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Posted at 12:02 PM in Anglican Renewal | Permalink | Comments (3)
Posted at 07:33 PM in Anglican Renewal | Permalink | Comments (0)
At some length, here. I decline, at this early stage, to parse or comment, and I certainly wish he were a little more clear. I will suggest some apparatus for reading, though.
1) He knows he is not an executive. The Anglican Communion does not have an executive (aka, a Pope). He seems to see his role as advisory, maybe even pastoral. He is not going to anathematize +KJS, and I am not sure he should. He has great concern for those remaining in TEO who wish to remain Anglican, and so he should.
2) His point #10 is unusually strong, for Rowan.
10. This is not a matter that can be wholly determined by what society at large considers usual or acceptable or determines to be legal. Prejudice and violence against LGBT people are sinful and disgraceful when society at large is intolerant of such people; if the Church has echoed the harshness of the law and of popular bigotry – as it so often has done – and justified itself by pointing to what society took for granted, it has been wrong to do so. But on the same basis, if society changes its attitudes, that change does not of itself count as a reason for the Church to change its discipline.
This won't satisfy those who want a bright line, but it's positively incandescent for ++Rowan.
3) He makes no mention at all of ACNA. Fascinating, irritating, and wholly perplexing.
4) There seems to be an underlying ecclesiology in which the Church can by some strong consensus adopt new doctrine or morals; now, certainly +++Rowan is too good a historian to believe that Christian doctrine emerged from the 1st century AD whole and intact, and has never changed since. And so it can't be said that the Church never changes its mind. Maybe he is right to emphasize the lack of consensus on the hot button issue, as the only common ground for the two sides. It's certainly true that the heterodox modernists who are running TET (my latest, The Episcopal Thing, for surely "Church" is inappropriate for an organization that cannot report from committee a resolution on Christ's uniqueness and has 86'd its 'evangelization' program) and their opponents do not agree on how the Bible is to be read, and the heterodox modernists are mostly too ignorant of Patristic thought to find a common ground their, so about the only ground ++Rowan has left is church processes. And that frustrates most of his North American critics.
5) For ++Rowan, "consensus" seems to mean "unanimity." I hate to imagine him presiding at any of the early Councils. You never get to unanimity.
Given ++Rowan's rather havering personality, a stronger statement than I imagined, but one that will satisfy or please no one. And there's this: the tasks for those choosing the ACNA escape pod remain the same. ++Rowan won't and can't take action about ACNA at this time. The problem of Anglicans within TET remains difficult. TET itself is, I think, clearly an ambulatory corpse. Nothing ++Rowan can do will change that. But ACNA doesn't reach everywhere, nor are all parts of TET equally dead. Time will dispose of part of the problem, but in the meantime the problem of the healthier parts of this diseased body remains.
Posted at 09:20 AM in Anglican Renewal | Permalink | Comments (5)
The Living Church reports that, to no one's surprise, that Northwestern University will acquire the assets of Seabury Western Theological Seminary. I'm not sure that TLC has all the details right: as the NU press release points out, some of the land has always been owned by NU and was under long term lease to SWTS. Mostly, the land along Sheridan Road and the main seminary buildings have been on NU land while other parts of the property were owned by SWTS. to the best of my knowledge, NU has always owned the land. NU does not have have a "theological library:" The libraries of Seabury and of Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, across Sheridan Road from Seabury on Northwestern's campus, have been combined for years. Garrett's lease on its land runs out in a few years, and there's a long term campus use plan that envisions reaquring the Garrett land. I guessed a while back that NU would engineer a switch.
It was Chicago Bishop George Craig Stewart, Northwestern alumnus and member of the Board of Trustees, who engineered the arrival of Garrett and Seabury on the NU campus. He envisioned an academic theological powerhouse growing up along Sheridan Road, but it never quite worked out.
Update: Northwestern has put up a FAQ page that adds some information. Here' s the Google map of the area. When Seabury announced the ending of the residential M.Div. program ("we are not closing"), accumulated debt was at least $3 million. I doubt that NU's purchase price was much higher. In this market, and already owning much of the land, NU was in the catbird seat. If from the map linked above, you'll scroll up a little to the north and west you should find a large empty space between Orrington and Sherman: this is the former site of Kendall College. Kendall changed its focus some years ago and moved to Chicago. The Kendall site was to be used for residential building, but a little financial crisis got in the way and the land is for sale again. Relations between Northwestern and the City of Evanston are such that Northwestern did not even consider bidding on the Kendall land, which the City wanted returned to the tax rolls. Of course, that didn't work out too well for Evanston, since the land is still vacant and not providing the tax revenue the city sought. I digress.
On the same map, Garrett-Evangelical is the unmarked cluster of buildings across Sheridan Road to the east, south of Dearborn Observatory. This land is far more central to Northwestern's plans than the Seabury land. NU owns most of the land on the west side of Sheridan, but has never developed it extensively except for the residential quads on the south. My bet is that Northwestern will find a way to finance Garrett's move across the street in the next twenty years or so.
Posted at 08:45 PM in Anglican Renewal | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Posted at 12:26 PM in Anglican Renewal | Permalink | Comments (0)
Arguably, this is a schism that's been waiting to happen for 400 years. A denomination or communion founded on divorce, both of a king and of a church, is hardly one that's predicated for infinite unity. The right for the freedom not to be bound by archaic and arcane doctrine tradition was what the reformers fought for, and is what liberals in TEC would argue is their right today.
Posted at 12:22 PM in Anglican Renewal | Permalink | Comments (0)