Stephen Noll: Sea Change in the Anglican Communion

There has been a sea change in the Anglican Communion over the past two decades. The vestments may be the same, the assorted “reverend” titles untouched, the website still showing smiling Global South Anglican faces. The reality is far different. The foundation of Anglican identity has been shaken, and with the Psalmist, many rightly wonder: “if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3).

The presenting cause of this sea change, as is widely known, is the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality and the redefinition of marriage. For 350 years, Anglican weddings in England and abroad have begun with these words:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church

When this doctrine of Holy Matrimony was challenged in the 1990s by gay-rights advocates in two Anglican Provinces – The Episcopal Church USA (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) – the Lambeth Conference of bishops answered decisively that

This Conference, in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage. (Resolution I.10)

The Lambeth Resolution led to a decade of strife within the Communion as the North Americans flatly rejected its norm and now are on the brink of providing official same-sex marriage rites. In the UK, same-sex marriage has now been signed into law by the Queen, and the Prime Minister vows to export it to the Commonwealth partners. While the Church of England has not approved same-sex marriage, the Archbishop of Canterbury argues that same-sex civil unions are a neglected moral obligation: “It is clearly essential that stable and faithful same sex relationships should, where those involved want it, be recognised and supported with as much dignity and the same legal effect as marriage” (Speech in House of Lords, 3 June 2013).

But isn’t sex outside marriage “incompatible with Scripture” (1998 Lambeth Resolution I.10; cf. Resolutions III.1 and III.5)? Indeed the larger question underlying the sexuality debate entails the authority of the Bible. To which question Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori replies, channeling her inner Humpty Dumpty: “When I use the Word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Or so it seems, as Bishop Schori interprets St. Paul’s exorcism of a slave girl, oppressed by demonic and human masters (Acts 16:16-18):

Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!

Permit me, as a biblical scholar and defrocked (by TEC) priest, to protest: that an apostolic leader can twist the text of Scripture and rebuke St. Paul as she does is emblematic of the false Gospel rampant in her church, and that she remains unrebuked by and in good standing with her elders in the Communion is emblematic of the utter dysfunction of that body. In what sense can one call it a “Communion” when such denial of the faith passes for normal? Keep reading