Manglicanism

www.churchsociety.org/Churchman/documents/Cman_124_3_Editorial.pdf


Churchman
E D I T O R I A L
Celestial fire?

One of the nice things about the Archbishop of Canterbury is that you never
quite know what he is going to do next. Ever since the consecration of a
practising homosexual bishop in the United States, people across the Anglican
Communion have been asking him to take a firm lead to resolve the crisis. For
seven long and lean years, the Archbishop has replied that Anglicanism is a
loose church and that unlike the pope, he has no authority to make binding
pronouncements or to pass judgement on anybody. Then all of a sudden, we
find him speaking urbi et orbi to the ‘bishops, clergy and faithful of the
Anglican Communion’, not telling them what to do exactly, but making it
pretty clear what the way forward ought to be. The style of address comes
straight from the Vatican, which may cause some confusion among those
Anglicans who are not used to receiving missives from that quarter. Many
Evangelicals for example, will be wondering why the letter seems to be directed
to them more than to others. Do the unfaithful members of the church not get
a look-in as well? ‘Bishops’ and ‘clergy’ will cover some of them, no doubt, but
surely not all! Of course, by ‘faithful’, the Archbishop means simply ‘lay
members of the Anglican church’ but confusion arises because we use the word
in a different way and find this usage somewhat disconcerting.

This may seem like a trivial matter to some, but it points to an underlying
difference of ecclesiology that has more than a little bearing on the current
Anglican crisis. In a very real sense, the troubles we face are all about being
faithful—the question is being faithful to what? This not only goes
unanswered; it goes unaddressed, because if the Archbishop’s use of the word
is accepted, it becomes difficult to know what to ask. If someone were to
approach you and inquire whether you are a Christian or not, would you
reply: ‘Yes, I am a member of Christ Church, Canterbury’? More importantly,
what would you make of someone who did give that kind of answer? If you
were asked when you became a Christian, would you say: ‘I became a
Christian when I was baptised’? How would you react if someone said that to
you? Put the matter like this and it soon becomes clear what the differences
between Evangelicals and those of the Catholic tradition essentially are. We do
not reject baptism or church membership, but neither do we think that such
things determine our standing in the sight of God. What matters to us is that
a person who calls himself a Christian is born again by the Holy Spirit and
possesses the mind of Christ as this is revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures. If
those things are in place, then the rest can be worked out in a variety of
different ways. But if they are not present, then all the external validation in
the world will not suffice to make a person Christian. This is why we do not
use a word like ‘faithful’ to mean simply ‘church member’ and why we cannot
build our spiritual fellowship on the basis of a common participation in the
sacraments, important as that is.

A real Christian is not someone who has been baptised with water but
someone who has been born again of the Holy Spirit, which is a very different
thing. Baptism proclaims the new birth but is not a substitute for it, nor is it
the means by which spiritual rebirth is achieved. One of the arguments used by
the pro-homosexual lobby in the United States is that because they are part of
the ‘baptised community’ they have every right to bring their unique gift to the
table of fellowship and share it with the rest of us. By rejecting that, it is we
who are dividing the church and cutting ourselves off from the voice of the
‘spirit’. If that is the sort of construction that can be put on baptism, then
Evangelical Christians have no choice but to disagree. As far as we are
concerned, those who live in the Spirit must be filled with the Spirit, and those
who are filled with the Spirit must live according to the Bible and the orthodox
rule of faith which it proclaims.

That this is not the sort of church the archbishop has in mind can be seen from
the next line, where he moves on to consider the Holy Eucharist, in which our
‘unity in and through the self-offering of Jesus is reaffirmed and renewed as we
pray for the Spirit to transform both the bread and wine and ourselves, our
souls and bodies.’ Here we see a confusion between spirit and matter which
Anglicans repudiated at the time of the Reformation. Article 28 could not be
more clear about this:

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in
the supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant
to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament,
and hath given occasion to many superstitions. The body of Christ is
given, taken and eaten in the supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual
manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten
in the supper is faith.

What is a transformation of the bread and wine if it is not a kind of
transubstantiation? Once again, there will be those who will say that this is
mere quibbling over words, and sixteenth century words at that, but this is not
so. At the heart of the argument is the nature of Christian fellowship, which
the Eucharist is meant to express but which it cannot create. If there is evidence
that a church member is not living according to the Word of God, and if that
is brought to public attention and censured, then the person concerned must
be excommunicated, because he does not share the beliefs that those who
partake of the sacrament are expected to profess. This is the fundamental
problem we have with the American Episcopal Church. As an official body it
has not merely stopped struggling against the world, the flesh and the devil, but
has invited them in to sit down and share in the feast of the redeemed. Those
who object—and there are many faithful witnesses inside the Episcopal Church
who have done so—are either sidelined or silenced. It is they who are
excommunicated, not those who have jettisoned orthodox Christianity and
covered their apostasy by performing traditional rituals. We need not doubt
that the Episcopal leadership has been canonically elected and has followed all
the correct procedures, but the evidence of the church’s public teaching makes
it clear that it has long since distanced itself from the substance of the matter.
This brings us to the most depressing thing about the Archbishop’s Pentecost
letter, which is that it says nothing at all about the content of Christian belief
and its fundamental importance for Christian fellowship. Instead it
concentrates on emotive words like ‘pain’ and ‘conscience’ which are elevated
to the status of objective categories that determine everything else. As the
archbishop sees matters, it is not false teaching but the pain caused by the
exercise of different (and mutually conflicting) consciences that has caused the
current problem, and there is really no way of dealing with that in any very
effective manner. Once again, Evangelicals have to dissent from this analysis,
not because we want to cause pain and certainly not because we do not have a
conscience, but because neither of these things gets to the root of the problem.
It is true that Martin Luther is supposed to have appealed to his conscience
when he stood up to defend his ‘heresies’ in front of the authorities of church and state at the Diet of Worms, but we must remember what the words
attributed to him actually are: ‘My conscience is captive to the Word of God.’

There is the rub. It is not enough to have a conscience and act according to it.
If my conscience is not subject to the Scriptures, then it is wrong. I may be
respected for following it, and of course being wrong is not a crime, but I am
still not doing the right thing. Nor can the pain I would feel at being
excommunicated be invoked as a reason for those whose duty it is to uphold
the truth not to proceed along that path. This is why faithful members of the
Anglican Communion cannot regard themselves as being in fellowship with the
American Episcopal Church as a corporate body. It is not for us to judge where
its individual members stand in the sight of God, and none of us would ever
dream of calling ourselves ‘perfect’, as the archbishop seems to fear at one
point in his letter. Of course we all need to repent. And yes, there are many
faithful soldiers and servants of Jesus Christ left inside the Episcopal Church
whom we must do our utmost to help and comfort in their time of need. What
we are talking about here is not that, but something else—the open and public
affirmation of false doctrine as the official policy of that church.

The great weakness of the Windsor Report, and one that continues to afflict the
approach taken at Lambeth, is the inability to appreciate the fundamental
difference between the approval given to homosexual behaviour in North
America on the one hand, and the ‘intervention’ by other provinces on the other.
The American Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada have
made public statements affirming the legitimacy of homosexual acts, thereby
making them part of their official teaching. They have approached the rest of
the Anglican Communion demanding to be accepted, which in practice means
that every other Anglican church is being asked not only to ratify this teaching
in North America but to regard it as acceptable for Anglicans everywhere. After
all, if the American Episcopal Church is in communion with the Church of
Tanzania (say), how can the Tanzanians legitimately exclude an American
bishop who is also a practising homosexual without breaking that communion?

The onus of schism would lie with them, not with the Americans, and in this
way false teaching would find itself at home in the worldwide church.
The ‘intervention’ which was so strongly censured by the Windsor Report, is
very different from this. No Anglican province advocates it as a matter of
policy, nor does it form part of anyone’s official teaching. Those who have
intervened have done so at the invitation of people in North America who had
already broken with their own church, so it is not even clear that they have
infringed anyone’s jurisdiction. Furthermore, far from pressing this sort of
thing on the rest of the Communion, the interventionists have done all they can
to re-establish an Anglican presence in North America which they can
recognise as the legitimate ecclesiastical authority there. By failing to
distinguish between a settled policy and an emergency reaction, the Windsor
Report and the Lambeth authorities have shown that they do not know the
difference between what is primary and what is secondary. No wonder their
proposed covenant is in such trouble. Who would entrust decision-making to
people who have shown themselves incapable of understanding what is really
going on?

It is interesting, if somewhat odd, that the archbishop cites the case of infant
baptism as an example of how we should handle our differences. He claims
that there are many Anglicans who reject infant baptism, but argues that
because it is the official policy of the church, such people should not be the
Communion’s accredited representatives, particularly in ecumenical settings
where they are expected to toe the official line. On that basis, he suggests that
the American Episcopal Church, and unnamed others who have also transgressed the Anglican norm, should not be asked to sit on such bodies, although their private eccentricities can still be tolerated just as we tolerate those who reject infant baptism.

The parallel is somewhat strange but it is instructive. Anglicans who reject
infant baptism know that they are a minority voice and they seldom try to
change the church’s official policy. If they feel strongly about it, they leave and
go elsewhere. Most of us respect them for that and continue to regard them as
fellow Christians, because we do not believe that the issues involved touch the
heart of the faith. Could we perhaps tolerate differences of approach to
homosexuality and especially to homosexual practice in a similar way? In
countries where same-sex ‘civil partnerships’ are legal there will always be
problems in trying to impose a strict discipline on church members and
differences of approach and practice are bound to arise. To that extent there is
already a degree of tolerance which will probably continue, if only because it
is almost impossible to do anything else. Nevertheless, if infant baptism is
taken as some sort of guide, there is nothing dishonourable about expecting
those who find their dissenting status intolerable to leave and join a
homosexual church instead. They could then restrict its membership to people
who share their views (as Baptists often do) and get on with making their own
particular witness to the world. What we cannot do is change the Christian
faith in order to keep them on board. Here the parallel with infant baptism,
such as it is, breaks down. Differences over baptism do not affect any
fundamental Christian doctrine and Evangelicals can live quite happily with
variations in practice. Homosexual behaviour is different, because it is morally
and spiritually wrong in itself. A Baptist church can be perfectly orthodox, but
a homosexual one would have to be classified with the Unitarians, Jehovah’s
Witnesses or Mormons—in other words, not orthodox Christians at all. We
have no desire to persecute them and do not think that we are better people
than they are, but we do not recognise them as fellow believers in Christ, even
if they themselves claim to be such.

No-one should pretend that the task of disciplining and reshaping the Anglican
Communion will be easy. As the recent invitation to Mrs Schori, the presiding
bishop of the American Episcopal Church, to preach and preside at a eucharist
in Southwark Cathedral shows, there are gospel-free zones in the Church of
England barely more than a stone’s throw away from Lambeth Palace. The
archbishop needs our prayers and support in dealing with this problem, as do
all those who have a voice in proclaiming the truth of God’s Word in and to
the church. If we are critical of them it is not because we reject their offices but
because we want them to act as the responsibility conferred on them dictates.
May God bless them and give them the courage to do what is right in this time
of decision for the Anglican Communion and for the wider Christian world of
which it rightly wants to remain an integral part.

GERALD BRAY
200 Churchman