As Dr. David Wells in his new book God in the Whirlwind notes, “It is impossible to think of the love of God apart from his holiness.” While love and holiness are not the same thing, he observes, we see the world today through therapeutic categories rather than moral categories. “In twentieth-century liberalism, then, we ended up with love that was separated from divine holiness. Love and holiness belong together and work together: Love is characteristic of every aspect of God’s being as well as every action that issues from it.

“Love and holiness belong together and work together: Love is characteristic of every aspect of God’s being as well as every action that issues from it.”

Is it any wonder then that Bishop Gene Robinson and his “Love free or Die” movie is all about his need for full inclusion and acceptance? His concept of “love” is not agape but Eros. It is devoid of any talk of holiness. His narcissism, driven by the need for the church to accept who he perceives himself to be, has so corrupted Western imperial Anglicanism that a realignment is underway that will not be stopped.

We live in a time, says Wells, when all religion which is from “below” dissolves the hyphen in God’s holy-love. It thinks of the love of God apart from its connections to his holiness. When that happens, it always leads us far from the Bible’s own way of thinking because we always end up with divine love that has severed any connections with atonement.

How this could escape the attention of Welby is mind-boggling. While not being a theologian, he knows that affirming a behavior based on a misplaced compassion profoundly affects the way he sees and presents the Good News of God’s salvation…and how it will be perceived around the Anglican Communion.

“In recent decades in America, we have drifted out of the moral world in which we once lived and which the biblical authors inhabit. Now, we think not of right and wrong but inward hurts and psychological healing. We look less for redemption and more to techniques of self-management. So, we associate love with open arms, warmth, listening, caring, healing and acceptance. We are instinctively drawn to love. We are easily repelled by holiness. We have become One Nation Under Therapy.

“Into this selfist maelstrom homosexuality has gained near total mainstream cultural acceptance right up to and including a president. It is one part of a multipronged effort to redefine the family. We are redefining the most basic building block of any society. The Marxists tried to redesign the class system of their day. That attempt now lies in ruins. Today, many western societies are attempting, in an experiment equally bold, to rewrite their societies’ ground rules about families. When this social experiment collapses confusion will reign as will disorder and suffering,” says Wells.

By caving into same sex civil unions, Welby becomes complicit in a doomed social experiment that will drag society down and with it the Church of England, but hopefully not the rest of the Anglican Communion.

The notion of an Anglican via media on a variety of pansexual behaviors (LGBTQII) is false. Welby is trying to urge a mutual respect for each other’s views, but that will not wash with the orthodox provinces of the Global South. They never bought those nostrums when Dr. Rowan Williams was archbishop and it won’t wash with Welby. Nigerian Archbishop Nicholas Okoh publicly condemned the outgoing archbishop in language never before seen from one primate to another.

Canon lawyer Allan S. Haley says the Archbishop gives away both the game and his role as a neutral arbiter – because the opposing views can by no objective means be called equally worthy of respect. That is an understatement.

The Global South’s traditional and hermeneutical reading of Scripture absolutely and totally rejects that so-called authoritative position. For them it is not “Anglican” (nor authoritative) to say, “one side says this, the other side believes that”. The Law of Non-Contradiction makes that an impossibility.

Again, as Haley observes, “The South’s ‘experience’ of same-sex unions is exactly the opposite of the West’s: in the South, even a perceived support of them leads to violence and death. Most often recently, such murder comes from the hands of Islamic terrorists bent on exterminating a Christianity that could conceivably espouse (even if in the South, it doesn’t) what has always been regarded as an abomination among the people of the Book. The West, on the other hand, regards the Islamic terrorists as a local problem of the South – a problem that is traceable largely to tribalism, fear and ignorance.

“So the South cries ‘Help! Stop adding fuel to the fires of our foes!’ – While the West largely says, ‘They are your problem, not ours.’ (Though that stance does not stop the West from actively intervening to ostracize Southern attempts to legislate on homosexuality, which intervention only exacerbates the tensions between Muslims and Christians in the South).”

In his attempt to be culturally sensitive, the Archbishop of Canterbury has tried to bridge the impossible. In the name of a false compassion, he has dared to place experience above reason, tradition and Scripture. In doing so, Welby violates holy-love dealing a deathblow to both holiness and its cousin sanctification.

The Global South, in their understanding of classical Anglicanism (and as it was taught them by English missionaries and later in English seminaries and colleges), believes that Scripture is the final arbiter in all things of faith and practice and that reason and tradition play a secondary or supportive role in understanding Scripture.

The West has switched this all around arguing that Scripture must be interpreted first and foremost in the light of ongoing experience, thus turning Scripture on its head allowing the zeitgeist and culture to determine what is true. Welby has fallen right into that trap. He cannot extricate himself from it unless he declares definitively what is true about sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman.

The torturous thinking by English liberal evangelical writer Andrew Goddard of Thinking Anglicans to get Welby off the hook suggests that both “the contexts” of the archbishop’s remarks about homosexuality and the murders of African Christians forces need to engage the broader questions of the nature and the rightness of his pattern of Christian moral reasoning.

This notion is too disingenuous by half and belies the soft underbelly of Welby’s moral thought processes.

The Archbishop wants compromise, but the Global South will give him none. His theology of sexuality has alienated both sides. Kenyan Primate Eliud Wabukala has made it clear that there will be no compromise, while lesbian Episcopal priestess Susan Russell calls Welby’s position “pathetic not prophetic.”

In light of this, will the archbishop be open to change?

Goddard interprets Welby’s dithering as not being a “consequentialist argument” that the cruel, wholly unjustifiable infliction of suffering on African Christians should determine and fix the church’s stance. Rather, in the face of a call for a sudden change in church practice, he appeals to the classic Anglican process of patient corporate, reasoned ecclesial reflection, which listens to a range of human experience and studies tradition and Scripture, with Scripture as definitive.

We have been down this road before. This is not new. Rowan Williams spent his entire political and theological capital arguing with Frank Griswold and the Global South Primates in Dromantine to the point that they wouldn’t even take communion together! Griswold privately blasted Williams for not being tougher on the Africans. The disillusionment by the African Primates was so great that they were a no show in Dublin. What does Welby not understand about that!

Orthodox Anglicans have been “patient” for decades while all the pansexualists have done is draw new lines in the sand.

Why Welby should now listen to the experience of homosexuals or “struggle” with the fact that different groups of people have different opinions on the issue when the behavior is definitively rejected by Scripture and more recently by Lambeth Resolution 1:10, the Dar Es Salaam Communique, et al is head shaking to orthodox Primates of the Communion.

If the first among equals in the Anglican Communion can’t make up his mind whether or not the church has, for the last 2000 years, mistakenly taught that homosexual activity is wrong, what hope is there for true unity?

Welby simply refuses to do what the church has done for centuries – take its moral cues straightforwardly from the Bible. So called “facilitated conversions” -- much loved by liberals to keep the conversation alive -- are nothing more than a stalling tactic to wear down the orthodox. We have watched this for the past 30 years in The Episcopal Church. There is nothing new here. Louie Crew and Integrity and endless committees, conferences and resolutions all give evidence of that.

Both the Anglican Communion and Welby’s own church are being torn apart because he refuses to take a definitive stand. He refuses to believe that homogenital sex is sin, yes SIN!

By vacillating about same sex behavior, he violates the causal nexus of love/holiness/sanctification and ultimately of salvation itself which, as an evangelical, violates his own fundamental view of Scripture’s authority and message.

God will never permit such a violation of His revealed will and, apparently, neither will the Global South.

Dr. David Wells is Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. His book God in the Whirlwind can be purchased here at Amazon http://tinyurl.com/k6glxw3