Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion

What if the challenge gay men and women present the church with is not emancipatory but hermeneutic? Suppose that at the heart of the problem there is the magna quaestio the question about the gay experience its sources and its character that gays must answer for themselves: how this form of sensibility and feeling is shaped by its social context and how it can be clothed in an appropriate pattern of life for the service of God and discipleship of Christ? But suppose too that there is another question corresponding to it which non-gay Christians need to answer: how and to what extent this form of sensibility and feeling has emerged in specific historical conditions and how the conditions may require as an aspect of the pastoral accommodation that changing historical conditions require a form of public presence and acknowledgment not hitherto known? These two questions come together as a single question: how are we to understand together the particularity of the age in which we are given to attest Gods works? Oliver ODonovans reflections on the current troubles of the Anglican Church are quite simply of unique significance. He consistently takes us to the questions others are not asking and refuses the ready-made questions and answers that paralyze our thinking about the sexuality debates. Anyone wanting to understand what is most deeply at stake theologically ought to read and meditate on this invaluable book. --ROWAN WILLIAMS Archbishop of Canterbury In tones of characteristically elusive profundity Oliver ODonovan forces the reader of his new book to realize that contemporary gayness represents an enigma which demands a long period of sustained cultural ethical and theological reflection before the Church can hope to reach any well-grounded consensus on this issue. He hints that the latter might well be at once more conservative and yet more radical than the political moralizing and prudishness theological liberals might desire. Yet if campaigning for gay rights is dismissed as both inappropriate and premature the schismatic reaction of certain evangelicals is roundly condemned. Indeed ODonovan has here achieved nothing less than an indication of just how Anglicanism can in the future reconstruct itself through a recovery of a Hooker-like sense of Episcopalian Catholicity and the Patristic integration of Platonic wisdom with Biblical revelation on the part of more discerning evangelicals like himself. --JOHN MILBANK University of Nottingham ODonovan is one of the preeminent Christian theologians of our time. Here he brings to bear his acute mind deep faith and broad pastoral sensitivities on one of the most pressing challenges facing our churches today. --EPHRAIM RADNER Professor of Historical Theology Wycliffe College Toronto Oliver ODonovan sees the current crisis in the Anglican Communion for precisely what it is--an invitation into the heart of God. Anyone who wearily feels they have heard it all on these issues will come away from this book challenged deepened and refreshed. --SAM WELLS Dean of the Chapel and Research Professor of Christian Ethics Duke University Oliver ODonovan is Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of numerous works in theology and ethics including The Ways of Judgment (2005) The Just War Revisited (2003) and Common Objects of Love (2002).