By Robin G. Jordan
I have been taking note of how different members of the
Anglican Church in North America react to the observation that the College of
Bishops is taking the denomination in the direction of unreformed Catholicism. As I noted in yesterday’s article some ACNA members
dismiss it as a passing phase. They insist that it should not be a cause for
concern. These ACNA members, however, cannot offer anything in support of their
belief. What they are essentially doing in engaging in a form of denial. They
are using this particular belief to convince themselves and others that nothing
out of the ordinary is happening in the denomination. It enables them to ignore
what is a serious problem in the denomination—the favoring of the teaching and
practices of one school of thought in the Anglican Church in North America to
the exclusion of the teaching and practices of the other schools of thought in
the denomination, particular that school of thought which is committed to the
Biblical and Reformation doctrines and convictions of the Anglican formularies
and authentic historic Anglicanism.
A number of member of the Anglican Church in North America show
a willingness to give much greater weight to the opinions of their bishops than
they warrant, at times surrendering to the bishops the interpretation of what
is happening in the denomination rather than interpreting developments for
themselves. If a bishop denies that the College of Bishops is favoring the
teaching and practices of one school of thought in the denomination, they will
believe the bishop rather than draw their own conclusions from the available
evidence. This is a very dangerous tendency. They are essentially allowing the
bishops to define reality for them, choosing to accept what the bishops tell
them over what a careful examination of these developments shows. They are
failing to recognize that bishops may be motivated by special interests and are
capable of behaving unscrupulously and rationalizing this behavior just like
everyone else. Nowhere in Scripture do we find anything to suggest that bishops
are free from the taint of sin, not inclined to evil, or infallible. This
tendency also shows how quickly members of the Anglican Church in North America
have forgotten what happened in the Episcopal Church when its members were uncritical
in their acceptance of the opinions of their bishops, increasingly giving more
credence to these opinions than to the revealed truth of God’s Word.
While one segment of the Anglican Church in North America is
committed to making the denomination unreformed Catholic in faith, order, and
practice and is a strong influence in the Prayer Book and Liturgy and other
task forces and the College of Bishops, another segment has this notion that
the Anglican Church in North America is—to borrow a description from the
writings of J.C. Ryle--a kind of Noah’s ark in which orthodox Anglicans of
various stripes rub shoulders, united solely by a common acceptance of the
creeds and a traditional view of marriage and human sexuality and a tacit
agreement to tolerate each others’ opinions. Clearly this view of the
denomination is not reflected in its constitution and canons, which favor the
opinions of the unreformed Catholic segment. It is certainly not reflected in Texts for Common Prayer and To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism. They favor the beliefs and thinking of the
unreformed Catholic segment over any other theological outlook.
This view of the Anglican Church in North America is more
than a harmless delusion. It inhibits those who hold this view from making a realistic
appraisal of Texts for Common Prayer
and To Be a Christian: An Anglican
Catechism and making sure their own beliefs and thinking is comprehended in
the denomination’s Prayer Book and Catechism. The unreformed Catholic segment
is able to take advantage of their hesitance. It has no such inhibition.
Those who hold this view of the Anglican Church in North
America also show a tendency to see as a form of intolerance the observation
that the College of Bishops is taking the denomination in the direction of
unreformed Catholicism. They themselves do not want to be perceived as
intolerant toward the denomination’s unreformed Catholic segment. For this
reason they are reluctant to agree with the observation despite the fact that
the College of Bishops is not making room for their theological outlook in the
denomination’s official doctrinal statements. One is left to conclude that they
do not take what is happening with the seriousness that it deserves or they
lack a strong instinct of theological self-preservation. What they believe and
think does not really matter that much to them. Being perceived as tolerant is
more important.
Those toward whom they wish to be perceived as tolerant,
however, do not exhibit such a concern and take advantage of their
preoccupation with being perceived as tolerant. It is as if the two segments of
the Anglican Church in North America live in entirely different worlds—one
segment going out of its way to show how tolerant it is toward the other
segment while the other segment devotes itself to undermining what that segment
believes and thinks.
What keeps some ACNA members from responding with alarm to
developments in the Anglican Church in North America is they are safely
cocooned in a local church that is not presently moving in the direction that
the College of Bishops is taking the denomination. They are not directly
affected by what is happening at the provincial level. Since they are not
experiencing the immediate effects of these developments, they do not take the
developments with the seriousness that they deserve. This may change when the
Prayer Book in preparation is completed and becomes compulsory along with the
Catechism, when their diocese gets a new bishop, or when their current rector
moves on to a new church.
Among the things that trouble me about these reactions is
that they are similar to the reactions of a segment of the Episcopal Church
when the direction which its bishops were taking that denomination was drawn to
their attention. It was slow if not reluctant to grasp the full implications of
what was happening. One of the results was that nothing was done about it at a
stage when doing something might have made a difference. The situation was
allowed to get out of hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment