Anti-gay bishops are after power, not truth
by George PitcherThe Telegraph, UK
Leadership in the West is “a mess and unable to understand the post-colonial reality”. The best thing to do would be to “dismantle” the western establishment to usher in a post-colonial world.
Who might this be speaking? The increasingly beleaguered Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in one of his more mild-mannered moments?
Actually it is Canon Vinay Samuel, who was yesterday addressing the alternative Anglican conference in Jerusalem, Gafcon, for bishops who feel that they cannot in conscience attend the decennial Lambeth Conference at Canterbury next month, so long as they have to be in communion with openly homosexual bishops.
Not that Canon Samuel is a bishop. He is from the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. But he reveals what Gafcon is really about. The Global South’s spiritual leader, Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, is fond of saying that the post-colonial West demonises him and that a new order must be ushered in.
So this conference of Anglican dissenters is not about homosexuality at all, or rather only in so far as it is a useful lightning rod for an alternative, authoritarian Anglican Communion.
Nor is it really about Biblical authority, which even the most conservative scholarship will acknowledge is a moveable feast.
It is simply about where the locus of Anglican authority should reside. And it is driven by a post colonial political imperative; the West has used and abused the Global South and now it’s pay-back time.
In this worldview, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is a “relic” (Canon Samuel’s word) of old empire, who must be replaced, presumably by the likes of Archbishop Akinola, who has come within a hair-trigger of saying that Muslim Nigerian violence against Christians will be met in kind.
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