I always enjoy reading the Old High Churchman and the reasoned reflections of Archbishop Peter Robinson, a case in point being his most recent Keeping Things Tidy. As usual, I see the same binary choice being offered between an idealised “patristic” style of worship and doctrinal belief and “corrupt” Rome. Falsus in uno falsus in omnibus. A man has a small cancerous tumour on his back, so the surgeon removes the brain and puts it in some kind of futuristic life-support machine and sends the dead body to the morgue. The analogy is horribly crude, but this is what comes to mind.
How can anyone conceive of a church with formularies that go back four and a half centuries and expect some kind of tolerant comprehensiveness to come out of it?
I am brought back to the old article by William Tighe, Can the Thirty-Nine Articles Function As a Confessional Standard for Anglicans Today?. There may be two consequences of trashing the Articles and other relics of English legalism, becoming Roman Catholic or devising some form of English Gallicanism or Old Catholicism – a local or national Catholicism that transposes Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology onto a western idiom and cultural context.
It is surprising to find a systematic omission of the pre-Reformation English tradition, unless it is simply assimilated to the “abomination of Popery” or so-called corrupt Roman Catholicism. I don’t know if Archbishop Robinson has read Eamon Duffy and the work of other historians who concluded that early sixteenth-century religion in Europe was less superstitious and corrupt than previously believed.The Reformation seems to be just as much built on prejudice and ideology as infallibilist propaganda in the 1860’s. Or the racial and occultist theories of Göbbels and Rosenberg for that matter! Perhaps religion really is something for little children and to be grown out of!
One thing that attracts me to Dr Tighe’s thesis is that he is a historian and submits belief to reason and knowledge.
It seem to become clearer that if the kind of “classical Anglicanism” that insists on the Articles and the other sixteenth century reformed formularies cannot tolerate the “Old Catholic” tendency, then it would seem appropriate for there to be a peaceful and courteous parting of the ways along that line. That would ensure coherence and stability in the two Christian communities.
The Blue Flower 
I have read both William’s and the Bishop’s articles. At the end of them, I found myself saying: “And…?” Why are Anglicans so tortured about their origins and legitimacy? It is not as if there is any single point or act which will satisfy everyone else, least of all Catholics. William remarks on the rapidity with which Marian Catholicism re-established itself after Edward’s Protestant reforms. I read an interesting book called “The History of the Church in England”. The author, an Anglican don, made the remark that if anyone thought that the people who accepted the Anglican settlement (in its henrician, edwardian and elizabethan versions) so facilely were obviously irreligious, then it says little for the pre-Reformational or Marian religiosity of the English people. You can’t have it both ways. I have read Duffy’s “The Stripping of the Altars”, Scarisbrick’s “The Reformation and The English People”, the “Life of Robert Southwell”, as well as Benson’s “Come Rack! Come Rope!”. Come on, please. Let us not try to insinuate a vicious kind of apologetics under cover of scholarship. Nature abhors a vaccuum. The Anglican Church became the reality in England because the Catholic (i.e. the Roman) Church in England at various levels failed to meet both the spiritual and political challenges of the time. More and Cranmer were BOTH martyrs, for exactly the same reasons.
We are, here today, all of the same skin. Centuries ago, things happened to change emphases and customs in religious life. Most of us are Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox or whatever by accident of birth. Truth has little to do with things; political worries much.
How can anyone conceive of a church with formularies that go back four and a half centuries and expect some kind of tolerant comprehensiveness to come out of it?
How can one conceive of a church with formularies or traditions that old or older that has NOT evolved some form of “tolerant comprehensiveness”? As I see it (and keep saying, perhaps to the point of tiresomeness) Anglican history leads inexorably to a mindset of both/and rather than either/or. Late Medieval piety and divinity and that of the Reformation are both developments of Patristic and Scriptural thinking. Where they seem not to agree, that is probably more an effect of the narrowness of human minds than of truth. Without two hale and hearty legs we limp. I think that to be the case with theology as well.
I have just been reading http://anglicancontinuum.blogspot.fr/2010/01/good-read.html and the 54 comments and the more recent article http://anglicancontinuum.blogspot.fr/2012/08/how-is-that-catholic-exactly.html with its 35 comments. The essential issue is the use of the 1662 Prayer Book and the very intelligent answers of Bishop Damien Mead of the ACC-OP in England. I find this exchange highly illuminating. To the second article which indicated Fr Hart’s decision no longer to use the word Catholic on his church sign, Bishop Mead has some very interesting things to say.
And all that is within a single communion!
I also found the link you posted to Fr Robert Hart’s article very sensible. I am sure many of my co-readers think I am a lost cause, but really, he makes the same point I have several times: that the word “Catholic” has been misappropriated. And, reading the comments, the thought occurred to me that a real temptation exists – like Eliot’s Becket’s fourth temptation – to do the right thing for the wrong reason – to inadvertently subject one’s religious agenda to the terms and rules of the loudest or biggest members on the block. Whatever else must be avoided, being or claiming to the “Third” (or fourth or fifth) “one true Church” must top the list! I say, please, eradicate for ever the phrase “one true church”. If it exists it must be beyond or bigger than that claimed by anyone. Think rather simply of the “one loved Christ”.
It is also the point of view of the “independent sacramental movement”: imitate Roman Catholicism and it would be more honest to become a Roman Catholic, and the same thing with the Anglican and Orthodox Churches. Or is there such a thing as a “generic Catholic” – truly being Catholic without a canonical link with the Pope? The problem there is knowing what’s in a name. What do we call ourselves – perhaps St Glinglin’s Sacramental Christian church (Anglican Catholic Church – Original Province, ACA, APCK, APA or whatever). Then it is a problem of religious market research in the US, of which I have no experience.
Perhaps the less we seek to appropriate the brand and simply offer generic sacramental Christianity to those not looking for institutional legitimacy and prepared to take the risk of being taken for a ride by a charlatan, the more the Christian spirit might be discerned in it. But what guarantee is there of orthodoxy, correct liturgy, etc.?
That is the question…
Well, Father, let me ask this: why do we need “guarantees” in the spiritual journey? We apply our reason, some intuition, and cultivate the balance of prudence and generosity. What need have we of the language and mindset of insurance policies?
The trouble is that writing on a computer screen hasn’t much in the way of humanity about it. The talk of “guarantee” is not something I think we should have, but I intended it to be an analogy of what people do seek.
The Thirty-Nine Articles are too bleakly Calvinist to be accepted by a Christian in good faith and I doubt that many Anglicans in the mainstream set a very high store by them today – certainly none of my acquaintance do! I agree with a few of them but ultimately they’re just reactionary constructs. Instead of looking for a ”doctrinal standard” in Anglicanism why not immerse yourselves in the Jacobean and Caroline Divines? I greatly enjoy the liturgical sermons of +Lancelot Andrewes, a man of great learning and piety. Otherwise the Thirty-Nine Articles are simply a product of the age, in stark reaction to the abuses of 16th century Rome.
I haven’t read Dr Tighe’s article but will do so over breakfast tomorrow morning. Yes, I now eat breakfast on Sundays!
Patricius, this is all too true. I did, many, many years ago read Tractarian attempts to give a more Catholic interpretation of the articles, but was, even then, not convinced.
The best way, or at least as I see it, is to simply get rid of them.
The whole concept of Calvinism, especially in reference to Predestinationism, is so utter opposed to the very concept of Sacrament, that I find it impossible, as a Catholic, to accept it in any form.
Calvin sounds so much like Augustine that it is somehow hard to know which is speaking. Predestination is something that the Scriptures (both Testaments) make much of, and both are correct to speak strongly of it. Augustine, however, though walking close to the edge on such issues did not overbalance to the exclusion of free will.
Free will of the creature is another strong theme of both Testaments. The mind boggles in trying to balance these apparent opposites, but both are true and the effort needs to be made. Calvin himself did not stray far from Augustine’s teaching, but many later Calvinists have followed the predestination concept to a logical extreme, where free will is eliminated. This is wrong. However, to reject predestination out of hand is to reject Scripture itself and Augustine also, and, at least potentially, to stray into the condemned heresy of Pelagius, to which Arminius (in part) and his followers (more fully) have fallen heir. As a Catholic, I find it necessary to affirm predestination in some form, even if it leaves me with a conundrum I can’t solve, at least as firmly as I affirm free will.
I’ve studied the Articles because they have given me problems, and Newman’s Tract 90 hasn’t helped me much. On the specific matters of election and predestination, I think they carry one of the best and most balanced statements extant, and were written to reflect the insights from both opposing schools of thought without endorsing either in itself. While I don’t think of them as a denominational standard (a concept I dislike anyway), I do see them as a document that should be heard and pondered deeply. To get rid of them would be tragic. To treat them as incontrovertable authority would be just as tragic.
Long ago, as a graduate student at Yale, I wrote a research paper comparing John Calvin and John Knox’s views of the “shape” of Church History, using John Headley’s Martin Luther’s View of Church History (1963) and Peter Fraenkl’s Testimonia Patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (1961) for comparisons.
Their views were very different, Knox taking a virtually Anabaptist line that the Church began to fall right after the death of the Apostle John, and that it had effectively fallen by the time of Constantine. Calvin was much more subtle: he sees the Church as having largely fallen by the time of Gregory the Great, but sees isolated individuals, like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, as witnesses to the truth in bad times.
But why I am posting this here is my recollection about how Calvin seeks to trumpet his agreement with St. Augustine at every possible opportunity (as opposed to his frequent criticisms of St. John Chrysostom and other Eastern Fathers), and more than once refers to him as a sure guide. Even when he criticizes Augustine — most notably, to my recollection, concerning the matter of Augustine’s advocacy of prayer for the dead, and especially during the Eucharist — he seeks to exculpate him: Augustine embraced this view, he informs us, because of his mother’s dying request to him to “remember me at the altar,” and sons, he goes on, are all-too-frequently influenced by their mothers, especially pious mothers, to indulge in superstitious religious practices. One might well contrast Calvin’s attitude to St. Augustine with that of Luther, who as time went on grew more and more dismissive of the Bishop of Hippo’s theological views.
Well said!
Fr Anthony, thank you so much for taking the time to download as well as write several of these fascinating articles dealing with the direction that continuing Anglicanism is faced with.
In some ways it appears that we are rehashing the proverbial arguments that have plagued Anglicanism from its very inception, or at least from the Elizabethan Settlement; are we Catholic? are we Protestants? are we a “bridge church”? Personally, I do not believe that this will be resolved in any manner that will be able to hold a big-tent comprehensive denomination together (if indeed the Faith and Practice do matter). Since Continuing Anglicans no longer have the establishment to provide some sort of unity, and even in the colonies (using the term as loosely as possible) a form of unity based upon ethnic identification also no longer exists, the external forces that held these theological divisions within the Church together are no longer viable inside of the Continuum.
Too much time and space has been exerted blaming the divisions within Continuing Anglicanism upon personalities, but I am not always convinced by this argument. The divisions between the Anglo-Catholics and more Calvinist low Churchmen (of the Reformed Episcopal Church or the Free Church of England) most likely cannot be resolved. And the parting of the ways seems almost natural; we will grow more and more apart, and more different as well as we establish patrimonies more reflective of our theological as well as liturgical heritages.
As one who supports the concept of an Anglican rite Old Catholicism, I am bothered by those who seem to want the continuing Anglicans to be simply another form of Protestantism, but with a better liturgy and also bishops, who are not bishops, and ministers who are not priests. I do believe that in the end, we shall have to go our own ways.
Unless, and I have mentioned this before, the only real interest is bigness.
I can’t find any coherence in a view of Christianity that would envision separate warring sects as justified in their separation. If we are not going to declare ourselves as “the one true church”, then we must be declaring that the Body of Christ has room for views we don’t agree with. If we are indeed one body (as the Scriptures insist we are), it is absolutely foolish that we go on excluding one another. Instead of seeking more and more ‘purity’ of doctrine and practice, and a consequent increase of sectarianism, I believe we need to be finding out just how far our limits will stretch toward others of like faith in Christ, and to be seeking ways to work as closely as at all possible with those we do see as brethren in Christ, opening doors rather than building walls. If the Church depends upon the civil government or other secular forces to hold us together, might it not be that we have already failed our mission?
I’m not talking about bigness; I’m not talking about a single central bureaucracy; nor am I talking about a toleration for views incompatible with Christianity, but I am talking about the need for Christians who recognize one another as Christians to act as though they/we mean what they/we say. When we are not actively striving to heal divisions, but rather come to see divisions as normal, our actions deny all that we say about the whole Church militant here in earth.
Maybe your vision is desirable but it could never come about, human being humans. The history of the Church, any Church, has been about exclusion and narrowing orthodoxy. That is why the institutional church needs secular control – or why most people are through with institutional Christianity – “I’m spiritual but not religious“.
A hypothetically comprehensive view of Continuing Anglicanism is still exclusive of something – women priests and gays and those who want to make liberalism mandatory for all. In modern life, we have to be all-inclusive or all-exclusive. Normally in history, one has a war every twenty years or so!
The game is over. Perhaps some of us can still keep something going for a few years. Then the churches, and even our little chapels, will be put to other uses as life goes on and on without Christianity.
I am not for building walls, but it is a natural reaction when we see everything slipping away into nothingness… That is my drift.
You are entirely correct that the vision can never come about, humanly speaking. The church has managed to demonstrate quite well over the centuries that humans are not to be trusted to bring God’s plans to fruition. I’ve never fooled myself that I or anyone else can build an ideal church. However, through the Scriptures, through the Spirit’s presence in Tradition, and through the still small voice within, God is calling us to turn our eyes toward his call, toward His vision, and to do our best, inadequate though it will always be. If we need to see results in order to be content, we will be, of all people, the most miserable. If we can reach toward God and toward those others he is calling, we will be on the path He has chosen, and there is peace and glory enough in that.. If we point our eyes toward our own narrow idea of what should be, and begin to exclude those God has not excluded, well, we ask for what we’ll get — pretty much nothing.
Ecclesiastical structures are designed to be no more than aids in that journey. If we make them to be more than that, we allow ourselves to be paralyzed.
But then, the logical outcome would be to have simply remained in the established Church, and not to have left over the rejection of Catholic Faith and Practice. There would be no need to be within the continuum at all, or to even have a continuum. Parish X,Y, and Z would be the local “Catholic” bunch, with or without the ministrations of women clergy, and A,B, And C would be “Evangelical”; the others simply pantheistic, with liturgy, perhaps, and would constitute the mainstream of Anglicanism.
I realise that the concept of all simply holding our hands, and our breaths and all that matters is that we get along sounds good, but it is really a horrible concept. There are things that do matter and there are heresies that do matter and do shatter the unity of Catholic Christianity.
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“There are things that do matter and there are heresies that do matter and do shatter the unity of Catholic Christianity.”
Dale, you are, of course, right, but what are the differences sufficient to shatter that unity? Are we dividing so finely as to convert a Catholic Christianity into a bunch of warring sects? Or is there a degree of disagreement that can be encompassed by the bonds of unity? Where do we draw the lines? My contention is that we are being far more exclusive than Our Lord would have us be.
And then, having drawn these lines, what is to be our attitude toward those on the other side? Are we to be thankful that those idiots have gone, or are we to exert effort to restore the unity that has been lost? Can we be certain that we ourselves are not a large part of what has forced them away? What bean is in our own eye?
When St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, wisely advised that church to excommunicate the man who was sleeping with his step-mom, was it with an attitude of “Good riddance”? As I recall he expected them to make the effort to win him back, and congratulated them in 2 Corinthians for having done just that.
Division is, of course, the present reality, and some of it (far from all of it) is division that had to come, but I see no scriptural license to be satisfied with such a dismal status quo. Division is to be hated and mourned and reconciliation is always to be the objective, even if it turns out to be impossible at the moment. It is true that we cannot solve every problem that is, and it is true that we are not responsible for what we cannot fix, but it is just as true that our failure to do what we can do, our failure to make the effort, does leave us with a great deal of responsibility.