By: Jim Taylor

Canadian and African Anglicans split over Bible


The Anglican Church in Canada managed to dodge the silver bullet last weekend. Its General Synod, meeting in Winnipeg, voted against approving same-sex blessings for gay or lesbian couples.

General Synod votes in three “houses”—laity, clergy, and bishops. All three must approve for a proposal to become church policy. On the issue of same-sex blessings—not marriages, just a blessing after a legal civil union—the laity and clergy both voted in favour. The bishops, by two votes, did not.

        But don’t expect this issue to go away.

        All three houses of the Anglican Church had previously agreed that nothing in their “core doctrines” prohibits same-sex blessings. That, in itself, will incite fury from conservative Anglicans around the world. Especially in Africa.

        The African bishops have already threatened to split the 76-million member worldwide Anglican communion over opposition to North American policies.

        It is not just about homosexuality, although that’s the issue that African bishops have seized on. It may be the only issue the mass media are capable of grasping.



Two issues

There are actually two issues—power and authority.

        Historically, the centre of the worldwide Anglican communion has been Canterbury, in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is still considered the church’s leader.

        But the weight of Anglican membership has shifted to Africa. And archbishops such as Peter Akinola, the Primate the Anglican Church of Nigeria, and Emmanuel Kolini, the Anglican archbishop of Rwanda, are no longer willing to meekly follow the lead of western churches in theology and practice.

        Other controversies have threatened to split the Anglican communion. Women’s ordination, for example.

        In the 1970s, U.S. and Canadian churches began ordaining women as Anglican priests; the British church followed later, kicking and screaming. Recently, the U.S. Episcopal Church elected Anglicanism’s first female Primate, Katharine Jefferts Schori; no church has yet elected a female archbishop.

        Both North American churches have gay priests. The Episcopalian Church in the USA has even ordained the first gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

        Until now, it’s commonly assumed that churches in former British colonies would follow the western churches’ path.

        Except that Asian and African churches, echoing the anti-Vietnam chant of the 1970s, are replying, “Hell no, we won’t go!”



Authority of Bible

Sex—whether gender or orientation—may seem to be the issue. But it is merely the flashpoint that identifies a deeper division.

        The real issue is the authority of the Bible.

        For the African bishops, homosexuality is a sin because the Bible says so. No other view is possible.

        The western churches, as I see them, no longer grant the Bible ultimate authority. They also give credence to genetic research, sociology, psychology…

        I used to joke that theological liberals believe the Bible if it corresponds with their experience and learning. Conservatives believe their experience/learning only if it corresponds with the Bible.

        Unfortunately, it’s not a joke any more.

        Richard Holloway, the former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Bishop of Edinburgh, helped identify the nature of the Anglican abyss. In the introduction to his 2001 book Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity, Holloway wrote that he was appalled by the venom with which African bishops used the Bible to attack their western colleagues at the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops.

        But he also knew that 30 years earlier he would probably have shared their views on the Bible, if not the tone of their words.

        He realized that he read the Bible differently now. Because in the meantime, he had been influenced by feminism. So he now read the Bible through a different set of lenses. He applied other criteria—reason, education, and inspiration—to assess the relevance of biblical texts to current situations.



Selective reading

 For the liberal churches, the overriding principle has become human rights.

        Which are, at their root, biblical. St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians says, “There is now neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for you are all one in Christ.”

        As my colleague Ralph Milton has written, it took us 1700 years to abolish distinctions between slave and free. And another 300 years to start dismantling artificial distinctions between male and female.

        We still have a long way to go to eliminate racial prejudices.

        For conservative Anglicans, though, the liberal view is not good enough.

        But their literal reading of scriptures is equally selective. They focus on a half-dozen or so verses that specifically condemn male homosexual relations.

        While taking those verses literally, the conservatives choose not to take equally literally other biblical instructions on the length of women’s hair, kosher food rules, or wearing clothes made from two different fabrics.

        So they too pick and choose the verses to which they grant authority.



Mixed motivations

The liberal view, I think, is motivated by hope. Hope, that the kind of openness that Jesus personally modelled among his contemporaries—be they women, lepers, Pharisees, Samaritans, even gentiles—can be extended to the whole modern world.

        By contrast, I see the conservative view driven primarily by fear. Professor David Mullan of Cape Breton University stated the case starkly: “If the Bible is unreliable in terms of homosexuals, then it is undoubtedly a useless authority elsewhere.”

        That puts the issue in a nutshell. For conservatives, regardless of their home continent, if any part of the Bible becomes subject to an extra-biblical authority, then all of it does. Take one brick out of the wall, and the whole wall comes crashing down.

        So the liberal churches will argue equality. Human rights. Genetics. Environment. Nurture. Psychology. Biblical criticism. They are all irrelevant to the conservatives. Because they are all an outside authority that, by its very existence, undermines the Bible.

        That is the battleground.

And whatever the Anglican Church of Canada eventually decides about same-sex unions, that battle will continue.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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