GAFCON, Gnosticism and Gangrene

by Charles Raven
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
March 13th, 2008

If an Anglican grouping were to be described by a supposed evangelical as post-modern, promoting 'a Gnostic gospel that renders the Cross in vain', it would naturally be assumed that reference was being made to a determinedly revisionist body such as The Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United Sates.

But in fact this is how Dr Michael Poon, Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia at Singapore's Trinity Theological College, has recently described GAFCON. http://tinyurl.com/2s78x2 This bizarre claim is made in the course of his recent essay on the evolution of the term 'Global South' in its Anglican context.

He writes: GAFCON holds before the Communion a new and unfamiliar utopia that is post-modern to its core. Webmasters and web bloggers render synodical processes irrelevant. They preside over web blogs in the virtual worlds of their own fabrication.

Its power in shaping public opinion on ecclesiastical authorities simply cannot be ignored. A communion that is no longer dependent on patient face-to-face encounters and governed by geographical proximity: it is a Gnostic gospel that renders the Cross in vain.

To maintain that leading figures in the GAFCON initiative such as Archbishops Peter Jensen and Peter Akinola are party to a post-modernist Gnostic movement is an arresting and ambitious claim, but no evidence is cited to show that any of its leaders have embraced Gnosticism in the normally understood sense - a form of religion which offers a form of new and special knowledge awakening the inner divine spark, to which a Saviour is irrelevant and in which the normal polarities of good and evil are dissolved.

Instead the accusation seems to be based on a confusion between form and content, a lazy bracketing by the author of conservative commentators sympathetic to GAFCON's vision together with computer gamers obsessed with their virtual worlds.

This linkage no doubt seems plausible to Dr Poon because the burden of his essay is that the Anglican South has been subverted by the political agenda of disaffected conservatives in The Episcopal Church/ECUSA and the Church of England who are using the African Provinces to gain political leverage, a process greatly facilitated by the internet which allows them to conjure up a distorted story in order to recruit presumably impressionable leaders to their cause.

However, it begins to look as if Dr Poon is himself creating a virtual reality. In the real world, it is in the North American Churches and, in usually less provocative ways, the Church of England, where we find the growth of modern Gnosticism, driven in practice by the homosexual agenda, and expressed in the development of syncretistic spiritualities which sit loose to historic doctrine and church discipline.

In this context, the real significance of the internet is, firstly, that it has radically democratized information, reinforcing a gradual disenchantment not only with TEC, but also with the Mother Church of England itself as awareness of its doctrinal confusion further weakens the fading historic ties of a shared imperial past. Secondly, it has strengthened the voice of those who were effectively disenfranchised by established rules and customs.

One leading African bishop told me recently how at the last Lambeth Conference, despite the securing of Resolution 1.10, he and other Global South bishops constantly felt they were on the back foot due to the calculated use of ambiguity in a language which was not their first, the imbalance of representation, particularly the sense of being overrun by TEC as a small church with many bishops (his actual phrase was 'a big head and little body'!), lack of money and manipulation through the use of complex 'parliamentary' procedures.

The problem with Dr. Poon's virtual reality is however deeper and much more serious than the question of the use and abuse of the internet. The underlying issue dividing the Anglican Communion is that of truth - specifically, the attack upon the truth of the gospel from within the Communion's own leadership.

The whole of salvation history can be seen as a struggle between the truth and the lie, a battle for the saving truth which God has supremely revealed in Christ and is witnessed throughout Scripture. So it is no surprise that the Apostle Paul's central charge against sinful humanity in Romans 1 is that 'by their unrighteousness they suppress the truth' (v18).

This suppression of truth will take different forms in different cultures, but in our own day it takes the shape of post-modernism, the fruit of a relativism which says there is only 'my truth', not 'the truth'. So I take it that Dr Poon's description above of GAFCON as 'post modern to its core' is meant to imply that GAFCON leaders are promoting 'their' truth as opposed to 'the truth' which will emerge from 'face to face' encounters. But there is a jaw-dropping irony in all this. We have already seen that there is no objective sense in which GAFCON can be described as 'Gnostic'.

Dr Poon has simply wrenched the word out of its historical and biblical context to express his disapproval and in doing so is - I presume unconsciously - demonstrating just how much post-modernism has infiltrated his own thinking. It gets worse; Dr Poon must know that GAFCON leaders would refute the charge that they are post-modernists on the basis of their Scriptural commitments and vision for the Anglican Communion, but since he insists that they are, 'to the core' he is insisting on 'his truth', a wonderfully post-modern usage of the term post-modernist! Evidently, he believes that truth will only emerge from the process of encounter and he is not willing to consider the possibility that their view might be true, even if he thinks their methods are flawed.

A Church which has lost its grip on revealed truth in this way is suppressing the truth by allowing words to be emptied of their biblical content and shared meaning. This has become commonplace, but let me illustrate with two examples from my own experience: In 1999, I and my parish church broke fellowship with the then Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby, as a result of his public denunciation of Lambeth 1.10 and his patronage of the gay/lesbian pressure group Changing Attitude, but he would never accept that he was anything less than orthodox, thereby effectively reinventing the word.

For my pains I was described as 'schismatic' by the current Bishop of Chelmsford even though I, unlike my Bishop, had not departed from the teaching of the Church, and the term 'schismatic' is now increasingly used to describe anyone who is in an impaired relationship with the official church irrespective of doctrine.

Dr Poon's claim that the GAFCON 'utopia' renders the cross in vain' can be seen in a similar light, no doubt echoing the Archbishop of Canterbury's warning in his last Advent Letter that not turning up to Lambeth would be 'a refusal of the cross'. Here the cross matters not because of its truth, but as a metaphor to encourage attendance at a gathering which will actually hazard and confuse the message of the cross.

The attempt to discern truth through encounter within the Anglican Communion has become in practice a suppression of the truth because those taking part have fundamentally different understandings of Anglican and Christian, identity.

Thus plausibility has been given to those who have denied core creedal doctrines and sponsor the gay/lesbian cause while doing nothing to reverse the revisionist agenda. In my personal experience and that of many others, talking is often a strategy to desensitize the faithful and create a climate of acceptance for that which should be unacceptable.

The failure of Episcopal leadership in North America and the UK, in varying degrees, to honour the outcome of the 'face to face encounters' at Lambeth 1998 and subsequent Primates meetings surely demonstrates the weakness of this process.

It is greatly to the credit of the African Primates that they recognized this and after their Council in February 2006 they issued a statement which concluded: 'There is no point, in our view, in meeting and meeting and not resolving the fundamental crisis of Anglican identity. We will definitely not attend any Lambeth Conference to which the violators of the Lambeth Resolution [1.10] are also invited as participants or observers'.

There was a time in the recent past when it would have been assumed that the Province of South East Asia, for which Dr Poon appears to be something of a spokesman, would have adopted the same stance as the African Primates, but it has just been announced that its bishops will be attending the Lambeth Conference and the Primate, Archbishop John Chew has been appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Windsor Continuation Group.

It is salutary to see what a difference a few years can make. In contrast, a previous Archbishop of South East Asia, Moses Tay, refused to attend an Anglican Consultative Council meeting in 1999 chaired by the then Primus of Scotland Richard Holloway who in his book 'Godless Morality' had promoted gay rights (as has the present Archbishop of Canterbury) and drug liberalization.

The following year the Archbishop was instrumental in the formation of the Anglican Mission in America, a pioneering and irregular action for the sake of the gospel which has borne fruit in the largest of the alternative Anglican jurisdictions in the United States. What I believe Moses Tay understood, but seems to have been overlooked by the present Archbishop of South East Asia, is the insight of the Apostle Paul that false teaching 'will spread like gangrene' (2 Tim 2:17). Collusion leads to contagion.

False teaching has its own malign spiritual dynamic and Dr Poon's essay illustrates this subtle decay. He is no doubt a man of completely orthodox views, but in the battle for truth he and his province are in danger of being neutralized. If GAFCON is in his view Gnostic, is at all possible that he can acknowledge the increasingly manifest Gnosticism within TEC?

If GAFCON is post-modern, is it at all possible that he can recognize the post-modernism of the revisionists who press Christian language and symbolism into service for ideologies of radical inclusion? If he interprets GAFCON's bold initiative to secure an uncompromised identity for the future of Anglicanism as rendering the cross in vain, can he stand against the abuse of the cross as a pretext for the death of truth?

To an Anglican Communion so infected with the modern diseases of relativism and pluralism, the Global South is able to bring a much needed prophetic clarity. Archbishop Moses Tay was in this respect a great pioneer; it is sad to find that the voice of South East Asia is now so muted.

---The Rev. Charles Raven is Senior Minister of Christ Church Wyre Forest which is an independent Anglican congregation but located within Worcester Diocese.