Anglican Mystery of the un-captioned photo

An Obadiah Slope Column

Photo search: Anglican Futures, a website run by Susie and Dan Leafe, English evangelicals who are fed up with the Church of England have been busy doing a spot of photo analysis.

This is the pic Anglican futures are working on – an official pic from Rome where the Primates – the leaders of national churches – of the Anglican Communion are meeting. But the pic was sent out without a caption. Obadiah can recognise Geoffrey Smith, from Adelaide who is the Australian Primate, and Justin Welby the Archbishop of Canterbury who is standing in front.

Anglican Futures asked the Anglican Communion Office if they could have a list of who is in the pic. Here’s what happened after ACO said they would not be supplying a caption. Anglican Futures and their friends to reached back through their memories “and trawling through grainy photographs, some more than ten years old, to identify the faces of the 32 men and 2 women in the publicity shot. Some have resorted to swapping information on X, Facebook and other social media channels in order to confirm their research.”

That team came up with “29 primates present- and two of those come from the same province – that of New Zealand, Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Accordingly, only 28 out of the 42 provinces appear to be represented in Rome – a third have stayed away.”

The Gafcon provinces in Africa are among the stay–aways. Nigeria, Uganda, and Rwanda make up more than 50 percent of the world’s Anglicans. So this meeting represented a minority of the World’s Anglicans.

Obadiah thinks the mystery of the photo will probably be solved if there’s a statement at the end of the meeting which lists who has signed on the what gets said. UPDATE: the list has been released

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Three Fountains. Obadiah recognised where the picture had been taken. It’s a place that Obadiah sought out in Rome, although it is well off the tourist track. It is Tre Fontane (the three fountains) which is the place where St Paul is said to have been beheaded. The story goes that his head bounced three times and three fountains sprang up. the fountains are still there but don’t work.
Whether one believes the fountain story, or not, Tre Fontane is yet another reminder that the Bible contains true history, and we can visit the places where these true events happened.

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Media blamed: updating a story about Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel returning to preach after his stabbing (and forgiving his assailant even though he lost an eye) Obadiah unfortunately came across a video promising to tell him what the media was concealing. Turns out the allegation – predictably –was false. The media was meant to be concealing that the alleged young assailant was Muslim. The reason for the concealment was that “the elites want to Islamify” our society. This is rather odd, considering the story has been running all week about more and more Muslim teenagers being arrested on suspicion of terrorism. (If anything the main criticism of the media has been that they identified the possible religious motivation of the alleged stabber.) Obadiah is an innocent – he was genuinely shocked to come across a conspiracy theory like that.

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So why is equality a good thing? Historian Tom Holland on Christianity’s egalitarian Impact” (From an interview at scroll.in)

“Christianity is founded on the principle of the first will be last, the last will be first. Well, you know, there are kings and nobles and rulers and beggars. And the foundational symbol of Christianity is someone suffering death on an instrument of torture. There are tortures, there are people burned, there are people hanged. Of course, and Christianity is founded on someone who, rather than fight back, surrenders himself, puts up his sword and willingly goes to death. But there are people with crosses on their surcoats who are attacking Muslim Spain and attacking the pagans.

Or attacking other Christians…
“Or attacking other Christians. And they’re taking the cross across the Atlantic and wiping out great empires there. So of course, there is a massive, massive tension there. But what is I think suggestive about this is that individual Christians, and indeed even those who may be executioners or kings or military leaders, at the back of their mind there is always the voice of conscience saying “are you sure that this is justified?” in a way that no Roman ever had that voice in the back of his head.

“And, I think that is pretty radically different. It means that when a nobleman may be riding out on his horse, and he passes a beggar, he’d look down at that beggar and part of what he is, is the anxiety that that beggar may be Christ. And it’s part of the churn of ideas that makes European history so restless and so transformative. Because if you look at the most convulsive development in modern European history, the French Revolution, it ends up targeting Christianity, the great Cathedral of Notre Dame gets converted into a temple to Supreme Reason. 

“But everything about the French Revolution is drawing on deeply Christian ideas. And so, the king is brought low, the church is brought low, but the church is brought low for deeply Christian reasons. The idea is that the church has been upholding monarchy. The priests somehow lost touch with those who are poor.”

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Those Northern Baptists: Obadiah heard it so long ago he has forgotten who told him – but the rule for deciding on the sort of theology Australian Baptists have is: “The closer to the equator, the more conservative they get” So NSW is more conservative than Victoria, and Queensland is more conservative than NSW.

This geographic determinism was borne out last week when Queensland voted to have women ministers – the last state/territory of Baptists to make that move.