A Philosophical musement.

Mulling things over the last day or two, as I talk to friends who are deciding to go to Rome re wifie Bishops in the CofE. In one case at least it's no surprise, as he is engaged to an RC and was going to join her Church so they both could receive communion together. In the other case, it is a culmination of 15 years of worrying about the authority of the Anglican Church to "innovate".

My take on it is this: if you believe that the Anglican Church is part of the historic Catholic Church like the RC and the Orthodox, then it must objectively be part of that body. That (to me) means that it retains the 4 classic 'marks' of Catholic identity - the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the catholic creeds of the undivided Church, the Dominical Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist and the threefold apostolic ministry of Bishop, Priest and Deacon. This the CofE, the SEC, TEC et al all do.

To say that that has been lost or imperilled by the decison to ordain women or gays to my mind confuses the objective and the subjective. Christ redeemed humanity and objectively you must be human to be ordained. Our particular gender is the subjective manifestation of that humanity. There may have been subjective periods of time when it was impossible to ordain both men and women due to culture or perception, but that is not the case now. Subjectively, due to present culture, it is actually undesireable not to ordain women.

So I'm not even faintly thinking of Pope-ing because I still think the SEC is objectively Catholic! I am also very rusty at philosophy and may well have got my self in wee epistemolgical pickle! I'm happy to receive comments, corrections etc. Probably I am on shaky ground by classifing gender as subjective!