After staring down the Goddess of Love, one of the key players counseling the Anglican Communion to stay together, is concerned his fellow conservatives in Sydney are encouraging the impending divorce of the Anglican Church.
Bishop Tom Wright is perhaps the world's most influential Bible scholar and a co-author of the Anglican Communion's so-called "roadmap to peace', The Windsor Report.
He has clarified statements reported by ABC radio yesterday that could have implied Sydney Anglicans were imperialists with "a very similarly independent-minded ecclesiology' to North American liberals.
Dr Wright told Sydneyanglicans.net that he understands that Sydney Anglicans have a "particular theology' with "a real focus on the congregation', but adds that they should also recognise their "particular responsibility to Anglican Christians in places like Palestine and Sub-Saharan Africa'.
"At the pragmatic level being connected to the Anglican Communion means having a responsibility for vulnerable Anglicans around the world," he says.
"To collude with the break-up of the Anglican Communion will leave a lot of Anglican Christians high and dry and vulnerable to liberalism and militant Islam."
Dr Wright is also continuing to urge the North Americans to repent of the appointment of active homosexual Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.
But in Sydney for lectures this week, he is telling the media that this is "very unlikely' and schism is ‘quite possible’.
"If they vote to go with the Windsor Report then that will pull the whole thing back from the brink," he told ABC radio yesterday. "But my friends in America tell me on many different sides of this issue that that’s actually very unlikely, that it looks as though, the way they are at the moment, they are going to ratify what they did last time in electing Gene Robinson."
Wright discusses future with world-renowned cosmologist
The Anglican Communion may not have a future, but what about the rest of the world?
Last night, Dr Wright discussed this question with internationally renowned cosmologist, Professor Paul Davies on the the topic: Does the World Have a Future? at a Macquarie University public forum.
From the source of good and evil to whether we could re-create the big bang in a test tube " the questions were huge and the responses thorough when two of the world's greatest minds met.
Prof Davies from Macquarie University is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist by profession, but now works in astrobiology, a new field of research that seeks to understand the origin and evolution of life, and to search for life beyond Earth.
Professor Davies commented that although the prospect of the world either ending with a great rip as it increased size too fast or being in a perpetual circle and never ending at all were equally depressing, he was still an optimist. He said the impact on humanity over the past 20 years of information technology and globalization was a positive sign as they had brought the whole world closer together.
The evening ended on a positive note as Dr Wright predicted a better future if Christians answered God's call to work together for tolerance, and good environmental stewardship.
The event is part of a week of events featuring Dr Wright presented by the Society for the Study of Early Christianity (SEC) and Macquarie Christian Studies Institute (MCSI), both based at Macquarie University.
The week will culminate on Friday, when Dr Wright will address the topic DeCoding the Da Vinci Code.
