The Anglican Church
July 1st, 2008 | by Matthew Smith |I was hoping to start off posting some important commentary about the stuff going down at Lambeth and GAFCon and the recent statements on Women Bishops but I don’t know enough about either the complexities of women bishops or the nature of the Anglican Communion to comment.
From what I can piece together, the women bishops thing all comes down to how conservative you are when it comes to scriptural interpretation and church tradition or a combination of those, for example, some liberal biblical interpreters might still object to women bishops just because it is not part of church tradition (perhaps extreme Anglo-Catholics might take this view?). Where as some relatively literal minded biblical interpreters might point to Paul’s letters (e.g. 1 Cor 14.34-36 and 1 Tim 2.11-15). Then centralist evangelicals like in the Melbourne Anglican Diocese are liberal enough in both church tradition and scriptural interpretation to not have a problem with women bishops.
As for GAFCon, I can only point to the Radio National program linked above which in summary suggests that Australian conservative evangelical Anglicans are teaming up with the conservative African Anglican churches to oppose the current direction of the Anglican Communion. Again, this seems to all come back to various mixes of conservatism and liberalism in scripture and tradition.
Actually, I think I should save my original topic which was going to be “Vatican II and all that Jazz” for another post and just leave this one how it is. If you’ve read this far and have some thoughts on the state of the Anglican church, please enlighten me in the comments.