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Fr Longeneker’s analysis of Anglican clergy is pretty much spot on.

However to say that Anglicanism is without dogma is wide of the mark - not least the 39 articles that clergy should assent to at ordination and induction into parishes.

How could he have responsibly been ordained if he did not agree with these delightfully protestant articles?

Methinks he was part of the problem every bit as much as those he castigates.

Let the Catholics go - the Anglicans are better off without them subverting it's historic statements of faith.

The foundational problem with modernism is that it is anti-supernaturalist. The most foundational difficulty with the anti supernaturalism of the modernist is that he has an anti-Christian conception of God. For the modernist God is either totally immanent. That is He is 'down here' and not transcendent, or he is so totally transcendent as to be a sort of deist God who is 'out there' and does not intervene. What the modernist theologian cannot believe in is a God who is both immanent and transcendent--a God who is 'out there' but who touches this world and ultimately enters this world through the incarnation.

Fr. Longenecker is engaged in building a strawman here, based on the dread word, "modernist." (Whatever that means....)

I seriously doubt that Fr. Longenecker is truly unable to find even a single "modernist theologian" who is able to believe in a "God who is both immanent and transcendent." It sounds like wonderful reason to leave ... but I suspect that the good Father is telling a lie.

Don't get me wrong: there's plenty wrong with what passes for theology in the Anglican churches (on both the "revisionist" and "orthodox" sides, it must be noted). But to simply condemn Anglicanism on the basis of an ill-defined epithet is not helpful; and it's not honest, either.

Over the past few years I've had the unpleasant opportunity to see at close hand the sorts of arguments that are unleashed by clergy engaged in self-justification. Fr. Longenecker's screed positively reeks with it.

A very interesting article. The Anglican Church does have a long history of compromise, and it has taken its via media role seriously. However, it is a Church that because of this stance is for the most part no longer Christian. Having been a member of Episcopalian churches from my youth till less than a decade ago, I have seen it led by individuals who do not believe in Scripture as foundational to the faith, nor do they really believe in Jesus Christ. They go through the motions of tradition, but even the tradition is jaded. The language of the Book of Common Prayer has been modernized and sanitized, and the heart of the CHristian message destroyed in favor of some pagan distortion. There are many faithful and Orthodox Episcopalians who want the CHurch to go back to its reformer roots, and they have left the ANglican communion to join with other like minded and conservative Episcopalians. I am not sure why this gentleman, Fr. Longnecker did not go in that direction. It is true that many Anglican churches are so Anglo Catholic as to be indistinguishable in practice from ROman Catholic ones. That is another reason I left the Episcopal Church. I am not a Roman Catholic. I do not ascribe to popery in any form, and the contemporary Episcopal church has in many ways gone straight over to Rome. Anyhow, I think there is are other Protestant alternatives to becoming a Roman Catholic when you are disillusioned by Anglicanism.