Learning from a Liberal mistake

Posted on December 15, 2009 
Filed under Opinion

Charles Raven has written a characteristically insightful article on the latest happenings in the Anglican Communion:

“the orthodox should not be in a hurry to draw the simplistic conclusion that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend…”

Learning from a Liberal mistake

As GAFCON was launched in Jerusalem last year, Archbishop Peter Jensen spoke of the ‘extraordinary strategic blunder’ by the Episcopal Church of the United States in consecrating a practising homosexual, Gene Robinson, as a bishop in 2003 which awoke the “sleeping giant that is evangelical Anglicanism”.

Now liberals have committed a second strategic blunder. Not so much the emergence of partnered lesbian Mary Glasspool as suffragan bishop elect by the Diocese of Los Angeles – such a move was entirely predictable after this year’s General Convention rejected Rowan Williams call for ‘gracious restraint – but their very public hostility towards Dr Williams following his rather cool and disapproving response.  

Frustration with the Archbishop’s waning enthusiasm for the gay agenda has been building for some time and is now being voiced very clearly. A coalition of British gay activists, the LGBT Anglican Coalition, contrasted his silence on a rather draconian proposal in Uganda to introduce the death penalty in certain circumstances for homosexual rape with his public rebuke to TEC and commented sharply –

‘If the Archbishop is to retain any credibility at all he needs to reconsider. This double standard of justice is frankly perverse. It appears to most people in Britain to be a disgraceful acquiescence in the demands of homophobic pressure groups both in England and in the Communion.’

And leading gay activist Colin Coward was equally forthright in a letter to the London Times on 8th December, convinced that ‘The direction that Rowan is taking the Anglican Communion is compromising deeply the position of gay and lesbian people. What he is saying about the bishop in the US and what he is not saying about Uganda is disastrous.’

Little wonder than that Ruth Gledhill wrote an article, headlined ‘Dreams of church liberals are almost dead’. But if the liberal dream of an Anglican Communion acclimatised to the acceptance of same sex unions proves to be just a dream it will not be Rowan Williams fault; it will be much more to do with the hastiness of gay activists. By running ahead and disowning their erstwhile champion, they have made it much less likely that the majority of the Communion’s Primates can be brought round. They have made it plain that they are no longer interested in his tortuous process of dialogue and debate when it no longer seems to serve their purposes.

This is a major mistake and fails to appreciate an importnat element of Rowan Williams’ theological method. He has never renounced the views he put forward on same sex unions. Instead, ever since it was evident that he would become Archbishop of Canterbury, he has drawn a distinction between his personal views and the position he is required to uphold in virtue of his office. This willingness to renounce a ‘campaigning role’ may seem laudable, but it does not amount to repentance in the biblical sense of a change of mind.

Instead it reflects Williams’ debt to the nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel. He sees truth merging as opposite ideas are held together in tension in the hope that a ‘higher truth’ will emerge. On this basis, it is perfectly logical that he should respect the current mind of the Communion without having to renounce his personal views. Unfortunately, this process becomes manipulative and frustrating where fundamental theological convictions, especially about Scriptural authority, are no longer held in common.

Giles Fraser is another leading liberal who has become impatient with Rowan Williams and was very critical of this approach as the Church of England began to grapple with another very divisive issue, the consecration of women as bishops in June 2006. In ‘Following Hegel’ he wrote ‘the archbishop believes that all oppositions can be nuanced into resolution. It’s a matter of faith for him. The dialectic describes the path a divided humanity must travel if it is to reach the good infinity, the kingdom of heaven’ but ‘What really happens is that you come up with a bodge and a room full of very angry Christians, exhausted by the politics of eternal negotiation’.

For liberals in a hurry, dialectic can look very much like a form of sophisticated stalemate, but they overlook the fact that it is a process which is subtly subversive of biblical authority. It does not require that the orthodox abandon their views, but if the dialectic is to work, there must be a willingness to resist closure, to continue talking and embrace a diversity which is incompatible with the gospel . And for these reasons, the orthodox should not be in a hurry to draw the simplistic conclusion that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend. The agonizingly slow progress of the Covenant process over which Rowan Williams presides is the practical outworking of his Hegelianism.

Applied to the struggle over sexuality in the Communion, this means that orthodox biblical teaching is reduced logically to ‘my opinion’ and is in principle provisional, something about which the Communion could change its mind, and Rowan Williams has not been given sufficient credit by his liberal critics for the way in which he has managed to institutionalise through much of the Communion a ‘listening’ or ‘indaba’ process based on a paradoxical reading of the 1998 Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 1.10. The intention of the bishops at Lambeth was to bring closure by declaring that same sex unions were ‘incompatible with Scripture’, and the commitment ‘to listen to the experience of homosexual persons’ was a pastoral response to those desiring to live their lives by this standard, not a commitment to continued dialogue with the Resolution’s opponents (in fairness it should be acknowledged that his predecessor, George Carey, prepared the ground and was vigorously promoting this revisionist interpretation in the United States just three weeks after the Lambeth Conference closed).

With patience, it is not impossible to conceive that in the long run a sufficient number of the orthodox leaders in the Communion could be sufficiently desensitized by this process to enable a widespread acceptance of homosexual practice throughout much of the Communion, especially as this would be given constant encouraging by the prevailing assumptions about sexual rights and expression in the wealthier and historically dominant provinces of the Communion. The GAFCON Provinces have already made their stand, but by attacking Rowan Williams, the liberals have discredited the process which could have been their main hope of turning the waverers.

The danger for the orthodox is that the attacks of the liberals could mislead some into thinking that it would be strategically smart to make common cause with Canterbury, but this would be to make the same mistake as the liberals – to look at short term surface appearances, rather than the long term erosion of biblical faith. The liberal criticism of Rowan Williams may be strategically naïve, but it does reflect the underlying reality, that there are two fundamentally different and incompatible forms of Anglicanism within the Communion which cannot be nuanced indefinitely. And Confessional Anglicanism needs to develop new leadership structures which have come to terms with that reality.

Charles Raven
14th December 2009

This essay will appear at SPREAD.