Posted on 11/09/2006 3:20:53 PM PST by sionnsar
It would be nice if the Episcopal left could get its stories straight. 2003 used to be "prophetic" and a "movement of the spirit." Since nobody bought that, some TEC liberals like LA's Sergio Carranza are trying a new line. They're pretending to be conservatives:
Some Anglicans of the evangelical persuasion want to impose their particular point of view and their way of being on the rest of the Anglican population, as if there were only one way of being Anglican. In order to achieve their objective they have found some weird bedfellows: ambitious minor prelates, frustrated aspirants to the episcopate, wealthy American conservatives and an African Primate afflicted with megalomania.
Each of these individuals has followers and, specially, a private agenda. Claiming to work for unity, they want to enforce uniformity, and all together they create a cacophonous and strident discourse that only serves to confuse the faithful mainstream, the "diverse center" of our Church, and to give rise to an identity crisis.
According to Carranza, Anglicanism has never been about rules and regulations.
In the midst of this identity crisis that we are going through as an ecclesial family, we must be reminded often that there is not such a thing as a worldwide Anglican Church, an English equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church, uniform and unanimous, but an Anglican Communion, a worldwide fellowship of autonomous churches in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury who is not an English equivalent of the Roman Pope.
A classical statement of who we are can be found in the resolutions of the 1930 Lambeth Conference: "This (Anglican Communion) is a commonwealth of Churches without a central constitution: It is a federation without a federal government. It has come into existence without any deliberate policy. They (the Churches) are in the idiom of our fathers, ’particular or national’ Churches and they repudiate any idea of a central authority."
Requiring Anglicans to believe certain things and recognizing the Network would be un-Anglican.
In the United States of America we belong to the Anglican Communion only and as long as we are loyal members of the Episcopal Church, the sole and legitimate incarnation of Anglicanism in this country. At the base of our ecclesiology we do not find (yet) a covenant, much less a confession of faith, but the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. Although we are used to regard it as an Anglican instrument for ecumenical conversations, it is also a way of understanding the basis and the coherence of the Anglican Communion itself: what we regard as essential for Christian unity is what is basic to our own life as a communion of Churches.
So don't let radicals like Bob Duncan, Peter Akinola, Jack Iker and Greg Griffith destroy the Anglican tradition.
It is rather apparent that the detractors of the Episcopal Church seem to have erected some Instruments of Disunion to achieve their purposes: the Archbishop of Nigeria, the Meeting of the Global South Primates, the Network of Parishes and Dioceses, and the Anglican Communion Institute. I fully agree with Canon James A. Newman when he writes: "The identity of the Church cannot be maintained by judgmentalism and condemnation, but by walking the way of Jesus even in the face of hostility. The struggle in our Church today is not really about sex, it’s about the courage to face new knowledge and new understandings when they challenge what we have long believed. It’s about being open to the power of God to transform us from (being) a people simply of tradition to a people of compassion."
One could be a twit here and point out that while TEC had the right to do what it did in 2003, nothing obligates the rest of the Anglican world to accept it. So if TEC wants to insouciantly jettison 2,000 years of Christian teaching for entirely political reasons "face new knowledge and new understandings when they challenge what we have long believed," the rest of the Communion is not prevented from demanding that they do so outside the Communion. Whether they'll have the courage to show TEC the door until such time as TEC truly repents remains to be seen.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. untilit comes to real estate and money. THEN it's sho' 'nuff about trules and regulations.
I keep hearing David Bowie's "Dear Mr. Gravedigger" and Jethro Tull's "My God" whenever I hear about "Lambeth". I know I should hear something elevated, but the term just gets dragged out as an excuse for abuse (of which the song is an extreme example).
Why don't we just say that TEC is the moonbat wing of the Democratic Party in their smokehouses and leave it at that?
The REAL reason that the Episcopal left can't get its story(ies) straight is that it has no story!!!!
The Rest of Us have a story, the Gospel of Jesus Christ!!!! If the "Episcopal left" doesn't want that story, or wants to substitute another one (i.e., the idea that the "New UN" is the savior of the world), it should just pick up its marbles and go far, far away!!!!
"weird bedfellows: ambitious minor prelates, frustrated aspirants to the episcopate, wealthy American conservatives and an African Primate afflicted with megalomania"
What, one might ask, is a homosexual bishop with a drinking problem, a P.B. who swims with the dolphins, and A spiritualist bishop who dies wandering in the wilderness? Weird bedfellows indeed!
Church history is full of ambitious prelates, frustrated aspirants, the wealthy, yes, and the occasional meglomaniac. This is standard stuff! (Nothing like a meglomaniac who believes there destiny is to overturn 2000 years of teaching about what is sin!)
OK...and the AOC can break communion with you just like the EP can with any Orthodox bishop or National Church. If the definition of canonical Anglicanism is communion with the AOC, then if he boots ECUSA, that's basically it for "membership" in the Anglican communion is it not? "The struggle in our Church today is not really about sex, it’s about the courage to face new knowledge and new understandings when they challenge what we have long believed." A propos of another long dead heresiarch, +Maximos the Confessor wrote: "Even if the whole universe holds communion with the [heretical] patriarch, I will not communicate with him. For I know from the writings of the holy Apostle Paul: the Holy Spirit declares that even the angels would be anathema if they should begin to preach another Gospel, introducing some new teaching."
OK...and the AOC can break communion with you just like the EP can with any Orthodox bishop or National Church. If the definition of canonical Anglicanism is communion with the AOC, then if he boots ECUSA, that's basically it for "membership" in the Anglican communion is it not? "The struggle in our Church today is not really about sex, it’s about the courage to face new knowledge and new understandings when they challenge what we have long believed." A propos of another long dead heresiarch, +Maximos the Confessor wrote: "Even if the whole universe holds communion with the [heretical] patriarch, I will not communicate with him. For I know from the writings of the holy Apostle Paul: the Holy Spirit declares that even the angels would be anathema if they should begin to preach another Gospel, introducing some new teaching."
I knew my story as a priest in TEC was going to get interesting back in the mid to late 80's when somebody asked me if I could tell him what "the Episcopal Church believes", and I realized that, as a "church", it offically doesn't seem to believe anything, not even its own words.
Episcopal clerics were happy to pronounce this and that to be the way it was, the true Gospel, the Saddharma, whatever. But it was always only the opinion they shared with a couple of their friends. HERE the Blessed Sacrament is reverently locked up in a little expensive and ornate closet before which one bows, and lay people are not allowed to touch the trappings and vessels associated with the sacrament until after a reverential decontamination by an ordained person. THERE we give consecrated hosts to dogs to eat and pour the consecrated wine onto the myrtle or down the drain to mix with the other sewage.
TEC new motto: "standing for nothing, falling for anything."
As former President Clintoon whined, "it depends on the meaning of is".
If Christians understand Jesus's words of Institution "this is my body" to be a statement of absolute fact then there are tangible and discrenable consequences on how the Body of Christ shall be handled, given, and received.
And if Christians understand the meaning of "are" as in St. Paul's admonition to Corinth "now you are the body of Christ" there are tangible and discernable consequences of how the physical bodies we think are our own are to be given and received in intimate relations.
But for those who preach a different gospel there is no new law of obedience to Christ, only hedonistic antinomianism
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