“God’s Church for God’s World” — Traces of Babel Rhetoric?
By The Rev. Dr. Joseph G. Muthuraj, Virtueonline:
The first Lambeth Conference met in 1867, making 2017 its 150th anniversary year. It is not surprising that the LC was not originally an idea from the Canterbury establishment. At the Provincial Synod of the Canadian Church, held on September 20, 1865, it was unanimously agreed, upon the motion of the Bishop of Ontario, urging the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Convocation of his Province that the members of Anglican Communion in all quarters of the world should be gathered from every land.
India and the Lambeth Conference from 1867
The circumstances under which the Archbishop of Canterbury had resolved to issue the invitation dated 22 February 1867 was that he was moved to invite the bishops of the Indian and Colonial Episcopate to meet him and the Home bishops for brotherly communion and conference. The Indian presence was there through its missionary bishops from 1867 onwards.
How was the response from the Indian sub-continent? The Anglican episcopacy had been in existence in India since 1814 and India is the third country outside England to be endowed with the Anglican Episcopate and it was first in Asian and Australian continents. The See of Calcutta founded in 1813 was considered the Bishopric of the British territories in the East Indies. According to the Letters Patent dated 27 May 1823, ‘The Diocese of Calcutta constituted a larger region of the continent of Asia and even to the islands of north of the equator. It comprised all islands, ports, havens, costs, cities, towns and places between the Cape of Good Hope and Straits of Magellan’ (a channel separating South America from Tierra del Fuego and other islands south of the continent and connecting the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans). The diocese included Australia and New Zealand geographically known at that time.
[…] Anglicanism in India is put to death both by Canterbury and the CSI
Both the Anglican Communion and the CSI treat Anglicanism as dead in India as Archbishop Justin Welby unofficially spoke of the CSI in terms of a successor to Anglicanism in India and the latter sees Anglicanism as a ghost roaming around the CSI churches. The Church Union is wrongly understood on both sides that the Union was meant to erase the footprints of Anglicanism.
When bishop John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich visited India in the year 1977 he said in his Sunday preaching at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Bangalore that the CSI was still holding on to some of the old practices of Anglicanism and singing the hymns the West had been thrown away when it was supposed to have given up on Anglicanism.
It is my aim to show that the Church of South India is made to stand firmly within the history and tradition of Anglicanism as a united church. Anglicanism is to be revived and its essence has to be reabsorbed by the CSI because the Church Union has been wrongly practiced to mean that each constituent church tradition represented in the making of the CSI is to bury the other and one should keep neutralising the other under the pretext of unity.
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