3rd March 1999
Dear Maurice,
Thank you for your personal letter to me, expressing your concern over certain utterances of mine since the Lambeth Conference, and for the copy of an open letter from yourself and seven other primates to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA, indicating your concern over certain unspecified developments in the American Church. Frank Griswold will doubtless reply in his own way and in his own time. However, since you have clearly included me among those whose actions you are challenging, I am sure you will permit me to offer my own general response to your letters.
First of all, let me say that I am grateful for the temperate tone of your communications. However, behind your letter I detect a centralising agenda that is contrary to the traditions and genius of Anglicanism. Our Communion is a fellowship of autonomous provinces, held together, not by juridical systems, but by bonds of affection (which occasionally get strained) and several loose structures, such as the ACC, the meetings of primates, and the Lambeth Conference. None of these structures has executive authority over individual provinces, not even the Lambeth Conference. This is why Lambeth resolutions have no legally binding authority on individual provinces. It is true, of course, that they have strong moral authority, but even here there has always been a range of responses to individual resolutions, and many of them have slumbered unnoticed in the pages of Lambeth Conference Reports. In fact, there has always been marked differences among the provinces, particularly in the areas of discipline and order. Indeed, Lambeth 1988 celebrated this contextual pluralism as a virtue, which is why provinces have gone at very different speeds over the ordination of women and the marriage of the divorced. As far as I am concerned, the issue of same-sex relationships falls clearly within the area of discipline, and is not a first order theological matter at all, so it does not surprise me that provinces vary widely in their approaches to the issue. Incidentally, at Lambeth 1988 I remember Archbishop David Gitari, one of your signatories, arguing along lines like these, in favour of a variety of responses to the issue of polygamy. We in the Northern world heard him politely, and did not try to impose our very different moral agenda onto his cultural situation.
The other major subtext in your letter concerns the authority of the Bible. This, not human sexuality, was the real theological issue at Lambeth, but we never really tackled it. To use a Church of Scotland formula, while I believe that the Bible contains the word of God, I do not believe every word in the Bible is the word of God. That is why I must engage in the arduous task of interpretation, using my rationality and the best scholarship available. It is because we have given ourselves the freedom to interpret scripture in this way that we have managed to abolish slavery, liberate women and offer new hope to the divorced. You and I, Maurice, disagree profoundly over the status of the Bible. But the really important difference between us is that, while I disagree with your use of scripture, I would not dream of trying to impose my theology upon your practice, but you are now very busy trying to impose yours upon mine. The real tragedy that appears to be overtaking the Anglican Communion is that we are moving away from that inclusiveness and magnanimity that used to be our genius, and are in danger of turning ourselves into a fundamentalist sect. It is a tendency which I shall continue to resist, and I am not alone.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Holloway, [Archbishop of Scotland and Primus of Edinburgh.]
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