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| A Religious Educator comments on Christianity and the world. |
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| If Bruce Kaye's analysis of the Anglican Communion on the ABC's Religion Report this morning is correct, then the bishops, priests and laity who met at GAFCON are striving for a church with a tighter administrative centre. These Anglicans want someone who can say, "We don't want them in our communion." Presumably this would be one of the roles of the small committee of Primates. I do not wish to belong to a church that hunts heretics, or even defines heresy. Our Communion may need a bit of sinew, but what it doesn't need is a persecution mentality. I like belonging to the current Communion, which historically has striven to be inclusive. In this, at least over the last century, it has largely succeeded. We have been a Church where conscience is respected. We have been a Church in which, for example, it is possible to find partnered homosexuals who sincerely believe that Scripture blesses their relationship alongside others who believe that all sexual activity between homosexuals is sinful. These two beliefs could not be reconciled, but were held in tension in the Church's life, just as there were those who condemned all abortion and others with more liberal views on terminating pregnancies. I have always taken this plurality as a mark of our genuine humility. Just because I hold a view strongly to be true doesn't mean that I am right. If Truth is always beyond us, just as God always transcends us, then part of the journey is learning to let go of views wrongly held. My hold on Truth is tenuous. I need to be corrected by fellow-Anglicans with views that challenge mine.A Church that proclaims one view only to be true, is a prison. A Church with normative teaching freezes me in my partial truth. Bruce Kaye this morning described authority in the Anglican Communion (in the way, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed), as whimsical. This whimsy, he asserted, was our strength. There is a genuine safety in an authority whose only power is to call us together. To be "in communion with the See of Canterbury" is to be allowed to be free to grow in Christ. To be subject to a group of Primates who can define one version of the truth as normal terms would be to be condemned for ever to be a child. It seems to have turned out to be impossible to be inclusive of every view. We could hold in tension contrary views on every subject from Scripture to the nature of faith, but we could not hold those who believe in exclusion. And it is this view that turns out to be the heresy. © Ted Witham 2008 Spirit-Ed: Consultant in Religious Education Email: twitham@graduate.uwa.edu.au | ||
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