Fr Tobias, of In a Godward direction, has suggested this morning that the Archbishop of Canterbury is playing politics in the matter of the Lambeth invitations and that his tactic is to give “+Abuja every reason to refuse to remain in Communion with Canterbury.” To this take on the behavior of “the wily Welshman” is added a further political reading by Catholic commentator Rick Allen, who suggests that the Archbishop’s diplomacy may be directed at “both sides” in the durrent Anglican dispute:

Both sides have now been affronted by having one of their standard-bearers refused an invitation to Lambeth. Both sides now have principled voices calling for non-participation because of the “snub.”

But the rub is that he who stays away on principle runs the greater risk of being held to have abandoned the communion.

Allen’s point that the withheld invitations give “both sides the chance to bolt” seems reasonable to me in light of a number of the Archbishop’s recent public statements about division in the church. On the other hand, most commentators at Invitations Sent and Withheld support Fr. Tobias’s conclusion that the Archbishop’s diplomacy is directed at +Abuja.

What interests me most about Allen’s commentary is a prefatory statement to the effect that “both sides claim to be the bearers of true Anglicanism.” I wish this weren’t true but fear that it is. It would be helpful, it seems to me, if those of us who believe in the legiticimacy of Bishop Robinson’s consecration could make our case on procedural or moral grounds without making claims of orthodoxy or theological purity. It is difficult to do that, however, when one is called apostate by those who disagree. The whole thing becomes ad hominem.

And speaking of ad hominem, Fr. Knisely at Entangled States put me on to this observation at the Ember Days blog:

. . . Archbishop Williams has expressed two propositions:

(1) that Gene Robinson is a genuine bishop of the Anglican Communion, but a stumbling-block to the weaker brethren, and

(2) that Martyn Minns is an outlaw.

Both these propositions have the merit of being true.

Susan Russell would do well to hold her tongue.

I think I understand what the writer means by calling Bp. Minns an outlaw; and I probably agree, though I suspect Minns thinks of himself as practicing a high sort of civil disobediance. But I’m not at all certain who the weaker brethren are for whom Bp. Robinson is a stumbling block. On the one hand, I’m not sure who might be led astray by Bp. Robinson’s example; and on the other, the folks most loudly threatening division in the church are hardly weak.

But politics is politics, even when it most pretends to be something else. I’m not sure what point the writer at Ember Days means to make, though I’m certain it’s a political one. I especially don’t understand the writer’s last sentence, unless he means to say that the ABC has clarified things and Integrity shouldn’t be outraged about that.