Scott Gunn at Inclusive Church blog has done his history homework on former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey. Comparing “then” with “now” he finds “there is a bit of conservative revisionism going on with respect to Anglican polity. Witness Carey’s two letters. In one, he unequivocally supports unity, and in the next, he implies that those conservative bishops who would imperil unity should be invited to Lambeth.”
In Lord Carey’s letter of 2000 he says:
“To talk of the Primates disciplining the Episcopal Church of the USA or any other Province for that matter, goes far beyond the brief of the Primates’ Meeting.” After noting that Lambeth resolution 1.10 “reflects the traditional teaching of the church,” and “Nevertheless, in many parts of the Communion, faithful Christians, some of whom are homosexual themselves, are seeking to engage the Church in a challenging reassessment of its teaching on human sexuality, because they have felt excluded from the Church for many years. I believe that it is wholly in the spirit of the resolution, and that is why the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA and I set up an international conversation between bishops of different views, an experiment which was so successful that it will meet again later this year. I have also sought to encourage such conversations more locally as well.”
Carey reminded the Communion that “we must guard against the risk of allowing one issue to divert all our attention from the primary task of mission to which we are called.”
This week in 2007, Lord Carey says,
“It is not too much to say that everything has changed in the Anglican Communion as a result of the consecration of Gene Robinson.” and he now writes that ECUSA “clearly signalled its abandonment of Communion norms, in spite of warnings from the Primates that the consecration of a practising homosexual bishop would ‘tear the fabric of the Communion’.”
Scott Gunn comments: “That’s a marked contrast from a consultative, advisory notion of the Primates’ Meetings. Now Carey is suggesting that ECUSA can itself be marginalized because of disregard of the Anglican curia. Now, I should also point out that there are plenty of “practicing homosexual bishops” in the Communion. What distinguished +Gene Robinson was his openness and honesty.”
Gunn’s point? “My point is that there is a bit of conservative revisionism going on with respect to Anglican polity. Witness Carey’s two letters. In one, he unequivocally supports unity, and in the next, he implies that those conservative bishops who would imperil unity should be invited to Lambeth.”
Read it all Here