I have been trying my darndest to figure out what best describes the essentials of Anglicanism. I fear, from time to time, that what defines Anglicanism is the notion of "peace at all costs". Unity at the expense of truth. As a result there appear to me to be three almost entirely incompatable belief systems in the Church of England and its daughter organizations that somehow coexist organically, but present a confusing picture to the world.
I have written before about the "revisionist" wing of the Anglican Communion. I won't rehearse it all here, instead, just a few notes on the historical development, with a bit more focus on the 39 Articles.
JI Packer speaks of the 39 Articles in these terms. They come to the Anglican church:
"... as prior judgements, time-honoured judgements, on specific issues relating to the faith of Christ, as set forth in the Scriptures. They come to us as corporate decisions first made by the Church centuries ago, and now confirmed and commended to us by the corroborative testimony of all later generations that have accepted them, down to our time.... It is a prime obligation for Anglicans to take full account of the expository formulations to which our Church has bound itself; and to ignore them, as if we were certain that the Spirit of God had no hand in them, is no more warrantable than to treat them as divinely inspired and infallible."
This is the balance that ought to be applied to all doctrinal statements - not infallible, but not malleable. But in our pluralistic culture, where modernism and postmodernism have both managed to undercut all confidence in the existence of fixed truths and of a language that can communicate such truths, the Articles of Religion, like most other statements of religious belief, become quite flexible.
I blogged long ago about what Robert Sanders has called the ecstatic heresy. Sanders wrote that since the days of Schliermacher, all understanding of God has been divorced from reason and content. Liberal theologians seek not truth, but a mystical experience of a God who is ineffible and beyond categories, words, or understanding. Since words cannot describe God, words can have virtually any meaning poured into them in the name of religious "faith". Said Sanders:
Ecstatics do not deny the Scripture, the Creeds, or the great documents of our tradition. They do not throw them away. They love them. For them the Scriptures are the foundation of our faith, the liturgy resonates with the Ineffable, the Articles of Religion are a cultural treasure. They simply revise these sources along ecstatic lines. That is why it is appropriate to call them "revisionists."
To me, this is the key disease of our age. Nothing exists that cannot be redefined.
Historically, the Episcopal church in the USA started to slide into revisionist territory in the days of Bishop Pike. Pike denied essential doctrines such as the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, Original Sin and the Trinity, yet the Episcopal church, fearing a media trial, never managed to discipline him or hold him accountable. His views, and those of others, were allowed to spread into the seminaries and eventually filtered into the churches.
Where many believe the Episcopal church began its slide into "revisionism" was in the issue of the ordination of women. Why? Women's ordination represented a first step in reading the Biblical text in the light of modern social consciousness - looking for ways to get around the implications of the text itself. Advances in women's rights may have been desirable. A plain reading of scripture, however, places a limit on very few, very specific roles for women, rooted in the nature of the created order itself. Ordaining women was, to many, playing loose with scripture.
In 1974 a group of women were "irregularly" ordained as priests in Philadelphia. In 1977 the "irregular" female priests "regularized." and one hundred women were ordained by the end of that year. By 1997 only four dioceses still refused to ordain female priests. Finally in June of 2006 Katharine Jefferts Schori was elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. In a single generation, the text of scripture and 2000 years of church history were reinterpreted.
Whether a woman can serve in a teaching capacity was not the primary issue. Whether scripture is subject to being molded by cultural pressure was the primary matter, and remains so.
Other bishops who denied the historic tenets, not only of the Anglican Articles of Religion, but of the historic creeds and the statements of scripture as well, found a home in a church that could not find the strength to oppose them. John Spong remains an author of popular influence. The Virgin Birth, miracles, the physical resurrection and the account of creation are all outdated notions according to Spong. He has argued that the Apostle Paul struggled with homosexual desires and has stated in essence he has no idea what God is like.
These views do require a great bit of "revision" of the text of scripture. They require a great deal of denying the text itself to find hidden meanings between the lines or in the "cultural" spirit of another time.
In the eyes of the new faith of the Episcopal church in the USA, the spirit of God is doing something new and discarding something old. One Bishop, Charles Bennison, claimed that the church wrote the Bible and can therefore rewrite it. He also holds that Jesus was himself a sinner - his great act of God-consciousness was that he forgave himself.
This business of ignoring the meaning of texts and finding all truth in the winds of cultural change finally culminated in a singular church shattering act when in 2003, Gene Robinson was elected to be a Bishop. Among Robinson's theological insights is the view that Jesus might be gay.
It may be no accident that Revisionist types in the Anglican church are often "high church", although as Revisionists, they are not at all squeamish about rewriting liturgies to suit certain "inclusive" agendas. God as Mother, for example is not an uncommon theme. But the external forms of religion lend a certain historical validity to ideas that have no root in either scripture or church history. Retaining certain words, actions, symbols and religious objects while completely altering their meaning enables revisionists to easily convince a sleepy flock that Pike, Spong, Schiori and Robinson are not, in fact, wolves, but genuine shepherds.
The final result is that this third face of Anglicanism is, in terms of theology, totally incompatible with the orthodox Trinitarian views of either Anglo-Catholic Traditionalists or Bible-believing Evangelicals. To those on the outside, Anglicanism presents an image of absolute chaos. The current trend of orthodox believers in both the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical camps seeking shelter from conservative bishops in the Global South is, in my mind an inestimable improvement over a historical pattern of compromise of truth for the sake of unity. Most evangelicals find it desirable and necessary to band together with Anglo-Catholics, who affirm the Trinitarian beliefs of the Nicene Creed and the essential morality of the 10 Commandments in order to resist the complete loss of all that is historically Christian in the camp of the Revisionists. Disagreements about sacraments and soteriology will have to wait.
Still it makes it difficult to explain to a watching world any cogent answer to the question "what is Anglican?" There is no answer that seems to suffice. The term "via media" is often used, but when one looks below the surface, it appears to suggest not a middle way but a blurring of boundaries. Gay rights groups have pirated the term to their own purposes.
For my part, I tend to take the scripture at face value and tend to take doctrinal statements the same way. As such, I land fairly solidly in the camp of Evangelicalism. I have learned to look to the history and traditions of the church for aid in interpreting scripture, but am hard pressed to enthusiastically embrace ideas or pratices that go beyond explicit scriptural texts. I am firmly opposed to bending scripture to fit with current cultural notions on sexual morality or theological definitions. For that reason I am very uncomfortable with bending the Articles of religion to make them compatible with a particular 19th century view of sacramental and ecclesial matters. I am more opposed to bending or obliterating historic and biblical concepts to fit moder or postmodern trends in the realm of both theology and behavior.
Anglicanism is definitely dividing into two camps, those who accept the orthodox Nicene definitions of the Faith and those who do not. It may well be that once that separation has become a matter of history, there will be too much distance on sacrament and soteriology to prevent the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings from dividing as well. Then again, it may be that both sides will decide that Nicene Orthodoxy is essential and sacramental theology it not, allowing both to agree to disagree within the same Ecclesial body.
But as the tug of war for the soul of the Anglican communion drags on, year after year, one wonders what the final toll will be in terms of the perception of Christianity before the rest of the world.
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