Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Archbishop of Canterbury in Canada.

This week the Canadian House of Bishops is meeting in Niagara Falls. While we need to be constantly critical of the tendency of Bishops and Primates to meet separately from our synodical structures, and while such meetings should have a consultative function only, nevertheless what emerges from this meeting will be important. It is also important that they are spending a day with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has promised similarly to visit the Bishops of ECUSA. His apparent distaste or fear of our side of the Atlantic appears to have been overcome, and I can only hope that a real dialogue can begin.

Before meeting with the Bishops, The Archbishop of Canterbury gave the Larkin Stuart Lecture on 'The Bible Today: Reading & Hearing'. In the lecture he is critical both of the fundamentalist way of reading the bible, which he characterizes as seeing scripture “simply an inspired supernatural guide for individual conduct” and of the liberal way which he characterizes as seeing it simply as “ a piece of detached historical record.”
While the thinking of Anglicans Really Alive sees itself as liberal, it is not liberal in this sense, and I believe most of us, as most of the liberal end of the spectrum in the North American debate, would be comfortable with Rowan Williams theology of hermeneutics.

A link to the full text of the lecture will be found on our Website:

http://anglicansalive.googlepages.com/institutionalpolitics

Other information pertaining to the meeting of the House of Bishops can be found at
http://www.anglican.ca/news/news.php?newsItem=2007-04-18_hob.news

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, I think it is important to make that point about hermeneutics clear--so many people assume that being inclusive means one does not look for the Word in the Bible.
(Nice site, by the way. I live in the US now, but I attend at the cathedral every time I return to Montreal.)

Anonymous said...

This is great info to know.