Scripture, Conversation and Anglican Identity (original) (raw)
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From the Editor Scripture, Conversation and Anglican Identity
2013
This editorial piece considers the implications of Scriptural Reasoning, a method of inter-religious exchange that is the subject of the present number of the journal, for contemporary Anglicanism. It suggests that the character of Scriptural Reasoning as a conversation held across and despite religious difference offers a challenge to contemporary Anglicans to maintain their own conversation about Scripture. Whoever then appears to understand the divine Scriptures or any part of them in such a way that by their understanding does not build the twin love of God and of our neighbour, does not yet understand. Anglicanism has rarely been well served by introspective quests for its own identity. The great movements and moments in Anglican history, contested as they may be – the Reformation, the Oxford Movement – have been to do with the character of the Church catholic, of Christian faith, of the sacraments, of Scripture – not of Anglicanism. Current quests for Anglican renewal, unity a...
Scriptural Reasoning and the Anglican–Muslim Encounter
Journal of Anglican Studies, 2013
The process of scriptural reasoning promises to facilitate dialogue and understanding across religious divides. In this paper, the author reflects on the experience of scriptural reasoning with Anglicans and Muslims; describing the phenomenon of 'fellowship, not consensus' with reference to key points of doctrinal difference between the two religious traditions.
Editorial: Communication, Argument and Conversation for Anglicans
Journal of Anglican Studies, 2008
Fred Hoyle was one of the most distinguished astrophysicists of the twentieth century. In 1957 he published a science fiction book, The Black Cloud. This was the story of a black cloud of immense intelligence that settled itself between the sun and the earth, gradually freezing the earth. A special group of highly intelligent scientists was set up in a country house in Nortonstowe, England and with highly complex computers tried to communicate with the cloud. This did not work and one scientist connected the information stream directly to his brain and died. His brain was not up to handling the material. While the scientists reviewed this development the gardener, a simple person, wandered into the radio shack and put the earphones on and conducted a conversation with the cloud. He was able to converse and obtained an extensive story about how the cloud had been looking for the beginning of the universe, and had searched for some super nova which had occurred in the vicinity of the universe. Fred Hoyle, with tongue in cheek, was trying to say that the way in which the physicists had learned to think was inadequate. A different kind of thinking was required to communicate with this different and more powerful intelligence. Communication with others is often made difficult by what we bring unstated and often unknowingly to the conversation. The easy option is simply to disagree and walk away. The harder, and in the church the more appropriate, option is to argue. Argument is disagreement in embrace. It is the determination to find with our fellow Christians some way of loving each other through times of division and conflict. Anglicans around the world are experiencing just how difficult this can be. Yet the vocation to love is central to our witness and to our own integrity as Christians and Anglicans. It is one of the very great strengths of the recent IATDC report Communion, Conflict and Hope that it places this aspect of our Anglican faith centre stage and points to the eschatological hope in Christ that sustains such a vocation. In their central argument they strike a remarkable note of practical and theological realism in the history of the church. There
Scriptural Reasoning: Its Anglican Origins, its Development, Practice and Significance
Journal of Anglican Studies, 2013
Scriptural Reasoning is the study and discussion of Tanakh, Bible and Qur'an together, usually by Jews, Christians and Muslims. On its Christian side it has had strong Anglican participation since it began in the mid-1990s. This article recounts its origins and development (including its spread beyond the academy and to many countries, including China); offers guidelines for its practice; discusses four key publications that offer Anglican theological understandings of it; summarizes its significance; and proposes that it be practised more widely in the Anglican Communion. The article concludes with meditative and prophetic postscripts.
The Church of Jesus Christ: An Anglican Response
Ecclesiology, 2005
Following an initial exploration of the teaching of The Church of Jesus Christ, this paper argues that a comparison of The Church of Jesus Christ with the Thirty Nine Articles and recent Anglican ecumenical statements and agreements shows a significant degree of agreement between The Church of Jesus Christ and Anglican theology and ecclesiology. This agreement reflects the fact that both the Anglican tradition and the traditions of the churches in the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe have been shaped by the Reformation. It also shows the influence of a growing ecumenical consensus on ecclesiological issues. However, alongside this agreement there also remain significant points of difference about the relation between divine and human activity in the Church, the importance of tradition, the holiness of the Church and the nature of the Church’s unity. These points of difference need to be explored and debated by Anglicans and members of the Churches of the Community of Prote...
'Neither Catholic Fish nor Protestant Fowl': the question of Anglicanism
Any claim for the ecclesiological integrity of Anglicanism seems, at the moment, tenuous. The divisions within the Anglican Communion over the issues of human sexuality and gender do not seem easily healed, despite the efforts of the current archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his predecessor, Rowan Williams. Despite the proud assertions of Anglican apologists down the ages that the Church was positioned, following the Elizabethan 'settlement' of 1588, with moderation and good sense as a via media between Rome and Geneva, this new five-volume history of Anglicanism reveals a church that has been in conflict from its very origins. In seeking to be a church for the whole of England, it was naturally constituted of competing theological and ecclesiological visions, influenced by continental reformations, that could never be entirely congruentdivisions which, at certain junctions since the break with Rome almost 500 years ago, have been the source of significant aggravation and tribalism. Those politico-theological tensions, the History underlines, were exported across Britain's expanding empire, spawning vibrant new networks and associations that only served further to disrupt the fragile unity of the Church of England after the confessional state was dismantled by the British parliament in 1828-1832. Despite the enormous vibrancy engendered by this conflict of traditions, now stretched across a global Communion and influenced as much by post-colonialism and globalisation as older theological traditions, the final two volumes pose challenging questions for any who would seek to speak meaningfully of a single entity called the 'Anglican Church'. This article suggests that the greatest threat to contemporary Anglicanism, however, lies in a postmodern retreat from the ecumenical task as truth becomes ever more contextualised, driven by a desire for peaceful cohabitation rather than institutional coherence. These volumes might suggest, rather, that Anglicanism's hope (and its gift to the wider Church) is to be found precisely in its conflicted quest for truth and unity in faithful response to Scripture, tradition and reason.
Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment
2009
Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment, Bruce N. Kaye, Lutterworth, 2011 (ISBN 978-0-7188-9243-2), x + 181 pp., pb £18.25 As priest of The Episcopal Church (USA) living in England, I get to see some of global Anglicanism's fault-lines face-to-face. During the Covenant debate in the Church of England, an English colleague of mine argued against it. However, in one debate, he came to the conclusion that he and his interlocutor wanted the same thing for the Anglican Communion: interdependence, mutual respect, and theological orthodoxy. While they agreed on the ends, they disagreed on the means. He came away from the conversation saying, 'We want the same thing'. I would expect to hear a similar note struck in Bruce N. Kaye's Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment. Kaye in his role as the General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia from 1994 to 2004 has lived through the various permutations of theological dialogue and process that led to the Windsor Report and the Covenant proposals. However, Kaye seems unable to say, 'We want the same thing' about the Covenant process. In this review, I will outline Kaye's basic and very helpful distinction between the local and the universal, chart an unhelpful collapse of the universal into the local, and then flag up what Kaye wants out of the Anglican Experiment. I hope to show that Kaye and supporters of the Covenant do want the same thing but disagree about the means of making it happen. First, Kaye helpfully describes a tension between local difference and cosmic belonging inherent in the spread of the Christian Gospel. Over the course of Part I, 'Conflict and Connection in the Church', Kaye posits that uncomfortable diversity is a necessary extension of the proclamation of the Christian Gospel (Chapter 1), that the relationship between the local and the universal differs from place to place (Chapters 2-3), and that unity in the Church is not about agreement or even mutual understanding, but about love (Chapter 4). 'Every time' the Christian Gospel passes into a new culture, Kaye points out, 'it inevitably extends the diversity apparent within the Reviews 259
“Just as I am” versus “Just as we ought”: Theological Legitimation in an Anglican Frame . .
Résumé: Située entre le romano°catholicisme, le protestantisme et l’orthodoxie, la théologie anglicane a adopté au cours de l’histoire une conception de gouvernance d’«église plus compréhensive» dans laquelle le nominalisme protestant, la communauté catholique et la tradition orthodoxe coexistent aussi difficile que puisse être cette coexistence. Or, en ce moment, partout dans le monde, la communauté anglicane subit le contrecoup d’une crise de la légitimation ouverte par les débats sur la sexualité et nourrie par des conceptions divergentes sur la vérité et la foi dans un monde de plus en plus divisé en «trois vitesses» (post°nationale et postmoderne, nationale et moderne et, aussi, pré°tribale et tribale). Cette étude articule un modèle de légitimation (qui réunit les éléments d’un mystère de l’appréhension personnelle et ceux d’un processus critique de rationalisation ainsi que l’appréciation de l’autorité de la communauté relative à la tradition anglicane opposée à un processus de la synthèse théologique prophétique) qui décrit comment un croyant anglican (dont le meilleur exemple est l’archevêque de Canterbury, Rowan Williams) peut l’utiliser, à partir de chacun de ces domaines, en vue de la perception et du jugement pertinent des phénomènes. Keywords: Anglican Theology, Anglican Communion, Legitimation, Personal Construct Psychology, Church of England, Episcopal Church of the USA.
Journal of Anglican Studies, 2013
ABSTRACT The emergence of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) as a movement and a society of scholars was made possible by the hospitality, influence and cohort of two Anglican theologians, the late Revd Daniel Hardy and Professor David Ford. In this essay, I offer a Jewish commentary on several Anglican theological dispositions that might contribute to this hospitality: among them are ‘found theology’ (as I label it), responsiveness to the powers of divine attraction, concern to repair obstructions to the healing work of the Spirit, and attentiveness to Scripture as host and source of reparative reasoning. While the primary subject of the essay is a species of Christian theology, the method of the essay emerges from a recent approach to Jewish philosophy we call ‘textual reasoning’ (TR), one of the antecedents of SR. In the style of TR, I encounter theology as a ‘disposition’, or mode of practice, displayed in particular in practices of reading and interpreting Scripture and of responding to the call of Scripture in societal action. The essay is structured as a series of brief accounts of Anglican theological dispositions, each one followed by a Jewish ‘commentary’, culminating in a sample of Anglican-Jewish dialogue as it might be overheard within a session of scriptural reasoning.
International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2018
Any claim for the ecclesiological integrity of Anglicanism seems, at the moment, tenuous. The divisions within the Anglican Communion over the issues of human sexuality and gender do not seem easily healed, despite the efforts of the current archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his predecessor, Rowan Williams. Despite the proud assertions of Anglican apologists down the ages that the Church was positioned, following the Elizabethan ‘settlement’ of 1558, with moderation and good sense as a via media between Rome and Geneva, this new five-volume history of Anglicanism reveals a church that has been in conflict from its very origins. In seeking to be a church for the whole of England, it was naturally constituted of competing theological and ecclesiological visions, influenced by continental reformations, that could never be entirely congruent – divisions which, at certain junctions since the break with Rome almost 500 years ago, have been the source of significant aggravation and tribalism. Those politico-theological tensions, the History underlines, were exported across Britain’s expanding empire, spawning vibrant new networks and associations that only served further to disrupt the fragile unity of the Church of England after the confessional state was dismantled by the British parliament in 1828–1832. Despite the enormous vibrancy engendered by this conflict of traditions, now stretched across a global Communion and influenced as much by post-colonialism and globalisation as older theological traditions, the final two volumes pose challenging questions for any who would seek to speak meaningfully of a single entity called the ‘Anglican Church’. This article suggests that the greatest threat to contemporary Anglicanism, however, lies in a postmodern retreat from the ecumenical task as truth becomes ever more contextualised, driven by a desire for peaceful cohabitation rather than institutional coherence. These volumes might suggest, rather, that Anglicanism’s hope (and its gift to the wider Church) is to be found precisely in its conflicted quest for truth and unity in faithful response to Scripture, tradition and reason.