Lambeth 2022: the Elevation of Experience
from English Churchman:
The Lambeth Conference is finally over. Thanks be to God! Its completion was about enough to turn the most emotionless soul into a pew-jumping Pentecostal. Hallelujah!
However, this most recent gathering did bring clarity. It visibly demonstrated the separation of the wheat from the chaff in the Anglican Communion. No one need wonder any longer where theological lines are drawn.
Most Anglicans worldwide acknowledge that sexual relations are only permitted between one man and one wife within the context of a life-long marriage. It is a very simple concept that is very readily understood from scripture.
The Archbishop of Canterbury demonstrated that he could simultaneously accept two contradictory positions as equally valid. One recalls the quip about the man who “had a mind so fine as to be incapable of understanding contradiction.”
On the one hand, he acknowledged that 1998 Lambeth Resolution I.10 was still the theological standard of the overwhelming majority of the world’s 80,000,000 Anglicans. On the other, he accepted the revisionists’ view within the church as valid without the need for censure. He pronounced that the revisionist minority arrived at their view after much prayer and study as If that were the unassailable argument in its favour.
But this is not just prayer and study; this is Revisionists’ Prayer and Study. The Archbishop’s entire rationale for permitting the faddish doctrine of the liberal provinces is that they have come to their position through prayer and study. What special pleading is this? Does this mean that only the revisionists pray, or that there are no scholars to be found at their studies on the conservative side?
Would this argument have held sway at the Council of Nicaea? “We must permit Arian teaching because it was arrived at through prayer and study.” Can the Anglican Communion really be hamstrung by such facile reasoning?
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
