Bishop Wright Speaks.

Journalist Ruth Gledhill has posted to her blog excerpts of an interview with Anglican bishop, scholar, and Lambeth (Windsor Report) Commission member N.T. Wright. Wright has heavy words re next week's Primates Meeting and the scandal of the Episcopal Church. Among them are these:

For the last three years, every meeting has looked like this is the make-or-beak one. There is a bit of this now - yet one more time round the tracks. However, the film is gradually unwinding and we are closing in on the fact that something has got to happen soon. By the end of 2007 the Archbishop of Canterbury will have had to send out invitations to the Lambeth Conference. One way or another, the decisions he has to make in relation to that are bound to have some kind of effect in various parts of the Anglican Communion.

"That is a way of saying that by this time next year, we will certainly not be where we are now. Some lines will have hardened, one way or another.There is so much sound and fury in many different directions that it is a matter of several different pressures from several different corners - trying to hear them and listen to the voice of God in the middle of it all and make some sense of it.

"The question is, is there any solution that a solid central ground will assemble around? My view is that it would be a solution based on the Windsor Report and what has flowed from it. It is the only thing on the table. If we are going to scrap that we would have to go back three years to start all over again.

. . .

At Dromantine the Primates said they wanted Ecusa to answer some questions. Ecusa did what they did last summer, which was not to answer the questions. They gave half an answer to two of them, and no answer at all to the third, which was about authorising blessings. Bishop Jefferts Schori herself authorised same-sex blessings in her former diocese in 2003, so she is one of the bishops who did what Lambeth specifically asked not to be done. Whenever she has been asked to comment on that, she says she stands where she always did. That is a real problem. That is the real issue. The fact that she is a woman is not the point.

Links are Gledhill's. Here's the whole thing.