Rather Not Unpacks Some Category Confusion By the Bishop of Arkansas

http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/8139/

[TitusOneNine] 6 Dec 2007--Donatism was not a difference over morality—no one in Christian antiquity, Catholic or Donatist, thought that cooperating with persecuting authorities was without moral significance—but an error about validity, an error that dissenters within and without the Episcopal Church have not made. No one has argued that the episcopal orders of the consecrators of Gene Robinson were subsequently rendered null and void by Gene Robinson’s sexual habits, but that these bishops have, by their doctrine, broken communion with the rest of us. We, on the other hand, are not simply asserting that homosex is wrong—we are insisting that the claim that homosex is morally neutral is itself a falsehood, an untruth, and we will not have communion with a lie. We are not breaking fellowship with sinners (we’d all be in a lot of trouble if we did), nor are we declaring anyone’s sacraments invalid. Rather, we are refusing communion with heretics, something which St Augustine, even in his most rabid anti-donatist diatribes, never confused, never lost sight of, and would never have condemned.

If this comment by the Bishop of Arkansas is connected with the the controversy ripping apart the Anglican Communion—and I find it hard to believe that it is not—then it is of a piece with other recent utterances by North American Anglican Officialdom. The Presiding “Bishop” of the Episcopal Church is fond of citing “ancient principles,” , while Fred Hiltz, the Primate of Canada, refers to “ancient canons” and Michael Ingham, the Bishop of New Westminster, pleads “ancient traditions.”