Shadow Gospel

Posted on September 26, 2010 
Filed under Resources

Just released:

Shadow Gospel: Rowan Williams and the Anglican Communion Crisis – by Charles Raven – a new publication from The Latimer Trust in the UK.

Here’s an extract from the preface:

“Although signs of hope are undoubtedly emerging, a secure future for the Anglican Communion rests on an accurate diagnosis of its present ills. In this account of Rowan Williams’ leadership as Archbishop of Canterbury a kind of tragedy unfolds, in which the weight of an historic institution and the resourcefulness of a deeply learned mind are brought to bear in an attempt to sustain the unsustainable – an illusory middle ground between two fundamentally opposed visions of Anglican identity.  

The one is confessional and is being articulated with increasing confidence by the leadership of the Global South; the other represents the seduction of the Church by the spirit of the age, as seen in its most developed form in the increasingly apostate behaviour of The Episcopal Church in the United States. This analysis demonstrates that Dr Williams’ theology is not only alien to the former, but also powerless to resist the latter and, in practice, the result is a doctrinally incoherent Communion barely held together by a mixture of sentiment and improvisation.

The understanding offered here is that at the heart of these difficulties is a shadow gospel; a theological project which can speak the language of orthodox faith, yet subverts the supremacy of Scripture and the essential nature of Christian truth itself.

This shadow gospel privileges form over substance and under Rowan Williams’ leadership the pragmatic ethos of Anglican Communion institutions has sat comfortably with this emphasis upon ecclesiastical process rather than doctrinal content, as exemplified by the Windsor Covenant and the associated listening programme of so called ‘indaba’. But these strategies are manifestly failing and it is now time to take seriously the calls emerging from the Global South for what we might call a ‘new wineskin’ of governance structures which will free Anglicanism to express its true confessional identity and make a fresh start in the re-evangelisation of the West.”

The book is available here.