By Robin G. Jordan
I am looking forward to the February 2016 release of the
third Eucharistic Prayer for the Anglican Church in North America’s proposed
2019 Book of Common Prayer, which, like the Second Eucharistic Prayer of the
Roman Rite will be based upon the purported third-century anaphora of
Hippolytus. According to Bishop Duncan’s report to the January 2016 meeting of the ACNA College of Bishops, ACNA
clergy and laity through the College of Bishops have requested a Eucharistic
Prayer based upon this anaphora.
Duncan does not identify which clergy and laity, how large a
group they comprise, and what theological stream they represent in the Anglican
Church in North America. Nor does he name the bishops through whom they
requested the prayer. As far as we know, members of the College of Bishops could
have come up with the idea themselves and only claimed that they were
speaking on the behalf of clergy and laity in the denomination.
A comparison of the
ACNA third Eucharistic Prayer and the Roman Catholic Church’s second
Eucharistic Prayer may prove revealing, particularly if the text is rearranged
to match the ordering of the traditional Roman Canon as was done with the Roman
Catholic Church’s second Eucharistic Prayer and phrases are added from the
Roman Canon in order to complete the liturgy as also was done with the Roman
Catholic Church’s second Eucharistic Prayer. It will be further
proof of the unreformed Catholic leanings of the Liturgy and Common Worship
Task Force and the College of Bishops.
While this anaphora
attributed to Hippolytus may hold a certain appeal due its purported antiquity
and its adaptation for use in the eucharistic rites in a number of
denominations in the last few years, recent scholarship has raised questions
about the age and authorship of the Apostolic
Constitutions in which the anaphora is found.
The task force and the
College of Bishops’ Review Committee has yet to produce a Eucharistic Prayer
that would be acceptable to Anglicans who are faithful to the Bible and the historic
Anglican formularies and stand in the Reformation heritage of the Anglican
Church—a prayer that is modeled upon the reformed Prayer of Consecration of the
1552 Prayer Book and reflects the Protestant and Reformed principles of
authentic historic Anglicanism. The Anglican Church in North America has
produced nothing like the Prayer of Consecration in the First Order for the
Lord’s Supper in An Australian Prayer
Book (1978), the Prayer of Consecration in the Holy Communion, First Order,
of A Prayer Book for Australia
(1995), the Prayer of Consecration in Holy Communion, Order Two in Contemporary
Language in the Church of England’s Common
Worship (2000), or the Prayer of Consecration in the Lord’s Supper, Form 1
in the Diocese of Sydney’s Common Prayer:
Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings (2012). Indeed the Anglican Church
in North America shows no respect for the historic Anglican formularies and the
Anglican Church’s Reformation heritage and ultimately for the Bible and the
gospel.
By now it should be quite
evident to the leaders of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans that
the Anglican Church in North America is far from an authentic expression of
historic Anglicanism. Its leaders are making no discernible effort to
comprehend the doctrinal beliefs and worship practices of Anglicans faithful to
the Bible and the historic Anglican formularies and standing in the Anglican
Church’s Reformation heritage. They have adopted what may be described as a de facto policy of exclusion when it
comes to this particular group of Anglicans and their school of Anglican
thought. Their presence for the time being is tolerated. However, their beliefs
and practices do not enjoy official standing in the denomination and have no
place in its formularies.
If any excluded group merits the intervention of the GAFCON
Primates on its behalf, it is this group. But the leaders of GAFCON prefer to
ignore its plight and to pander to the unreformed Catholic leaders of the
Anglican Church in North America, a group of leaders whose ideology GAFCON’s
own Theological Resource Group has identified as a major challenge to the
authority of the Bible and the historic Anglican formularies in the Anglican
Communion along with liberalism.
Those who presently occupy the center of influence in the
Anglican Church in North America seek not only to promote unreformed Catholic
teaching and practices in that ecclesial body but also in the larger Anglican
Communion. When he was Archbishop, Duncan promoted the use of the ACNA
Catechism in the member provinces of the Anglican Communion. The ACNA Catechism
teaches the Roman Catholic order of salvation and its sacramental system. The
ACNA Catechism affirms the Eastern Orthodox position on the filoque in the
Nicene Creed and its view of sanctification.
Before the 2008 Lambeth Conference Duncan toured British
churches, promoting the replacement of the Protestant Elizabethan Settlement
with a new settlement, arguing that the Elizabethan Settlement was no longer
relevant for today. It is the Elizabethan Settlement that shaped historic
Anglicanism. Duncan now chairs the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force.
Serving as a special consultant to the task force is Bishop
Keith Ackerman, former President of Forward in Faith North America, an
organization dedicated to “the promotion of Catholic doctrine, order, and
practice.” Bishop Ackerman has called for a “new Oxford Movement.” He was a
major organizer of the International Catholic Congress of Anglicans convened
this past July in Fort Worth, Texas. With this gathering its organizers sought
to revive the influential Anglo-Catholic Congress movement.
Both Duncan and Ackerman share a common vision of the
Anglican Church—an Anglican Church reconstructed along the lines of the
supposedly undivided Church of the early High Middle Ages before the East-West
Schism in the eleventh century. Their vision of the Anglican Church is an
Anglican Church in which the historic Anglican formularies and the Anglican
Church’s Reformation heritage play no part.
Confessing Anglicans in the Anglican Church in North
America, those who are faithful to the Bible and the historic Anglican
formularies and stand in the Anglican Church’s Reformation heritage, need to be
weighing their options. In the long-term they have no future in that
denomination. With unreformed Catholic catechism and service book and a College
of Bishops dominated by Anglo-Catholic and philo-orthodox bishops, the Anglican
Church in North America will not provide an environment conducive to the
maintenance of their theological identity, much less to the spread of their
doctrinal beliefs and worship practices.
By now the precariousness of their position should be clear
to them. The deck is stacked against them. The prospect of maintaining a
faithful witness in the Anglican Church in North America is nil. They have only to look at what happened to the “Anglican
Loyalists” in the Continuing Anglican Movement to see their future in that
denomination. The “Anglican Loyalists” increasingly lost ground to the
“Catholic Revivalists” and eventually ceased to exist as a wing of that
movement.
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