Archbishop Justin Welby

The Bishop of Durham, Justin Welby, has been appointed the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop-designate strongly supports the purported ordination of women and is pressing for the admission of women to the episcopate in the Church of England, and yet has opposed until now purported homosexual marriage, a profoundly inconsistent position.

It appears that his theological outlook may be loosely defined as liberal evangelicalism or evangelical modernism, an emphasis on personal conversion and faith and contemporary popular-culture based worship styles over received consensus, historic liturgy and sacraments and Sacred Tradition. 

Christian orthodoxy has never been in a process of 'reception' concerning the ordination of women and is unprepared to admit that the universal Church has erred or been misguided about something as important to the Gospel as the sacramental essence of the Church and her Apostolic Ministry instituted by Jesus Christ. For Traditional Anglicans, as for the Patriarchates of East and West, the maleness of Holy Orders is a settled issue because it is a dogmatic truth revealed by God in Scripture and Tradition. Women's ordination, for this reason, has been a church-dividing issue and is not a second-tier concern or problem.

The purported ordination of women and the blessing of purported marriages of persons of the same sex are hermeneutically inseparable: they are both constitutive of the religion of pansexual inclusivism, a gnostic anti-material assertion of human autonomy in which one may indulge any desire no matter what Scripture or Tradition or natural law may dictate. This radical humanism/secularism began in earnest in 1970's and 1980's when a number of bodies in the Anglican Communion abandoned the clear Scriptural, Apostolic, patristic and traditional dogma regarding the Sacrament of Holy Orders and permitted, contrary to universal and biblical teaching, the purported ordination of women. Today we see that the creation of a new synthetic system of marriage is the direct result of the creation of the new synthetic priesthood. Those religious organisations which follow in the same path believe themselves masters over the sacraments, and therefore masters over the created order sanctified by the sacraments, free by fiat to change what God has created, redeemed and revealed. The Church of England has followed this path.

Purported women's ordination and homosexualism share the same flawed interpretation of Holy Scripture, or biblical hermeneutic, a modern historical-critical revisionist approach to the Scriptures. Both are based on the same reading and interpretation of the Bible, as both undermine the basic anthropological revelation concerning the nature of God, Man and the Church contained in the Word of God. Both doctrines are equally heresies of the Christological and anthropological order.

Let us pray earnestly for Bishop Welby as he begins his new ministry, and let us pray for the restoration of the Church of England.