Tectonic Shift or Slip of the Tongue?
The Secretary-General of the Church of England has just issued a clear response to the syllabus of accusations raised by GAFCON that the said Church has "violated" the provisions of Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference.
I'm very pleased to see one particular affirmation in the letter: "clergy and laity alike are entitled to argue for changes to teaching and practice." Those with sufficiently long memories will recall that the principal reason for denying the episcopate to Jeffrey John was not the fact of his living in a civil partnership (which was within the bounds set) but the fact that he was advocating for something contrary to the teaching of the church.
It would appear that this "raison de ne pas être" has reached its sell-by date. It also indicates that same-sexuality need not be regarded as a first-order doctrinal issue, or a part of the permanent deposit of the faith.
UPDATE: GAFCON UK has responded to William Nye. The rejoinder continues the trend noted above to raise marriage to the status of a "core doctrine" — this time explicitly. And there you have the nub of the problem: GAFCON and its fellows believe and claim marriage to be a central doctrine of the Christian faith, about which there is one and only one orthodox position.
Obviously, as any reasonable review of Scripture and the Tradition show, this assertion is not true, since Scripture itself and the Tradition (both within Anglicanism and outside it) offer mixed testimony concerning the nature of marriage itself, and provide no evidence for a continuous place for marriage as a central doctrine. Marriage has rarely found a place as more than peripheral in dogmatic theology, if it is mentioned at all.
A further UPDATE: Stephen Noll has issued yet another response to Nye's letter. This is a particularly absurd example of revisionist history. It contains the astounding statement, "These [Lambeth] Resolutions, read together, form a fairly harmonious tradition." I suppose to give him benefit of the doubt his definition of fairly might differ to mine. But to pretend that Lambeth has consistency on matters of "family life" is an absurdity. Instead, the Lambeth resolutions explicitly rescind, overturn, or contradict each other on things such as birth control, polygamy, and remarriage after divorce.
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
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