Friday, August 08, 2008

Dr Williams has made a split inevitable in the Anglican Church

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4481688.ece

[Times Online] 8 Aug 2008--A split in the Anglican Church was inevitable, a leading conservative cleric said last night as he attacked Rowan Williams’s belief that gay relationships could be “comparable to marriage”.

After a successful Lambeth Conference for the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he avoided schism over the issue, Dr Williams faced a fresh furore over the strength of his liberal views.

The Primate of the Southern Cone, Bishop Gregory Venables, predicted the end of the communion, saying: “This is more evidence of the unravelling of Anglicanism. Without a clearly agreed biblical foundation, all the goodwill in the world cannot stop the inevitable break-up. Unity without truth is disunity.”

Bishop Venables, who has infuriated North American Anglicans by taking conservative defectors into his South American province, including the entire Diocese of San JoaquÍn in central California, was among the organisers of the recent Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem.

With Archbishop Henry Orombi, of Uganda, and Dr Peter Akinola, of Nigeria, he will be at the meeting of the Global Anglican primates in London this month, where Anglican bishops who boycotted Lambeth will discuss Dr Williams’s views.

A leading Global South primate told The Times that most conservative bishops and archbishops in Africa and Asia had been unaware of Dr Williams’s personal theology on same-sex relations and had never read his 1989 essay The Body’s Grace, where he gave some indication of his views.

The disclosures will add impetus to the Global Anglican Future movement and drive liberals and conservatives in the Anglican Communion even farther apart.

1 comment:

Cany said...

If there is one correct theology, which I don't agree there is, then surely Akinola and his ilk have it wrong.

As for me, i am happy if they leave the communion, as they surely well, so the rest of us can get back to what we should be doing, and not what THEY think we should be doing.