Leaving home: The Future of the Faith in England

The thought of leaving Canterbury, spiritually or emotionally, breaks my heart. I grew up there. I spent five years in the school built around its cloisters. I sang from its tower on Ascension days. I sat for hours at the entrance to the cloisters where Thomas a Becket was struck down for refusing the demands of the secular over the sacred. I took the Eucharist there in the bowels of its undercroft before dawn in the mists of winter. I was confirmed there when the saintly prophetic Michael Ramsey was Archbishop.

But Canterbury has sold its birthright. She planted the orthodox Gospel around the world so that scores of millions worship our adored Risen Christ, but has slid from under the obligations of the Apostolic faith she received, to a heterodox secularized shadow of that faith.

I often wonder how I could explain our present difficulties to St Augustine who came here to evangelise in 597. I think I would say that “just as you, blessed brother in Christ, are still struggling with the Arians, who are powerful in Eastern Europe at the moment, we are struggling with the new Arians. Just as you will overcome them by the 8th Century, we will too, by the power of the Spirit.

But our Arians have assaulted the apostolic faith not by a full on assault on the Holy Trinity, but by a sideways undermining of it. Jesus has become less than the 2nd person of the Trinity because he has been reduced by claiming he suffered from cultural ignorance; he is thought to be captive to a 1st century culture with its misogyny and restricted sexual ethics. Our heretics have decided that Jesus did not come to reveal the Father, because they have adopted a new secular and essentially Marxist idea, that gender is an oppressive cultural construct. And they join that idea to a second piece of Marxism, that ‘equality’ is the most important social value to strive after. The masculinity of the Father, and that of the Son, are for them unwelcome cultural constraints. The revelation of a hierarchy of glory inverted by love became an anathema to them, because they worship equality. Keep reading

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I posted this comment on Anglican Ink in response to Gavin Ashenden's essay:

"We know that under Archbishop Foley Beach the ACNA has continued to plant Churches, convert the lost and longing to the faith, and reconcile the catholic, evangelical and charismatic charisms. It has kept the historic and apostolic teaching about gender and sexuality. It has resisted the spirit of the age. It flourishes."

My reaction to this statement is to question whether Gavin Ashenden has closely examined the doctrinal statements that the ACNA has issued to date in the form of its constitution and canons, its ordinal, its trial Holy Communion services, its catechism, and its proposed rites of admission of catechumens, baptism, and confirmation. There is no reconciliation of "catholic, evangelical, and charismatic charisms"--far from it! These documents are Anglo-Catholic in stance, doctrine, and practice. This has become increasingly evident with each document that has been issued. The ACNA makes no room in these documents for Anglicans who are Biblical and Protestant in their stance and Reformed and Evangelical in doctrine and practice, for Anglicans who fully accept the Bible as their rule of faith and practice and the Anglican formularies, including the two Books of Homilies, as their standard of doctrine and worship. The English Reformers would not be welcome in the ACNA!

The ACNA's affirmation of the Jerusalem Declaration is cosmetic and rhetorical and does not represent its actual commitment to that statement of the tenets of orthodoxy underlying Anglican identity. It far from wholeheartedly embraces this declaration as it claims on its website.

For example, the ACNA rejects Point 4, "We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God's word and as authoritative today." It takes the position that the Articles are a historical document related to doctrinal controversies of the sixteenth century. The ACNA website in its statement of the denomination's fundamental declarations uses the wording of the Common Cause Theological Statement, which differs from the wording of Article I of its constitution. The Common Cause Theological Statement describes the Articles "as expressing the fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief." Article I omits the "the" and describes the Articles "as expressing fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief."

This wording leaves ACNA leaders free to determine what "fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief," are expressed in the Articles, "taken in their literal and grammatical sense." Since John Henry Newman published Tract 90, this last phrase has been understood to refer to his ahistorical reinterpretation of the Articles in a Romeward direction, disconnected from their historical context and the intent of their authors.

The GAFCON Theological Resource Group in the official commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration, Being Faithful: The Shape of Historical Anglicanism Today, published to prevent multiple and conflicting interpretations of the declaration, identifies the Articles as the long-recognized doctrinal standard , of Anglicanism, alongside the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. It takes the position that acceptance of their authority "is constitutive of Anglican identity." It makes this point, "the Jerusalem declaration calls the Anglican church back to the Articles as being a faithful testimony to the teaching of Scripture, excluding erroneous beliefs and practices and giving a distinct shape to Anglican Christianity."

The position that it has taken on the Thirty-Nine Articles, its tinkering with the preface and ordination rites of the Ordinal, its adoption of a worship standard that includes the pre-Reformation medieval service books, as well as the partially reformed 1549 Prayer Book, and its departures from the teaching of the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Anglican formularies in its catechism all raise serious questions as to whether the ACNA may be viewed as genuinely Anglican. It is certainly not Anglican in the confessional sense.

The ACNA may be planting new churches but, while it may draw attention to its efforts to reach non-traditional constituencies on its website, its church planting efforts are to a large extent targeted at traditional constituencies of the Episcopal Church in the USA. Here in Kentucky its efforts are confined largely to two major urban areas--areas where the Episcopal Church has historically had sizable constituencies. Except for the suburbs of these areas rural and small town Kentucky are ignored. Its church planting pattern is not too much different from that of the Episcopal Church in the past. The Episcopal Church, however, did give more attention to rural and small town Kentucky. The ACNA has not to my knowledge made public reliable data on distribution, size, and viability of its church plants.

Ashenden needs to consider deleting this paragraph from his essay as it shows that he knows nothing of the real situation in North America. It casts doubt on the validity of everything else that he written.

Photo credit: Pixabay, public domain