A Living Text: The Anglican Church in North America Versus the Thirty-Nine Articles

ACNA's Provincial Meeting Journal is out and it shows ACNA talking out of both sides of its mouth on the filioque, a doctrine central to all of Western Christendom. The draft liturgies in this document contain a Nicene Creed that reads:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. The foot note to this reads:

The filioque clause “and the Son” may be added here. It is not included in the text above for ecumenical purposes, in accordance with the 1978 Lambeth Conference, though the ACNA does not disagree with the theology of the filioque.

So you can do whatever you want, say the filioque or not, because ACNA wants to be ecumenical with a church that explicitly violates Article XXII of the 39 Articles.

And how do you not disagree with the theology of something and then drop it anyway? Read more

The Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Jerusalem Declaration, and Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today--the official GAFCON commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration--take the position that the Thirty-Nine Articles is as authoritative for the global Anglican community in the 21st century as the Articles were for the Church of England in the 16th century. The GAFCON Theological Resource Group in The Way, the Truth, and the Life identify Anglo-Catholicism and liberalism as two major challenges to the authority of the Bible and the Anglican formularies. Both of these challenges originated in the 19th century. The Anglican formularies consist of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the 1661 Ordinal, and the two Books of Homilies. The GAFCON Theological Resource Group in Being Faithful affirms acceptance of the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles as constitutive of Anglican identity.

The ACNA's ecumenical adventurism puts it at odds with GAFCON and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and shows how loose the ACNA sits to the tenets of authentic historic Anglicanism. As I have pointed out elsewhere, as far as the identity of the ACNA is concerned, the ACNA is moving in direction of Independent Catholicism, not Anglicanism. Driving this movement are the traditionalist Anglo-Catholic and Convergentist wings of North American Anglicanism (albeit referring to it as "Anglicanism" may be a misnomer.)

Leading the global Anglican community has been viewed by the Episcopal Church as its manifest destiny since the 19th century. Elements in the ACNA and the Anglican Mission have not abandoned this idea. They see themselves in the same role, determining the future shape of global Anglicanism. The major difference between this group and the Episcopal Church is their vision of global Anglicanism. The Episcopal Church's vision of global Anglicanism is a radical liberal vision. Their vision is a radical Catholic one.