Anglican Mainstream

Referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reflection last year “Challenge and Hope” (News, 30 June), Professor McCord Adams said: “The Archbishop’s conception of the Church combines with the Tanzanian communiqué to send the message: national or ‘local’ ecclesial bodies are only organs of an international, intercultural body-politic. They . . . are not in themselves real Churches, any more than a finger or a gall bladder is a human body in itself. . . National or ‘local’ ecclesial bodies should not decide whom to ordain and whom to bless all by themselves.”

She continued: “Body-of-Christ imagery is not apt for the human side of the Church. . . The organic body is a Fascist-Marxist political model, which had proved politically disastrous as a way to organise the human state, and is idolatrous . . . The best model for the human institutional side of the Church is not the organic body, but the liberal state.”

Hence the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Church of England, and “the loose federation that the Anglican Communion was (and legally still is) were more apt than the authoritarian structures that [the Primates] are now trying to substitute for them.”

[Read here->http://churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=38038]

AM notes that African Christians have long commented that the European corporate model of the church is less appropriate to Christian faith than the family model expressed in African culture and expounded by Paul in the Pastoral Epistles.

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