The Great Anglican Debate

theledger.com ^ | August 1, 2008 | Cary McMullen

[Alex Murphy]

When people begin studying the history of the church, the result frequently is disillusionment. It is quite a messy business.

Even the great councils that devised the foundational doctrines of Christianity resembled political conventions more than a solemn assembly of priests speaking in hushed tones. People who only months before were being fed to lions by the Romans debated points of theology with similar ferocity, and in some cases the meetings devolved into brawls.

Closely held beliefs, when they clash with others, held just as passionately, will produce sparks. It's all too easy to pronounce the other side heretical, and everyone knows you don't compromise with heretics.

The Reformation is perhaps the biggest example of a clash of beliefs in which there was no reconciling the two sides, and only today, more than 500 years later, is there an uneasy peace between Protestants and Catholics.

Something akin to this seems to be going on now in the Anglican Communion, the third largest Christian group in the world. Over the past couple of weeks, Anglican bishops have been meeting at Lambeth, England, in their decennial conference. They are divided on the question of sexual ethics and, perhaps more significantly, the means of scriptural interpretation used to justify their positions.

The "innovators" (to use the term of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams) want to move ahead with the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals as priests and bishops. Traditionalists say this is prohibited by the Bible.

Williams has been trying, rather vainly, to hold together his fraying communion. The situation has deteriorated in the past 10 years.

In 1998, the Lambeth conference adopted a traditionalist position about homosexual practices, but within a few years, the American Episcopal Church had defied it by electing a partnered gay man as bishop.

This year, about 200 traditionalist bishops are boycotting Lambeth and seem poised to form a parallel Anglican organization. Even among those who are present, media reports indicate, there is a mood of pessimism.

In his second address to this year's conference, delivered Tuesday, Williams presented the situation to the bishops by summarizing each side's position.

The traditionalists: "We don't see why welcoming the gay or lesbian person with love must mean blessing what they do in the Church's name, or accepting them for ordination whatever their lifestyle. We seek to love them - and, all right, we don't always make a good job of it: but we can't just say that there is nothing to challenge."

The innovators: "We know that no one is the best judge in their own case, but we see in our church life at least some marks of the Spirit's gifts.

And part of that is acknowledging the gifts we've seen in gay and lesbian believers."

In Williams' speech, each of the two personae, traditionalist and innovator, pleaded with the other to recognize the risks and accusations of betrayal and unbelief they had suffered, sometimes from within their own ranks.

The archbishop noted that there had been a recent effort at compromise.

"It didn't happen, and each group was content to blame the other. But the last 18 months don't suggest that this was a good outcome. Can this Conference now put the same kind of challenge? ... At the moment, we seem often to be threatening death to each other, not offering life. ... We need to speak life to each other; and that means change."

All this has the ring of history, of the great debates of the past. Indeed, the Lambeth conferences in 1998 and 2008 are the only occasions I know of in which international Christian leaders have debated the contentious issue of homosexuality.

It seems unlikely there will be a compromise at Lambeth. Williams has proposed a "covenant" in which the provinces of the Anglican Communion agree to certain principles and a tighter discipline, but the bishops are not rushing to embrace it.

Williams sounded a hopeful note, appealing to "the heart of God out of which flows the impulse of an eternal generosity which creates and heals and promises." It may be a hope that is only realized after Williams is entombed beside his honored predecessors.