Pierre Whalon: Peering Past Lambeth

Posted by Kendall Harmon

While the Anglican Communion watches and wonders what its bishops will be doing this summer, most at the Lambeth Conference, some at the GAFCON conference, and one in New Hampshire, it is interesting to try to peer past these events and see what the future might look like.

This writer claims no prophetic charism—none of these events will decide anything. The outline of the questions facing Anglicans around the world will probably look the same. What will have changed—and this is a prediction—is that the bishops at Lambeth will begin seriously to examine together what it will take to move the Communion forward, so that these questions can be faced.

While the presenting issues seem to be sexuality and territorial invasions creating new non-geographical jurisdictions like the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, the real issue is ecclesiology. The broader challenge facing Anglicans around the world is to re-commit to and live out in new ways the distinctive Anglican ecclesiology—what makes us Church.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • - Anglican: Commentary • Anglican Identity • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Theology • Ecclesiology

9 Comments
Posted July 2, 2008 at 8:34 am [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Chris Hathaway wrote:

We who are participants in our church know it [ecclesiology] only through the lens of our personal participation and relationships within it, what some call intersubjectivity.

Who is the “some” who use such terms as intersubjectivity and asymptote and for whom are they writing? On second thought, who cares?

This is just so much high jargon blather whose principal use is to hide the absence of substantive logic and any practical answers.

July 2, 9:57 am | [comment link]
2. robroy wrote:

While the Anglican Communion watches and wonders what its bishops will be doing this summer, most at the Lambeth Conference, some at the GAFCON conference, and one in New Hampshire...

Is the simple country bishop going to stay in New Hampshire this summer?

July 2, 11:07 am | [comment link]
3. Brien wrote:

This bishop could write on the wonders of being able to minister as an Anglican in an overlapping jurisdiction.  It would remind the ABC that such things can work quite well among Christians of goodwill.  His personal testimony about overlap of the pompously named “Convocation of American Churches in Europe” (with the C of E, and the Spanish and Portugeuse Anglicans) would make good conversation.  I’m not sure what this paper is about.

July 2, 11:54 am | [comment link]
4. Anthony in the desert wrote:

I wonder if the good bishop himself really knows what this is about!?

July 2, 2:25 pm | [comment link]
5. Cennydd wrote:

The bishops should seriously examine what it will take to REFORM the Anglican Communion, and then take action to DO it.  That’s what GAFCON was about, and Lambeth needs to do a lot more than just sit down for tea and crumpets.

July 2, 6:15 pm | [comment link]
6. Chazaq wrote:

People from all sides, driven by their own agendas, want to prematurely separate the wheat from the weeds.

I am content to wait for Jesus to come through with the Divine Weed-Whacker, now that I have moved mself and my family to a more Christ-centered wheat/weed patch.  In the meantime, however, it would be nice to be able to plant some wheat without the Episcopalians busily destroying it with their false gospel.

July 2, 7:07 pm | [comment link]
7. carloarturo wrote:

This is Pierre at his usual “best”. . .if we could only package his pronouncements in hermetically sealed containers, we’d have a solution to our rising gas prices, as we could distribute the containers at our service stations, hey it beats both gas and methane!

July 2, 7:12 pm | [comment link]
8. archangelica wrote:

It is this kind of erudite, careful and edifying theology that drew me to the Episcopal Church. So long as men such as this are bishops in the Anglican Communion there is still a light in the darkness. For those low-church rightists who are fat babies full of milk and can’t or won’t abide a theology that will not fit on a 3X5 card, get thee to a Free Church. Anglicanism has once again been infested with Puritans. Good Lord deliver us!

July 3, 12:55 am | [comment link]
9. rob k wrote:

No. 8 - Well said! Thx.

July 3, 1:11 am | [comment link]
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