As I attempt to overcome whatever strange illness has beset me, I’ll offer some thoughts on the Lambeth Commission report that came out a few days ago.

As was expected, it had a little bit of everything, which may not go very far in accomplishing much of anything. The conservatives don’t think the report went far enough in slapping the collective wrists of the ECUSA for their behavior, while the liberals seem pretty upset that anyone would even suggest that they are headed in the wrong direction.

One of my favorite heretics John Spong writes in the London Times:

he developing consensus on this subject in Western countries could never be bound by the culture of the Anglican Church in Sydney, Chad or Sudan. Only a leader who imagined that his version of truth and Truth were the same could have thought that a proper tactic.

The Commission made its first mistake in that it spoke to the symptoms that it erroneously assumed were the causes of our division. Its second mistake was to presume that the great moral issues of our day can be made secondary to the Church’s unity. When-ever a prejudice dies, there is always conflict and dislocation. A Church united in either prejudice or ignorance can never be the Body of Christ.

Needless to day, Spong takes an openly hostile position against the evangelical wing of the Anglican church. It would hard to imagine him not.

N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, and the top theologian on the Lambeth Commission, spoke to Christianity Today and shared his observations:

we say that there is a basic duty that if you’re going to propose an innovation—and everybody agrees that it was an innovation, is an innovation—then it is incumbent on you to provide a full explanation as to why you’re doing it. And they simply haven’t done that. So that is a matter of process. But it is also a matter of content. We must stress, and I think the report says this two or three times in italics, that we were not set up to talk about sex. Had we been, we would have had very different membership, for a start. We were set up to talk about the issues of communion, because in a sense, an obvious example, the issue of sexuality may be the fire that somebody has lit in one room that is actually setting bits of the house on fire. But what we’re doing is actually fireproofing the house, and then saying now we’ve got to deal with this particular fire, which happens to have broken out in this room. But we’re really more interested in long-term fireproofing the house. And of course that demands patience, because there’s plenty of people who want to say what you should simply do is go in with all water canons as fast as you can. And the difficulty about that is that the Anglican Communion, unlike some other churches, simply does not have an international canon law or polity that would enable that to happen.

I’m glad people like Wright are involved in this debate. He seems to bring a certain thoughtful optimism that is otherwise missing in this discussion.