From the comments posted on this report at Thinking Anglicans:
Just one question, please. What if the opponents of woman bishops win at the next synodal selections, "win" in the sense of increasing their numbers, and hence strength, in the House of Laity?
Posted by: William Tighe on Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 2:27pm BST
William Tighe, thank you for your salutary warning. It will be relatively easy for hardline opponents in the House of Laity to muster enough votes to block the process again, although not now in the other two Houses.Help me, please. We are told that in contemporary Anglicanism one of the ways in which we discern the 'mind of the Church' is as a result of the synodical process which, we are told (at least by our lex orandi - try to suppress your hollow laughter) is guided by the Holy Spirit.
You ask what will the consequences be if that happens?
There'll be a lot of anger but the matter will just keep coming back again and again until it is resolved in favour of women bishops as that is clearly and permanently the mind of the Church.
Posted by: Concerned Anglican on Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 4:46pm BST
Yet if the synodical process fails to come up with the goods to the satisfaction of the liberals pressing for each and every change, measures must be brought back again and again until the 'right answer' is given. This isn't merely the opinion of one person who comments pseudo-anonymously on a website; bishops and archbishops have said the same.
Clearly, then, the synodical process can form no essential part of the process of discernment, as not only the reference point for any acceptable result clearly lies 'permanently' elsewhere, but also that the result of any vote can safely be ignored if it fails to express what has already - somehow- been defined as the Anglican consensus fidelium.
If anyone can tell tell me where that point of reference lies, outside, that is, of the fashionable imperatives of the post-modern secular 'elite' (it is clearly not Scripture and Tradition, and reason as mediated by the foregoing: the correct interpretation of the so-called 'three-legged stool' of classical Anglican polity) - I would be very grateful, as no doubt will the Holy Spirit Himself who must be somewhat wearied by now by our repeated and fruitless invocations before the taking of each synodical vote.
No religious body deserves to survive the desperate incoherence and dishonesty of this kind of Mickey Mouse ecclesiology... not to mention the insane circularity of the arguments used to justify it.
The Holy Spirit obviously can't be trusted as He keeps on getting it wrong, according to the Liberals!
ReplyDeleteI have long held the conviction that behind zealotry in the promotion of WO and SS is the worship of the Zeitgeist, and mistaking it, or he, for the Holy Spirit. The Zeitgeist is clearly, on a cultural level, "the prince of this world," as Someone once said, and so, as the Germans say, Da scheiden sich die Geister ("this is the parting of the ways").
ReplyDeleteIt is pleasing to have one's notions so signally supported by those whose views are most alien to one's own. That is the great use of perusing "Thinking Anglicans" from time to time.
It's not a wonder that the vast majority of British citizens are not CofE and many former practicing members actually simply stop caring and attending (or become agnostics or self-identified atheists). However, Fr Michael, and I would say many of those still within FiF today, know the true answer to this dilemma, as most of us aligned with FiF did two years ago on both sides of the Atlantic.
ReplyDeleteThe New Oxford Movement many of us were seeking some years back has arrived and is ironically once again the work of, among others, Blessed John Henry Newman: www.ordinariate.org.uk
God bless you and your people.