In Spirit and in Truth: The Challenge of Discernment for Canadian Anglicans Today

The essays in this collection explore questions that are fundamental to Anglican identity. What do we mean by doctrine and its development? What does it mean to be Spirit led? What is holiness, in Scripture and in the church's reading of Scripture? How might we negotiate in a theologically coherent way the relationship between the church's cultural context and its inherited faith? These questions arise immediately from the debate about same-sex blessings in the Anglican Church of Canada and in particular the questions posed by the Primate at General Synod 2007. But the questions also stand on their own as deep-seated and far-reaching inquiries involving who we are as people of faith in this time and place. The contributors to this volume are all Anglicans and scholars who are deeply engaged in the life of the church and committed to its well being. While all very different, their essays are nevertheless linked by two intriguing common emphases: first of all on Scripture, and secondly on the consensus fidelium-the mind of the whole church through history and throughout the world. In this they witness to the possibility of an emerging common mind in the church of Canada: a way of seeing that is both catholic and evangelical-reading both the tradition and the times and, in both, reading Scripture. They represent what it might mean to be the church in spirit and in truth in our time. These essays are offered as an articulation of the guiding principles by which the church may move forward in a time of serious disagreement, and in the belief that this approach-at once catholic and evangelical, rooted in Scripture and in the community of the faithful-captures the peculiar genius of Anglicanism and, more broadly, something of what it means to be the Church. About the Editors: Catherine Sider Hamilton is a doctoral student and Instructor in New Testament Greek at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, and Honorary Assistant at Grace Church on-the-Hill in Toronto.Peter M. B. Robinson is the Priest at Emmanuel Church Richvale and Adjunct Professor of Theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.George Sumner is the Principal of Wycliffe College, an honorary assistant at St. Paul's Anglican Church, and a Canon to the Dioceses of Toronto and Saskatchewan.