The New Yorker, of all things, has a very interesting piece about Anglicanism and its current struggles. Including these amazing comments from the primate of the West Indies and a prominent professor.
“The problem is that in Anglicanism, as presently constituted, we have no means of officially disciplining people,” says Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the Primate of the West Indies. Some, such as Paul Zahl, Dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, began to despair that Anglicanism’s very DNA bore the seeds of its undoing. “This whole crisis has revealed a very serious deficiency in the character of Anglicanism,” Zahl told me. “It’s a severe deficiency in Anglicanism because there isn’t really a church teaching in the same way that there is in the Church of Rome. . . . I would say there is a constitutional weakness, which this crisis has revealed, which may in fact prove to be the death of the Anglican project—the death, at least in formal terms, of Anglican Christianity. We’ve always said that we’ve had this great insight, and I used to think that we did. But I’m not quite sure whether we’re not on very sandy ground. . . . It’s at the edge of the abyss. It’s about to be extinguished, and that’s not histrionic.”
Oh, c'mon. Everyone has a pope --a definitive arbiter of the content of Christianity when disputes arise about what the Master meant.The only question is: are you going to be your own personal pontiff, or are you going to listen to the guy Christ chose? Cross the Tiber, for Pete's sake!
