Anglicanism is not confessional. In the United States, Anglicanism has never been confessionally binding like some Reformed and Lutheran churches are. While there have been binding statements in place to be employed at some Episcopal churches or institutions, the PECUSA never had a united document for discipline that all Anglicans agreed to beyond the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer is a wonderful liturgy, but it is not a confessional statement upon which negative sanctions like ex-communication could easily be applied to one who dissents from some aspect of it not common to the catholic creeds.
This allows for far greater flexibility of Anglicanism than many other church traditions, but it also makes internal policing almost impossible. Such a wide range of beliefs makes systematic treatment of theology difficult and discipline based on deviant theology very difficult. Even if many dioceses come to affirm a common statement on theology, that other dioceses do not affirm the same standards opens the door to future infiltration and compromise at all times. In other words, an almost complete consensus is needed before any hope of discipline can be successfully employed. As an Old School Presbyterian minister said about his New School counterparts in the denomination, “The measure of the strength of a machine is the strength of its weakest part.”
The ACNA’s diversity also means that different cultural traditions like Low Church and Anglo-Catholic are at high risk for entirely different forms of infiltration. In theory, a denomination with a single confessional tradition has a finite number of discernible weaknesses which can be enumerated and protected against. As we will see, the PECUSA had and the ACNA has an infinite number. Policing all possible forms of heterodoxy is an exhausting task, and cultural distinctions, or prejudices, will begin to emerge in order to signal conformity to certain parties. This has the positive effect of building homogeneous, high-trust churches, but the potential downside of people taking on the social identity without the theological content, and never being vetted, a common occurrence in early 20th century Episcopalianism. For instance, the aforementioned Joseph Packard was an incredibly staunch Calvinist, almost out of place by the early 20th century. He defended an explicitly Protestant and Bible-centered identity around the PECUSA. Yet in his autobiography, he referred only positively to Charles Briggs, a newcomer to the Anglican tradition who had been effectively forced out of the Presbyterian church for his promotion of higher criticism. Packard selectively had his guard up, choosing to make certain social identities enemies (critics of the 39 Articles, like Tractarians), and certain social identities friends (New England Calvinists, like Briggs), without considering how his prejudices blinded him from his own side’s weaknesses. Unsurprisingly, it wouldn’t even take two decades from the publication of Packard’s autobiography for VTS to fall to modernism.
There has yet to be a method proven within the Anglican tradition to successfully police institutions while maintaining the breadth of theological diversity within Anglicanism. The Anglican micro-denominations which supported the Congress of St. Louis recognized this, and opted for a distinctly Anglo-Catholic identity, making them more internally stable, but at the cost of losing their public, national, and outward-facing identity altogether. Many of their parishes are almost unrecognizable, highly combative, and very focused on internal church politics–all traits of less wealthy, ethnically centered, confessionally bound denominations more than any historic Anglican Province.
! Commonplacing
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