If there was ever a possibility for this “Anglo-Catholicism,” along the Orthodox model, it seems to me it was cut short by the political developments of the 17th Century. During the 18th Century, both “high church” and “low church,” elements in the Cof E. were heavily influenced by the reform tradition. John Henry Newman, who came from an evangelical family to Oxford, followed this “Third Way” until he found that his bishops were not bishops in the traditional sense but governmental officials in a sense that no Orthodox/Catholic bishop ought to be. Erasmianism has been the fatal flaw in the C.of E. The Liturgical Movement dressed up the priests in catholic looking garments, and there was a return of sorts to early Anglicanism, but it could not carry the day.
“The Liturgical Movement dressed up the priests in catholic looking garments, and there was a return of sorts to early Anglicanism, but it could not carry the day.”
RS, I doubt the likelihood that Anglicanism, on any broad basis (this is not to say that there are not Anglican parishes out in the world which are fully Catholic in theology and praxis but in an Anglican form as opposed to Roman or Greek or Arab or Slavic), can recover its pre-Whitby character as a fully Catholic Church outside the Roman style. Too much has changed and the society around it is fundamentally antithetical to an Orthodox mindset. Unlike the Maronites, who may well recover that which Rome almost completely stamped out, there is no surrounding, supportive culture within which to restore an “Orthodox” Anglicanism. But I will say that there is a corner of Anglicanism where an Anglican form of Orthodoxy could, in fact here and there does, flourish and that is in monasticism. Perhaps starting there it could restore The Faith to Anglicanism as practiced “in the world”.
As a side note, I’d have said that a more “Orthodox” Anglicanism was still an even odds chance into the late 19th century and frankly it was the more evangelical wing of that church which seemed more patristic in its theology than the Anglo Catholics of Card. Newman. The theology of the Anglo Catholics is much closer to the “innovative scholasticism” as one Orthodox theologian called it, of the Latin Church of those times than it was to the patristic theology of of Orthodoxy. You tell me, RS, who sounds more like the Eastern Fathers, +JC Ryle or Card. Newman?
The whole “smells and bells” thing is important and because lex orandi, lex credendi is a basic principle of both the Orthodox and Latin churches, the lack of a sound liturgical praxis in evangelical Anglicanism is as troubling as the High Church praxis of the Anglo-Catholics may have seemed comforting. From where I sit in Orthodoxy in 2007, however, in a church which is regularly receiving converts from TEC, the underlying theology is far more important, for now, than the praxis.