The Admiral of Morality has been so kind as to reprint an excerpt of an essay, “The Death of Liberal Anglicanism,” written by the Rev. Lynda Patterson, director of Theology House, Christchurch, New Zealand. The essay, originally published in the current issue of The Anglican Taonga, the newsmagazine of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, describes how “liberal Anglicanism, the stream most closely identified with Anglicanism in general, must reexamine and reinvigorate its theology if it is to survive and prosper,” says AoM.
Patterson writes:
For those of us who consider ourselves liberals, there is something disorientating about the current state of Anglicanism. The rug seems to have been pulled from under our feet. We find ourselves increasingly squeezed between two competing conservatisms. There is an evangelical one which seems determined to implant a rule book of doctrinal and moral orthodoxy at the centre of Anglicanism.
There is a catholic one committed to preserving the unity of the church by re-inventing the primates as a sort of Anglican curia. A church which seemed to have room for diverse expressions of Christian faith is solidifying around us into something rigid and unfriendly. What happened to the Anglican habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility ?
If we are honest, we liberals have to shoulder some of the blame for the loss. The liberal tradition had settled down into something which looked suspiciously like complacency.
Even the early stirrings of the debate on homosexuality seemed to pose no serious threat. It had long been the logic of Anglicanism that reform movements eventually—if often with painful slowness—won the day. The church’s position on the ordination of practising homosexuals looked as if it was temporary. It was assumed that evangelical objections were an attempt to resist change, and in the longer term, they would eventually be worn down.
AoM’s excerpt of the Patterson article is here. The original is in the Winter 2007 issue of Taonga magazine, available as a PDF download on the Taonga site, here.