THE MCJ

but you know, you can tell it's not the Archbishop because what he's saying is so clear.

To argue that this represents a mature work of the ABC is ludicrous because no sentence approaches the normative 100 word mark of the mature style. Also, a definite conclusion is given. This, admittedly, is the opposite of the sense of the actual words of the object of discussion. However, it is not the inversion of value given to the apparent words (this is mere elemental postmodernism) but rather the actual attainment of a stated meaning to the object that allows us to categorize this as a puerile work. In more mature works, the reader is left with a complete inability to ascertain either the meaning of the employed words in the object of discussion AND what the author (the ABC) actually understands them to mean. The whole realm of meaning is given over to a superfluity of plurality in the finished style of the ABC and renders the reader stranded in open space of potentiality awaiting the arrival of an intergalactic improbability drive mode of transport whilst suffocating in the vacuity of the ABC's words. None of that here!

We must conclude that this the earliest extant kernel of what will become the ABC's style and which will lead to social cohesion by confusion, a pet theory of his first demonstrated in miniature in the Anglican Communion (see footnote in A HISTORY OF DEFUNCT CHRISTIAN BRAND NAMES - 2003, St Vickie's Press, Newark, for further data). This matter is under the heading of variant or perverse chaos theory about which the ABC is scheduled to address the Mathematical Society of the United Kingdom and which, undoubtedly, will prove as sensible and reasonable and as capable of understanding as Fermat's Last Theorem. However, there is concern that since mathematicians assert the unitary value of the concept designated by the symbols 1 and one, the ABC is entering dangerous ground from which he might not be able to shuffle his cards quite so deftly as to convince. We shall see.

I must take this opportunity for allowing me to comment on this unsubtle indicator of the reality of the timing of this composition and noting the confirmatory nature of the possible age of the author. But, really, now, you had all beat me to the conclusion based on your own taking the text as partner and living into it. Well done!

Is is is?

"Please reassure us that medicine has not also become a victim post-modern meaninglessness and the various psychosexual 'political agendas'." Alas, the American Psychiatric Association and its publication the DSM, have long been a toy of the agendas political and otherwise. So has the AMA and even the ACOG, my own college. When I took ethics in medical school, the profs were positive that no one would regard IV fluids and feeding tubes as "heroic" efforts, nor that abortion for sex selection would ever be countenanced. You all know differently, as I do after 28 years have passed. That said, I must confess that I am in the Episcopal School for Ministry in the Diocese of Missouri, in my third year, in the next to final course. That means I have 2.5 years of reading in OT/NT/Preaching/Church History I and II/ Introduction to Theology/Ethics/Seminars and am currently in Sacramental Theology this semester with Liturgics to go this final summer semester and graduation in September (God willing). Therefore, readings and indeed books by the current ABC have been on my plate for 2.5 years.

Additionally, I have been following closely the WR and sequelae and lack thereof, the Draft Covenant development, the unsavory developments in the ECUSA/TEC as it has morphed into the GCC with the curial ascendancy of the Executive Council, the fantasy canons manufactured out of whole cloth by the PB and Beers, the attempted emergence of an Episcopal popette, the legal debacles of the "reconciliation squad" ('no mission too small for our attack dogs') at 815, Virginia, et alia, and the devolution of the Gospel into univeralistic tripe by the "defenders of the gospel-of-inclusion as-we-define-it and NOBODY else better gainsay us".

Thus, I have been educated, am being educated, and will be continually educated by the on-going slo-mo collapse of the ECUSA/TEC/GCC and the Anglican Communion. We live in interesting times and are thus blessedly cursed by that Chinese affirmation/warning. (See my diversity!) So, on an educational level as well as a personal level, I have a larger-than-average exposure to the ABC and his style. Blessing or curse or insipidity really depends on the subject he addresses. PNP, OP above has it correctly as to theological works versus administrative or (worse!) theoretical legal addresses (bah! humbug!) Smurf Breath, you raise an interesting potential problem, which I will restate as: "Does the internal textual evidence contradict an early attribution to Rowan Williams, specifically: are the alleged self-referential allusions to the archbrishopric evidence against early dating or a matter of interpolation" (corruption is so degrading a term that we dare not use it for fear of insulting a document!); wherein we consider the possibility of the gift of prophecy of said Rowan Williams and the multitudinous implications of that ascription in the pluriform considerations of "truth" or "falsity" with an exploration of the great and glorious fog of gray/grey-ness as the bracketted consideration of privileged import." If that is satisfactory as the problem, I shall attempt a short assessment in a later missive whan the fourth dimension shall open to me the possibilities of further rumination and disclosure of my considerations as considered.

PROPHETIC, definitely prophetic. See:"But if ever I am called upon to describe myself as "The" Archbishop of Canterbury, I do so not in the sense that I am in any way singular in comparison to other Archbishops of Canterbury, past, present or future, but rather in the sense that I am, at this precise moment in the space/time continuum, the - or more precisely "The" - Archbishop of Canterbury."

The key is provided by the author himself in the "past, present, or future" phrase. What we have here is the self-satisfaction of laying the clew (clue, for American 'readers') precisely in the face of the observer and having them over-accept the valuation as one of face construction rather than as an ingenious allusion to the grammatical (even if one allows that grammar is a patriarchal construction of the essence of communication depriving it of the fluid characteristics of (alleged) "meaning" in the matrix of reader-laden perceptual hermeneutical comprehension(s) and rendering it a 'bit dangerous' to the interaction of humanity in relation to either the text or each other; pardon the digression). The "but if ever I am called upon to describe myself as..." is a pluperfect future infinitive which, graciously, was not split. This usage in Hebrew and Greek constructions is often the source for confusions in translation - which, face it, is probably easier than translating the ABC's mature comments (but see

http://mcj.bloghorn.com/3649#Comments

for technological aides de memoire).

The Hebrew/Greek construction is a pluperfect infinitive which suggests the static present representation of reality in the present which is fully actuated only in the future and hence may viewed in the past as already existent by God (and the prophet to whom the vision/dream/reality was 'given' if we must use such imprecise conceptualiztions of the plurality of entanglements with the 'Divine' however/whatever conceived). So, you can see how the usage by the ABC as a 9-10 yr old third grader was merely prophetic and showed remarkable precociousness in his octolanguaganal capabilities as applied in this 25th-%-ile range of said ultimate language acquisition, as a mark of intelligence. This, in summation, to be brief in the recapitulation of the foregoing argumentation in question of the dating of this archival fragment of the text under discussion, I submit that your allegation of dyssynchrononicity as a proof of the later-dated authorial production is bovinely fecal, for the afore-adjudicated reasons. But, I admit in defense of your having raised the question, that lesser minds have stumbled upon these little crags of hermeneutical suspicion in the fog of postmodernistical educational paradigms incapable of appreciating the nuances of same, notably the case of the use of the pluperfect future/present/past tense usage and, no doubt, will continue to do so in the (absolute directional sense of time conveyed to human perception, though perhaps not in the theoretically bidirectionality of Einsteinian constructs) future.

I have been called to ESM. I may be called to the cure of souls (if my discernment committee ever moves off zero). I have not been called to leave my cure of patients.

I might be discerning a call to parody, but it seems too easy. It's probably a temptation....