The choices that face our archbishops in Canterbury
by Gavin Ashenden, Anglican Ink:
(Reposted from 2016)
THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY….
In Germany in the 1930’s, the seed of fascism was taking root. It grew ferociously fast. Some parts of the Church saw what was coming and stood against it. They became known as ‘the Confessing Church’. Other parts of the Church cooperated with the secular agenda of the new regime, hoping to buy political credit and claiming it gave them an invaluable influence.
Before long, the fascist state turned on the accommodating part of the Church that had for a while cooperated and compromised, and destroyed it – as it had always intended.
There were a few brave men and women in the Confessing Church who knew what was coming and made it their business early on to speak as prophetically as they could in the name of the Gospel and the Living God, against the coming evil. They were first ostracized and then arrested.
One of the bravest of them, Dietrich Bonheoffer, was hung in prison by piano wire in April 1945, in a final act of spite as the end of the military struggle with Nazism approached.
The rest, as they say, is history.
CANTERBURY 2016
What does this have to do with the meeting of 38 Archbishops of the Provinces of the Anglican Communion in Canterbury in the second week of January 2016?
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