Searching for God # 112

 The Anglican Communion Office works to promote Christian unity, fostering visible communion both within the Anglican family and with other world communions.

This work deals with questions of Christian belief (faith) and church structure (order) that have historically divided denominations. The ACO facilitates theological dialogues among Anglican churches, and ecumenically, with Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and other Christian traditions.
It provides the theological foundation that makes deeper unity possible—helping churches move from mere cooperation to actual reconciliation and potentially full communion. (from anglicancommunion.org. website)

Volumes have been written, councils held, creeds written, memorized and memorialized, seminaries have been generated and both inter-church and ecumenical dialogue continues. Even last month, the newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury met with Pope Leo XVI in Rome where both agreed to continue to work together to foster the path toward unity of the Christian church.

On an important level of both cognition and theology, not to mention the politics of operating in a universe where conflict seems to dominate, ‘unity’ connotes harmony, credibility, trustworthiness, consensus. From multiple gods, as comprised the galaxy of sacred entities in Greek and Roman culture, there was a thrust of energized opinion that fought for and, to a degree won various commitments to a single God, with Three various ‘metaphorically-contained entities. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The tension between the concepts of immanence and transcendence, human/God (Jesus as man, Father as God with Holy Spirit as ‘neither-and-both’)  is a tension from which many theologians, evoking a physics concept, would like to have generated energy, new ideas, new life and a both-and rather than an ‘either-or’ kind of theology. For them, (an example might be William Blake who equated God and imagination as one) such a theology will, they believed and proposed, would continue to generate new interpretations of what is essentially beyond ‘cognition, reason, imagination, time, space and human ‘grasp’.

The declaration of Peter as the ‘rock’ upon which Jesus would build His church, the date of Easter, the deployment of icons, Bishops, archbishops, the ordination of women, the generation of clergy at all, especially the question of how to read and interpret scripture, (The Bible, in this case, yet the Torah and the Koran as well), the nature of sin and forgiveness, the process of application of those theological notions and concepts, the relationship between church and state (Henry VIII’s vengeful generation of the Church of England, separated from Rome over an un-granted yet demanded divorce, and the subsequent British monarch’s dual role as Head of State and Heat of the Church of England, are just part of this divide), the welcome or exclusion of the LGBTQ+ community first as parishioners, then as approved clients for church marriage and/or union, and later, ordination as clergy…the Biblical (Old Testament) injunctions that women remain silent and subsidiary to their male partners…..even the Eucharist, its design, its delivery, the question  of whether and  how sinning clergy could continue to administer it….these are only a brief list of some of the theological, traditional, exegetical and cultural divides that render ‘the church’ (even considering only the Christian umbrella) deeply, seemingly permanently and increasingly divided.

There is currently a growing branch of Anglicanism, The Global Anglican Future Conference, (Gafcon) who have restructured their organization, signalling a break from the traditions of the historic Anglican communion, and replaced their Gafcon Primate Council with the Global Anglican Council. They oppose liberal trends like same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly LGBTQ+ clergy.

At the core of many of the ‘divides’ lies a perception, conception and belief in what might be termed ‘fixed’ interpretations of specific phrases in scripture, and an evolving, ‘intent’ of the scribes given the time and place of their entries and the various contexts in which translations, revisions and evolutions in both words and meaning have become part of the lectionary. Conservatism, the preservation of the past, as it has been ‘handed down’ by church fathers (not the gender of that last word), continues to erupt as the social, political, moral and ethical landscape continues to evolve (they would likely prefer ‘unwind’)

Homosexuality remains taboo in many African countries, in some cases criminalized under colonial-era laws or newer legislation. Uganda enacted legislation in 2023 prescribing the death penalty for some homosexual offense.

The Anglican Communion is moving toward a decentralization plan of its own, making it ‘less Canterbury centric,’ according to a summary of the proposals, recognizing that a majority of Anglicans now live in the Global South, far from England. (apnews.com, in a piece by Peer Smith, March 2, 2026, entitled, ‘Conservative Anglican leaders meet in Nigeria, facing debate on a possible breakaway’)

Church organization, political structure and decision-making centralizing will, however, do nothing to change the LGBTQ+ community to becoming ‘straight’ as the conservative group would have it, whether they acknowledge their adamantine stance or not. This is not about ‘political structure’ (although many in Gafcon do not accept the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in part because she is a woman).

There is a global divide, albeit epitomized by and within the Anglican Communion itself, that, to this observer, seems eminently intractable. Old Testament words are unlikely to be revised. Deeply entrenched gender attitudes, beliefs and laws are unlikely to be remanded, revised or non-prosecuted.

In his profoundly provocative book, Honest to Jesus, founder of the Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk writes sensitively, cogently and prophetically of an opportunity to revisit and to set Jesus free:

The quester should think of how it must have been in those first, tentative decades, in the thirties and forties of the common era, when the Jesus movement was young, amorphous, a fledging struggling to find its wings. That is the correct perspective from which to view the present challenge. At such moments in history, then and now, (book published in 1996), anything less than complete openness to the claims being laid on the future by the past will not serve the cause of truth. There is nothing in the creed, in the gospels, in Christian tradition, and in the historical and scientific methodologies with which we study them that is immune to critical assessment and reformulation. We cannot put a protective shield around any part of the Christian heritage if we aspire to set Jesus free. Everything is on the table….

In the ‘new age,’ all theology is post-Auschwitz, as a German theologian recently remarked. Theology conducted in the aftermath of Auschwitz means, among other things, that we can no longer trust the authority structure of an ecclesiastical tradition that learned, at several crucial junctures in its history, it was unable to resist the ultimate compromise. We should already have learned that from the lessons of the Spanish Inquisition. Or we might have the Nazi horror to look back on as well. In view of the compromises ‘Christian’ leaders made in those and similar contexts, it is a wonder that anyone would want to claim the authority of this or that church council for the ultimate truth. From now on we musts always ask whether the Christian tradition has something to teach us and, if it does, what that something is. We can no longer give Christianity prior consent without determining what we are embracing as a part of the bargain. (Funk op. cit. p. 298-299)

Funk continues in a “Quest Designed for a New Age’’ using these words in part:

Jesus is also a secular sage. His parables and aphorisms all but obliterate the boundaries separating the sacred from the secular. He can teach us something that has nothing directly to do with what we know as Christianity, or indeed, with organized religion as such…..When the name of Jesus is mentioned, ‘religion’ is assumed to be the subject. But in fact, the Jesus of whom we catch glimpses in the gospels may be said to have been irreligious, irreverent. and impious. The first word he said, as Paul Tillich once remarked, was a word against religion in its habituated form: because he was indifferent to the formal practice of religion, he is said to have profaned the temple, the sabbath, and breached the purity regulations of his own legacy; most important of all, he spoke of the kingdom of God in profane terms—that is, nonreligiously. For these reasons alone, his significance deserves to be detached from any exclusive religious context and considered in a broader, cultural frame of reference. (Funk ibid, p. 302)

Positing the notion that Jesus is not the proper object of the Christian faith, but God the Father is, Funk writes:

Jesus called on his followers to trust the Father, to believe in God’s domain or reign. The proper object of faith inspired by Jesus is to trust what Jesus trusted….Jesus pointed to something he called God’s domain, something he did not create, something he did not control….Jesus himself should not be, must not be, the object of faith. That would be to repeat the idolatry of the first believers…

Jesus quite deliberately articulated an open-ended, nonexplicit vision in his parables and aphorisms. He did not prescribe behavior or endorse specific religious practices. He was never programmatic in his pronouncements. His followers had and have the obligation to transmit his tradition in the same key. It is perfectly acceptable to specify what his pronouncements may mean for our time and place, but it is not commensurate with his vision to chisel them in stone. Our interpretation of parables should be more parables—polyvalent, enigmatic, humorous and nonprescriptive…..Just as Jesus challenged the immense solidity of his everyday world, we, too, must discover for ourselves in what respects our  habituated sense of reality is illusory. (Funk, ibid, p.304-305)

To be continued…….