SPREAD the Marmite

Well, I have to say, I find SPREAD a little distasteful. I love Marmite btw but not the latest flavour the GAFCON affiliated organisation have created. The assessment of the Anglican Church they voice to attract support to their organisation, is not very judicious.

They describe the Anglicanism of 1998 - 2008 as 'toxic' by implication. I do not find it toxic. Moreover, I marked my commitment, in this Church and its 'reformed Christian faith as classically expressed in the Anglican Formularies, the Thirty-nine Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal.'

GAFCON do not hold a monopoly on the Anglican faith.

They also quote Richard Hooker, of whom I am a great fan. But their choice of quotation implies that this Church about which I am passionate is listening with one ear to our Saviour and another, false prophets. They seem to completely miss the point that Richard Hooker's was a generous orthodoxy in which he argued that those mistaken were unlikely to be damned. Mistakes are made on all sides, by the Gafconites and the rest of us. Hooker insisted very much on something rather akin to indaba - a listening process, so that we might all learn from each other and together. He was less antagonistic and more optimistic. Scripture is infallible but it doesn't pertain to governing every detail of our life with prescription, we need reason to work out how our lives might be led according to the supernatural duties of scripture. We understand what is morally right by looking at human nature as God has created it. Hooker is less enthusiastic about tradition and holds fast to the supremacy of Scripture but he expects us to be thinking beings and rather like Tom Wright's five act play idea, asks that we work out how the church conducts itself based on what has been revealed to us by God with the understanding that the church will change as it adapts to new times and different cultures. There are, of course, some absolutes, particularly pertaining to salvation.

At least this organisation says that they do not intend to be schismatic, which is all too well if they champion Hooker who encourages unity in all things, unity within the church is essential and motivates the way Hooker addresses his opponents with a 'Charity which hopeth all things, [and] prayeth also for all men,' (Hooker, Op. cit. BOOK V. Ch. xlix. 2). GAFCON want to accuse us less of a 'toxic' drift and pray for us, if they are to do anything. Hooker trusts that although,

...contentions are now at their highest float...that the day will come...when the passions of former enmity being allayed, we shall with ten times redoubled tokens of our unfeignedly reconciled love, shew ourselves each towards [the] other...(Hooker, Op. cit. Preface, Ch. ix. 4).

Rowan Williams believes Hooker's methodology proved Hooker opposed any position that 'refuses the work of interpretation or that pretends that history has come to a halt,' (R Williams, The Richard Hooker Lecture, transcript).

Before SPREAD speak again of this church as 'no longer fit for purpose when confronted with deep theological confusion in which evil is held out as good and good as evil,' they should attend again and more carefully to Hooker. Because although as a church, we argue and debate, and at times the world reckons that there is little love amongst us, we should speak words to one another, like Hooker, in his controversies with the Puritans and the Romanisers, that prove that we

...labour under the same yoke, as men that look for the same eternal reward of their labours ...in bands of indissoluble love... as if our persons being many our souls were but one, rather than in such dismembered sort to spend our few and wretched days in a tedious prosecuting of wearisome contentions...(Hooker, Op. cit. Preface, Ch. ix. 4).