[Dialogue] Spong 07-09-08 Lambeth Conference

[KroegerD at aol.com]

July 9, 2008 
The Lambeth Conference 2008:  Expect Heat, Not Light  

The bishops of the world-wide Anglican Communion, together with invited  
ecumenical and interfaith guests, will convene on the campus of the University  of 
Kent in Canterbury, England, on Wednesday, July 16. This gathering is called  
"The Lambeth Conference," because it was originally held in Lambeth Palace, 
the  official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, just south of the 
Thames in  London. That space was quite sufficient in 1851 for the 78 bishops who 
attended  the first of these gatherings. Since that modest beginning this 
conference has  grown in size and scope, meeting once every ten years, except in 
1941, when,  because of the war, it was postponed until 1948, after which the 
once every  decade pattern was resumed. This Conference is convened by the 
invitation of the  Archbishop of Canterbury and as such has no legislative 
function and its  resolutions have no binding authority on any one. It is a 
consultative not a  legislative body. The bishops speak to the church not for the 
church, a  distinction that is not always clear. I expect very little from this 
gathering,  for the Anglican Communion has, I fear, entered the backwaters of 
history.  
In many ways this Lambeth Conference has been for over half a century little  
more than an anachronistic bit of ecclesiastical irrelevance. It looks and 
acts  like the last vestige of the long gone British Empire. Anglicanism reached 
its  position as the third largest Christian body in the world (after the 
Roman  Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox traditions) primarily by following the 
flag of  English military power. As the Empire grew the Anglican church grew. 
In the last  century, however, empires were dismantled and indigenous 
governments established  in what were once colonies or protectorates. That is how 
Rhodesia changed into  Zimbabwe and South West Africa became Namibia. When the 
Anglican bishops come  together, however, under the leadership of the appointed 
head of the Church of  England, they can still pretend that the British Empire 
exists.  
The Archbishop of Canterbury is himself a political appointee of the British  
government. George Carey, probably the least competent person ever to occupy 
the  "See of Canterbury," was the appointee of Prime Minister Margaret 
Thatcher. That  choice was intended to punish the Church of England because the 
previous  Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had not supported with 
sufficient zeal  her war against the Falkland Islands. At the "Great Victory 
Celebration" held in  St. Paul's Cathedral in London to mark the war's end, Runcie had 
the audacity to  offer prayers for the people of Argentina. Margaret Thatcher, 
livid, made George  Carey her instrument of revenge. This tongue-speaking 
evangelical was simply  overmatched in the position, causing both embarrassment 
and lasting damage to  the church's integrity. Of course he had no insight into 
that. Evangelicals are  so obsessed with what they think they know that have 
no sense of either how much  or what they do not know.  
The present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was the appointee of  
Prime Minister Tony Blair. A man of outstanding academic credentials, he has  
revealed a total lack of backbone (I have on several occasions likened it to  
"well boiled spaghetti"). His inability to stand up for truth or justice, if  
either is going to disturb some part of the Communion, is breathtaking. He  
effectively abdicated his leadership on his first day in office. He now receives  
primarily pity not honor from the English press.  
With no effective leadership at the top splinter groups compete for power.  
The largest of these splinters is made up of four provinces in Africa and one 
in  South America and their individual angry and alienated allies in the rest 
of the  Communion. The issue has been homosexuality, about which the church 
exhibits a  profound ignorance. When that ignorance is combined with a use of the 
Bible that  ignores the scholarship of the last 200 years the problem is 
compounded.  Listening to these people quote Leviticus to condemn homosexuality 
feels like  stumbling into a meeting of the "Flat Earth Society."  
These five renegade provinces want to force both their view of homosexuality  
and their literal Bible on the whole Communion as the standard of orthodoxy. 
If  the Communion refuses to accept this they threaten not just to withdraw, 
but  also to work to subvert the entire Communion. Rowan Williams appears to 
view  their threat as appropriate behavior and so he seeks to negotiate some  
accommodation with them, as if that were possible. In the process he has lost  
almost all respect. The progressives throughout the Communion have thrown up  
their hands in despair at his ineptitude and the blackmailing provinces now  
treat him with total disdain because they know he is unwilling to do anything  
about it.  
Unity is a value in the church, but it is not the ultimate value. Truth and  
justice always trump unity. Because Rowan Williams has decided to worship at 
the  altar of unity chaos reigns, as it always does, in an organization that 
has a  vacuum at its top.  
I attended Lambeth Conferences as one of its Anglican Bishops in 1978, 1988  
and 1998. Very few bishops have careers long enough to attend three. They have 
 gotten progressively worse as a pre-modern mentality has taken over the 
church  and few seem either able or willing to engage the intellectual revolution 
that  has engulfed the western world from Copernicus to Einstein. That 
revolution has  rendered most of our religious concepts and language inoperative and 
our  prejudices non-sensical. Fundamentalism, a denial of that reality, has no 
 credibility in academic circles even when perfumed and called 
"evangelicalism."  Recent Lambeth Conferences have made this quality of being out-of-touch 
with  reality quite clear. In 1978 the Lambeth debate was about whether women 
could be  ordained. Interestingly, they already had been. In 1988 the battle 
was about  whether women could be bishops. In 1998, with about fifteen women 
bishops  actually in attendance, the issue shifted to homosexuality. The debate 
was  framed this way: "Is homosexuality either a sin that needs to be condemned 
or a  sickness that needs to be cured? Or is homosexuality just one more 
variation in  the rich fabric of humanity that we are finally beginning to 
understand?" It did  not stop the Bible quoters to be told that the first of these 
alternatives, out  of which they operate, has no credibility in medical and 
scientific circles and  that no learned person shares this false and dated 
perspective. People do not  choose their sexual orientation any more than they choose 
their gender or their  skin color. How many heterosexual people can recall 
the day when they chose to  be heterosexual? How does one then bring unity to a 
church bound in such  ignorance without confrontation in which this ignorance 
is challenged?  
It is not as if this is the first time the church has been down this path.  
The unity of the church was threatened by the fights to end slavery in the 19th 
 century and to end segregation and apartheid in the 20th. Charges were made 
on  each of these occasions that those agitating for change were "destroying 
the  unity of the church" by forcing a new racial consciousness on its 
prejudiced  membership. Can a church be united in racism? Have we forgotten that 
Christians  in America were once so committed to slavery that they were willing to 
destroy  the unity of this nation in the Civil War to preserve that evil 
institution? One  of our Episcopal Bishops even resigned from his southern diocese 
in 1860 to  accept a commission as a general in the Confederate Army to fight 
for slavery's  preservation. Had Rowan Williams been the Archbishop of 
Canterbury then, would  he have wanted to keep the church unified by recognizing and 
respecting the  prejudices of the slave holders? Does there not come a time 
when one must stand  on principle? If the purpose of the Christ is to bring 
abundant life to all, as  John's Gospel states, then how can any Christian stand 
by idly while people of  color are being denigrated with the cooperation of a 
church that is motivated by  appeals to unity?  
When women throughout the church, claiming the meaning of their baptism as  
members of Christ, demanded to be treated with equality, the unity of the 
church  was once again threatened. When women were ordained to the priesthood, some 
 people, like their cousins today, wanted to split the church, so that they 
could  nurse their sexism in some quiet church corner, undisturbed by reality. 
When  women became bishops (a status that the Church of England has not yet 
achieved)  the great concern expressed by the church's leadership was about the 
people who  were emotionally incapable of embracing this new consciousness, 
rather than  about the denigration of women throughout the centuries at the 
hands of the  church. Would Rowan Williams say that the unity of the church must 
be preserved  by compromising women yet again in the service of the persistent 
sin of  patriarchy?  
The issue before the Church today regarding gay and lesbian people is no  
different. I do not want to be part of a church united in homophobia. The  
Anglican Communion is walking a path that will lead only to embarrassment and  
ridicule. A rising world consciousness will not wait for frightened church  leaders 
to adjust. Consciousness and knowledge do not flow backward. The church  has 
always had gay members, gay clergy and even gay bishops. The only thing new  
is that we are finally being honest about it. Perhaps we need to recall that 
the  Christian call is not to reconcile one Anglican to another, but to 
reconcile the  world to God. Can this be done by rejecting those of God's children who 
are by  their own natures homosexual? As the Episcopal Church's great 20th 
century  Presiding Bishop John Elbridge Hines once said: "When you do an 
audacious thing,  you do not then tremble at your own audacity."  
Rowan, my friend: Will you please stop trembling and act for God's sake and  
ours!  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Rhianna Lee McClaren of Arvada, California, writes:  
How do you believe there is an actual God rather than just principles by  
which the universe operates? I feel like everyone has the equivalent of a radio  
receiver in their brain and almost everyone can at least get static on the 
"God  channel" for lack of a better analogy. They at least know there is really  
something there because they can hear the static or maybe even hear a bar or 
two  of music once in a while. Other people have really good reception and can  
actually tune into the God channel and have a dynamic experience. I, however, 
 don't even get static. All my life people have been telling me that I can 
use  the radio receiver in my brain to listen to someone far away and hear the 
music  of life. But because I don't even get static, I have no way of knowing 
whether  they are lying to me and just want to control my actions, or whether 
they are  delusional and truly believe there is something there even though 
there isn't,  or whether there really is something there but my tuner/receiver 
isn't sensitive  enough to pick it up. I can tune in mathematics, physics, 
chemistry; all these  things I can believe in even when I don't understand all the 
math behind the  physics. But I can't tune in "God." My question is, "How do I 
do that? How do I  get any kind of reception?"  
Dear Rhianna,  
Thank you for your question. How one talks of God is always culturally  
conditioned. No one has seen God, and the deity about whom most of us speak is  our 
own creation. Religious systems try to pretend that God has revealed God to  
them, but when they describe that God, it is clearly a God in their own image. 
 Throughout history we human beings have perceived of God as an animating  
presence, an earth mother, the sun, the moon, a tribal chief and a universal  
presence. Each image, however, was shaped by human need and human understanding. 
 That is the first thing you should embrace. The God you say you cannot see 
is a  deity of some other human being's creation. As long as you are bound by  
another's definition, you may well never see God for yourself.  
I do not believe that any human being can ever know who God is; we can only  
know how we think we have experienced God. God and my experience of God are 
not  the same thing. That is a crucial difference. We can experience on some 
level  what we cannot ultimately define. What we describe in our words, 
scriptures,  creeds and doctrines is not the reality of God but our limited human 
attempt to  explain our experiences of that reality.  
God is not bound, as your words seem to suggest, to someone else's  
definition. That is the God with whom you say you cannot make contact. I urge  you to 
trust your own perceptions, perhaps even the absence of the God of others  is 
the first step in your own authentic search.  
I experience God as life. I experience God as love. I experience God as  
being. I find God when I see life being lived, love expanding life and people  
finding the courage to be. I look inward to find the holy. I look at other  
people to see God at work in the power of love. I do not look to some distant  far 
away place above the stars.  
I wish you well in your search and hope you continue to engage it with  
integrity.  
John Shelby Spong 



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