Choice and the Archbishop

Sam Candler observes that Archbishop Williams' essay is mostly descriptive, but is also diagnostic and prescriptive. Here's what troubles Sam:

It is the way that Archbishop Rowan uses “choice” which is bothersome, as if it would be as easy for someone to choose a homosexual lifestyle as it would be them to choose a certain way of being Anglican. At their deepest levels of identity, neither homosexuality nor Anglicanism is a choice. In particular, Anglicans have claimed that Anglican Christianity is a gift; and part of that gift is a joint realization of local grace and global grace. I understand that certain formal parameters of an Anglican Covenant have yet to be developed, notably any “two-way” system. However, it seems to me a distinctly un-Anglican maneuver to sever local autonomy from global communion. Those very poles, taken together within one orbit, are exactly what define the structure of the wider Anglican tradition.
Read it all.

Posted by John B. Chilton on July 29, 2009 7:25 AM | |
Comments (3)

As I write in my latest post, http://thanksgivinginallthings.blogspot.com/2009/07/analyzing-rowan-williams-rhetoric-about.html,
it is Williams' rhetoric that bothers.

Posted by Christopher Evans [TypeKey Profile Page] | July 29, 2009 9:26 AM

What a perceptive exposition of the inner workings of the thoughts of ABC Rowans as expressed in his letter to the Episcopal church.
+Rowan seems to have little faith in the workings of the Holy Spirit, through which some Anglicans have been called to their decisions regarding acknowlegement and inclusion of the GLBT communities in our faith.
It would be a fine thing if the Holy Spirit just called us to easy things.
It seems to me that a mark of a true calling is often visible in the difficulty of the thing.
The proposed covenant, though on the surface a complex construction, is at it's heart a very simplistic way to deal with a thorny problem and as such is likely not an expression of the Spirit working through us. Bill Pearson

Posted by orderoutofchaos [TypeKey Profile Page] | July 29, 2009 9:52 AM

I believe that Dean Candler misreads the Archbishop's use of "choice." He is obviously referring to the choice people have to live out their orientations in a specific way and is not saying that the orientation itself is a choice. I realize that this is a distinction that many here will not agree with, but it *is* the distinction to which the ABC is referring.

Jody Howard

Posted by Jody+ [TypeKey Profile Page] | July 29, 2009 3:02 PM

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