Turning Point

By Robin G. Jordan

We are confronted with what may be regarded as two momentous developments in the history of the Anglican Church. We may not see the consequences of these developments fully worked out in our life times but they are going to impact the Anglican Church during the remainder of our lives. The first is Pope Benedict XVI’s Anglicanorum coetibus (Groups of Anglicans) and the creation of the Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans in the Roman Catholic Church. The second is the recent Primates’ Meeting in Dublin and the absence of one-third of the Primates of the Anglican Communion from that meeting. This meeting made it quite clear that the liberals hold captive the Instruments of Unity in the Anglican Communion. They have concentrated the reins of power into their own hands.

With the Dublin Primates’ Meeting Statement the liberals declared that the agenda of the Anglican Communion is to be their agenda. As a number of commentators have called to the attention of the world Anglican community, the statement made no mention of The Episcopal Church’s flagrant violations of the moratoriums on the election and consecration of practicing homosexuals to the episcopate and the blessing of homosexual liaisons. It also made no mention of the Anglican Covenant.

As liberals have been urging conservatives, the Primates’ Meeting has formally “moved on.” There was reference to continuing dialogue, in other words, conversations that are designed to wear down any remaining resistance to the liberal agenda and to bring about acceptance or acquiescence to that agenda. All eyes are now turned to the absent Primates to see what they are going to do—what will be their response to the Dublin Primates’ Meeting.

Since the nineteenth century Anglicans have been caught up in a struggle over identity. First the adherents of Tractarianism and Ritualism and then the adherents of liberalism, modernism, and pluralism have sought to change the identity of the Anglican Church. The result has been great confusion over who Anglicans are. What has added to the confusion is that before the nineteenth century Anglicans did not think of themselves as Anglicans and they did not think of their beliefs and practices as Anglicanism. Anglican and Anglicanism became a part of the English language at a time when the Church of England had grown from two provinces in the British Isles to two British provinces and a number of dioceses around the world, the Church of Ireland in what is now Eire and Northern Ireland, and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. It was becoming a world church instead of a national church.

The Church of England had at the beginning of the nineteenth century a Protestant identity and a Protestant faith. At the conclusion of that century it had two wings—one that retained the Protestant identity and the Protestant faith and the other that was bent upon moving the English Church closer to the Church of Rome, even if it required a deliberate campaign of ecclesiastical disobedience.

At its Annual Conference this year Church Society will examine how the ecclesiastical disobedience of the Tractarian – Ritualist movements paved the way for the ascendancy of liberalism, modernism, and pluralism in the Anglican Church. Whether the modern day successors of these two movements want to admit it, they did set an example with their disobedience that the liberals would follow. They showed the latter that the Anglican Church was not prepared to deal with such rebellion in her midst and a determined innovator could successfully move forward its agenda.

In the Church of England evangelicals were divided over what was the best way to deal with the Tractarians and Ritualists. In the Protestant Episcopal Church the most evangelical of the Episcopalians succumbed to the propaganda of the Tractarians and the Ritualists and accepted their reinterpretation of the Anglican tradition. They seceded from the Protestant Episcopal Church and formed a new church, the Reformed Episcopal Church. They left the Protestant Episcopal Church in the hands of the adherents of Tractarianism and Ritualism and the more liberal of the evangelicals who quickly lost their evangelical identity and became Broad Churchmen.

For sixty odd years the Protestant Episcopal Church was without an evangelical wing. In the opening decades of the second half of the twentieth century there was a resurgence of evangelicalism in what had by then become the Episcopal Church but it did not lead to a wide-spread revival of traditional Anglican evangelicalism that was Reformed in doctrine and Low Church in practice. Influenced by the liturgical movement, the charismatic renewal movement, and the Ancient-Future, or Worship Renewal, movement, the new evangelicalism is less Reformed in doctrine and more Broad Church in practice than classical Anglican evangelicalism.

In some quarters the new evangelicalism is barely recognizable as evangelicalism due to the independent Catholic influence that has permeated the Ancient-Future movement. This influence is far from a revival of primitive Catholicism that it is promoted as being. Rather it represents the introduction of later medieval Catholic teaching, customs, and usages, including doctrines and practices that English Reformers had rejected at the Reformation, for example, the exposure of the consecrated host in a monstrance for adoration.

In the twenty-first century we find a situation that is not unlike in the nineteenth century—a divided evangelical wing in the Church of England and conservative evangelicals in North America who have bought into a liberal-modernist-pluralist reinterpretation of the Anglican tradition and who are prepared to succeed from the Anglican Church at a time their presence is needed to bolster the Protestant and Reformed identity of Anglicanism. Like the nineteenth century Evangelical Episcopalians who formed the Reformed Episcopal Church they are permitting another school of thought to define Anglicanism for them instead of championing authentic historic Anglicanism, accepting its revisionist reinterpretation of Anglicanism as genuine Anglicanism and then rejecting Anglicanism on the grounds that it is too liberal, too modernistic, too pluralistic, and so forth. It is like a replay of what happened in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the 1870s.

This development comes at a most inopportune time. The establishment of the Personal Ordinariates and the recent events of the Dublin Primates Meeting have created a window of opportunity to take back the Anglican Church and recover and reinforce its Protestant and Reformed character. Those who should be at the forefront of such a movement are set upon bolting the Anglican Church. They are conceding victory to the liberals in the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church without even putting up a fight and they are leaving the Anglican Church in North America and other breakaway Anglican bodies in the hands of those who are less capable of spearheading a recovery of genuine historic Anglicanism in North America. They are contributing to the creation of the very situation in North America which they erroneously claim already exists. They are repeating the same mistake as the founders of the Reformed Episcopal Church. They do not see it that way but seldom do those who are caught up in a movement have insight into what they are doing.

At the same time if their hearts are not in the recovery of genuine historic Anglicanism in North America but are elsewhere and God is behind their departure, then all we can do is wish them well. They will be sorely missed. Their presence might have tipped the balance. But if God is calling them to serve Him in another denomination, and they are not following the thoughts and intents of a deceitful heart, we cannot hold them back from serving God where He calls them to serve Him. We must release them with our blessings and prayers and send them on their way. God will provide others to take their place.

Our Lord turned away those who desired to follow him but only on their own conditions. He knew that the half-hearted soon turn back or fall by the wayside. Those who would truly follow him were those who were willing to follow him with their whole heart. It is the same for any cause. Those supporting the cause must be willing to completely put their heart into it. This is no criticism of those who are not drawn to a particular cause. It is recognition that God is not leading them to support that cause. He has other things in store for them.

They may in time discover that he is indeed leading them to support the cause of authentic historic Anglicanism in the North American Anglican Church but first they must sojourn with another denomination for a time. God may do this to equip them. He may do this to help them discover whom they really are, where their heart really lies. He may do this to test them, to try their hearts. He may refine them in the fire of adversity.

God may show them that what they are seeking to escape is wide spread and not confined to the Anglican Church. It is symptomatic of a number of spiritual diseases that afflict Christianity in our time. Fleeing them is not the answer. They are everywhere. They must be confronted and contained.

We must not underestimates the tremendous impact culture has upon churches, even conservative churches. This impact in not limited to our time but has affected the Christian Church in the past. What we sometimes consider a part of the ethos of a particular church is really the remnants of past cultural contexts in which the church existed.

We have undergone and are undergoing a number of major shifts in our own culture. The spiritual diseases we see in our churches are in part the effects of these cultural shifts. They are also spiritual diseases that have afflicted humanity for a long time and are related to being human.

Wider cultural elements will be incorporated into a particular church’s own culture and then will be assigned spiritual meanings. Once they undergo this process of spiritualization, they become hallowed by religious association, and become a part of the church’s sacred tradition—its cultus. They may come in time to distort, overshadow or even replace the actual teachings of the faith.

I am convinced that we have reached a major turning point in the history of the Anglican Church particularly in the West. The retention of particular cultic elements in any North American expression of Anglicanism is going to prove far less important than our adherence to core beliefs and values and our practice of these beliefs and values. In the marketplace of religions Christian forgiveness and kindness is more likely to demonstrate the greater worth of Christianity than flickering candles and pungent incense.

Historic Anglicanism—the faith of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal—is meant to be living vibrant faith, not a dead lifeless orthodoxy. It is not only to be believed but also to be lived. This may be seen from the Homilies. It is to be lived not in isolation from others but in the fellowship of the church and in relation to the community.

The world is in great need of this kind of faith—a faith that believes on the Lord Jesus Christ for everlasting life, a faith that works through love. It does not need a faith of human contriving that is hollow and empty—a bauble to fascinate children like a Christmas tree ornament that catches and reflects their image but is incapable of showing those lost in darkness the way God has opened for them into his marvelous light.