WHY "COME HOME"? Anglicans on the Rome-ward Journey(Part I)
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
February 28, 2013
It's a significant and major phenomenon. Many Anglicans are aligning with the Roman Catholic Church to hear the greeting "welcome home."
The Rome-ward journey encompasses many more than converting Anglicans. Folk from strong Protestant and Evangelical backgrounds are finding their way back to the bosom of "Mother Church".
The stories of these former Anglicans and Evangelicals are heartfelt, and their reasons formidable. Highly intelligent, well trained, articulate, and mature believers are rejoicing in the discovery of Rome's hospitality and bounty. They uniformly testify to the "fullness" that the "one true church" affords. Through pilgrimage and struggle they delight in their new found spiritual satisfaction and certainty.
Of course, the traffic is two way and the views of new Catholics need to be matched to the conversion accounts of those who departed from the old church fold. We all tend to over-simplify our religious development without being cognizant of the complicated factors behind all our decisions and allegiances which are laden with motives and emotions operating at a secret and undetected level in our personalities. There are pains we avoid and pleasures that we seek in our religious histories and experiences that are many layers below our conscious thoughts and rationalizations, and when it comes to our relationship with God our grasp of divine truth and action is puny and not panoramic.
To know God we need to know ourselves as well, to some extent, and we scarcely grasp, let alone master, that mysterious and elusive subject. Our self-knowledge is partial and dangerously deceptive. By nature our perception of spiritual need and of our Fashioner is dangerously skewed. We wish to impose our desires and inbred lies concerning reality upon the nature of man and the nature of God and our pursuit of understanding is "doctored" and misdirected.
To rely on our head and follow our heart is dangerous, even fatal, advice to unregenerate man, and regenerate man has to be cautious about both. Head and heart are only partially and gradually corrected by divine grace. To help us in our predicament of spiritual blindness and ignorance we are dependent upon the light and truth of God shed upon us through his Scriptures and Holy Spirit. We do not dare to step beyond the boundary of the Word or stray from the sphere of the Spirit's illumination. There is no health in us(BCP 1662).
Susceptibilities
To aid our growth in understanding we need discernment as to our susceptibilities. Initially, we may not choose our religious nurturing. We may receive it from family and the community of faith that disciples us and always these two sources of our religious formation will be inadequate and sometimes unwittingly offensive to our sensibilities. No family or fellowship of faith has it all as regards truth and as a medium of grace and knowledge. No single expression of Christianity is sufficient. Each one is imperfect and incomplete and the form of religion that constitutes our home territory will soon yield this awareness. We may settle for the tradition that we have received in consciousness of its limitations or seek an alternative, usually with over optimistic expectations as to what we shall eventually find. Convinced converts are usually more enthusiastic than those whose membership originates from the cradle.
Our home base can evoke a mixed reaction of admiration and anger. Legitimate needs and understandable irritations can niggle away within us over extended periods until decisive action is imperative. We must either stay or separate. In religious restlessness or turmoil, or even calm enquiry, we still do not have comprehensive or exhaustive understanding of our inner world influenced by so many forces that we have not knowingly registered. Our impressions are caused by internal traits, the teachings of men, the motions of the Spirit of God, and the meddling of Satan. We do not have the skill to monitor or assess the origins of the multitude of our impulses and inclinations.
We latch on to those that tickle our fancy or turn us away. So often when we critique or castigate the tradition we leave we are actually deploring the tendencies, flaws, and attitudes of ourselves within that tradition and transferring blame. We single out and exaggerate certain features, generalize them in sweeping statements of condemnation, but are actually reflecting, for everyone to see, our own sinfulness and limitations within the heritage we have enjoyed from birth or our first encounter with Christ.
We are exhibiting the insufficiencies of ourselves and the forms in which we were bred. When we make a legitimate move in our Christian allegiance we must be aware that mood muddies the shift. We can glamorize our goal and entertain grievances against the body we have left, amplifying the intellectual and spiritual conquests we have made.
The Anglo-Catholic exodus to Rome arises from well cultivated susceptibilities that excite no surprise. Rome is home, ultimately, for many Anglicans who feel themselves to be exiles, and the arrival at that destination is the culmination of a strand within Anglicanism that survived the Reformation, blossomed at various junctures in Anglican history, and came to the fore in Tractarianism which is incompatible, in spite of various attempts at reconciliation, with the foundation documents of the Anglican way.
Some adherents to the Catholic tradition do not desire, or perhaps they delay reunion with Rome because of their love for the romanticized (merrie) English version of Catholicism and have their reservations concerning the papacy, but for many the High Church phenomenon emits a siren call to assemble around the papal throne at St. Peter's. In the mess and jumble of human minds, hearts, and motives, our own and others, we are obliged to acknowledge true piety wherever it exists and Catholicism and Anglo-catholicism shelter many of the people of God and raise up invaluable godly leaders, but the tone and teaching of their faith is mixed with human and invented tradition that blurs the simplicity of the gospel and begs the question as to the nature of the church.
Form and Essence
Listening to the converts to Rome none seem to deny the validity of their previous faith and earlier experience. Their life has been a journey and now they have found their earthly home prior to entrance of their heavenly home. They have come to trust Rome, a better place than previous staging posts, where souls were supplied and fed, but much was lacking.
Protestantism, Anglicanism, Evangelicalism have in many ways diluted the faith-experience of many believers through defective theology, unworthy and cheap approaches to worship, absence of sound sacramental administration, and insufficient counsel and discipline in the spiritual life and the encounter with the wonderful and holy to be found in the contemplation of God in his relation to the soul. Certain elements of the well rounded "spiritual person", the spiritual man, are sparsely provided or totally neglected.
One sector ravishes the emotional side of our being and another fosters intellectual plumpness and praises it as the acme Christian maturity. All the facets of Christian identity are not well served or integrated in many facets of non-Roman religion. Those famished of certain aspects of the multifaceted grace, goodness, and companionship of the Lord fancy that they will find fullness in Rome, but they bring to Rome enriching perspectives and experiences of their own background that receiving Catholics perhaps do not share, and perhaps also their earlier exposure to divine favour actually nullifies the exclusive claims of Rome to which they now concede. They were found by Christ without the instrumentalities of sacerdotalism and sacramentalism.
They may now claim to find such ministrations enhancing of the life of the soul, but they also prove them not to be of absolute necessity and indispensable. They met with Christ without the mass, they fed on him through the Word and sacrament without the consumption of his actual flesh and blood, they enjoyed communion with Christ before their entrance into the Roman communion. Within their hearts and minds they possessed the essence of divine salvation and blessing without Roman spirituality and forms.
Perhaps what was needed was not the institution but broader instruction in the wealth of God's word that brings us the fullness of Christ and points to methods of discipline, devotion, obedience, and development conspicuously consonant with Scripture and orthodox tradition derived from the Redeemer himself, his prophets, and apostles.
Rome presents us with a multitude of debatable issues that would require fulltime occupation i.e. ecclesiology, Mariology, synergy, transubstantiation, purgatory, invocation of the saints, and endless other topics and practices. But the theme of overriding importance for lost souls hastening through time is soteriology.
SOTERIOLOGY
Anglicans have much agreement with Rome in a creedal sense and on vital moral concerns raised by our current culture. The point at which we urgently need clarity and accuracy is as to how the Son of God eternal, incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended is grasped as Saviour and donor of every necessary gift for our sanctification and preservation. Is Rome reliable in its explanation of Christ's role and accomplishment? And is its perceived authority really derived from the word and confirmed by the witness of history? And is its evident "fullness" really an enlarged manifestation of Christ or a collocation of notions, exercises, ordinances, and observances that obscure and even obviate the simple facts and truths pertaining to Jesus and his assignment of human rescue?
Rome is crammed with claims, pluses, and extras that may baffle or beguile Protestants, but are they benefits or distractions in our comprehension of the Lord Jesus and confidence in him?
Watch for Part II
END
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