According to Fr. Mark Harris, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent letter to the primates is “filled with affront and seeming offense. It is not a letter of blessing.” I agree, though I’m not sure I entirely agree with Fr. Harris’s assessment that finds the letter merely “something of a mess and a disappointment.”
It seems to me that the heart of the letter is its evocation of what the Archbishop asserts to be a common understanding of scriptural tradition against which The Episcopal Church has made “a decisive move that plainly implies a new understanding of Scripture that has not been received and agreed by the wider Church.” To this framing the Archbishop adds:
Where such a situation arises, it becomes important to clarify that the Communion as a whole is not committed to receiving the new interpretation and that there must be ways in which others can appropriately distance themselves from decisions and policies which they have not agreed.
Moreover, it seems to me that while the Archbishop grants that “it is part of our Christian and Anglican discipleship to condemn homophobic prejudice and violence, to defend the human rights and civil liberties of homosexual people and to offer them the same pastoral care and loving service that we owe to all in Christ’s name,” the weight of his rhetoric supports those in the church who agree that there is a “deeper question . . . about what we believe we are free to do, if we seek to be recognisably faithful to Scripture and the moral tradition of the wider Church, with respect to blessing and sanctioning in the name of the Church certain personal decisions about what constitutes an acceptable Christian lifestyle” [italics original]. In other words, as faithful anglicans we are free to minister to “homosexual people,” but we may not legitimate their behavioral choices if they do not choose to lead celibate lives.
To be sure, the Archbishop has said these things before, but in this letter he says them with a particular stated intention.
[I]t is historically an aspect of the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury to ‘articulate the mind of the Communion’ in moments of tension and controversy, as the Windsor Report puts it (para. 109). I do so out of the profound conviction that the existence of our Communion is truly a gift of God to the wholeness of Christ’s Church and that all of us will be seriously wounded and diminished if our Communion fractures any further; but also out of the no less profound conviction that our identity as Anglicans is not something without boundaries. What I am writing here is an attempt to set out where some of those boundaries lie and why they matter for our witness to the world as well as for our own integrity and mutual respect.
It has long seemed to me that the Archbishop is politically and theologically a tory and that he characteristically frames the questions that confront the Anglican communion in a Burkean frame. I see this letter as no exception, except that the ABC makes it clear that he is speaking on behalf of a “mind of the communion” that is articulated in the Windsor Report, a written document, and that he speaks so as to make participation in the upcoming Lambeth conference contingent upon “willingness to work with those aspects of the Conference’s agenda that relate to implementing the recommendations of Windsor, including the development of a Covenant” [italics original]. I’m quite disturbed by this language, and I think the ABC, while he may understand the polity of The Episcopal Church, does not respect that polity. And hence, it seems to me that the ABC’s letter is more confrontational that Fr. Harris’s metaphor of a “slow dance around the issues troubling the Anglican Communion” implies.
And there are two other aspects of the letter that disturb me. the first is the Archbishop’s plan “to pursue some professionally facilitated conversations between the leadership of The Episcopal Church and those with whom they are most in dispute, internally and externally, to see if we can generate any better level of mutual understanding.” the ABC says he “will not seek any predetermined outcome,” but I strongly suspect he has a pretty good idea already “about the future pattern of liaison between TEC and other parts of the Communion” since he says as well:
This will feed in to the discussions at Lambeth about Anglican identity and the Covenant process; I suggest that it will also have to consider whether in the present circumstances it is possible for provinces or individual bishops at odds with the expressed mind of the Communion to participate fully in representative Communion agencies, including ecumenical bodies.
Finally, I think it is really too bad that the ABC includes the following exhortation in his discourse:
. . . I have said that the refusal to meet can be a refusal of the cross – and so of the resurrection. We are being asked to see our handling of conflict and potential division as part of our maturing both as pastors and as disciples. I do not think this is either an incidental matter or an evasion of more basic questions.
Perhaps, but this language is an appeal to force, akin to questioning the patriotism of a political opponent. And if somebody throws theology back at me, I must reply that the history of preaching is full of informal fallacies, and much worse. I wish I could think of something positive and uplifting to say here at the end, but I can’t. I think the ABC’s offering of this discourse as an Advent message is more than unfortunate. It makes me sick at heart, and it utterly contradicts and erases the inclusiveness of the ABC’s Christmas message I so loved yesterday. I feel tricked and betrayed.