Peter Carrell continues his attempts to find eirenic ways forward for the fractious Anglican Communion, having read Melbourne assistant bishop Peter Elliott’s article on Damian Thompson’s blog. In that article he seeks to argue that the Anglican Ordinariate is not much different from a Uniate Church or an eparchy (as uniates are known when they’re part of an immigrant community outside their own lands.
Reading this, Peter comments
I am now wondering why we Anglicans cannot be that smart – ACNA as an eparchy in North America? Why not! And if TEC want to form an eparchy in the UK? Why not!
We could all be in communion with Canterbury, and our bishops could meet together in conference.
OK. I know. Some of those bishops just will not make the necessary compromises.
It’s a great attempt, but sadly I’m not convinced by this rather creative idea. An eparchy is distinguished by some combination of rite, ethnicity and language, and exists because of emigration exporting the rather complex history of middle European countries.
Rome permits cultural differences of this sort (and has sometimes only done so grudgingly) but there is no doctrinal difference, and nor would one be permitted. Further, no uniate church could claim another was not truly the church.
It’s not at all clear to me that the Ordinariate has much in common with a Uniate Church. In the UK at least (and I suspect elsewhere) most of these people are not Anglican Rite anyway, but Roman Rite, at least as far as the breviary and missal go. They have no particular patrimony to bring, merely the habit of glorifying the office of episcopacy by disobeying every specific bishop, and speaking of the Holy Father as the oracular voice of God, while denying his teaching about the invalidity of their orders. This is hardly the model of obedient communion of different cultures which the Uniate Churches are supposed to be a model of.
To cap things off Bp Elliott is also somewhat disingenuous in claiming the Uniate Churches as a fig-leaf to cover Rome’s naked authoritarianism. English speaking countries are just rediscovering that as Episcopal Conferences have lost the right to translate the liturgy into actual English, because the Vatican doesn’t trust them to express the Latin doctrine soundly enough in their own language. This is mainly an attack on the liberal (as the Vatican sees it) attitude of the US bishops to gender inclusive language.
Now that’s monolithic for you.
Tagged as:
anglican,
Church,
Ordinariate,
roman catholic
Help! I’ve been tagged by Lingamish in a highly provocative post. In a nutshell he writes:
What do we do about the curses, the bloodshed, and the vengeance found in the Old Testament? The answer is very simple: we skip it.
In making his point he willingly acknowledges the ways in which the pleas for vengeance in the Psalms, for example, mirror our own instincts in certain situations, however he sees that (and by implication the OT) as something to be redeemed. He goes on to illustrate what is a rather Girardian take on the problem of sin and its solution by claiming Jesus as someone who also edits the vengeance out of Scripture.
Consider Jesus’ method of “skipping” the violence of the Old Testament during the opening quotation in his sermon recorded in the Gospel of Luke: … Jesus is quoting Isaiah 61:1-2 but has deliberately left out half of verse 2 … “the day when our God will seek vengeance”
Well, there are no answers here. But since I’ve been asked, I will try out a few observations.
I think the sermon at Nazareth as a preface to Jesus’ ministry is a Lukan literary creation that is programmatic for his account of the one who dies with “Father, forgive” on his lips. Luke has a more radical idea of repentance as rooted in God’s initiative than the other gospel writers, and is perhaps the easiest to interpret in Girard’s categories. Girard’s work is also a tremendously attractive explanation of sin and atonement, but while I feel its pull, I keep feeling some important issues of justice are getting lost. The best of the Old Testament (and New Testament) expressions of divine violence are statements of God’s passion against injustice and evil, however much we might want to express things differently.
One of the interesting moves made by some of the earlier interpreters of Scripture, before the West became over-suspicious of allegory, was a reinterpretation of the texts of divine violence as warfare against the evil spirits and demons. It is an allegorisation broadly in line with the literal interpretation of other texts. I’m not quote sure how we might do any kind of demythologised allegorisation today, but perhaps this mythologically framed reinterpretation of the difficult texts has something to offer.
Of course, as Luke’s Jesus does, and as David does, we are all selective about our readings of Scripture in the light of the broad themes we adopt, or the methods we use to tame difficult texts to our own theology and morality. We are not alone in that. Our Jewish brothers and sisters do much the same with the text of the Old Testament, without needing the New Testament to do it. Indeed, some of the more vivid metaphors of God’s destructive condemnation come on Jesus’ lips. It is not confined to the Old Testament. That would suggest that there is no simple principle of selectivity that will let the text off the hook.
The human desire for vengeance reflected in a number of texts is not very far removed in many cases from a desire for the destruction of evil and the establishment of justice. The vengeful instinct may be a distortion, but it is a distortion of our better instinct: the desire for justice. And the desire for justice may be one of the more powerful pointers of our hearts towards the existence of God. For is it not true that in the end, only God can guarantee a justice that sees the human heart, and whose judgement may yet lead to restoration?
Perhaps then, wrestling with all the problem texts may lead to a deeper appreciation of justice, and in the end a justice that may look suspiciously like mercy. That’s why we need to keep those difficult texts, admit to their awkwardness, wrestle with them and argue with them. Perhaps in the course of that conversation which takes them seriously, we will admit both that we long for justice, but that left to our own devices, we’re more likely to end up with vengeance. And perhaps we need these texts of terror to help us learn the difference.
Tagged as:
First Testament,
Girard,
justice,
vengeance
