Anglican Archbishop condemns unification plan

Update on the unification plan: Obviously it was a media beat up on a slow news day, but the response from Sydney Anglicans have been measured and informative - note the following short interview of Peter Jensen on the 7:30 Report - and the excerpts I have taken deal with the "doctrinal" issues rather than the bureaucratic / institutional ones:

On the Nature of the Church

KERRY O'BRIEN: Archbishop Jensen, can you imagine a day when Anglicans and Roman Catholics are united as one church?

PETER JENSEN, ANGLICAN ARCHBISHOP OF SYDNEY: No, Kerry, not this side of Heaven. In Heaven, we'll all be one church.

....

KERRY O'BRIEN: Why?

PETER JENSEN: Because there's no need for it. The churches are really big institutions, denominations. They have grand histories, that's fine, but they're not the real Church. There's one real Church that all Christians now belong to and although there is some use in, perhaps, denominational mergers from time to time, I don't really see any need for the churches to unite in that way.

(alluding to the Church invisible vs visible, and the conflation of the Roman Church with the former as Augustine's City of God on earth)

....

On Papal Authority

KERRY O'BRIEN: How hard would it be for the Anglican church to accept one central authority, that is, the Pope?

PETER JENSEN: If I said impossible, that's what's on my mind. It is impossible. There may be some Anglicans who would, Anglicanism is a very big body of people, but not the Anglican Church that I know, because we deliberately made the decision, hundreds of years ago, that there was one head of the church, Jesus Christ, and not the Pope and that's why we are not part of the Roman Catholic church

Later...

"...But the sort of rethink which says that somehow the Pope of Rome is going to be in charge of all Christians, never."

(Perhaps Kerry (and Anglicans!) should consult the 39 Articles to see the approach to the authority of the Bishop of Rome)

Later...

"It's not a matter of being biased against Roman Catholics, but it is a matter of deep principle with us. We'd prefer to say, you become Anglicans."

and so on..

On Objective Truth

"Christians are a little bit odd in today's world. We actually believe in objective truth, which makes us awkward. It makes us awkward with each other, too, but I think that's a testimony worth fighting for."

(Something Kerry should be pleased to hear considering as a journalist he should be interested in matters of truth - unless the ABC is going the same way as Channel 7, for example.)

....

On Protestantism and Biblical Authority

PETER JENSEN: We do have one central authority, that's the Bible. What we have is a lot of people who interpret the Bible, which is perfectly right. Each of us is accountable for interpreting the Bible. That's our central authority. Now, that is the way that God rules his Church. That leads to all sorts of differences of opinion. It is called Protestantism, and I'm actually in favour of it. I think it's a good thing in the modern world.

(One the one hand Kerry devil's advocates in favour of a merger, but is trumped by this postmodernist-flavoured appeal to diversity.

On the nature of the Bible

KERRY O'BRIEN: Isn't the Bible itself an imperfect document?

PETER JENSEN: I would say it isn't, but that would be a very interesting discussion that you and I could have.

....

All in all a very adroitly handled and neat little summary of most of the major issues here. Worth watching further.

Cloud Cuckoo land

Recent article in The Daily Telegraph covering the proposed merger between the Anglicans and Catholics (also covered in detail in The Times).

The Australian Anglican position on this is far from united. Here's what one evangelical Sydney Anglican had to say (quote from the Daily Telegraph):

But the Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies, a senior assistant bishop to Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen, last night dismissed proponents of the plan as living in "cloud cuckoo land".

"The very thought that we could agree across the world to give up our autonomy is fanciful," he said.

And perhaps no-one in Anglican head office has yet read the September issue of The Briefing - called "No, thanks, I'm Catholic", and includes articles on how to evangelise Catholics and major differences between Anglicanism-as-she-is-spoke in Sydney, and the Church of Rome.

Doctrinal differences between Anglicans and Catholics have attempted to have been smoothed over by the Anglo-Catholics but a few of the more formal differences need a bit more ironing out. And no, the issues aren't women's ordination and gay priests - the evangelical wing of Anglicanism in Sydney at least would on the whole agree with their catholic cousins.

Here's a pundit's list (in no particular order):
1. Submission to the authority of the Bishop of Rome. Athe the report states (quoted in the Times:

"The Roman Catholic Church teaches that the ministry of the Bishop of Rome [the Pope] as universal primate is in accordance with Christ’s will for the Church and an essential element of maintaining it in unity and truth.” Anglicans rejected the Bishop of Rome as universal primate in the 16th century.

2. Different understanding of the Mass / Eucharist / Lord's Supper

" For example, evangelical Anglicans regard a communion service as a memorial of the Last Supper, a symbolic community meal. Catholics believe the mass is a propitiatory sacrifice, where the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ are offered up on the altar in a re-enactment of Calvary. It is hardly possible to overstate the difference between the two approaches or the understandings of the role of the church and the kinds of spirituality to which they give rise."
(From The Australian's take on Kevin Rudd as a Cafeteria Christian)

3. Different approaches to the Bible - the "Wesleyan Quadrilateral" emerges again, and the Catholic magisterium + Scriptures vs the Anglicans "sola Scriptura" (at least in principle, such as Article 6 of the 39 Articles).

...and many more sundry, weighty reasons. Perhaps the elite ecclesiastical types with their refined sense of liturgical order should rather jump ship and join their catholic brethren rather than compromise the last 400 years.

It goes a little bit deeper than "Henry VIII couldn't get a divorce".

Joke:
Q: Why did Henry VIII have so many wives?
A: Because he liked to chop and change!

Islam and Christianity can't both be right

A Sydney church leader has used a Good Friday address to tell his congregation that Christianity and Islam cannot both lead to God.

Anglican Dean of Sydney Phillip Jensen told a service at St Andrew's Cathedral that Islam denies some of the Christian beliefs about Jesus.

Islam views Jesus as a prophet but does not believe he was the son of God who died on Good Friday to save humanity from its sins and was resurrected on Easter Sunday.

"Now that Islam has become more common in our society, you need to know the difference between Christianity and Islam," he said.

"For the Koran, and therefore Islam, denies that Christ dies."

But Dean Jensen said that the two religions cannot both be right.

"Either both are wrong or one is right and the other is wrong," hw said.

"But both of them cannot be right."

Bishop of South Sydney Robert Forsyth said the comments were in no way inflammatory towards Muslims, but instead were an attack on the naive who believed all religion was the same.

"What he was attacking was not Muslims," Archbishop Forsyth told AAP.

"The thing he was attacking was the unwise who people think that all religions are part of the same thing - so he was attacking the seculars."

AAP