Classical Anglicanism and Me

I just received word that a friend of mine from the University of Chicago is going to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in Colorado in a few weeks. This young man was once a youth minister at an Episcopal parish in his home state, though while in Chicago he joined Moody Memorial Church (a keystone of the American evangelical movement). I haven’t really been in touch with him since I returned to Texas fifteen months ago, so I don’t know exactly what took him from Moody Church to Catholicism. I certainly wish him well, and I rejoice that he is joining a branch of the Church that teaches the apostolic Faith, values the great Tradition of the Church, and cherishes all the Sacraments. May God bless him on this new path.

This news has made me pensive. He is not the first friend of mine who has “swam the Tiber” during the last two years. One friend (whose wife is still an ECUSA priest, btw) was received in the RCC a year and a half ago. I think it was the philosophical heritage of Roman Catholic theology that attracted him more than anything else. A young U of C undergraduate friend, whose father was an Episcopal priest all her life, was received into the RCC last Easter with the rest of her family. A third dear friend of mine in Chicago--I have heard through the grapevine--is close to taking the plunge any time. (It is possible that he has already made up his mind to do so and is holding back from telling me.) All of these people were Episcopalians until the events of General Convention 2003. And they all no longer at home within ECUSA. After having spent seven year living in the diocese of Chicago, I certainly understand that feeling. It is very difficult to maintain “the faith once delivered to the saints” under present conditions in much of the Episcopal Church.

I am first and foremost a Catholic Christian, dedicated to the one Faith of Jesus Christ as revealed in the two Testaments of Holy Scripture, summarized in the three great historic creeds, defined by the first four Ecumenical Councils of the Church during the first five centuries of the Christian era. I want to live and die in the undivided Truth of the Church as it was taught before the sad division between East and West.

I personally stand within western Catholic tradition because it is the western expression of the undivided Truth (i.e., Augustine, Gregory, Anselm, Bernard, Thomas) that resonates most strongly within my heart (though I honor those who find the eastern expression of our common Faith more compelling). I am an Anglican rather than a Roman Catholic today primarily because I do not find the claims to infallibility that the First Vatican Council made on behalf of the Holy Father in Rome to be consistent with the practice of the ancient Church (or of the undivided Church at any time in her history—to my knowledge the East has never accepted the claims to papal infallibility that arose in the West in late antiquity and the Middle Ages). This hesitance to accept papal infallibility in no way implies a lack of respect for the present Pope as a man of faith and a Christian leader. (Readers of this blog have no doubt noticed that I hold Pope Benedict in very high esteem). Rome clearly has a strong traditional claim on a “primacy of honor” within the worldwide Church, and the bishops of Rome deserve great respect for the fine work they have done in preserving the orthodox Faith down through the centuries. I long for the day when traditional Anglicans and Roman Catholics are once more reunited as a visible Christian family on Earth. But I cannot in good conscience affirm a power of infallibility in the successor of St. Peter as an individual. (I feel this power would reside only in a genuine ecumenical council of the Church, not an individual bishop.) I certainly understand why many people find comfort in papal infallibility in the face of so much doctrinal division today, but I am afraid that I cannot concur. (Though there is clearly some value in having a "court of final jurisdicition" for doctrinal disputes.) For me, classical Anglicanism is the expression of western Christianity that I find most consonant with the ancient heritage of the Church.

Another aspect of classical Anglicanism that I find appealing is its traditional ability to reconcile Catholic and evangelical viewpoints within a single orthodox body, both constituent parties of which are devoted to the veracity of Scripture, the validity of the Sacraments and the unity of the Body. This is the true meaning of the Anglican Via Media, and I believe that at its best it enriches our Catholic heritage with a zeal for the Gospel that honors our Savior highly. I am an Anglo-Catholic by conviction, but I honor my evangelical Anglican brothers and sisters sincerely for their dedication to the Truth.

These are the reasons I remain an Anglican. But let me be clear—I am a Catholic Christian standing in the tradition of classical Anglicanism. Increasingly it is becoming difficult to find this kind of Anglicanism in practice in North America and Great Britain. Many Episcopalians in the US are in fact liberal Protestants by conviction. They just happen to prefer a “fancy” style of worship, with esthetically appealing worship spaces, vestments and music. Many liberal Episcopalians could care less about the authority and integrity of Scripture or Tradition. Classical Anglicanism has been marginalized within ECUSA. A dozen dioceses, a few dozen embattled parishes in heterodox dioceses, a couple of seminaries—that is about all that remains today. I have to admit that if I were not in a solidly orthodox diocese with a faithful bishop and presbyterate, I might despair of a future for classical Anglicanism. Under the circumstances that prevail in much of ECUSA the Tiber might beckon to me as well. I therefore wish those who have already left Godspeed. But the Anglican Communion Network gives me hope that classical Anglicanism may not perish from our continent, and my diocese remains steadfast. May God have mercy on us and preserve our Anglican heritage, if it is worthy of being preserved. If it is not, may He take what is worthwhile from its wreckage and pass it along for the good of the Universal Church. As for me, I will stay the course and follow the lead of Bishop Iker, my reverend father in God.

I wish all my friends who have been received into the Roman Catholic Church well and assure them of my prayers. I also pray for the day when we all may be one as Christ and the Father are One.

I would assume you are referring to Abp Cranmer's Zwinglian theology. It was not typical then and is not now. Cranmer believed that Christians fed upon the Body and Blood of their Lord and Saviour spiritually at all times, and that this was entirely separate from the Eucharist (that is the Zwinglianism). He believed that Christians consume Our Lord as Abraham did, by faith and in the spirit. Now, the only reason the Church of England was held to what appeared liturgically to be a 'Protestant' theology is that changing the BCP required the approval of Parliament, which basically never said yes to anything.

The American BCP derives from the Book of the Church of Scotland and thus there are differences from the English Book. And, of course, one way to locate Anglo-Catholics is to ask what edition of the American Book is being used. If the answer comes back '1979', you are very unlikely to be communicating with an Anglo-Catholic. We use the 1928 American BCP, supplemented by the American Missal. Citations there, especially the Kalendar of Saints, suggest that this Book dates back at least into the 19th Century and was compiled for specifically Anglican use. Its Rite emphatically rejects Protestantism (that is, the tendency to confine the celebration to the minister and to isolate the congregants in private mediation rather than corporate worship).

One should also note that the 1549 BCP was written with the intent of placing the Church under the direct and total control of the King in perpetuity. It was Cranmer's belief, one for which he never got assent from any other churchman (clearly some would have agreed), that the King was and always would be the proper head of the Church. In today's terms that is...peculiar. We are changed philosophically from that time and must think in the terms of the day to appreciate that the urge to impose uniformity by aligning church and state was normal thought in his day. Consider was he was thinking here: he was viewing Christ as King on the eternal plane and placing his national King as Christ's chief subject on the temporal plane. We call that Caesaro-Papalism generally. Cranmer would have profited from documents we have found since his time.

This was also complicated by the fact that most English bishops were in fact state employees and vetted and hired as such. That many were also Godly men is one of those Providential things, as is the bare thread one can trace in the Holy Communion linking it back to the original Four-Action shape of the Liturgy of the ancients (Offertory, Prayer, Fraction, Communion). It must be noted that Cranmer's signal act was to suppress any mention of the Offertory, the better to separate the bread and wine from any possbility of being considered consecrated or even venerable. And it must also be noted that the episcopacy in England was a force to restrain the clergy and laity from expressing the Catholicism which had been the religious heartbeat of the nation from antiquity.

That all is to barely hint that lex orandi, lex credendi is a loose rule at best and likely something rulers would wish is truer more often than it is. And it all bears remembering that the English Church was established (in the sense that American Democrats can never seem to understand) and thus that it was treason to worship using any other Rite or liturgy. It was not until Bills were passed permitting wider freedom of religion in Britain that people who never felt comfortable in the CoE were able to express their dissent freely. The result could have been more Catholicism overall. The record is mixed, but there is a firm line of high Catholicism, most especially marked in the influence of the Oxford Movement (Pusey, Keble & Newman, etc.)

As to the Articles, they are purposely irenic and can be read in either a Protestant or Catholic sense. That is why they are not binding any more: they mean effectively nothing, as all laws do under grace.

As to PECUSA's use of the name 'Protestant', well, that reflects the power base in the church when that name was adopted. Being Protestant or being Catholic is a matter of the facts of faith. Labels were loose before and they are a positive trap now.

And as PECUSA has drifted into open heresy, as we in APCK said they would do 30 years ago now, it is of no consequence to us what they call themselves. Their faith is rapidly parting company with Mere Christianity, much less anything recognizably Anglican, and with no reference whatever to Catholicism. It may have some contacts with Unitarianism, but I don't see that as an improvement.

I would type myself as Reformed Evangelical Catholic, if pressed to be as precise as I can. The reasons?

Reformed: various medieval accretions have been removed from the Anglican Rite we use, as well as a number of extra-liturgical devotions and practices (such as indulgences and the Treasury of Grace-footnote: we do pray for intercession both of the living and the dead and we do believe that souls are purged in Purgatory. That we can remit their penalty or reduce their time for purgation is a medieval accretion to us. We pray rather that they may sustain their trial and be comforted by our love and remebrance. We are seeking to strengthen, we cannot intervene.). In addition, certain speculative theological points have been rejected (such as Transubstantiation). That would be a point of controversy with Roman Catholics, though not Orthodox, who never adopted that explication either. So, my religion is Reformed.

Evangelical: I require that any proposition put to me as a matter of required belief be either proven or compellingly implied by Scripture. This does not put all the weight of belief on Scripture but it does involve Scriptural backup in every discussion.

Catholic: The article that started this thread did a reasonable job of explaining Anglo-Catholicism, though too much weight was there put upon the pre-Chalcedonian Church (as vladimir noticed) and not enough on the Scholastics. So we do rely upon the theological analyses of Aquinas and Anselm (Abp of Canterbury, among other achievements: this is an office established far before 1534 and one which has been continuously occupied, save lacunae similar to those which have afflicted the Sees of Rome and Constantinople), among many other great medieval Doctors. To me, the essence of Catholicsm in practice is the assertion that the ekklesia gathers as the Mystical Body of Christ to make self-oblation to the Father and to invoke His grace to provide us with the Body and Blood of Christ, sanctified by the Holy Spirit (none of the Persons is therefore passive in the Eucharist) that we may be nourished by His grace and cleansed by His Blood. In short, we DO as He commanded us to do and as He said that this [bread] is His Body and this wine His Blood, we take Him at His word.

We also insist that the Eucharist, along with Baptism are real Sacraments and Mysteries, instituted by Christ and that we are directed to do them for the building up of His Body in time. These Sacraments cannot in fact be done by Man. They must be done by God through those He has set apart. We believe He ordained His disciples a ministerial organ of His Mystical Body and set them apart for this purpose and that they began a chain of consecrations which continues to this day. A fortiori, the Sacraments cannot validly be provided except by Apostolic clergy as defined no later than Ignatius of Antioch and preserved by the laying on of hands and the giving of the Holy Spirit that the ordinand be delegated to act in God's name for His people. This power to ordain is delegated only to bishops themselves validly consecrated by other bishops. Our bishops have this dignity through several Catholic churches and through Apostolic bishops of the American Episcopal Church (Bp Albert Chambers of blessed memory, for example). Now, while this has every spiritual overtone and aspect, it is real and conveys actual grace, changing the man forever. This is not magic, it is miracle.

Thus, Reformed Evangelical Catholic.

In Christ,
Deacon Paul+

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