Category Archives: Anglican Church of Canada

Fred Hiltz plumbing the depths of understatement on the marriage canon

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Apparently, the ACoC’s impending change to the marriage canon is causing “a bit of anxiety.”

Fred Hiltz visited Justin Welby recently to talk about the proposed marriage canon changes; and reconciliation – an odd juxtaposition since adoption of the former will eliminate the possibility of the latter. Funnily enough, during his last visit, Hiltz cautioned Welby about recognising ACNA; we wouldn’t want to overdo the reconciliation charade, would we.

From here:

“The archbishop was interested in where we are with the marriage canon matter, and in the interests of transparency I took a copy of the resolution from General Synod, the resolution from Council of General Synod giving the commission a mandate,” said Hiltz, who met with Welby on Dec. 17. “I gave him an update in terms of where the commission was at this particular moment, and that was as much as I could do. I think he appreciated that.” The commission is looking at a proposed change to Canon XXI to allow for same-sex marriage.
[…….]
Hiltz also met with officers at the Anglican Communion Office and at Lambeth Palace, and noted that the question of the marriage canon came up more than once. “There’s a bit of anxiety in the Communion about what might happen here and the fallout that might come from that.”

Anglican Standing Commission urges the Anglican Church of Canada not to amend the marriage canon

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From here:

The Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) has urged the Anglican Church of Canada not to amend its marriage canon (church law) to allow the marriage of same-sex couples, saying such a move would “cause great distress for the Communion as a whole, and for its ecumenical relationships.”

The IASCUFO’s statement came in response to a request from the Canadian church’s Commission on the Marriage Canon for an opinion about proposed changes to Canon 21 that would allow for same-sex marriages. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, decided IASCUFO would be the “most appropriate” body within the Communion to deal with such a question.

The Anglican Church of Canada has the prerogative “to address issues appropriate to its context,” the IASCUFO said, but it noted the ramifications of “a change of this magnitude” for the Communion and its ecumenical partners. In a letter addressed to Canon Robert Falby, chair of the marriage canon commission, IASCUFO members said they were unanimous “in urging you not to move beyond your present policy of ‘local option,’ ” which allows dioceses to choose whether or not they will offer same-sex blessings. They noted that the absence of a General Synod decision about the blessing of same-sex unions or same-sex marriages “has given space for the rebuilding of fragile relationships across the Communion.”

When deciding whether to allow the blessing of same-sex civil marriages, the ACoC delegated downwards: the ever slippery national church has made no statement that unequivocally gives its approval for same-sex blessings, yet it doesn’t censure individual dioceses that do. In this way, the ACoC nurtures the hope that it will not be held accountable for the chaos created by its sexual agenda.

I’ll be interested to see how the ACoC attempts to wriggle out of accepting responsibility for continuing with the marriage canon discussions; there aren’t enough conservatives left in the dwindling denomination to prevent the almost inevitable marriage canon change, yet there can’t be a local option marriage canon.

Perhaps the church will abdicate its responsibility by exiting the marriage business altogether.

Living Reconciliation in the Anglican Church of Canada

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The ACoC is going return the church buildings it acquired through the legal system from ANiC parishes; Bishop Malcolm Harding’s portrait will be restored to its rightful place in the Diocese of Brandon; James Packer will be invited to preach at St. John’s Shaughnessy; a certain bishop and a certain blogger who were entangled in a defamation lawsuit will tearily kiss and make up; Anglican Church of Canada bishops will call ANiC the “Anglican Network” not the “Network”. Projectile pigs with “Indaba” tattooed on their porcine posteriors will float gracelessly skyward during the Marriage Canon debate at the 2016 General Synod.

From here:

It is a fractious time in the life of the Anglican church, both in Canada and in the world, but even as the Communion struggles to overcome pernicious divisions over issues such as human sexuality or the ordination of women, it is also turning to the tradition of the scriptures and the indigenous wisdom of its diverse membership to find potential ways forward.

Living Reconciliation, a new book published jointly by SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) in the U.K. and Forward Movement in North America, tries to use the resources that exist within the church to explore more peaceful ways of handling disagreement.

The authors, the Rev. Canon Phil Groves, director of Continuing Indaba for the Anglican Communion, and Angharad Jones, former communications and resource manager for Continuing Indaba, understand reconciliation to be one of the foundational principles of Christian doctrine. The Christian story, they suggest, is fundamentally about how God reconciles his people to himself through Christ, which means that a faithful response to this story must be one that places reconciliation at the heart of Christian ministry.

Bishops in Dialogue Sham

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Whenever the words “bishops” and “dialogue” appear in the same sentence, it is likely that something fishy is going on. In this case, Western bishops are having conversations with African bishops to convert them to the fashionable foibles of contemporary Western Anglicanism. The hors d’oeuvre is same-sex blessings with, no doubt, the suggestion that there are many paths to God and Jesus isn’t really unique to follow.

Toronto archbishop Colin Johnson was there to lead the neo-colonial charge:

The Consultation of Anglican Bishops in Dialogue

The consultation began at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, when the Anglican Communion was split over issues of same-sex unions and larger questions of Scriptural interpretation.

At this conference Archbishop Colin Johnson of Toronto and the Rev. Canon Dr. Isaac Kawuki Mukasa, a Ugandan-Canadian now on staff with General Synod, began conversations with African bishops. Interested African dioceses started theological correspondence with Canadian counterparts, first on human sexuality and then mission.

The chairman of the GAFCON Primates’ Council, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, seeing through the ecclesiastical murk, denounced the Canadian funded propaganda exercise as a sham.

Canada figured prominently in the second half of the archbishop’s letter, as he condemned as a sham the Anglican Church of Canada’s Bishops in Consultation initiative. Underwritten by the Canadian church and supported at its last meeting in Coventry in May 2014 by the Archbishop of Canterbury and his Director of Reconciliation, the Rev. Canon David Porter. Begun in 2010 and funded by the Canadian Church, the gatherings have brought together Canadian, American and African bishops to discuss the divisions within the church, with an eye towards achieving institutional unity while permitting a degree of latitude of doctrinal positions on issues ranging from sexual ethics, Christology, universalism and soteriology.

Archbishop Wabukala wrote: “For instance, the ‘Bishops in Dialogue’ group after their Coventry meeting earlier this year claimed that we must maintain visible unity despite everything because ‘now we see through a glass, darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). In other words, things will only become clear in heaven. This is a bad mistake. It is true that there is much about our future state that we do not yet understand, but God has given us the inspired Scriptures as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path (Ps.119:105). Our future hope cannot be turned into an excuse for compromise or silence when Scripture is clear. For Anglicans the collegial mind of the Communion on sexuality and Scripture remains the orthodox position as strongly reaffirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference which continues to call us to obedience and pastoral responsibility. Dialogue is no substitute for doctrine.”

Ironically, as the Anglican Church of Canada’s denunciation of the Doctrine of Discovery escalates in righteous vehemence, so does its attempt to impose Anglican Western values – none of which have much to do with Christianity – on African Anglicans.

Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada to combine synods in 2019

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A conjoining of the likeminded, a consolidation of withering, a pooling of unbelief, a unified witness of doubt to an indifferent world, a belated smokescreen to conceal decades of intellectual inbreeding.

Or, perhaps, a desperate attempt to endure for a few more years.

The article below makes it clear that this has nothing to do with survival; nothing at all.

The Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) have approved in principle a plan to hold a second joint assembly in 2019.

[…]

Hiltz said the report [a report from the Joint Anglican and Lutheran Commission] emphasized the point that for the majority of those ministries, the choice to work together was made from “a position of strength for common witness,” not from a survivalist point of view.

The Anglican Church of Canada turns to magic mushrooms

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I have thought for some time that the doctrinal meanderings of the Anglican Church of Canada owed more to hallucinogens than hermeneutics; my suspicions have now been confirmed.

In its fevered denunciations of the Doctrine of Discovery, the ACoC has sought inspiration from – not the cross, that would be too obvious – but from the medicine wheel:

Finlay and Wesley reported that the commission began to develop a theological reflection on the Doctrine of Discovery, its continuing impact and ways that it might be dismantled. Secondly, members discussed “what reconciliation looks like in parishes and communities, particularly around the understanding of healing and wholeness and the Circle of Life,” which Wesley explained is a part of the teachings of the medicine wheel.

For sceptics who think I am making up the magic mushroom aspect of the ACoC’s delirium, look here:

The space where you take your trip [the magic mushroom trip] is not only important, but also magical; it is possible to design this symbolically by putting an object in the four corners, a kind of watchtower. Native Americans also frequently make a circle or a medicine-wheel; this is also a kind of screen, meant to keep the `good’ energy inside and to lock out evil energy.

The Anglican Church of Canada smudging the altar

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Today, most people think that Christianity is a collection of antique superstitions no longer fit to be taken seriously by anyone whose reasoning faculties are intact.

This is not true, of course. Christianity is perfectly rational: it has its own set of presuppositions, none of which are less plausible than an atheist’s presumption that God does not exist. The Anglican Church of Canada has its heart set on changing all that: it is busy polluting the elegant inner coherence of Christian belief with vacuous rites whose meaning would stretch the credulity of anyone but an ACoC priest beyond the breaking point.

From here:

As we gathered in the chapel to celebrate Eucharist, our friend and colleague Barbara was preparing to smudge the altar. In attempting to light her sweetgrass braid from the altar candle, she held it too close to the flame and for a moment too long, and the flame sputtered and died.

Well, one of the very best things about extinguishing beeswax candles, as many of us know, is the rich honey scent that the smoke carries across a space as it disperses from the tiny flame into the wide world and then vanishes.

It turns out that at the moment that Barbara’s sweetgrass braid put out the flame, an ember appeared on its tip. Its smoldering smoke joined that of the spreading honey-scented beeswax as Barbara slowly circled the altar. The blending of smoke from sweetgrass and smoke from beeswax filled the space with what you might call a providential aroma; both sweetgrass and beeswax were there, but so was something else, something at once brand new and ancient, the aroma of encounter, partnership, hope.

More like the stink of nonsense.

Anglican Church of Canada considers the repercussions of changing the Marriage Canon

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Having already shattered the unity of the Anglican Communion by blessing the union of same-sex couples, the Anglican Church of Canada, in a rare moment of penetrating insight, is considering the remote possibility that pressing ahead with actually marrying same-sex couples will make things even worse.

From here:

The Commission on the Marriage Canon’s final report will incorporate not only the submissions received from Anglicans across Canada, but will also reflect consultations about how changing the church’s law to allow for same-sex marriage might affect relationships within and outside of the Anglican Church of Canada.

“It’s clear that as we engage our conversation around this potential canon, it has implications for our relationships with others — our relationships across the Anglican Communion and our relationships with our ecumenical partners,”

Bishop Linda Nicholls went on to note”

“We also recognize that at some level, this is a no-win proposition,” added Nicholls. “Whatever we put forward, there will be those who are unhappy, in pain, struggling.”

That just about sums up the ACoC: pain, struggling, unhappiness and no Salvation.

Lift High the Housing

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I’ve always enjoyed singing the hymn “Lift High the Cross”; what more fitting symbol of the Christian Gospel could there be than the Cross?

It has taken the combined theological insights of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Lutheran Evangelical Church in Canada to come up with something better: November 22nd is “Lift up National Housing Day”:

On November 22, Lutherans and Anglicans are called to lift up National Housing Day 2014, learn more about the issues contributing to poverty, homelessness and substandard housing, and advocate for changes.

It goes without saying that neither denomination feels inclined to house the homeless in their increasing number of empty church buildings.

Dr. Priscilla Turner’s submission to the Anglican Church of Canada’s Commission on the Marriage Canon

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I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this discussion. The Lord Jesus Christ taught us that there is no marriage in the heavenly life; but it is my conviction at 76, having lost an exemplary husband to Parkinson’s Disease just shy of the 51-year mark, that there is nothing more significant in this world than marriage, both for those who have marriages and for those who have none.

Discussion in our branch of the Anglican Communion has most unfortunately been characterised by a number of serious misunderstandings, including but not limited to these: That the Holy Scriptures are ambiguous about same-sex physical intimacy; that we may not know what were the convictions and practice of the Lord Jesus; that the phenomenon was different in the ancient world; that the behaviour of those with same-sex leanings is genetically pre-determined; that Christian love requires us to ‘bless’ same-sex ‘unions’; that people of the same sex can consummate sexually; and that all love may legitim­ately find an intimate physical expression. It is important to note that none of these positions is held by serious biblical and theological professionals: for instance, even those very few scholars who hold that the Scriptures are mistaken acknowledge that they are wholly adverse to same-sex practice. For none of these positions has the case ever been made outside advocacy scholarship, for the very sound reason that such a case cannot be made, and the most positive thing that may be said of such views is that they are less than informed. That busy bishops and other leaders unequipped with the tools of the trade have not tested them is venial. What is less excusable is that our Church has not until now asked any of the tiny handful who are so equipped to contribute.

To address your questions:–

  • How do you interpret what scripture says about marriage? It is monogamous, between a man and a woman, and ideally life-long, though the Lord Himself admitted the possibility of pastoral provision for failure, and ‘evened up’ the sexual inequality of His day.
  • How do you understand the theological significance of gender difference in marriage? It is an acted parable of the love-and-response relation between Christ and his Church prefigured in the Old Testament. In it all of us His people are feminine, and His passion and our response are made visible in fruitfulness. Same-sex physical relations do not correspond to this pattern at all. Which is the husband and which is the wife in such relations? How do they lead in any natural way to offspring? How do they show Christ to the world when they are characterised by the first-listed of the ‘Works of the Flesh’ in Gal. 5?
  • Is there a distinction between civil marriage and Christian marriage? Yes. It is to be doubted whether the church ought ever to recognise divorces on as many grounds as the State. Fur­thermore, if the State chooses to institutionalise a relationship which is a nonsense, or a contra­diction in terms, or which has an immoral act at its heart, this cannot be confused with Christian marriage or celebrated in church.
  • The marriage canon describes “the purposes of marriage” as mutual fellowship, support, and com­fort; the procreation (if it may be) and nurture of children; and the creation of a relationship in which sexuality may serve personal fulfilment in a community of faithful love. What is the theological significance of:
    • companionship in marriage? My partner becomes both my closest Christian brother/sister and my nearest neighbour.
    • bearing and raising children? Together we sub-create unique persons to serve God and the world and to live for ever.
    • (the theological significance of) the relationship between marriage and sexuality? Mar­riage is essentially and irreducibly sexual, whatever other enrichments we may have added in Christian civilisation. The idea of husband and wife as best friends, for in­stance, was once very new. Unconsummated marriages have traditionally been capable of annulment, on the grounds that no marriage has been established in the sight of God or man. Same-sex acts may be genital, but they are precisely not sexual, because sex is by definition la petite différence.
  • What is the difference between marriage and the blessing of a relationship? Are you asking about the public ceremony, or something else? In any case Christ’s Church has no authority to ‘bless’ what He does not bless, and such ‘blessings’ are of none effect. It never has been a sensible let alone godly way of running a diocese or a denomination to have something ‘blessed’ in some places which is believed to be sinful in others.
  • How do you understand the sacramentality of marriage? As we always have, the outward and visible sign is sexual intercourse, which only opposite-sex people can have, married love is the inward and spiritual grace created and nourished thereby. How can those be married who can­not consummate sexually?

I have arranged for you to receive by the end of the month in three shipments:–

8 copies of Holy Homosex?: This & That Priscilla D.M. Turner [one copy for each member, best read back end first for those without ancient languages, i.e. starting with my Brief to the Lambeth Commiss­ion, and paying careful attention to my Dialogue with Hugh]

The Bible And Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics Robert A. Gagnon [one copy to be passed around to all who have not read it]

O Love How Deep: A Tale of Three Souls Diana Maryon [one copy to be passed around to all who have not read it]

The Septuagint Version of Chapters 1-39 of the Book of Ezekiel: The Language, the Translation Techn­ique and the Bearing on the Hebrew Text Priscilla D.M. Turner [My Oxford doctoral dissertation, one copy provided for those with biblical languages and long immersion in the study of the ancient world]

These works should be considered part of my brief. Many people will be watching to see the content re­flected in your conclusions.

I will gladly travel at my own expense to discuss any of these matters with the Committee face-to-face.

Yours most sincerely,

Priscilla Turner

DR. P.D.M. TURNER