Lambeth: Third Presidential Address published
on Sunday, 3 August 2008 at 3.11 pm by Simon Sarmiento
categorised as Anglican Communion, Lambeth Conference 2008
The full text of The Archbishop of Canterbury Concluding Presidential Address to the Lambeth Conference 2008 is now available online.
PDF copy also.
I think this final presidential address is pretty appalling. It is the same centralising project as if the Lambeth Conference had not happened. I want to know why his move towards an international Church is not to be paused against and restricted on the same lines as his desire to restrict Anglican Churches that believe that certain inclusive practices are consistent with Christ? His idea that the Anglican Communion is one is surprisingly based (here) on the Zimbabwean woman beaten by police, the scavenger in India denied lawful rights, the orphan in Burma, the abducted having to fight in Uganda,… Read more »
Pluralist this talk has been very well recieved by Integrity in the states. Which is interesting in itself. I have not yet studied it, myself.
btw I always look forward to your take on things …
Not one word about the on-going attemtps to alienate TEC property in Virginia, Pittsburgh, etc. NOT ONE BLOODY WORD. Border crossings get a tut tut. And 4 of the 5 major culprits were not even at Lambeth, and the one who was has announced he will continue his border raids when he feels it is necessary.
Do you know what roars of disapproval would ensue if our PB said, oh, yes, moritoria, but we’ll do what we want about blessings and elections anyhow? [Which I wish she would.]
It’s difficult, and perhaps at this point unnecessary, to avoid sarcasm at the spectacle of an Archbishop of Canterbury who has less allegiance to (if I were being sarcastic, I would say less knowledge of) Anglicanism than the students in my confirmation classes. We say, over and over, on our circle of blogs: “Lay supremacy: national churches”; “Anglicanism is not a church”; even “this would have been treason in the 16th century.” Where is the person, where are the people, who can rise up out of the blogosphere to insist in the real world of synods and meetings that if… Read more »
As Churchill said, this may not be the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. For all that, for days, Episcopal bishops have been encouraged, feeling heard, there is no evidence here that what was heard was granted any credence. Williams keeps emphasizing that “no one *wants* for the Communion to divide.” That doesn’t really mean that no one will accept division if he or she feels unity doesn’t serve mission in his or her context. Is it really true that so many were heard, and the Archbishop, of all people, led those who said,… Read more »
Pluralist, re: “I want to know why his move towards an international Church is not to be paused against and restricted on the same lines as his desire to restrict Anglican Churches that believe that certain inclusive practices are consistent with Christ?” It isn’t a move toward an international Church, as I read it, so much as it is a way of developing structures for the autonomous churches of the Anglican Communion to remain in relationship with each other and adhere to a basic catholic faith and order in an age of increasing globalization. As schism, division, and lawsuits continue… Read more »
“[T]he onus of proof” required to show the theological validity of gay partnerships will be a formidable challenge, in convincing fellow Anglicans, our ecumenical partners and, crucially, the leaders of other faiths. A “vision of an ecclesiastical world empire” is a sort of blueprint for global theocracy by consent, rather than by imposition. It rides roughshod over provincial autonomy which has hitherto been compatible with Enlightenment principles. The ordinary laity and clergy are simply not to be trusted with issues of global significance. Assuming gay-friendly provinces reject this, will the Church of England, in the inner conservative tier, bear this… Read more »
No Go Rowan…No News IS “Good News” and don’t try to force your Continuation Inquistion down our throats either…sneaky and despotic manuverings and notions of “what’s right” are amazingly damaging to everyones health…and dimly conceived too.
Poor Archbishop! It seems that, whatever he says, he is going to be criticised by someone. Perhaps, in his Presidential Address, the ABC has had to try to accommodate all aspects of left and right (or north and south) of the argument – in order to mainatain the Unity of the Church, which Jesus prayed for in his High-Priestly Prayer. Perhaps the reason he has to do this is because of the perceived intransigence of more than just the two extremes. He has, for instance, to deal with the intransigence of some of the Bishops within the Church of England… Read more »
“And this is emphatically not about forcing others to conform . . .’
If only I believed you, Rowan.
If only I could trust you, Rowan.
But a committee’s report has miraculously become and edict and another committee’s preliminary observations have now been carved in stone.
I do not believe you, Rowan.
And I am not convinced you can be trusted.
Those who have been following RW’s thinking about the nature of the Church, and what constitutes the Church, and there are many who write here regularly, will not be surprised by RW’s final address at Lambeth. He continues to believe that the Anglican Communion needs to become more like a world wide church, with an international code of canon law, and several bodies that have the function of exerting pressure to bring innovating regional churches into line with the common denominator of the majority, or face some form of marginalization in the Communion. He seems undeterred by the fact that… Read more »
Fr Ron Smith does for Rowan what Rowan himself asks us not to do. In Rowan’s scheme of things he is not standing in the middle appealing to two extremes as he explains in an earlier Presidential address. To do this he says would be just creating the “middle” as yet another political standpoint. I think Rowan poses he is standing where things were before Gene was ordained, Sydney cleared away the legal obstacles to Lay Presidency and interventions became the name of the power game – he thinks the majority of Anglicans stand there with him unable to consent… Read more »
> Our global, Catholic faith affirms that the image of God is the same everywhere – in the Zimbabwean woman beaten by police in her own church, in the manual scavenger in India denied the rights guaranteed by law; in the orphan of natural disaster in Burma, in the abducted child forced into soldiering in Northern Uganda, in the hundreds of thousands daily at risk in Darfur and Southern Sudan, in the woman raising a family in a squatters’ settlement in Lima or Buenos Aires.
But not, apparently, in this poor man:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7539526.stm
Thanks, Rowan.
“He is a centraliser and Catholic fantasist, and seeks to impose this bureaucracy based on exclusion on everyone, and it is up to Western Anglicans to say no to his project. There is no Covenant of Faith – maybe of Fate, but that unwritten one Jonathan Sacks mentioned is sufficient.”– Pluralist
Not to worry; the “Covenant” idea is DOA here in America. Rowan can simply forget it.
For a Cathloic its really fascinating watching Anglicans try to invent the wheel, when the Divine pattern for authority in the church is in the New Testament under their very eyes.
An authority which both liberals and evangelical conservaytives would find unpalatable
Ah, now, Robert Williams. You’ve actually climbed out of the closet on this site – now we know whom we are addressing and reading from. Having yourselve once been an Anglican theolog – from the N.Z. Diocese of Nelson, I can understand what made you jump into the arms of ‘Mummy’. I might have done so myself in that situation. However, Robert, your comfy feeling that you are now in the right place, might suddenly become a little uncomfortable, once you realise that one of your stated aims on this site, that ‘The Church’ will not resile from it’s course… Read more »
“For a Cathloic its really fascinating watching Anglicans try to invent the wheel, when the Divine pattern for authority in the church is in the New Testament under their very eyes.”
I’ve been reading quite a few books by Roman Catholics banned from their church because their theology doesn’t conform to official edict.
Despite all the muddle, I much prefer the Anglican way of talking about differences rather than suppressing them.
And don’t get me started on Roman Catholic leaders protesting birth control, where nuclear families of eight live in shanty towns in urban zones.
Papal supremacy does not derive from the New Testament, but rather from the early Middle Ages. You’ve read Unam Sanctam, haven’t you?