Waiting for the Penny to Drop

Blackpool Pier

By Robin G. Jordan

I don’t share the confidence of ACNA’ers who identify themselves as Protestants and accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 and the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as their authoritative standard of doctrine and worship but believe that they can not only practice their reformed faith in the Anglican Church in North America but also thrive as a theological school of thought within a province that shows no evidence of being committed to tolerating a diversity of theological views. I believe that they are underestimating the dogmatism of the ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic-philo-Orthodox wing and its determination to transform the Anglican Church in North America into a church that is unequivocally Catholic in doctrine, order, and practice.

I do not see ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic-philo-Orthodox wing relaxing its efforts at some point down the road and being satisfied with the gains that it has made. One has only to look at the history of the Anglican Church from nineteenth century onto see that it not the nature of the beast. For those who may be unfamiliar with this idiomatic phrase, it refers to characteristics or qualities of individuals and groups that are regularly displayed by these individuals or groups. These qualities or characteristic are often undesirable or problematic.

Changing the identity of the Anglican Church from reformed Protestant to unreformed Catholic has been a longstanding aim of the Anglo-Catholic movement. One has only to survey the various articles on the Internet to see how effective that Anglo-Catholic movement has been in influencing perceptions of the Anglican Church. While its views have little factual basis, they continue to circulate and to shape the way people see the Anglican Church. The newer liturgies that a number of Anglican provinces have adopted reinforce the impression that if the Anglican Church is not outrightly Catholic, it is a hybrid of Protestantism and Catholicism. The doctrinal malleability and ritualistic proclivities of American evangelicals and charismatics who have migrated to the North American Anglican Church in recent years has further contributed to this impression.

Making repeated concessions, accommodating the ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic-philo-Orthodox wing at every turn, backing down instead standing up for what one believes, and maintaining an illusion of unity at all costs are not going to secure a future for historic Anglicanism in the Anglican Church in North America. They only encourage the ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic-philo-Orthodox wing to press its demands and to see how far it can get.

Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement did not prevent Hitler from invading Poland and Czechoslovakia. It delayed the outbreak of World War II by only a few months. As Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in 1948, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

The Old Testament is filled with warnings about treating serious problems lightly and preferring to believe that everything is okay when it is not, about wanting to hear only pleasant words and listen to illusions. Human nature has not changed over the centuries. I keep reading stories of tourists who are mauled by a bear in one of the National Parks because they ignore the signs warning against approaching the bears. These stories suggest that human beings are incredibly stupid or they do not take potentially dangerous situations with the seriousness that they deserve. They are unable or unwilling to entertain the possibility that the bear they are approaching might attack them. It does not fit with how they want to see things.

Rather than accept the possibility that the assessments of the present situation in the Anglican Church in North America in my articles may be accurate, I suspect that some readers may chose to view me in a way not too different from the way liberal Episcopalians view conservative Anglicans who reject non-celibate gay priests and same sex marriage on biblical grounds. They may believe that I am motivated by a deep-seated hostility toward Anglo-Catholics. They prefer to ignore the serious differences between the ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic-philo-Orthodox wing’s unreformed Catholicism and historic Anglicanism’s reformed Protestantism.

Those differences, however, are very real. Anglo-Catholic beliefs and practices have much more in common with the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church than they do those of the reformed Anglican Church. Anglo-Catholics espouse much of what the English Reformers rejected on solid biblical grounds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their beliefs and practices are in many instances antithetical to those of historic Anglicanism. There is no way around it. Anglo-Catholicism and historic Anglicanism are two diametrically-opposed systems of thought. This may not fit with the views of those who see the Anglican Church in North America as an ecumenical church in which historically disparate theological traditions merge into a single, unified theological tradition. It is, however, a reality that has been recognized by both sides of the divide as far back as the sixteenth century.

Protestants and Catholics may use the same words but the words have different meanings for them. They have different views of the Bible, the creeds, salvation, sanctification, the Church, the sacraments, ordination, apostolic succession, and a laundry list of other issues. There may be some areas of agreement such as on marriage and human sexuality but these areas of agreement do not outnumber the areas of disagreement, which are numerous.

This is the reality with which ACNA’ers who identify themselves as Protestants and accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 and the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as their authoritative standard of doctrine and worship appear to have not come to terms. A church that in which Anglo-Catholic-philo-Orthodox bishops exercise significant influence in its College of Bishops, its Provincial Council, and its various task forces, and which has an Anglo-Catholic catechism and an Anglo-Catholic service book, is not an environment favorable to the growth of historic Anglicanism.

I have images of myself as a clockwork monkey in a red fez and yellow vest, banging cymbals, or a pink Energizer bunny in sunglasses, banging a drum, when I write articles like this one. But what I have written today needs to be said over and over again on the off chance that the penny will drop with one or more of my readers and they grasp what I have been saying.

For readers who may be unfamiliar with this expression it harkens back to England of the 1930s. At the time England had a lot of machines that operated with an English penny. They were a favorite attraction on seaside piers. They still had a few of them when I was a boy—weighing machines that also told your fortune, moving picture machines into which you put a penny, cranked the handle, and watched the pictures move. Sometimes the penny would get stuck and you have wait for the penny to drop for the machine to work.

My grandmother and my mother used this expression frequently when I was a boy. They used it to describe that aha! moment when someone eventually put two and two together and came up with four. They finally understood what my grandmother or mother was saying. The person in question was often as not my grandfather, my older brother, or myself.