A struggle for power lies behind the Anglican Communion’s divisions over homosexuality, the former Archbishop of Armagh Lord Eames said last week at the annual Lecture to the College of St George at Windsor Castle.Speaking to the topic: “The Mechanics of Reconciliation Today,” Lord Eames --- the chairman of the commission that prepared the Windsor Report --- explored reconciliation’s social, political and theological principles, seeking to define its terms.
The modern world was “experiencing a constant evaluation of the concept we call 'reconciliation',” he said. The “fracture of society, the break-down of human relationship, the tensions between nations and how human kind’s failure to understand the deep significance of our contribution to the fracturing of the natural world” had led to a reevaluation of the concept of reconciliation.
“My thesis,” Lord Eames said, was that “short of understanding the mechanics of reconciliation we have yet to define that process itself. So often the process we call 'reconciliation' has become a form of retreat when other efforts of human progress fail --- a sort of comfort zone when other means of solving problems fall short.”
The “endeavour to overcome division or misunderstanding” had also become an “an end in itself,” defeating its purpose. Reconciliation, he argued, was not a short-term goal but an on-going process, for “when agreement is reached it is usually only a beginning to any lasting appreciation of what has been achieved and each stage in the process can produce a fresh evaluation of what we set out to accomplish.”
The Windsor Report was an example. The 2005 report “contained sign-posts, laying out the possible routes to greater understanding of each other’s arguments,” he explained.
However, “Anglicanism has moved on since Windsor. Now the talk is about a Covenant, about parallel jurisdictions. The Windsor Report had not been an attempt at “total reconciliation of the irreconcilable but an encouragement to understand more of others' approaches and deeply held faith convictions,” he said.
It sought “to produce a road map for greater understanding of the divisions within Anglicanism. Much of that division centred on and stemmed from questions of sexuality, but my experience at that time and since has left me with little doubt that behind the headlines of the main agenda there were significant questions to be asked to do with authority, power and influence.”
There were “sharp divisions over the question of a practicing gay bishop, division that represented contrasting interpretation of Scripture and the understanding of Tradition – but whatever lies ahead for Anglicanism I am convinced that reconciliation must take account of what I have termed those other agendas,” Lord Eames said.
However, a Christian has “no option” but to engage in reconciliation, he said, as “deep in the heart of faith lies the urgent necessity for the follower of Christ to be an agent for reconciliation.”
“It is impossible” he concluded, “to contemplate the God-head of Good Friday and the Cross of Calvary without sensing yet again the relationship of reconciliation between God and wayward humanity.”
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