You can watch the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address to the General Synod of the Church of England online through AnglicanTV:
In a wide-ranging address to the General Synod at Church House, London, the Archbishop of Canterbury discusses the nature of human freedom and the value of listening and learning from one another, in both national and international debates, as well as those occurring during Synod this week.
And, a helpful analysis of the Archbishop’s address by Will Briggs, blogging at “God’s Will” :
It’s a very clever address in many ways. Picking up on the recent (ongoing?) debate on an Equality Bill before the English parliament which threatened to reduce the church’s right to set doctrinal and ethical limits on employment ++Rowan employs a motif of “the balance of freedoms” (or the balance of “goods” or “liberties”).
“…if we concede the right to government to settle matters for religious bodies in some areas, how do we resist it in others?”
What Rowan does is bring this motif to interact with a number of topics and controversies. By doing this perhaps he is naively assuming that agreement on one issue may transfer to agreement on other issues via the conduit of his rhetoric.
Rather, the tension is apparent even in his own language. In some cases he is happy to present his opinion on where the fulcrum of the balance is and in other places he basically cries “grey, grey it’s all too grey.”