At 02:24 PM 5/11/03 +1100, Rohan Pryor wrote:
As well as the publicly-known issue (ie. whether a person was openly gay or not, so to speak, at the point of offering for candidature), I suspect there's another issue that centres around the understanding of authority (episcope) and bishops. And we in the Uniting Church don't have so much direct experience of bishops, so I'm talking from theory not practice, from my reading in the field of ecumenism, and episcope more specifically.
My understanding is that in most traditions Bishops are the ones to confer ordination (and baptism in at least some traditions too), rather that your general run-of-the-mill ordained person (not that I've ever met one of them, from memory).
I think the typical arrangement in Australian Anglicanism is that the Bishop must do ordinations and confirmations. This ensures in theory that the Bishop visits every local church once per year to do confirmations. However the local priest does baptisms. This no doubt has a practical aspect (imagine the bishop confronting a line-up of 50+ baptisms most Sundays :-)
In the UCA we are used to seeing a bit of a mix of ordained and lay people lay hands on the candidate during ordination, so our view is a bit slanted by practise. What I guess happens theologically is that the authority of the church, the apostolic succession or episcope, is conferred by the blessing of the bishop, who represents the authority of the church in that place/region at that time. In the UCA our structure for this authority is the presbytery, so it's probably the chair of presbytery and other presbytery members who are vested with the authority to ordain. This is exactly why some traditions have trouble with our ordination, and our ordained -- they're not "proper" because we don't have a "proper" bishop who was made bishop by a "proper" bishop before him, and so on back to the original apostles, so to speak (yes, I know the male pronoun is there, inappropriately or inaccurately).
Sorry to nit-pick, but my understanding is that the presbytery is the corporate bishop in this sense, and the chair of presbytery has no special standing WRT ordination, other than leading and acting on behalf of the presbytery.
It is also my understanding that UC-Anglican relations have gone a long way towards recognising each others ordinations, despite the lack of a bishop in UC. There are still issues to be worked out but they may be soluble to a large extent.
While in general I would be in favour of a UC-Anglican union, my greatest reservation would be bishops and the consequent concentration of power in an individual.
So, perhaps it's one thing to have a gay priest and a whole other thing to have a gay bishop -- theologically speaking.
Well it certainly raises a plethora of issues for the Sydney archdiocese for example, because they won't recognise priests who have been ordained by a bishop who they don't recognise. But that will apply to women bishops as well as openly homosexual bishops. Imagine the energy they will have to put into keeping track of which priests are OK and which are not. I'm also unsure if they have a policy on accepting confirmations performed by unrecognised bishops, or baptisms performed by unrecognised priests. But it all rapidly descends into farce, IMHO.
Kind regards, Lindsay Brash.
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