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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