By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org
It is now apparent to the world’s roughly 85 million Anglicans that the Anglican Communion is irretrievably broken, and that short of repentance it will never be repaired.
There is no glossing over it, no parsing it, no pretending otherwise, no hope that if we talk long enough and lovingly enough about unity, we will somehow arrive at a different conclusion. We will not.
The Fault Line and the Point of No Return
Lambeth Resolution 1.10, passed in 1998, was the starting point of the schism. GAFCON and the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 were its ending point — the moment the orthodox declared, decisively and without apology, that there is no third way, no place at which anyone may say we have reached consensus and can now move forward together. There is no consensus to be had. There never was.
Every Remedy Has Failed
Consider what has been tried, and what has come of it. Neither the coercive maneuvering of the late Frank Griswold, nor the bullying of the late John Shelby Spong, nor the unctuous self-regard of Gene Robinson, nor the mailed fist of the LGBTQ lobby has moved the needle a single inch toward reconciliation. Just the opposite. Each hardened the divide while The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada raced headlong toward their own demographic extinction. Rainbow flags draped over every available surface, endless invocations of God’s indiscriminate love for absolutely everybody, and the ready cry of “homophobe” for anyone who dared question the new sexual theologians made one thing abundantly clear: compromise was never on the table. Never. Conform, or be gone.
The remedies offered by successive Archbishops of Canterbury resolved nothing. The Windsor Report, alternative episcopal oversight, the Communion Partners bishops — each was a bridge thrown across a chasm that could not be spanned. Rowan Williams, for all his genuine brilliance, could not resolve the impasse, because he was himself conflicted. The obscurantist theology of his “The Body’s Grace” — an essay that labored to baptize what Scripture plainly forbids — could neither persuade the global bishops nor kindle the faithful in the pews. One cannot, in the end, synthesize sin. God has not changed His mind.
Two Narratives, Two Religions
Here is the heart of it, the thing no committee can paper over and no communiqué can disguise. Two narratives now govern the Anglican Communion, and they do not merely disagree. They cannot be reconciled, because they do not share a common authority.