I have just been looking at Retro-church and its recent articles. Go over there, read them and come back here:

• An Appeal from the Continuing Anglican Churches to the ACNA and Associated Churches – the background, already linked to and commented on this blog – More Questions about the ACNA and What can we learn?.
• Archbishop Robinson Signed ACNA Letter Without Reading It, Apparently
• Bi-Polar Anglicanism and the Doctrinal Train-Wreck

I know that some are going to comment – See I told you so, you have only to convert to your local Ordinariate, Western Rite Vicariate, etc. There is also the alternative of giving it all up for a trite grin from Richard Dawkins!

When we take a deep breath, we will see that this is simply about Archbishop Peter Robinson who represents a type of churchmanship that differs from some of the doctrines upheld by the Affirmation of Saint Louis. The ACC and other churches coming under the category of Continuing Anglicanism, including the TAC, go by the Affirmation of Saint Louis, including the seven Sacraments.

I have always held Archbishop Robinson in high esteem, though I have never met him. He runs the Old High Churchman blog, and has just written an article about his position on this particular matter in Barking up the Wrong Tree?

It seems to be a fair-minded article, yet he denounced any attempt to narrow the criteria for being truly Anglican in A Broad Orthodoxy. The Archbishop’s two articles raise questions about what is needed to be truly Anglican. In Anglicanism as it existed in England up to the Tractarians, anyone upholding seven Sacraments and seven Ecumenical Councils would have met with disapproval. The doctrinal authority in Anglicanism is the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Book of Common Prayer.

High-church doctrine and liturgical rites come to be tolerated from about the beginning of the twentieth century. Push for anything hard enough in Anglicanism and you’ll get it – as can be seen in our own time! In the Continuum, the Affirmation has been proposed as a standard of orthodoxy. Personally, I have no problem with that, but I can ask the question of whether the Affirmation is truly Anglican. Is this Affirmation a piece of “revisionism”, as much so as Spong’s theses, ordination of women and same-sex marriage? Probably, few of us have been to a “straight” 1662 Communion Service. I have known it with the Rector wearing a stole instead of his tippet over the surplice, facing east at the altar and changing the place of the Prayer of Oblation from after Communion to after the Institution to reflect the order of the Roman Canon and most other historical anaphoras. I believe Archbishop Robinson wears vestments, and situates himself in the “old high-church” tradition as the title of his blog suggests. Percy Dearmer went to great pains to stick to the Prayer Book whilst making it as “Sarum” as possible. His work was remarkable.

In the Archbishop’s mind, the Anglo-Catholic position – as it developed from the ritualism of the slum priests and the Arts & Crafts Movement – is inimical to the old classical Anglicanism. Therefore, to ensure the unity of Continuing Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism (Anglo-Papalism) has be to be rejected, together with its influence in the Affirmation of Saint Louis.

His sweep at Eastern Orthodoxy in the mouth of Metropolitan Jonah is quite breathtaking, but he senses the danger of the same thing happening with the Orthodox as happened to those who formed the RC Ordinariates. Does not Anglicanism have its own identity, its own integrity based on Scripture, the ancient Creeds and Council[s], the Articles and the BCP? Archbishop Robinson sees the seeds of Continuing Anglican disunity in “revising” away from the strict Prayer Book and the King James Bible. He believes that assimilating Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine is shifting one’s own position in a dishonest way. In this logic, accepting the orthodoxies of the RC and EO Churches will lead to the elimination of the Reformation confessional traditions in Anglicanism and all the way to the so-called Hepworth narrative, that of the collective conversion of the TAC to RC doctrine.

In a certain way, I can understand Abp Robinson’s position, and Anglo-Catholicism, as it got itself tolerated by the beginning of the twentieth century, is little more than a cancerous accretion, playing on English charm and tolerance rather than the support of authority. The trouble is, as in the sixteenth century, how far you prune it all back. The six points of the Ritualists in the nineteenth century (eastward position, unleavened wafers, vestments, mixed chalice, etc.) were the beginning of the full-blown Anglo-Papalist movement. I read an article recently about Evangelicals in London who, whenever they “get” an Anglo-Catholic parish, would cover up the altar screen with a projection screen and get rid of the statues. Iconoclasm all over again!

What differentiates the most authentic Anglican idea from the dour and iconoclastic Calvinist puritanism of Scotland and parts of Switzerland? Even the Swiss reformed Christians have had their high-church movement. Lausanne Cathedral has a stone altar and stained glass windows (and a very nice organ)! What justification is there for reviving “old high church” practices if there is none for aping post-Tridentine Catholicism or fifteenth-century Sarum? Is the via media more than the fancies of a few seventeenth-century intellectuals? I’m not “trashing” anything, just asking questions.

The difficulty about Catholicism as with Anglicanism is whether they can exist independently of Rome or Canterbury respectively. Some do attribute the disunity to the schismatic status of independent communities. Schism is worse than heresy – in the minds of some. The basis of Anglican comprehensiveness is coexisting under a single authority – the King or Queen of England and the British Empire. Without that authority, one really seems to be pissing upwind! The problem is that the State is not always a guarantee of credal orthodoxy, but rather a hindrance to the Church’s work as mystical body of Christ whose Kingdom is not of this world.

At this point, I might seem to be handing everything on a plate to the RC and EO apologists. The big crisis of our time is that of Catholic-minded people being alienated from their original ecclesial communion, alienated also from Rome with its narrowing criteria of orthodoxy and the western-rite EO solution being simply unavailable for most, and badly implemented where it is available. I had my own experience of conversion to Roman Catholicism, which you can read about to an extent elsewhere on this blog or my website. Institutional churches are tightening the screws always the same way. It is bad enough having to be exiled from one’s Church of origin, worse to mess up one’s conversion to another and be brought to regret a big chunk of one’s life.

We become unchurched, not on account of our heterodoxy or bad morals, but because the tightness of the institution makes life intolerable. So all we can do is walk away…

This is why I sympathise with the idea of free Catholicism, or what someone coined as the independent sacramental movement. See Independent / Old Catholicism and New Goliards for my constant thought on the matter. If we can replace the role of totalitarian authority with conscience and love of what we seek to uphold and keep going, perhaps we can save the freedom of religious humanity, rather than let the atheists have the monopoly of freedom (and our rational faculties)!

In the strict context of our subject, I can only suggest a friendly separation between Anglicans strictly adhering to the Reformation formularies and those Anglicans who appeal to pre-Reformation norms of doctrine and liturgy. Of course, we have to remember that pre-Reformation Catholicism was no freer than the Reformation churches which were as exacting in matters of conformity to their orthodoxy. The Protestants had the quartering block and Rome’s inquisition had the faggots, the stake and a box of matches!

Perhaps I can hand it all to the apologists and fade away, finding my place in the godless world, or appeal for a kind of Catholicism that is free and filled with Christ’s light and tenderness – however illusory that aspiration may be.

The alternative is a life that is not worth living and one I would not want to live.