THE ECCLESIASTICAL FANTASIES OF CANADIAN ANGLICAN PRIMATE FRED HILTZ

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
11/20/2008

Someone, out of mercy, should turn off the spin cycle on the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada's ecclesiastical clothes dryer.

Canadian Archbishop Fred Hiltz says plans to create a new North American Anglican province, defined by conservative theology rather than a geographic location, is "disturbing".

"The creation of provinces, as I have always understood it, is based on mission. It is based on a commitment to embrace and give flesh to an expression of the gospel in a particular context. There is a geography associated with that context; there is a set of cultural needs, a set of social needs."

Truthfully, what is really disturbing is that Hiltz's Canadian Anglican province is withering and dying, with shrinking income and budgets, even as he pushes pansexuality to fuller acceptance within his province.

Based on weekly church attendance, his entire province would fit comfortably into one medium-sized Nigerian diocese. Two years ago, the Anglican Church's House of Bishops released a troubling report showing that between 1961 and 2001, Anglican adherents plunged 53 percent, from 1.36 million Canadians to 642,000, a loss of 18,000 members per year.

Still, Hiltz holds a fundamentalist view of the Canons and Constitution of the Church arguing that geography is more important than theology, even as Canadian Anglicans walk out the door never more to return.

If the Apostle Paul had adopted such a view, Early Church mission would have been restricted to a small corner of Asia Minor. Boating trips would have been out of the question. At least it would have saved Paul from a life-threatening shipwreck and a temporary stay on an island. If Hiltz had been around, he could have publicly thanked him for staying at home.

To say, as Hiltz does, that geography is more important than theology begs the question as to what sort of theology he has that anybody would want to listen to. Why is it that bishops like Donald Harvey and Malcolm Harding have split from the ACofC to form a diocese that has a better understanding, more biblical, of both mission and the church?

For orthodox Anglicans, the Great Commission forms the basis of mission, not some silly post-modern notion of "inclusion" heralded by Jefferts Schori and her much-beloved Millennium Development Goals. Here the orthodox part company with Hiltz. (Note the parallel between GAFCON and Lambeth.)

Hiltz says that the gospel must be expressed in a "particular context...with cultural needs and social needs." He might have also added sexual needs because that is what he is really implying.

But is this true? Just how important is culture? This writer has travelled far and wide and has seen the gospel at work in diverse places ranging from Eastern Nigeria to Kota Kinabalu in South East Asia. For the most part, culture is irrelevant. The gospel message is the same and is preached in context of the culture, but the gospel is not defined by the culture.

C.S. Lewis put it well when he wrote, "On the whole, the NT seems, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture. I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the NT; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it important."

For Archbishop Hiltz apparently, it is very important because it allows his province to experiment with same sex blessings which he deems a cultural norm instead of seeing it for what it is, namely a theological and moral aberration.

Hiltz builds his entire ecclesiology on culture because he doesn't want evangelical overseas primates who have a very distinct and clear understanding of the gospel (and don't give a fig about culture) invading his territory and raining on his cultural and pansexual parade.

Now it should be noted that overseas primates are not "crossing boundaries" at will. They are being INVITED by orthodox bishops to come on over, more like a Macedonian call than an invasion from the Outer Hebrides. For the record, it took 19 months for the Province of the Southern Cone to finally come around to accepting the Diocese of Ft. Worth's invitation, a local journalist told this writer last week. Archbishop Gregory Venables was the reluctant invitee to the Ft. Worth diocesan ball.

That he agreed to take them under his ecclesiastical wing speaks volumes about the state of The Episcopal Church and what it does and does not believe (see my article on Bishop James Adams here http://tinyurl.com/68864b) and nothing about the Southern Cone Primate. When the time comes, overseas primates will be happy to pass along their franchises to a new North American Anglican Province. They have little interest in ministering to dioceses 5,000 miles from their home bases. They have enough problems of their own. They don't need ours.

Hiltz says that the determination to create a province (it will be formally announced Dec. 3 in Wheaton, Il) based on theological grounds will not get very far because the Anglican Consultative Council is the only body of the church that can create a province. It does so, only after "after a long period of discernment and testing the viability and capacity for the province to maintain itself in the spirit of mission." The Anglican Consultative Council is also the only body of the church that includes bishops, clergy and laity, according to Hiltz.

Perhaps. But readers should know that the ACC aka The Anglican Communion Office elevated itself to become the Fourth Instrument of Unity under the Svengali leadership of Canon John Peterson when Archbishop George Carey was taking a shower and didn't see it coming. The ACC is bought and paid for by the Episcopal Church, USA which pays most of its budget. Canon Kenneth Kearon, Secretary General of the Anglican Communion has no intention of biting the hand that feeds him. Neither does Canon Geoffrey Cameron, the Council's Deputy Secretary General who also happens to be a close personal friend of Dr. Rowan Williams. In short, if TEC did not fund ACC, it would disappear down the Thames River right past Lambeth Palace and out to the English Channel.

If the expression "thick as thieves" doesn't come to mind, it should. At one point in time, Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola ripped the ACC for its liberal bias. Nothing has changed. Peterson, when he led the ACC, was the master of manipulation and agit-prop, isolating Global South primates at Primates meetings. He finally got caught when an Episcopal priest, Dr. Paul Zahl found some papers at a Xerox machine implicating Peterson in his plans to keep orthodox primates apart and from addressing pressing issues. Thankfully, those days are gone.

Hiltz criticized the Common Cause Partnership's determination to go forward with its plan, with or without the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury. "That is quite simply not in keeping with Anglican tradition. Part of the essence of being Anglican is that you are in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. We respect his office as first among equals. We respect the wisdom and experience of that office and we look to the office for guidance." He also noted that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has already stated that the only ecclesial body he recognizes in Canada is the Anglican Church of Canada.

So what? What is more important, the truth and spread of the gospel or ecclesiastical form and structures devoid of spiritual power?

Hiltz says it's a "huge assumption" to think that the views of the GAFCON primates accurately represent the views of the millions of Anglicans in their provinces. He's wrong. They do. GAFCON might have had only 303 bishops in Jerusalem, but they represented more than 75% of the Anglican Communion's church going worshippers. The 600 plus bishops at Lambeth represented less than 25% of the communion's active worshippers.

Hiltz went on to explain that clergy in the Global South do not, in every case, represent the views of their bishops."There were some bishops who were told by their primate do not go to Lambeth and 'if you go you could be deposed'."

That is simply not true. I have heard of no bishop being deposed because they went from Kenya or Nigeria to Lambeth. It never happened.

Hiltz thinks the difference between GAFCON or the group that's connected with GAFCON and the rest of the communion is that the rest of the communion is trying to build bridges, is creating links, and conversing with one another. "It has become more and more clear that those associated with GAFCON are not so committed to building bridges and keeping in conversation, but rather to separation."

This is nonsense. The outright persecution of orthodox priests and bishops in both the Canadian and American branches of the Anglican Communion has been well documented. None has been more documented than in the Diocese of New Westminster, which is deposing priests and suing churches by one of the most revisionist bishops in church history, a Jack Spong clone in the person of Michael Ingham. This bishop's notion of "building bridges" is little more than a replay of the Bridge over the River Kwai.

Hiltz characterized the Lambeth Conference "as having a spirit of openness, good will and a general determination to find ways to keep the communion together."

Really. The bishops were so "open" and full of "goodwill", the press couldn't get near them to ask what was really going on, unless risking a walk through a media minefield. Fences, gates and a phalanx of university and local police limited access to the bishops. Anglican Communion flunkies from the ACC made it virtually impossible to reach bishops. On one or two occasions, bishops came to the media, the most spectacular example being the Archbishop of the Sudan. GAFCON, by comparison was completely open.

Finally, Hiltz blasted cross-border interventions specifically contrary to the moratoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury's call for "gracious restraint" on both sides.

This begs the question: Who is inviting whom? Archbishop Venables never came uninvited to the U.S. or Canada. On the one occasion he tried to reach Hiltz to tell him he was coming, Hiltz ignored him and then Hiltz went ballistic in cyber space. Venables responded by telling the Canadian Archbishop that all he had to do was pick up the phone and call him. Instead Hiltz went straight to the media.

"Gracious restraint" is a fiction. It means you will agree with us or you can leave. Mrs. Jefferts Schori and a coterie of her revisionist bishops are suing the pants off any priest who dares to think they can leave with their property. There is no negotiation. The same is true with liberal bishops in Canada. Ingham wouldn't know "gracious restraint" if it bit him on the backside. He dared to depose one of the most renowned Anglican theologians of the 20th Century, a theologian whose shoelaces he is not fit to tie.

In the Diocese of Ft. Worth recently, Bishop Jack Iker said this: "I call upon the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church and her colleagues to halt the litigation, to stop the depositions, and to cease the intimidation of traditional believers. Instead, let us pursue a mediated settlement, a negotiated agreement that provides for a fair and equitable solution for all parties, and let us resist taking punitive actions against our opponents."

Will she heed that? Not a chance. If the same request was made of Archbishop Hiltz, would he honor such a request? One doubts it. Instead he puts the blame on those bishops, priests and laity who would be faithful to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. He blames those who have a message to proclaim, a message that he himself cannot proclaim or no longer believes in, if he ever did.

END