriage ban in a ruling that would make the nation’s largest state the second one to allow gay and lesbian weddings.
Download the text of the judicial decision here.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 8 Comments »
“Come, Let Us Reason Together” — The Future of a Useful Covenant
By CSeitz-ACI | May 15, 2008
This essay was published on the Anglican Communion Institute site here…..
One concern about the covenant process now underway is that the reality of the Communion’s present condition could be bypassed by well-intentioned efforts of a committee to hear everyone and find a common document that proves unable to address a reality.
We are in a crisis. Unless someone can offer facts to the contrary, there is only one way for an Anglican Communion to remain in place, and no real alternatives to that. Indeed this was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s own stated assumption from the very beginning as he sought to address the crisis before us.
This is for a two-tiered composition to emerge, with the largest bloc of Anglicans genuinely interested in and committed to Communion to remain as such, and a second tier to ‘take courage in both hands’ and declare their intention to develop a form of Anglicanism stressing federal arrangements, based upon commitments to new teaching in the area of human sexuality, and an emphasis on the larger theological systems that undergird these commitments.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 3 Comments »
Meditation for the Feast of St. Matthias the Apostle
By RichardKew | May 14, 2008
The Feast of St. Matthias
Sherlock Holmes was able to solve cases by deft analysis and the careful organization of the tiniest scraps of information, but I’m not sure even he could have done much with the mere crumb of information that we have about Matthias – the Apostles’ thirteenth man!
All we know about Matthias is that sometime between the Ascension and Pentecost the remaining Eleven called an electoral convention, Peter gave a stirring speech, and the names of two candidates who had from the beginning been part of the wider apostolic band were presented to fill the vacancy left by Judas. Matthias got the job but not because he was elected – they cast lots and the dice happened to fall out his way.
After that even the legends disagree markedly about what happened to Matthias as the Gospel spread outward. He clearly began his ministry close to home in
As if this weren’t confusing enough, there is the matter of his death and burial. The Abbey of St. Matthias in
Topics: Anglican Communion | 3 Comments »
Archbishop of Canterbury’s Pentecost Letter to the Bishops of the Anglican Communion
By Craig Uffman | May 13, 2008
From the home page of the Archbishop of Canterbury
Monday 12 May 2008
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has today sent an open letter to the bishops of the Anglican Communion, in advance of the Lambeth Conference.
The full text of the letter can be found below:
The Feast of Pentecost is a time when we give thanks that God, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, makes us able to speak to each other and to the whole world of the wonderful things done in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a good moment to look forward prayerfully to the Lambeth Conference, asking God to pour out the Spirit on all of us as we make ready for this time together, so that we shall indeed be given grace to speak boldly in his Name. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Anglican Communion | 1 Comment »
Cognitive Revolution to Challenge Divine Law?
By Craig Uffman | May 13, 2008
According to David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, a new wave of research into how the brain functions will pose a great challenge to Christian theology along the lines of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Brooks says this cognitive revolution “will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Anglican Communion | 4 Comments »
The “Evangelical Manifesto”
By Craig Uffman | May 12, 2008
On May 7, a group of self-described evangelicals released - at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. - a 20-page document called “AN EVANGELICAL MANIFESTO: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment.”
I am still digesting its contents. The document purports to define (or re-define) the term “evangelical” and calls those who identify with that definition to a particular form of political participation (or non-participation). The document is not Anglican but surely touches on areas of interest to all Christians. You may download the Evangelical Manifesto here.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 4 Comments »
On Immigration: Consider the context that sparks migration
By Craig Uffman | May 12, 2008
Immigration policy is one of the most explosive issues in the U.S. and European political landscapes these days. Immigration drives much of our legislative and judicial agendas at both the local and national levels these days. For example, laws regarding voter identification were recently considered by the U.S. Supreme Court and the state of Missouri is considering legislatively the rules that govern driver’s license access. These seemingly innocuous laws often have widespread implications for how undocumented workers are treated within host countries.
Immigration is an important theological concern for Christians because we are called to be an alternative community, a people whose lives manifest the love of God for all creation. For the Christian, the duty of Christian hospitality provides an important theological lens through which arise questions about the implications of what appear to be mundane policies such as voter identification.
Topics: Anglican Communion | No Comments »
McCain Repeats Call for Cap-and-Trade System
By Craig Uffman | May 12, 2008
Stewardship of the environment should be an important theological concern for Christians. I trust that this statement is uncontroversial.
One of the notable aspects of the U.S. presidential campaign is that all three remaining candidates signal a departure from current U.S. policy on responding to the rising levels of carbon dioxide gases within the earth’s atmosphere and their global consequences (”global warming”).
Several years ago, while taking a graduate course in environmental ethics and economics, I wrote a paper about Senator John McCain’s legislative proposal (a bill he authored that was never approved by the U.S. Senate) for a “cap-and-trade” system in lieu of the Kyoto Treaty’s more regulatory approach to the problem. All three candidates now support some form of this concept.
In a speech today, Senator McCain signals a substantive break from Bush policy on the environment, echoing his long-held recognition of the seriousness of the implications of global warming, along with his preference for the cap-and-trade response to the problem.
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Graham Kings: A Poem for Pentecost
By Graham Kings | May 11, 2008
THE IMAGE OF HER FATHER
For many years in Israel’s womb
The embryo grows, the Church of Christ:
First the Head, then the Body,
The Son of Man includes the many.
For hours upon a Roman cross
The Church’s birth begins in blood:
Crucified with Christ her Head,
Constricted by the love of God.
The third day, from a gaping tomb,
The Church emerges urgently:
Risen again with Christ her life,
Released, relieved, the joy of God.
The fiftieth day, with tongues of flame,
She breathes the Spirit, cries the word:
Conceived, inspired with Christ, she grows,
The heir of all, the child of God.
Graham Kings
First published in The International Review of Mission
LXXX no 317 January 1991.
Topics: Anglican Communion | No Comments »
A Pentecost Reflection
By Greg Jones | May 11, 2008
Pentecost was already a special day in Jerusalem before the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father, through the Son, and into the disciples of Jesus. Pentecost was a Jewish harvest celebration, when the first fruits of the harvest were consecrated to God. But, on the fiftieth day after Jesus’ death on the cross, the ancient feast of Pentecost became all new.
We call it the Church’s birthday, because it’s the day when the Holy Spirit poured out upon flesh and blood people like you and me who had decided to follow Jesus, as his own. On that day when God’s life, breath, wisdom and binding love came pouring out on the disciples of Jesus, a new thing was done. God did a new thing. A new thing different than anything that’d gone before. A new age was born, a new era begun, an era of God’s salvation. And we are still in that age.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Did You Know?
By Craig Uffman | May 8, 2008
Topics: Anglican Communion | 3 Comments »
Julian of Norwich
By Dr Jean Meade | May 8, 2008
Her confident assertion that, “All shall be well, and all manner of things be well” is what we think first of when we think of Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English anchoress, whose “Revelations of Divine Love” is a spiritual classic, revived in the 20th century by T. S. Eliot among others.
This May 8 as we remember the Lady Julian, we are also approaching the celebration of Pentecost and the Coming of the Holy Spirit, when we contemplate the mystery of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In recent years the traditional “formula” has grated on some ears, and some have sought to substitute philosophical categories in order to avoid the “sexist” terms “Father” and “Son,” found in Scripture. Since the Hebrew for Spirit is ruach, a grammatically feminine noun, it also seemed logical as the locus of the feminine principle in the Trinity. But that can seem to divide up the Holy and Undivided Trinity into different “sexes.” So we end up with Gnostic benedictions in the name of the ‘Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier,” or, worse yet, adoptionist benedictions, “Glory to God… glory to Jesus… glory to the Holy Spirit…” as if the latter two were not God.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 1 Comment »
On Hermeneutics and the Rev’d Wright’s theology
By Craig Uffman | May 7, 2008
J. Kameron Carter, a Duke theologian whose work I have often cited on this blog, was recently interviewed by USAToday as part of its coverage of the Obama/Wright controversy.
I found this interesting as a commentary on the controversy, but also as a point of reflection on our own differences across the Communion. Surely this is why Archbishop Rowan has called for a hermeneutics project in parallel with our effort to create a covenant?
“Someone reading the Exodus story who was a slave would read it differently than the white master on that same plantation,” says J. Kameron Carter, associate professor of Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke University Divinity School. “Hermeneutics isn’t whether you have the Scripture right or wrong, it’s the sunglasses you’re wearing when you read it and when you look out at the world,”
Part of that viewpoint is a communal sense of faith. At the National Press Club, Wright cast all criticism of himself as an “attack on the black church” because, historically and culturally, black people have not thought of their religious life in individualistic ways, Carter says.
“The afflictions of Miss Jones down the street or a sanitation worker or a middle-class person are all bound together by history and experiences across time. Attacking Wright is seen as attacking that tradition,” Carter says. This view defies any kind of inward, individualized piety or spirituality, he says.
“Black liberation theology, at its root, was an attempt to bring a Christian answer forward with intellectual force and coherence,” says Carter. “This theology says Jesus, as God’s representative in the world, was about deliverance, uplift and liberation of the downtrodden. God is working out the uplift of his people and freeing the captors as well as the captives from the structures of oppression.”
Says Carter: “He is harkening back to the prophets of ancient Israel, charged by God to call Israel back to its mission, identity and purpose. They often had to use such harsh words that Jeremiah was thrown in a dungeon for his gloom-and-doom declarations. The prophet’s job is speaking truth to power, not on their own authority but on God’s.”
Topics: Anglican Communion | No Comments »
Key GAFCON leaders to attend Lambeth Conference
By Craig Uffman | May 7, 2008
Good news to report regarding the Lambeth Conference….
Yesterday, Bishop Bob Duncan announced that the bishops of the diocese of Pittsburgh will be attending Lambeth 2008, as well as the GAFCON.
This follows similar announcements that Archbishop Venables and Bishop Iker will be doing the same.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 1 Comment »
Prayer
By Craig Uffman | May 7, 2008
“A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.”
Søren Kierkegaard
Christian Discourses
Jesus told his disciples always to pray and not give up. Many people use the monthly Cycle of Prayer, as a way of praying methodically for the work of our parishes, chaplaincies and our brothers and sisters around the world.
The Anglican Cycle of Prayer can be used as part of the ‘ daily offices’ of the Church universal- the daily services of preparation for the day ahead and reflection for the day past. Choose either the Book of Common Prayer or the Common Worship versions below.
Click here to go to Morning Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church.
Alternatively, the Daily Prayer feed below is provided by the Church of England.
Daily Prayer
Daily Prayer is provided by the official Church of England web site,
© The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, 2002-2004.
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/services/
Morning Prayer
Book of Common Prayer
Today Tomorrow
Evening Prayer
Book of Common Prayer
Today Tomorrow
Night Prayer
(Traditional)
Today Tomorrow
Topics: Anglican Communion | 4 Comments »
Isolationism
By Fr. Tony Clavier | May 6, 2008
One of the sure signs that a dominant group in the church is suffering from hardening of the arteries is when it gets defensive and perhaps isolationist. A movement which was full of vigor, freshness and hope, breaking out of the proverbial box, and stretching minds and hearts gradually becomes narrow, legalistic and defensive of its turf.
Such a development is as much a part of our Anglican history as the “golden ages” some love to re-visit for strength and solace. One of the tasks of a historian is to dig into golden ages to reveal, as best one may, that they were perhaps not as golden as they seemed, as well as to examine so called “dead” periods to see just how lifeless they really were. When I was much younger the popular historical view was that the 18th Century church was as dead as the proverbial Dodo until the Evangelicals came along and woke it up. Today a perhaps more measured description is available.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 3 Comments »
Addendum in light of the Presiding Bishop’s April 30, 2008 Letter to the House of Bishops
By Craig Uffman | May 6, 2008
The ACI has just published an addendum to the memorandum for presentment of the Presiding Bishop. The source is confidential to the ACI. The link to the addendum is here, but the full text is published below for your convenience.
A defense now proffered by the Presiding Bishop and her supporters is that the same procedures were followed in the recent cases of Bishops Davies and Moreno. Past violations of the canon’s clear provisions are said to justify current ones. In considering this defense, it is necessary to distinguish three senses of “precedent” in legal usage. One is the well-known sense of precedent as a formal ruling on a legal issue by a competent juridical body. This is clearly not the case here as no one has suggested that the prior cases were determined to be canonical by any body reviewing the canonical issues. These cases are not offered as reasoned legal rulings, but as a fait accompli.
Topics: Anglican Communion | 2 Comments »
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