Thursday 6 December 2012

Abp Rowan Williams doing what he does best: talking b*ll*cks

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Sometimes I think I may have been too hard on Archbishop Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican church, the third largest Christian denomination in the world...

And then he says something; and I realize that nothing I could possibly write could begin to measure up to the weaselling mendacity of the man.

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Take a look through his latest outpouring:

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2732/archbishops-advent-letter-to-anglican-primates

For those of you who have a life, here is the choicest tidbit:

In the work done around evangelism, healthcare, the environment, the rights and dignities of women and children and of indigenous peoples and many more areas, what drew people together was this halfway formal model of a global community of prayer and concern maintained by deep friendship and common work.  This is where you are probably most likely to see the beauty of the face of Christ in the meetings of the Communion; this is where the joyful hope of Christian believers is most strongly kindled.

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Now, the first and most obvious impression is that this is nonsense on stilts: complete and utter b*ll*cks.

That would be bad enough, but it is in fact far worse than meaningless drivel. He is stating his conviction of what the Anglican communion is about; and it is clearly not about Christianity. A cursory reference to 'evangelism' is overwhelmed by Leftist politics "healthcare, the environment, the rights and dignities of women and children and of indigenous peoples".

And what is this vacuous (but recurrent) trope about 'face' of Christ? For Williams, this seems to be as specific as he can get about the nature of what he terms Christianity.

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Aside from this, there is his usual dishonesty, in passages such as:

Despite many questions about how our decisions about doctrine and mutual responsibility are made in the Communion, and some challenges to the various ‘Instruments of Communion’, the truth is that our Communion has never been the sort of Church that looks for one central authority. 

The Truth (as contrasted with Abp Rowan's 'truth') is that the Anglican Communion did not 'look for' one central authority because it actually had one.

There was a single central authority in the Anglican Communion, when it was a thriving Christian church; and that was The Book of Common Prayer - used by all Anglicans everywhere and supported by the Authorized Version of the Bible.

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But let the man speak for himself:

This doesn’t mean that we are not concerned with truth or holiness or consistency. It simply acknowledges that all forms of human power and discipline can become corrupted, and that in the Church we have to have several points of reference for the organising of our common life so that none of them can go without challenge or critique from the others.

Our hope is that in this exchange we discover a more credible and lasting convergence than we should have if someone or some group alone imposed decisions – and that the fellowship that emerges is more clearly marked by Christlikeness, by that reverence for one another that the Spirit creates in believers.

Another way of saying this is that ... we are a ‘community of communities’. And perhaps in our own time we could translate this afresh and say we are a ‘network of networks’. Certainly this language has something to recommend it in an age when, so we’re told, networks are the decisive social fact for most younger people, often networks that are maintained through the new electronic media.

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Minus the BCP liturgy and the single scripture, the Anglican Church is indeed precisely that unChristian and incoherent 'community of communities' or 'network of networks' that Williams describes, celebrates and advocates: that is, the Anglican Community is nothing more than a bureaucracy with memories of greater things.

And RW and his ilk want to eradicate all links to these greater things; and leave nothing but an international 'spiritual' bureaucracy; bureaucratically-enmeshed with the explicitly-secular Leftist bureaucracies, and evolving open-endedly into whatever Leftism requires it to become.

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7 comments:

dearieme said...

There's no need to bang on, Bruce; you can learn everything you need to know from the 'around' in "the work done around....".

Thursday said...

A lot of the appeal of the left is its rhetoric of communal feeling. Of course, the reality is much different. See here:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/individualism-uber-alles/

“Though the path hasn’t always been straight, one can discern over the course of the twentieth century an overarching ambition in the Nordic countries not to socialize the economy but to liberate the individual citizen from all forms of subordination and dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, the workers from their employers, wives from their husbands, children from parents – and vice versa when the parents become elderly…legislation has made the Nordic countries into the least family-dependent and most individualized societies on the face of the earth. To be sure, the family remains a central social institution in the Nordic countries, but it too is infused with the same moral logic stressing autonomy and equality. The ideal family is made up of adults who work and are not financially dependent on the other, and children who are encouraged to be as independent as early as possible.”

And:

“[A]uthentic relationships of love and friendship are only possible between individuals who do not depend on each other or stand in unequal power relations. Thus autonomy, equality and (statist) individualism are inextricably linked to each other.”

The Nordic report those quotes are taken from is here:
http://www.globalutmaning.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Davos-The-nordic-way-final.pdf

Bruce Charlton said...

@dearime - I agree. When I was working in the public health bureaucracy c 20 years ago, the phrase 'issues around' was used all the time. Which tells you everything you need to know about public health.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Thu - you probably know the quote from Milton Friedman -

"A Scandinavian economist once stated to Milton Friedman: "In Scandinavia we have no poverty." Milton Friedman replied, "That's interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either." "

So it is mostly population genetics; plus the good fortune of not having a terrible government - until recently. Now the Scandinavian governments are changing the genetics of the population, and Scandinavians are discovering that everything they value depended on it.

Anonymous said...

I have often wondered about this, since becoming a rightist years back. What on earth did I ever think was good, either intrinsically or extrinsically, about equality? How did *that* ever even *appear* to be something worth working towards? The closest I've come to an answer is that the leftist's belief in equality must be understood as a deep perversion of some lingering quasi-Christian feeling. It has something to do with the idea that, deep down, every human being has some kind of ultimate or infinite worth or value (and so is the equal of any other in that cosmic sense). This is the only way to explain, up to a point, how people can be so deeply attached to a form of words -- "all human beings are equals" -- that is either patently false or patently meaningless.

JP said...

"[A]uthentic relationships of love and friendship are only possible between individuals who do not depend on each other or stand in unequal power relations."

So how could they possibly demonstrate that my love for my children (and theirs for me) is not "authentic"? They can't - they simply assume this is so and proceed from there. A fine example of Leftist propaganda masquerading as a "social science study" (see here).

Jonathan C said...

“[A]uthentic relationships of love and friendship are only possible between individuals who do not depend on each other or stand in unequal power relations.”

How dehumanized the person who wrote this! Pray for their soul. This quote comes straight out of oppositeland, where war is peace and gravity has sucked all the topsoil out into space.

I can't think of a better foundation for authentic love than dependence on each other. And few things bond a man and a woman so effectively as the erotic charge of unequal power relations.