Justin Welby to Speak in Dallas

From The Living Church-

The Diocese of Dallas has announced a vocations conference that will feature the Archbishop of Canterbury as a plenary speaker. “Ancient Order, Radical Vocation: The Anglican Priesthood as 21st Century Calling,” or “RadVo,” is scheduled for Sept. 20-22 at Church of the Incarnation.

Other speakers include:

Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, general secretary of the Anglican Communion

Stanley Hauerwas, professor emeritus of divinity and law at Duke Divinity School

Oliver O’Donovan, professor emeritus of Christian ethics and practical theology at the University of Edinburgh

Ephraim Radner, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto

Bishop N.T. Wright, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews


More here-


https://livingchurch.org/2018/04/13/justin-welby-to-speak-in-dallas/

Taking the Bible seriously means reading it figurally

From Christian Century-

Because I had recently become a Christian, I enrolled in a New Testament studies course during my first year as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Our guiding textbook was Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I recall one stuffy fall afternoon when the teaching assistant for our precept group (who happened to be a clergyman) explained that we would investigate the Christian scriptures as though they were no different from any other historical document or work of literature. “We’ll be reading and studying the New Testament the same way they’ll approach Beowulf down the hall from us.”

His comment about Beowulf sticks in both my memory and my craw because it ignited a small rebellion among my evangelical classmates, who resisted the idea of reckoning with scripture the way one would any other historical document. I also recall the titters of patronizing laughter set off by one classmate’s protest: “But it’s not like the Iliad; it’s God’s Word.”

More here-


https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/taking-bible-seriously-means-reading-it-figurally

UNDERSTANDING OUR EMBODIMENT

From The Living Church-

Review by Rowan Williams

Anything written by Ephraim Radner can be guaranteed to be serious, constructively difficult, spiritually challenging and original, and this book is no exception. It will be hard to classify, though; it is essentially an essay in theological anthropology, but is at the same time an exceptionally wide-ranging essay on our North Atlantic cultural crisis. In a nutshell, what he argues is that our Western society has lived through a “Great Transition” involving altered expectations of life and health, and reduced birth rates. We are less and less capable of seeing our lives as following a God-given trajectory in which birth, generation, and death constitute the way God gives us of being human and growing in our humanity to the point at which we resign our lives into God’s hands for a “Great Transfiguration.” Learning to inhabit this trajectory is the “Great Traversal,” the journey in which we enact and echo God’s traversing of human experience in Jesus Christ, the divine act that has established that the prosaic transitions of our routine experience are the stuff of which the new creation will be made — not by our effort or success, but by God’s mercy.

More here-

http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/04/27/understanding-our-embodiment/

‘God Is Dead, And We (Boomers) Have Killed Him’

From The American Conservative-

A reader sends in this WSJ book review by D.G. Hart, of veteran religion journalist Kenneth Woodward’s latest book, Getting Religion, tracing the evolution of American religion in the postwar era. Excerpts:

In the 1950s, he writes, “Catholics inhabited a parallel culture that, by virtue of their numbers, ethnic diversity, wide geographical distribution, and complex of institutions mirrored the outside ‘public’ culture yet was manifestly different.” As Mr. Woodward sees it, Catholics were surrounded by a membrane that intermediated between the worlds of American society and the church. The “powerful sense of community” nurtured within this membrane has virtually disappeared. Now Americans “journey toward adulthood” not through relationships formed by families, neighbors, teachers, pastors and community organizations but through the effort of discovering “an inwardly derived, original, and authentic self,” one autonomous from “institutionally structured relationships.”

How this change happened is the subject of the book, and Mr. Woodward’s reporting put him on the front lines of the transformation.

More here-

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/god-is-dead-baby-boomers/

12 Theses on Bishops’ Ministry

From The Living Church-

The Episcopal Church is struggling to redefine its order and mission in the face of rapidly declining membership amid a radically changing civil society. The role of bishops has always been central to our church — hence our church’s name — but this role is now itself a part of the struggle for the Episcopal Church’s faithful mission. What are bishops for? To what are they accountable? How should they engage in the oversight (episcope) of the Church and what role should they have in her councils and decision-making? General Convention is only one place, if a key one, where these questions arise. Without addressing particular issues before Convention that involve our bishops — their constitutional responsibilities, doctrinal authority, discipline, and role in the Communion — let me suggest, in the form of several theses, some foundational elements that ought to inform our church’s understanding of her bishops.

1. The full description of the episcopal office is given in the Holy Scriptures’ description of Jesus Christ. This is because this full description of Jesus Christ is the figure that the episcopal office represents (1 Pet. 2:25).

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/12-theses-bishops-ministry

Can the Instruments of Unity Be Repaired?

From Ephraim Radner-

When the turmoil surrounding Gene Robinson’s consent and consecration arose in 2003, everyone knew that the Anglican Communion was in for some rough times. But even more pessimistic observers believed that these times would be relatively limited, and that somehow the Communion would muddle towards some stabilizing resolution. Few could have imagined how quickly and how completely the organizations that held the Communion together would fragment and crumble. Yet this is where we have arrived: a seemingly single incident in one small corner of the global church’s reach has managed to unravel centuries of common bonds and shared witness to Christ.

At this point, all the so-called Instruments of the Unity for the Anglican Communion are broken, some, it seems to me, beyond any hope of repair. What can be done about this? The four Instruments – the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) and the Primates’ Meeting (in order of their founding) – have each, in different ways and together, been key means by which Anglicans around the world, drawn from their various migrational and missionary origins, have grown into a vital communion of churches. And this Communion has been characterized by elements unique, admired, and even desired still by many non-Anglican Christians. With the demise of the Instruments of Unity, the question of the Anglican Communion’s survival and vocation is necessarily raised.

I will discuss the status of each Instrument today; then ask what we have learned from these Instruments’ collapse; finally, I will address the question of what we can do about any of this.

More here-

http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2010/10/can-the-instruments-of-unity-be-repaired/

Essay: Actions Now Have Consequences

Ephraim Radner in The Living Church

What should be the ecclesial consequences for Anglican churches that have consciously rejected the “mind of the Communion” during this past decade? Many have waited a long time for Archbishop Rowan Williams to spell out his own views. Since 2007 he has openly talked of the costs involved in going one’s own way, however conscientiously, in opposition to the formally stated teachings of the Communion on the matter of sexual behavior and other key matters of doctrine and discipline. But what costs? The archbishop’s Pentecost letter has now begun the formal process of both laying out and setting in motion these consequences. This alone makes the letter significant.

Until this point, the archbishop has steadfastly followed two tracks in responding to the divisions of the Communion. First, he has formally initiated and supported Communion-based processes of consultation and evaluation leading out of the 2004 Windsor Report. By and large, and based on commonly accepted standards of doctrine and discipline around the Communion, these have consistently pressed for Anglican churches around the world to adopt and enforce moratoria on the consecration of partnered homosexual bishops, on the affirmation and permission of same-sex blessings or marriages, and on the cross-jurisdictional interference of bishops in the dioceses or provinces of another church. Through the Instruments of Communion — the Primates’ Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Lambeth Conference — as well as through representative commissions like the Windsor Continuation Group, the acceptability of this track has been reiterated over and over. Yet, for all that, there has never really been stable resolution emerging from these repeated requests for moratoria.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/6/4/essay-actions-now-have-consequences

Ten Years and a New Anglican Congregationalism

From Ephraim Radner via David Virtue-

It is ten years since Anglicanism's current travails were formally inaugurated with the formation of an alternative "Communion" church in North America, the Anglican Mission in America. Not the cause, it was nonetheless the first major sign that "communion" was no longer a given in Anglicanism, but something to be variously asserted, antagonistically claimed, and built up or torn down as the case may be.

And after ten years, I think it necessary to say that most of the work thus far has been one of tearing down. Tearing down, but also of exposing new things and clearer lines of calling, so that what had been emerging as a communion might now be seen as demanding deeper commitment for its flourishing than anybody had imagined. The work that many of us have been doing out of a commitment to the traditional Christian faith as Anglicans (and others) had received it has been worth the effort, and continues to be demanded. But what we are seeing, especially as Christian communion is being assaulted not only from within the Church, but more importantly by a rapidly dissolving Christian culture in the West, is that there are deeper roots to put down and nourish than we had perhaps first thought.

The tearing down, in any case, is what is most obvious, perhaps, to outsiders or onlookers from within. One by one, for instance, the so-called "Instruments of Unity" for Anglicans around the world have been eroded in their perceived integrity, and certainly in their effectiveness.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, over the past decade (from Lord Carey through Rowan Williams), has issued pleas, statements, constructive ideas, hopes. But when, last month, a schedule conflict, not to mention in any case the ash of an Icelandic volcano, kept him from the South to South Encounter of non-Western churches in Singapore, the transient and quivering video image of his unfocused greeting was symbolically all that was left of his presence to an increasingly estranged majority of world Anglicans. For whatever reasons - the constraint imposed on Lambeth's voice by America's money monopoly on Communion bureaucracy, loyalties divided between Britain and Communion, mixed convictions within his own mind, an under-appreciation of the demanded influence of his own witness? - ten years of people all going their own way has rendered the moral authority of his voice almost inaudible.

More here-

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=12638

Dr. Radner: Covenant Part of a Global Shift

From The Living Church-

The final text of the Anglican Communion Covenant pleased the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, who has served on the document’s design group since its inception in 2006. Dr. Radner, an Episcopal priest, is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto, Ontario.

“My sense about it is that they didn’t really change anything substantial,” he told The Living Church, referring to the working group charged with revising the document from its previous iteration as the Ridley Cambridge draft.

“They salvaged what could have been a bad mess from May [2009],” when the Anglican Consultative Council met and, after a chaotic legislative session, ultimately asked for revisions to the document’s fourth section, which proposes how provinces will be accountable to the Anglican Communion as a whole.

Because changes to the fourth section did not reflect what Episcopal Church leaders were seeking, Dr. Radner said, the document helps change that province’s standing. He described it as being part of a pattern, along with the ecumenical dialogues of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission and the recent meeting of the Archbishop of Canterbury with Pope Benedict XVI.

“You take this, with the restarting of the ARCIC dialogue and what Rowan was engaged in at Rome, and there is a shift going on, and that shift is leaving the Episcopal Church behind,” he said. “There’s nothing the Episcopal Church can do about it at this point.”

While acknowledging the archbishop’s explanation that the Covenant is “not going to be a penal code for punishing people who don’t comply,” Dr. Radner said of Episcopal Church leaders: “They’re not going to be able to claim any moral high ground. They’ve been sidelined.”

Those leaders are not being shown the exit, he said, but “they’re on a path that’s going around the side of the building.”

He highlighted Section 4.1.6, which says simply, “This Covenant becomes active for a Church when that Church adopts the Covenant through the procedures of its own Constitution and Canons.”

Conservative provinces in the Global South “ought to be able to go ahead with it,” he said about adoption of the Covenant, “whatever problems there are with this or that detail.”


More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2009/12/21/dr-radner-covenant-part-of-a-global-shift

Misreading History: The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner

From The Living Church-

The Washington Post’s On Faith weblog recently published “A Christian Case for Same-Sex Marriage,” a column by Bishop John Chane of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The occasion for the piece is a debate about a law that would legalize same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia. But Bishop Chane’s main goal, as he tells us, is to “offer a short history of changing Christian understandings of the institution of marriage” that will counter traditional Christian arguments against same-sex partnerships.

Journalists, he worries, think that traditionalists speak for the church and for the Christian tradition. They speak for neither, according to the bishop. Given the high profile of the Post, and Bishop Chane’s standing as a bishop of a prominent (if recently beleaguered) Christian body, one should probably take his remarks seriously. Alas, as a short history his remarks cannot be taken seriously at all, but amount to a tissue of popular myths, used to promote a tired and unfounded historical perspective whose application now has a track record of political intolerance.

Bishop Chane first argues that traditionalists are inconsistent — maybe even hypocritical? — because Jesus was against divorce and traditionalists are not “demanding that the city council make divorce illegal.” Of course, Jesus did not proclaim all divorce wrong (cf. Matt. 9:9).More important, by begging his own question here — just what is the status of divorce, then? — Bishop Chane undercuts his case: the state’s accommodation of divorce has indeed encouraged and even created turmoil in social relations. If anything the failures of church and wider culture in this area are actually a good argument for restraint on further social confusion.

Second, Bishop Chane says that traditionalists are inconsistent in their defense of the centrality of heterosexual marriage because, after all, Paul thought marriage inferior to the celibate life. But, of course, the apostle Paul’s teaching does not claim that marriage is an inferior state, but rather that it is often an impractical one in comparison with celibacy. Bishop Chane’s disingenuous assumption that traditionalists ought to apply Paul’s teaching to all of human life was certainly not shared by other writers in the New Testament (or by Jesus), and such an attitude made only partial inroads into the Church’s practical life some centuries later. Most Christians, including Christian priests even in the Middle Ages, understood Paul’s teaching within a larger theological reading of the Scriptures that included a created sexual difference, the blessing of procreation, and the social responsibilities of church and state to nurture families. Within this reading, celibacy is a great gift, and an evangelical vocation for some, and it remains so.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2009/11/25/misreading-history

ACI, Communion Partner Bishops Mull Petition in Pittsburgh

A friend-of-the-court petition filed in the ongoing litigation in Pittsburgh by the Presiding Bishop’s chancellor represents a new, serious challenge to the long-standing polity of The Episcopal Church, according to a joint statement to be issued March 12 by the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) and the Communion Partner bishops.

“The historic episcopate has long been recognized as an essential, non-negotiable element of Anglican identity,” the statement notes. “The polity of The Episcopal Church, clearly expressed in its name, its constitution and its history, is that of dioceses and bishops meeting in a general convention as equals. The Presiding Bishop and the Executive Council are the agents, not the superiors of dioceses.”

The statement is signed by Communion Partner bishops D. Bruce MacPherson of Western Louisiana and John Howe of Central Florida and by the Rev. Canon Christopher Seitz, the Rev. Philip Turner, the Rev. Ephraim Radner and Mark McCall of the ACI. According to Fr. Seitz, the statement presages a longer, more scholarly paper that will flesh out the two organizations’ concerns. He said leaders of the two organizations have not ruled out the possibility of filing a friend-of-the-court petition of their own.

Last October clergy and lay deputies to the annual convention in the Diocese of Pittsburgh voted to realign with the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone. Members of the diocese who did not wish to leave The Episcopal Church filed a plea in January to recover assets it says rightfully belong to The Episcopal Church. Lawyers for The Episcopal Church filed a friend-of-the-court petition in February. If leaders for the ACI and Communion Partner bishops were to file a friend-of-the-court petition, it would be to ask the court to deny the pleas by the reorganizing diocese and The Episcopal Church, Fr. Turner said.

“We have made it very clear that we will not choose sides in the fight between Bishop [Robert] Duncan [of Pittsburgh] and the Presiding Bishop,” he said. “We seek only to preserve the historic polity of The Episcopal Church from interference by the civil courts and a Presiding Bishop acting beyond her constitutional authority.”

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2009/3/11/aci-communion-partner-bishops-mull-petition-in-pittsburgh

The new Anglican branch will face several significant hurdles.

Christianity Today gives a realistic assessment of the obstacles confronting the "new province". Already Jack Iker (who may or may not be a Bishop (See below)) has declared himself to be in impaired communion with the women clergy in Pittsburgh. Ian Douglas is right, this sort of division is just part of their DNA.

Under Anglican rules, formal recognition of a province usually requires the assent of two-thirds of the communion's 38 primates — or leading archbishops. But Wednesday's unprecedented announcement raises new questions.

Bishop Martyn Minns, a leader in the Common Cause Partnership, estimates that nearly a dozen primates will support its new venture, about half the number it needs for recognition. Gaining the approval of more primates may prove difficult, said the Rev. Ian Douglas, of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"What happens in one province could set a precedent and come back to their own (province)," said Douglas.

Similar concerns could be raised by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), a 70-member international body that must also approve the new province, said Douglas, who sits on the council.

In an essay published online, the Rev. Ephraim Radner, a leading North American conservative, argued that these obstacles are nearly insurmountable.

The new province "will probably not be recognized at the primates' meeting as a whole or even by a majority of its members," he said. "Nor will it be recognized at the ACC. Thus it threatens to be yet another wedge in the breakup of the communion."

(snip)
According to the constitution released late Wednesday, each diocese, cluster or network in the newly declared province will have significant autonomy on women's ordination and other matters. But already, Bishop Jack Iker of Fort Worth, Texas, whose diocese seceded from the Episcopal Church this year, has declared himself in "impaired communion" with female priests ordained in Pittsburgh.

"The new grouping is, in the eyes of many," said Radner, "representative of diverse bodies whose theology and ecclesiology is, taken together, incoherent, and perhaps in some cases even incompatible."

That bodes ill for the denomination's future, Douglas said. "Those who have been quick to separate themselves out in the past have that as part of their operational DNA," he said.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/decemberweb-only/149-53.0.html

A New “Province” in North America: Neither the Only Nor the Right Answer for the Communion

Ephraim Radner gives a helpful analysis of the proposed new province in North America.

A new “province” for North American Anglicans is now promised to be “up and running” in the next month or so. It will comprise the 3-4 dioceses that have voted to leave TEC; the associations of various congregations that have left TEC (e.g. CANA) and those started outside of TEC from departing groups; it will also include congregations and denominations within the Anglican tradition that have formed over the past decades in North America. All of these groups now form part of an association called Common Cause.

The formation of this new “province” appears to be a fait accompli. It will presumably provide formal stability for the congregations and their plants who have left TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as some kind of more easily grasped relationship with some other parts of the Anglican Communion. It is important to note, however, that such a new grouping will also not solve the problems of traditional Anglicans in North America , and that it will pose new problems to the Communion as a whole. As a member of the Covenant Design Group, committed to a particular work of providing a new framework for faithful communion life in Christ among Anglicans, I want to be clear about how the pressing forward of this new grouping within its stated terms poses some serious problems:

http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=324

True Christian Unity? Reflections on the Lambeth Conference

The Rev Dr. Ephraim Radner has a long but very good analysis of the hopes for the Anglican Communion post-Lambeth. Ephraim was one of the drafters of the Anglican Covenant and committed to staying in the Episcopal Church. There are several other pieces on the blog by him.

"And what if churches and bishops and dioceses simply continue to “do what is right in their own eyes”, despite the consensus of the Conference’s voice? The Archbishop noted that “if the north American churches don’t accept the need for moratoria then, to say the least, we are no further forward”; indeed, we “continue to be in grave peril” and the hopes of the Covenant itself are undermined. ACI reiterates its view that there is a need for some concrete response of relationship now in the face of rejection of moratoria if the Communion is to get beyond its current morass, even in spite of the new clarities offered above. The rejections of the moratoria are already evident in some cases, and likely soon in others on all sides. Unless the Pastoral Forum, the Primates, the Joint Standing Committee and the Archbishop are willing to respond relationally, according to the reasonable and Christian parameters that a “communion” embodies and intends, what was seen as a way forward is no doubt only a glimpse before a backward fall."

http://covenant-communion.com/?p=837#more-837

London Daily Telegraph on Ephraim Radner's Open Letter

Earlier in the week I mentioned a letter that Ephraim Radner had sent to the Lambeth Bishops. Ephraim is a thoughtful theologian and one of the drafters of the proposed Anglican Covenant. The letter can be found here-

http://covenant-communion.com/?p=799

The London Daily telegraph has picked up on the letter and the article about it and Lambeth's possible response reads in part

"The Anglican Church is facing the "most perilous crisis" in its history due to disagreements over gay clergy as it meets for the Lambeth Conference this week, traditionalists have warned."
Its all here-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2300925/Gay-clergy-split-is-%27most-perilous-crisis%27-in-Church%27s-history.html