Sunday 10 August 2008

Campaign

Yeah, I'll join the Bishop of Grimsby's Campaign.

This is still the Mind of the Communion after all:

That it is important that, so far as possible, the Church should be adapted to local circumstances, and the people brought to feel in all ways that no burdens in the way of foreign customs are laid upon them, and nothing is required of them but what is of the essence of the faith, and belongs to the due order of the Catholic Church.

David Rossdale makes this point:

As I heard the conversations between Bishops from very different context explaining how issues in sexuality affected their mission within their context, social norms and cultural inheritance - Resolution 19 sounded very modern. It addresses the crux of these matters - what is the essence of faith and of order? The conversations of which I was part were really about 'foreign customs' being forced upon radically different parts of the Communion - and some of those radically different parts were contained within the same province!

He asks:

how do we reconcile Resolution 19 from 1897 with 1.10 from 1998?

Presumably when there is a Pastoral Forum in place they become unreconciled. He concludes:

So I am starting a campaign for Resolution 19 and it will become my 'litmus test' for orthodoxy.

That's a good idea: but, presumably, the real message from his post-Lambeth reflective blog entry is that none of these resolutions has any binding impact; they are just the output, as it went along, of Anglicanism, and that those people holding up resolutions - in grabbing hold of them and turning them into hammers with which to hit people over the head - are being quite selective in their choices.

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