The ACI: It’s Broken. Fix It!

from Stand Firm by Matt Kennedy

The ACI has posted a relatively short editorial addressing the Primates Meeting controversy and acknowledging their own internal disagreement with regard to the question of attendance. It is an interesting and in some sections baffling read. This passage in particular has raised a number of eyebrows:

Whatever one’s view of the matter, there is one perspective that is particularly disturbing in its implications. It argues that the Archbishop of Canterbury and his fellow administrators – or in some versions, the Presiding Bishop of the American Episcopal Church — are conniving and manipulative, perhaps even heretical, and that the meeting is a sham. Surely people are entitled to this view, or for that matter, its opposite: such is the confusing state of affairs we find ourselves in, and manifold is the evidence to be used to draw this conclusion or that – indeed, by those who are otherwise opponents in our parlous season.

These words might well be understood to mean that ACI is "particularly disturbed" by those who consider "the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church" to be a heretic.

It is true that the logic of Dr. Radner's latest essay in which he argues for full attendance at the Primates Meeting and the scriptures he marshals in support of his argument only "work" if you consider the present debate about human sexuality an "internal" one...a dispute among fellow believers who basically share the same gospel. I personally find this assumption part of an orthodox scholar of Dr. Radner's calibre "particularly disturbing in its implications".

But I am not convinced that the same implication is contained in the passage quoted above. I think what they meant to say is that they are "particularly disturbed" by the idea that Archbishop Rowan Williams and his fellow administrators are "conniving, manipulative, perhaps even heretical..." because, as they point out in the paragraph that follows, the implication of that idea is that the Primates Meeting is irreformable.

It is not that people have sized up this or that Primate in this or that way that is so disturbing. What is the truly serious area of concern is this: the claim that, given the character of e.g. the Archbishop of Canter bury, there is nothing that can be done about the Meeting.

The aside in which the PB is mentioned merely points out that in some "versions" of this "disturbing perspective" the Archbishop and his administrators are even in cahoots with the Presiding Bishop. In other words I don't think they mean to say that the PB is not a heretic. I think they were only describing a perspective in which the ABC and his administrators are conniving heretics in league with the Presiding Bishop with no comment about the PB's theological standing.

In any case, I certainly hope that's what they meant.