As we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the need to demytholo-gise unbiblical teaching and practice in the church remains as necessary as ever.
In the medieval Catholic Church a whole mythology had built up around the practice of penance, reaching its apogee in the systematic sale of indulgences which triggered Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517. Now the leadership of the Anglican Communion is generating its own postmodern mythology.
Holding opposites together
It is known as ‘Walking Together’ and is essentially an audacious political response to the reality of the Communion, which as GAFCON and the Anglican Global South have repeatedly said, is precisely the opposite.
In the emerging mythology of the Canterbury Primates’ Meetings, ‘Walking Together’ really means an overriding duty to hold the institutional church together in unimpeded spiritual fellowship, irrespective of the fact that some members have clearly crossed the boundaries of apostolic and biblical Christianity as understood through the last two millennia.
Having formally sanctioned same sex ‘marriage’, the Scottish Episcopal Church has now had similar ‘consequences’ applied to it as The Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States, but these are limited to procedural matters and the precedent of TEC shows that in practice even these amount to virtually nothing. There is no reason to believe that sacramental fellowship and participation in Lambeth Conferences, Primates’ Meetings and the Anglican Consultative Council will be hindered in any way that really matters.
Using the Canons illegitimately
The malign effects of this myth are seen in the Canterbury Primates latest communiqué. For example, the Canons of the Council of Nicea (325) are illegitimately pressed into service to support a call for repentance over boundary crossing, even though that action has been taken to defend orthodox faith, while the fundamental overturning of Scripture and tradition represented by including same sex unions in holy matrimony is simply referred to neutrally as ‘deep differences in understanding on same sex marriage’, rather than recognising the reality of false teaching.
As Archbishop Stanley Ntagali made clear when setting out his reasons for not attending the Primates Council, the reality is that there can be no true walking together if unity is based on anything else other than the shared basis of the clear teaching of the Bible and apostolic Christianity.
The toxicity, therefore, of the ‘Walking Together’ myth is that it actually attempts to unite what cannot be united, the holy catholic and apostolic with the unholy, heterodox and humanly invented.
But how could this happen with Primates present in Canterbury who had only a month before at the Anglican Global South meeting in Cairo issued a communiqué in which they said that adoption of same sex marriage continues to ‘tear the fabric of the communion’? It is deeply implausible to believe that these men simply changed their minds in the space of a month.
Who wrote it?
Fortunately, one of those Primates, Archbishop Gregory Venables of the province of South America, has given us valuable insight. In an interview with Kevin Kallsen of Anglican Ink, he notes that this latest Primates’ Meeting was unique in his long experience for not setting up a communiqué commission at the beginning and he goes on to say: ‘So who wrote it? It does not reflect what I experienced and heard in the meeting. That’s fine, it might be somebody’s perception, but it wasn’t my perception and that leads me to ask more serious questions.’
It seems clear that the ‘Walking Together’ myth had to be preserved at all costs. The extent to which it has taken hold is evident in an Anglican News Service headline ‘“best” Primates Meeting’ despite the awkward fact that over 30 million of the Anglican Communion’s 55 million active members were not represented because of their Primates’ principled absence.
‘Walking Together’ is a myth contrived for institutional ends which relies on ambiguity and breeds confusion. It must be exposed continually to the searching light of Scripture, just as the myths of mediaeval Catholicism were exposed by the Reformers, so that Anglicans may recover what the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement and Declaration sets out as the great purpose of that movement, ‘a clear and certain witness to Jesus Christ’.
