By Robin G. Jordan
The attack on the protestant and reformed principles of the
Anglican Church, which characterizes the official doctrinal positions of the
Anglican Church in North America, is not confined to its constitution, canons,
and ordinal. It is also quite evident in Texts
for Common Prayer, To Be a Christian:
An Anglican Catechism, and the proposed ACNA rites for admission of
catechumen, baptism, and confirmation.
With each new doctrinal statement that has been issued, that
attack has intensified, suggesting that absence of widespread objections to the
doctrinal positions taken in these documents has emboldened those behind them
to move in a more extreme direction.
One cannot, however, assume from the absence of such
objections that the congregations and clergy forming the ACNA embrace these
doctrinal positions 100%. Other dynamics are at work in the ACNA that account
for the lack of any observable pushback. Five such dynamics have been
discernible to date.
One dynamic is the belief that a united front must be
maintained at all costs. This belief is associated with an irrational fear that
the Episcopal Church’s liberals will take advantage of any disunity to damage
and destroy the ACNA. This is not going to happen. The liberals in the
Episcopal Church provide a convenient bogeyman to distract the attention of
congregations and clergy in the ACNA from one faction’s concerted efforts to
shape the denomination to their liking.
A second dynamic is that congregations and clergy in the
ACNA display a naïve trust in their leaders. They credulously assume that their
leaders always have their best interest at heart. They do not consider the
possibility that their leaders might have a hidden agenda or might act out of
self-interest. In the case of ACNA leaders such an agenda may not so much be
hidden as congregations and clergy are blind to it. Anglo-Catholic and
philo-Orthodox leaders in the ACNA are pretty forthcoming about their
aspirations for the denomination.
A number of congregations and clergy in the ACNA have bought
into the inane idea that their bishops are more “godly” than the leaders of
other denominations, investing them with a kind of infallibility with which no
bishop is endowed. When they use the term “godly” in association with a bishop,
they are not referring to his belief in God and in the importance of living a
moral life. What they are alluding to is a special charism or charisma which
they believe that the bishop in question has received from the Holy Spirit.
This charism or charisma sets him apart from other bishops. Essentially they
are claiming that ACNA bishops have a special anointing that is lacking in
other denominational leaders.
This attitude toward denominational leaders is a dangerous
one. As a result ACNA bishops have been allowed broad discretion on matters
which demand reasonable limits to their discretion. Negligible accountability has
been required from them for their decisions. Their irregular and unlawful
actions have been explained away and rationalized.
The notion that the ACNA bishops have a special anointing goes
hand in hand with the belief that the formation of the ACNA is a special
movement of the Holy Spirit. The ACNA represents the next if not ultimate phase
in the evolution of the Anglican Church, purportedly uniting in one denomination
three disparate ecclesiastical traditions and forming from these traditions a
new synthesis.
Critics of this particular view of the ACNA point out that
the new synthesis is nothing more than Anglo-Catholicism in a new guise. The
positions that it takes on key issues are identical to those that
Anglo-Catholicism takes. Those who are taking these positions may have come to them
by a different route than traditionalist Anglo-Catholics but how they came to
the positions does not make the positions any less unreformed Catholic. Anglo-Catholics
have also appropriated the thinking behind this view of the ACNA and are
exploiting it to further the teaching and liturgical practice of their school
of thought.
A third dynamic is that disagreement with what ACNA leaders
are doing is equated with disloyalty to the ACNA. Consequently people in the
ACNA are reluctant to voice their disagreement. Those who do voice their
disagreement generally elicit a strong negative reaction from their peers. If
they are outspoken, they may be subject to pressure from ACNA leaders to moderate
their criticism or to discontinue it altogether.
A fourth dynamic is that people in the ACNA are weary from
the struggles of the past 30 years. They may not be happy with developments in
the ACNA but they are not prepared to change denominations or to start a new
denomination. They acquiesce to teaching and liturgical practice to which they
would have strenuously objected at an earlier stage in their lives. They have
lost their will to fight for what they believe and value.
A fifth dynamic is that people in the ACNA do not recognize
the extent and seriousness of the problem. Some take the position that doctrine
does not matter. Others take the position that the ACNA is a work in progress.
What is happening in the ACNA today, they argue, is no indication of how the ACNA will be in
the future. They are oblivious to the lessons of history. The ACNA is moving
along a well-defined track with predictable outcomes. The ACNA shows no
signs of switching to a new track.
The ACNA does have its share of people who mistakenly view
Anglicanism as a pope-less variant of Roman Catholicism, an independent form of
unreformed Catholicism. The ACNA also has a contingent who view the supposedly
undivided Church of the eleventh century before the East-West Schism as a
golden age of Christianity and whose aspiration is to reconstruct Anglicanism
along the lines of that Church.
A group that is well-represented in the ACNA as well in the
Episcopal Church are those who hold that “Anglican is what Anglican does” – a view
of Anglicanism that echoes the words of Forest Gump’s mother, “Stupid is what
stupid does.” This view of Anglicanism ties Anglican identity to whatever
beliefs and ways of doing things have come to the fore in a particular
jurisdiction, in a particular locality, in particular time period. In other
words, Anglican identity is ever-shifting and is defined by the moment, not by
a particular doctrinal foundation.
Within such an environment it is fairly easy for one faction
to establish the doctrinal positions of its school of thought as the official doctrinal
positions of the denomination and exclude the doctrinal positions of other schools
of thought, including positions on key issues, which are more biblically
orthodox and authentically Anglican and which are consistent with what the
Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans identifies as the doctrinal
foundation of Anglicanism, defining core Anglican identity. Having firmly ensconced
its doctrine as the official doctrine of the denomination, this faction need
not fear a major reform movement dislodging its doctrine from that place as it
has left no room for such a movement to develop. It has robbed of their
standing the other schools of thought represented in the denomination and
relegated them to the fringe of the denomination. This happened in the abortive
first Anglican Church in North America and the Continuing Anglican Churches
into which it splintered. It is happening in the second Anglican Church in
North America today.
The Anglo-Catholic ascendancy in the former Protestant
Episcopal Church contributed to the present state of affairs in the Episcopal
Church. It helped to pave the way for the spread of liberalism in that
denomination. The Anglo-Catholic Movement would reshape attitudes toward the
Bible, the Church, and the clergy in the Episcopal Church and would foster an
environment in that denomination, in which false teaching could flourish. In a
denomination in which the laity were expected to defer to the clergy and
inferior clergy to their superiors on matters related to doctrine, discipline,
and worship, congregations and clergy would prove easy prey for false teachers.
The spread of ritualistic practices in the worship of the Episcopal Church,
through the influence of the Anglo-Catholic Movement, also facilitated the
spread of liberalism in the denomination. As long as clergy spreading false
teaching did not make any alarming changes in the worship of a congregation, the
congregants would accept such teaching as they had that of previous clergy.
Ritualism would provide a convenient smokescreen behind which liberalism could
make inroads into the denomination.
Here in western Kentucky Episcopal churches
are fairly Anglo-Catholic and high church in the way that they worship. Anglo-Catholicism
was an important influence in the Diocese of Kentucky from the 1830s on. One
does not detect the radical liberalism of their clergy until they begin to preach
or teach. Those who continue to attend these churches do so in large part out
of loyalty to a particular church and due to a preference for Anglo-Catholic
and high church worship, not because of the liberal preaching and teaching of
the clergy.
Anglo-Catholicism’s occupation of a dominant position of
influence in most Continuing Anglican Churches in the United States has not
resulted in the growth of these jurisdictions but has led to their decline. As a
member of the clergy of one of these jurisdictions belatedly pointed out, the
focus of the Continuing Anglican Churches has been upon the maintenance of doctrinal
purity, not evangelism and church planting.
As this writer sees it, the Anglican Church in North America
in failing to rein in the more extreme Anglo-Catholic and philo-Orthodox element
in the denomination and to show generosity to congregations and clergy in the
ACNA who are faithful to the protestant and reformed principles of the Anglican
Church and to ungrudgingly make room for their beliefs and values in the
denomination is sabotaging itself. The incorporation of these beliefs and
values not only into the doctrine, disciple, and worship of the ACNA but also
its form of governance would counterbalance the worst tendencies of
Anglo-Catholic and philo-Orthodox extremism in the denomination. In the
long-term it would strengthen the denomination and show to the world that the
ACNA had the requisite maturity to become a member province of the global
Anglican Communion.
Photo credit: Pixabay, public domain
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