Teetering on the brink: Shared convulsions at Synods
from Christian Concern:
Joint statement from Andrea Williams, Chief Executive of Christian Concern, and Member of General Synod and Rev. Dr. Joe Boot, (M.A, Ph.D.) Director of the Wilberforce Academy and Senior Pastor of Westminster Chapel, Toronto following the Church of England’s ‘shared conversation’.
It has been a troubling week for Western Anglicanism. The Canadian General Synod, after some bureaucratic confusion, carried a motion to accept recommendations for the full adoption of same-sex ‘marriage’ by the church – the decision will become canon law in 2019. There was no real shock here. The Anglican Church of Canada has long been in the vanguard of assaulting the orthodox teaching of the church on sexuality and revelling in their divisiveness. Here in the UK, the ‘shared conversations’ of the past two years culminated in a General Synod meeting at York University, where plenary sessions and small group work largely proved to be the stage-managed piece of theatre many were expecting. [i]
The Canadian philosopher George Grant understood the spirit of the age that is today actuating these ‘conversations’:
Justice is understood to be something strictly human, having nothing to do with obedience to any divine command or conformity to any pattern ‘laid up in heaven.’ Moral principles, like all other social conventions, are something ‘made on earth.’ Human freedom requires that the principles of justice be the product of human agreement or consent, that is, they must be the result of a contract, and these principles must therefore be rooted in an understanding of the interests of human beings as individuals rather than in any sense of duty or obligation to anything above humanity. The terms of the contract may well change as circumstances and interests change. But the restraints free individuals accept must always be ‘horizontal’ in character rather than ‘vertical.’ [ii]
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