Signs
There have been of late several ominous signs concerning possibilities of a break-up of the Anglican Communion and perhaps of ECUSA as well.
The first sign I will note here is the move by the Church in Nigeria to remove any reference to being in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury as being a defining characteristic of Nigerian Anglicanism. Archbishop Akinola has assured us all that this does not mean a split, but I am not so sure. Folks such as Stephen Noll have told us that the African Anglicans are incapable of the type of dissembling we see in their Anglo-American counterparts. We’ll see.
The second sign (and this one is a BIG one, folks) is to be found in a recent article on the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301185.html. In the article Robinson tells us that he now predicts a split in the Communion. This came about after attending the unofficial meeting Jon Bruno called in July of about twenty bishops from a wide variety of theological positions. While all were sworn to secrecy, Robinson has now broken silence to tell us that while he went to the meeting to “talk about how we can live together,” the conservatives wanted to “divvy up the property of this divorce.” This convinced him that a split is inevitable.
Let us leave aside Robinson’s disingenuousness and imputation of base motives to his opponents for the time being. The importance of his comments is that he has discarded 815’s party line that all is well in ECUSA and the Communion. To have Bishop Robinson concede that we are on the verge of a crack-up is HUGE.
While the end will be more like “The Hollow Men” than Beneath the Planet of the Apes (OK, two really weird and disparate cultural references), thus allowing Griswold to opine that everything is still peachy, it does begin to look inevitable.
I am sure that there are other signs out there, enough to fill an M. Night Shymalan movie (Another totally gratuitous pop reference). In any event, I think the grand ecclesial experiment that was the Anglican Communion may be coming to an end.
The first sign I will note here is the move by the Church in Nigeria to remove any reference to being in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury as being a defining characteristic of Nigerian Anglicanism. Archbishop Akinola has assured us all that this does not mean a split, but I am not so sure. Folks such as Stephen Noll have told us that the African Anglicans are incapable of the type of dissembling we see in their Anglo-American counterparts. We’ll see.
The second sign (and this one is a BIG one, folks) is to be found in a recent article on the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301185.html. In the article Robinson tells us that he now predicts a split in the Communion. This came about after attending the unofficial meeting Jon Bruno called in July of about twenty bishops from a wide variety of theological positions. While all were sworn to secrecy, Robinson has now broken silence to tell us that while he went to the meeting to “talk about how we can live together,” the conservatives wanted to “divvy up the property of this divorce.” This convinced him that a split is inevitable.
Let us leave aside Robinson’s disingenuousness and imputation of base motives to his opponents for the time being. The importance of his comments is that he has discarded 815’s party line that all is well in ECUSA and the Communion. To have Bishop Robinson concede that we are on the verge of a crack-up is HUGE.
While the end will be more like “The Hollow Men” than Beneath the Planet of the Apes (OK, two really weird and disparate cultural references), thus allowing Griswold to opine that everything is still peachy, it does begin to look inevitable.
I am sure that there are other signs out there, enough to fill an M. Night Shymalan movie (Another totally gratuitous pop reference). In any event, I think the grand ecclesial experiment that was the Anglican Communion may be coming to an end.
posted by peregrinator at 7:44 PM
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