I have put in a link to the site of Andrew Goddard, who teaches Christian ethics at Wycliffe, Oxford’s evangelical Anglican ordination college. Andrew’s site is not the prettiest, but it is increasingly full of material on Christian ethicists, and includes some properly theological and ecclesiological thinkers. Christian ethics is no longer done in complete isolation from, and ignorance of, Christian doctrine or the Christian community. Goddard’s list of theological ethicists includes much more than the merely culturally evangelical, not only because it has representatives of every conceivable denomination, but because some of these Christian teachers are producing some real works of discipleship. The Roman Catholics are producing some of the best of them. We are going to have get used to saying that John Paul II and Benedict are among the greatest evangelical theologians of our generation.
Andrew seems to be the only English man involved in the work of the Anglican Communion Institute, which is leading the way in what we could term ‘the church struggle’. He has a couple of gentle, charitable but rigorous articles on the choices for the US Episcopalian Church which you can find on the ACI’s site.
We all have conversations in which we have to defend the Church against those who want the Church to merge peacefully into the world until, all distinctiveness gone, it is no longer objectionable to anybody. I have such conversations with the clergy here. I think we should all learn to quote the Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion and other documents published by the Anglican Communion so we are able to quote them as public decisions that the Anglican Communion has taken, by which it remains faithful to the whole Church, that God holds united through time and across the world, and that therefore may be regarded as properly describing who we are. I’ll quote you some salient bits from the Windsor Report in future posts – you’ll like it.
