Theo Hobson wrote on Comment is free that
Church reformers must come to terms with the fact that it is a fundamentally reactionary institution…
Read O thou great irredeemable.
Andrew Brown wrote on helmintholog a piece unhelpfully titled Anglican Anorak post. It is in fact a discussion of the Manchester report including this:
The real story is that the ordination of women priests was bought on credit, and the church can’t ever pay down more than the interest on the bill. When women priests were ordained, the Church of England was only held together, to the extent that it was, by both sides making solemn promises that they didn’t believe they would ever be called on and had no real intention of delivering. In particular, the supporters of women priests solemnly promised that there would always be an honoured place for their opponents within the church, even though they thought of the arrangements as entirely transitional; in return the opponents solemnly declared that women priests were legally and validly priests, even though they did not believe this could possibly be true. They still don’t.
It occurs to me how much the antis need to swim the Tiber where, as they have hardened on this subject the past several decades, they invented a “Theology of the (Human) Body” PRECISELY to assert that the penis was sacerdotally-essential.
Vaya con Dios!
This is the same case exactly for TEC. Both sides thinking they got what they wanted and at the same time crossing their fingers when it came to their opponents.
I’m not so sure it was so much finger crossing as wishful thinking, of the Red Queen variety: believing six impossible things before breakfast and so on. Anglican Fudge grows stale with time, and crumbles.
Bishop Alan Wilson has posted on his blog some very interesting historical reflections preliminary to plunging into the reading of the current papers on the question of women bishops:
http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2008/05/women-bishops-but-how.html
What I found particularly arresting were his thoughts on the British imperial tradition of “institutionalising schism” as they withdrew from the colonies, but there’s much else of value as well.
To be quite frank gentlemen and gentlewomen, those of British parliamentary tradition, most all in situ in former parts of the British Empire, handle these issues surrounding women in Holy Orders quite differently than USA Episcopalians. I think that difference in political ethos is the element History will record together with the Internet as the most salient forces in this 21st cen modern Anglican Crisis overall. Mr. Hobson could cut the rant level a bit and tone down the rhetoric because anyone with half a brain knows what a screwed up thing is institutional religion. Disagree? Go hahead and enjoy… Read more »