The 10th annual Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine (SEAD) conference was held Jan. 7-9 at the Cathedral of St. Luke and St. Paul in Charleston, S.C. Because of an unexpected medical ailment, the invited keynote speaker, John Webster, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, was unable to attend, and so individual SEAD members stepped in to address the situation of the church after last year's Lambeth Conference.

The Rev. David Scott, professor of theology and ethics at Virginia Theological Seminary, began the conference with an address titled "Contending for the Faith: Anglican Ecclesiology before the End Things." He asserted that the two current predominant views of the church were a "liberation ecclesiology" which has a tendency to "reduce eschatology to the present condition of oppression" and a "communion ecclesiology" which seems unable to express a tension between "this age and the age to come."

Speakers during the second day of gathering included the Rev. William Sachs, rector of St. Matthew's Church, Wilton, Conn., who used a historical view of Lambeth to plead for an "Anglican sense of doctrinal development" and a "theology of consensus," and the Rev. Ephraim Radner, rector of Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colo., who addressed the painful situation of "bad bishops" and "their significance for the Anglican Church." We need to acknowledge "our cultural distance" from the early church, Fr. Radner said. "We simply do not trust" as they did, both in God and in his appointed authorities.

The Rev. Christopher Seitz, former professor of Old Testament at Yale University and now at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, began the conference's third day by addressing the question: "Does Anglicanism Have a Doctrine of Scripture Post Lambeth?" He claimed the truthful answer was "no. I count it as one of the real tragedies that modern Anglicans, many with very powerful positions, speak about an Anglican approach to scripture that is self-evidently bogus, and out of touch with Anglican Christian preaching and the history of Anglicanism, especially before the 19th century."

Fr. Seitz traced the history of this different understanding of scripture, suggesting that it began with the Oxford Movement in the 19th century, during which Edward Pusey's successors inadvertently established "an entente cordiale" between doctrine and historicism which was "neither possible nor desirable."

The final speaker to address the assembly was the Most Rev. Donald Mtetemela, Archbishop of Tanzania. With regard to scripture and its authority, he said many bishops at Lambeth found a "peace at any cost" philosophy which seemed to prevail among Anglican leaders in the West. In contrast, he pleaded for a recovery of the priority of "God's mission to the world" against which backdrop we need to learn "how to read and interpret scripture faithfully."

He and many of his colleagues found at Lambeth a "shift away from affirming scripture as our final authority in all matters of faith."

In particular on the question of marriage and sexual ethics, Archbishop Mtetemela said Lambeth leaders "learned how divided we were on this subject." To him, the central question was one of conformity to culture or obedience to scripture. "We seem to want the easy way out," he said.

SEAD now will be headquartered in Charleston at the cathedral, where the next conference will be held April 8-10. The topic will be "Praying Our Faith: Celebrating 450 years of the Book of Common Prayer." The special guest speaker will be the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. George Carey.