Bad to the Bone – Part 3

An Appraisal of American Anglicanism

By Robin G. Jordan

In this third and final part of my article, "Bad to the Bone: An Appraisal of American Anglicanism," I complete my examination of the problems besetting American Anglicanism and what lies behind them. In this part of the article my focus is the last three of the areas that I listed in the first part. They are bishops and episcopacy, the sacraments, and mission.

Bishops and Episcopacy. One of the problems in the Episcopal Church was, and continues to be, the disregard of Episcopal bishops for their own canons when dealing with clergy who opposed the normalization of homosexuality and other changes in the Episcopal Church in their dioceses. Underlying this problem is their understanding of the office of bishop and the authority inherent in that office. During the nineteenth century the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Episcopal Church promoted the view that all authority in the Church is derived from the bishops as the successors to the apostles. The parish clergy, the parish vestry, the diocesan convention, and the diocesan standing committee obtain their authority from the bishop. The general convention obtains its authority from the college of bishops. What limits the constitution and canons imposed upon episcopal authority are voluntary. This view would shape thinking about the role of the bishop and the exercise of episcopal authority in the Episcopal Church. This view tended to encourage bishops to be disdainful of the constitution and canons of their diocese and the province and to see themselves as above the law. It tended to discourage the Episcopal Church from taking disciplinary action against bishops who flouted the provisions of these governing documents. It also enabled those who were sympathetic to the liberal agenda to explain away or justify the arbitrariness of a liberal bishop in his dealings with dissident clergy.

The same view has also shaped thinking about the role of the bishop and the exercise of episcopal authority in the Anglican Mission, formerly the Anglican Mission in America, as well as the Anglican Church in North America. It certainly has shaped that thinking in most of the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions.

One of the earliest proponents of this view was Bishop Samuel Seabury. He opposed the admission of the laity to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, with the privilege of legislating, and much less their possession of co-ordinate power. Seabury and the churches under his oversight refused to unite with the Episcopal Church until a change had been made in its constitution that not only gave bishops the right to sit as a separate house and to originate and propose acts for the concurrence of the other house of the General Convention but also to veto the acts that the other house proposed and of which they disapproved. This would give the clergy legislative power disproportionate to their numbers. It would provide fertile soil for clericism and prelacy in the Episcopal Church and foster their growth, but not to the benefit of the Church or to the advance of the gospel.

The Sacraments. The Thirty-Nine Articles recognizes only two sacraments—Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. While Article 25 contains a reference to “those commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction,” the Articles do not affirm the sacramental system of the pre-Reformation Medieval Catholic Church and the post-Tridentian Roman Catholic Church. Rather they view these rites as partly having grown from “the corrupt following of the Apostles” and partly being “states of life allowed in the Scriptures.” Confirmation, penance, orders and extreme unction fall in the first category; matrimony in the second.

As I noted in the Part 2 of this article, the Thirty-Nine Articles, while adopted in a revised version in 1801, were not given regulatory force in the Episcopal Church. As a consequence Anglo-Catholicism would flourish in the Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century, as would liberalism. The Anglo-Catholic wing of the Episcopal Church would re-establish sacramental system of the Medieval Catholic Church that the English Reformers had rejected in the sixteenth century. With that system they would also revive the sacerdotalism and sacramentalism that had characterized the Medieval Catholic Church and which characterizes the Roman Catholic Church to this day.

The Medieval Catholic-Roman Catholic sacramental system would so influence thinking in the North American Church that Anglican Mission Bishop John Rodgers who claims to be an adherent of classical Anglicanism and Reformation Christianity writes in Essential Truths for Christians, his commentary on the Articles and introduction to systematic theology, that he sees no reason not to refer to these five rites as “lesser sacraments.” Bishop Rodgers argues that they are important means of grace and use outward and visible signs and on this basis they should be recognized as sacraments. (John Rodgers, Essential Truths for Christians, pp. 468-469) In doing so, he contradicts Article 25, which does not recognize these rites as means of grace and which states emphatically: “…they have not any visible sign and ceremony ordained of God.”

Rogers does not interpret Article 25 in plain, natural, and intended sense, taking into consideration not only the teaching of the Homilies but also the writings of the English Reformers in his interpretation of Article 25. Rather he takes a fanciful, ahistorical approach to the Thirty-Nine Articles at this point reminiscent of the “liberal catholic” approach of E. J. Bicknell. (J. I. Packer, The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today, p. 46) In his interpretation of the Articles Bicknell was influenced by John Henry Newman and the Tractarians who reinterpreted them in a Roman direction. Newman and the Tractarians and Bishop Colenso and “higher criticism” would undermine the authority of Scripture and the classical formularies in the Church of England in the nineteenth century. They would do the same thing in the Episcopal Church in the United States.

The position that Rodgers takes in Essential Truths for Christians is not far removed from that of “An Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism,” found in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It maintains that “confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction,” which its describes as “sacramental rites,” evolved in the Church under Holy Spirit’s guidance and are a means of grace. (The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 860). The 1979 Prayer Book relegates the Thirty-Nine Articles to its historical documents section.

Bishop Rodgers makes a number of statements in Essential Truths for Christians that cast doubts not only his scholarship but also his evangelical credentials. For example, he states that what he describes as “sacramental actions” are “treasured by Anglicans,” with the inference that all Anglicans are of one mind in regards to these rites, which is far from the truth. (John Rodgers, Essential Truths for Christians, pp. 468-469) In Essential Truths for Christians he shows the tendency of “three streams” theologians to gloze over significant differences between Anglo-Catholicism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism.

The influence of the Medieval Catholic-Roman Catholic sacramental system upon the North American Church has been so great that liberals in the Episcopal Church who no longer regard Scripture as divinely inspired or totally trustworthy continue to subscribe to teaching associated with that sacramental system. This includes belief in the presence of Christ under the forms of bread and wine in the Holy Communion and the ex opere operato operation of the sacraments.

Mission. The growth of the Episcopal Church in the United States was slow due to a number of factors. The Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches accompanied the pioneers as they moved west. The Episcopal Church waited for the advent of the railroad and the steamboat. By this time the Tractarianism and Ritualism were growing movements in the Episcopal Church, influencing its worship as well as its beliefs. This would impact what population segments with which the Episcopal Church would enjoy a measure of success. The Episcopal Church would become a church for the cultured, educated, and wealthy rather than a church for people in all walks of life. The Episcopal Church would engage in mission work on number of Indian reservations and with the freed slaves as well as overseas but it remained basically a church for the America’s elites. The breakaway churches—the Continuing Anglican Churches in 1970s and 1980s and the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission have followed in its footsteps. While some churches in the ACNA and the AM are reaching out to people groups that do not form a part of the traditional constituencies of the Episcopal Church in the United States, how extensive is this development has not been studied. By and large most churches in these two bodies appear to be focusing upon those population segments where the Episcopal Church was the most successful before radical liberalism became the dominant ideology of the church.

The Decade of Evangelism in the Episcopal Church in the 1990s revealed a church that had little stomach for evangelism. Those who did respond to call to reach and evangelize the unchurched were looked at askance if not with derision. Evangelism in the minds of Episcopalians had become to be associated with the evangelical churches, in particular the Baptists. Episcopalians had for several decades if not longer been building their identity around being anti-evangelical.

Among those who left the Episcopal Church to form the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission were some of the more mission-minded clergy and congregations in the Episcopal Church. But this cannot be said for all disaffected Episcopalians that make up the core of these two bodies. An anti-evangelical, anti-evangelistic mindset persists in the two bodies. Some but not all the churches in the ACNA and the AM have started new works. For some disaffected Episcopalians these two bodies are viewed as providing real opportunities to engage in evangelistic outreach and church planting; for others they are seen as offering safe havens from which they can escape the unwanted changes taking place in the Episcopal Church.

As for the Continuing Anglican Churches some jurisdictions have made an attempt to establish new churches. However, the anti-evangelical, anti-evangelistic mindset has tended to dominate the Continuum. In churches in which the sacraments are given greater emphasis than the Word of God, the proclamation of the Gospel is not the priority that it should be.

Archbishop Robert Duncan promotes the idea that the Anglican Church in North America is a part of a reform movement in Anglicanism. While Archbishop Duncan himself may believe what he is saying, it is really not the case. What one sees in the Anglican Church in North America do not represent change from what has been happening in the North American Church for the past 200 years. The Common Cause Partnership from which the ACNA was formed backed away from some of the more radical aspects of liberalism in the Episcopal Church such as the normalization of homosexuality. But the Common Cause Partnership did not by any stretch of the imagination represent a movement toward the recovery of the classical Anglican formularies and the authentic Anglican Way in the North American Church.

Duncan has in a number of his public statements sounded the themes of regression in response to a crisis and the need for a new settlement. The first translates into a return to prelacy, which as we have seen is hardly a new trend in the American Anglicanism. The second translates into a rejection of the reformed catholicism of the classical Anglican formularies. This as we have also seen is not a new trend in American Anglicanism either. One has only to look at the photos of the consecration of the new bishop of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin to have a good idea where the ACNA is heading. One sees a group of old men vested in all the finery of Medieval Catholic bishops.

In a time of economic downturn, high unemployment, and recession can North American Anglicans really afford such wasteful and worldly pomp and pageantry and the Medieval Catholic vision of the Church of which it is an integral part? The authentic Anglican Way embodies a reformed catholic vision of the Church, which is a much plainer and more spiritual vision of the Church, of men clothed in holiness, not costly ornate vestments, of lives devoted to the service of Christ and their fellow man, not the aggrandizement of power. It is, after all, the way of Christ whom St. Paul tells us:

… though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8, English Standard Version)

To read the accompnying article, "Further Thoughts on the State of Anglicanism in North America," click here.

To read Part 1 of the article, "Bad to the Bone: An Appraisal of American Anglicnism," click here.

To read Part 2 of the article,"Bad to the Bone: An Appraisal of American Anglicanism," click here.

To read the related article, "Bishops and Their Selection," click here.