Ok, I shouldn't be snide, but over the years I've come to expect from Anglican leaders a smoggy rhetoric that seems designed to obscure the fact that they don't really believe anything much resembling Christianity. Former Episcopal presiding bishop Frank Griswold was reportedly a master of it. Here (via the First Things blog) is a fine piece published in 1998 by then-bishop of Monmouth and current archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I've had the sense that Williams is fundamentally a solid man, someone Catholics and other Nicene-Creed-believing Christians can at least talk to, and this confirms it. Williams is responding to retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong on the occasion of the latter's propagation of a set of "controversial" theses attacking the Christian faith. Of course they're controversial only in the fact that they reveal an Episcopal bishop not only failing to believe the faith but vigorously attacking it.

Williams treats Spong's attack with more seriousness than I think it deserves, but along the way he says some fine and memorable things. E.g.: "Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited." And: "God is never competing for space with agencies in the universe."

I see hints of ideas that would still perhaps cede too much theological ground to modern prejudices. Still, it's refreshing.