Monthly Archives: April 2014

Justin Welby vacillates about gay marriage

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From here:

“We are struggling with the reality that there are different groups around the place that the Church can do — or has done — great harm to,” the Archbishop says. “You look at some of the gay, lesbian, LGBT groups in this country and around the world — Africa included, actually — and their experience of abuse, hatred, all kinds of things.” But he says: “We must both respond to what we’ve done in the past and listen to those voices extremely carefully. Listen with love and compassion and sorrow. And do what is possible to be done, which is not always a huge amount.”

The Archbishop adds: “At the same time there are other groups in many parts of the world who are the victims of oppression and poverty, who we also have to listen to, and who find that issue an almost impossible one to deal with.

“How do you hold those two things [in balance] and do what is right and just by all? And not only by one group that you prefer and that is easier to deal with? That’s not acceptable.”

The most senior bishop – the first among equals – in the Anglican Communion can’t make up his mind whether or not the church has, for the last 2000 years, mistakenly taught that homosexual activity is wrong.

The problem appears to be that, rather than do what the church has done for centuries – take its moral cues straightforwardly from the Bible – Welby is “struggling” with the fact that different groups of people have different opinions on the issue. This astonishing development has completely flummoxed him.

Clearly what is needed is a series of facilitated conversions on the next problem that will face the first among equals: if, for fear of upsetting one side or other, the Archbishop of Canterbury is unwilling to take a side on the issue that is tearing his church apart, why bother to say anything about anything; no-one is going to listen – not even if it’s facilitated.

Fred Hiltz’s Easter message misses the mark

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Primate Fred Hiltz delivered his Easter message on video. You can watch it all here (I’m sure he would be grateful: it only has 52 hits thus far). Most of it is maudlin Residential School hand-wringing delivered in a lugubrious monotone. This next clip I found interesting, though:

Holy Week is “all about reconciliation”, of course but not primarily reconciliation with one another: it is firstly and most importantly about reconciliation with God under whose wrath we justly find ourselves until delivered by the penal substitutionary atonement of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

In the Anglican All You Need is Love Church of Canada, God’s wrath, our sin, our deserving of punishment, our inability to “do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us” have all been buried in the bog of sentimental liberal theological mush that has been oozing into the denomination for decades.

St. Aidan’s Windsor: Supreme Court denies Leave to Appeal

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St. Aidan’s Windsor has been in a dispute with the Diocese of Huron over the ownership of the church building and a bequeathment.  On 4 September 2013, the Court of Appeal, upheld the conclusions of the trial court judge, Justice Little. In addition, the Diocese of Huron was awarded partial costs of $100,000.

St. Aidan’s applied for Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada and, as I suspected would happen, it has been denied.

From the ANiC newsletter:

 St Aidan’s rector, Canon Tom Carman writes, “Yes, sadly the Supreme Court has decided not to grant us leave to appeal.  It’s not really surprising – not from a human standpoint – but we were hoping for a miracle.  Sometimes, though, God simply calls us to bear reproach for his name’s sake.  And we know that in the end our reward is with Him and in Him.  He will see us through this. Please do continue to keep us in your prayers.”

Welby and Hiltz discuss sexuality and reconciliation

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Read it all here:

When Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby met with the primate, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, he was “very interested” in the work of the Anglican Church of Canada’s commission on the marriage canon because of the reality that the Church of England will have to wrestle with the issue of same-sex marriage following its legislation in the U.K.

“Notwithstanding the declared position of the Church of England at this moment, he [Welby] is very conscious, of course, that there’s going to be a fair amount of pressure from within the Church of England to at least have some discussion around that [same-sex marriage],” said Hiltz in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “He hoped that we would stay in touch over the work of the commission, [because] inside the Church of England, they will need to have the same conversation.”

Here we have a rare example of a clear statement by an Archbishop of Canterbury. The Church of England will be following in the Anglican Church of Canada’s footsteps: conversations about same-sex blessings; decline in attendance; dioceses performing same-sex blessings; further decline in attendance; conversations about same-sex marriage; full steam ahead to extinction:

During their two-hour meeting April 8, Hiltz said Welby was interested in how the church has dealt with the conflict over human sexuality, in particular, how the 2010 General Synod in Halifax dealt with the issue in a non-parliamentary manner and how there has been “continuing conversation” about the matter. Hiltz quoted Welby as having said, “You’re actually on the frontline of where we’re going to be eventually. You’ve been on a journey; it hasn’t been an easy [one]— it has been conflicted at times, but you stuck with it.”

The Anglican Church of Canada has indeed been on the frontline of dealing with “the conflict over human sexuality”: it sues those who refuse to go along with it. I suppose this is “interesting”; the fact that Welby believes that that is where the CofE is “going to be eventually” should make orthodox CofE clergy very nervous.

Hiltz said he informed Welby about the Canadian church’s long history of “bending over backwards to hold people in dialogue, to create provisions for everybody to stay in the fold…”

Considering the number of defections from the ACoC to ANiC, these provisions have been spectacularly ineffective.

Overall, Hiltz described Welby’s visit as “good,” saying that he thought it provided the Archbishop of Canterbury “a sense of the commitment of the Canadian church to the Communion.”

Not sufficiently committed to pay any attention whatsoever to Provinces that are opposed to same-sex blessings.

Hiltz said that the dinner he hosted for Welby was an opportunity for him to meet “a host of people from Canada who are so deeply committed to the various works of the Anglican Communion…to get a sense [that they] have a broad, global view of the church.”

To invite ANiC church leaders would have been a diversity too far, of course.

 “One of the blessings of the visit is that he has heard things about all of us and says we’re very diverse, even within our church…,” said Hiltz. “He was leaving us knowing of our deep commitment to preserving the unity of the church as best we can, being prophetic as best we can, being committed to the life and witness of the Communion.”

To put it more plainly: the Anglican Church of Canada continues on a course of theological liberalism; it has no inclination to change direction but is willing to offer the  concession of a dense smoke screen designed to lure the unwary into believing that it cares about what those who disagree think.

Justin Welby interviewed by the Anglican Journal

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The whole interview is here. It is titled: ”Welby explains gays and violence in Africa remarks” because, as you can imagine, liberals have been wailing and gnashing their molars at Welby’s saying that gay marriage in the West will lead to more murders in Africa. Many are grasping at tenuous explanations to excuse such a calamitous lapse from diversity groupthink.

The Anglican Journal tries to come to the rescue:

Q: Were you in fact blaming the death of Christians in parts of Africa on the acceptance of gay marriage in America?

This encourages Welby into Rowanesque waffling:

A: What I was saying is that when we take actions in one part of the church, particularly actions that are controversial, that they are heard and felt not only in that part of the church but around the world…And, this is not mere consequentialism; I’m not saying that because there will be consequences to taking action, that we shouldn’t take action.

So even though there are “consequences” – like murder – to our actions, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them. Or does it? I really have no idea:

What I’m saying is that love for our neighbour, love for one another, compels us to consider carefully how that love is expressed, both in our own context and globally. We never speak the essential point that, as a church, we never speak only in our local situation. Our voice carries around the world. Now that will be more true in some places than in others. It depends on your links. We need to learn to live as a global church in a local context and never to imagine that we’re just a local church. There is no such thing.

Now for the hard question:

Q: In 2016, the church’s General Synod will be presented with a resolution changing the marriage canon to allow same-sex marriage. Is this a cause for concern?

A: That’s a really tough question. Well, it’s got to be a cause for concern because this is a particularly tough issue to deal with…And, I hope that two or three things happen: I hope that the church, in its deliberations, is drawing on the wealth of its contribution to the Anglican Communion and the worldwide church, to recognize…the way it works and how it thinks, to recognize the importance of its links. And that, in its deliberations, it is consciously listening to the whole range of issues that are of concern in this issue. We need to be thinking; we need to be listening to the LGBT voices and to discern what they’re really saying because you can’t talk about a single voice anymore than you can with any other group. There needs to be listening to Christians from around the world; there needs to be listening to ecumenical partners, to interfaith partners. There needs to be a commitment to truth in love and there needs to be a commitment to being able to disagree in a way that demonstrates that those involved in the discussions love one another as Christ loves us. That’s the biggest challenge, that in what we do, we demonstrate that love for Christ in one another.

It’s easy to tell that the answer is prating twaddle: it contains “listening” four times. My favourite is: “consciously listening”; can we unconsciously listen? I suppose so: in institutional Indabas. Although we must listen to “LGBT voices”, when it comes to listening to anyone who lives trying to resist same-sex attraction it will, as usual, be a case of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear.

Anglican Journal: Bishop settles lawsuit with blogger

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Read it all here:

The settlement also stipulated that Jenkins would pay “a majority of the legal costs involved, remove the Bishop from his posts, and agree not to publish any similar posts about the Bishop in the future,” according to a release issued by the diocese of Niagara. In a related post on Anglican Samizdat, Jenkins noted that he had agreed to pay $18,000 toward legal costs, which Bird’s lawyer had stated were $24,000. Jenkins did not pay damages, which were listed as $400,000 in the original claim filed in February 2013.

Jenkins’s statement of defence had denied that his postings were libelous or defamatory. It asserted that he was exercising his freedom of religion and expression and that his comments were “…intended to be humourous and make use of satire, sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, wit, ‘send up’ and other types of humour to make a point other than what one would take literally from the comments. In those cases, no reasonable viewer or reader of the blog postings would be expected to believe that the statements are true…”