Anglican
- Warren wanted to push the conversation. This was a provocative effort to change a denomination’s core doctrine and identity, with a ‘Walk Together’ paradigm.
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Warren is astute that the denomination, like all denominations, will be facing new challenges as cultural norms have changed for younger generations.
- The Revd William Alexander Ayton, Vicar of Chacombe, in Oxfordshire, was one such case. A Freemason of extraordinarily deep occult learning, he maintained a clandestine alchemical lab in his rectory basement, and declared that he had made the Elixir of Life […]
- The Revd A. H. Baverstock, twice Master of the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) in the 1920s, was a member [of the Golden Dawn], as was the Very Revd Frank Selwyn Bennett, the Dean of Chester Cathedral, a formative influence on the culture of Anglican cathedrals in the 20th century.
- The Revd Francis Heazell, secretary of the Church of England’s committee on ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox from 1917 to 1929, was a Ruling Chief of the Order’s London Temple. His duties would have included teaching the Order’s hermetic doctrines to new initiates. […]
- So were some of his brothers at Mirfield. In fact, Rees, and a fellow monk of Mirfield, Fr Charles Fitzgerald CR, helped to found a Golden Dawn temple in New Zealand while on mission there in the 1910s. The chapter that they started eventually came to include several Anglican bishops from that country. […]
- During the Divine Liturgy all believers will wear masks.
- Before entering the Church, they will disinfect their hands with a disinfectant present at the entrance of the Church.
- They will not shake hands with anyone.
- They will not kiss the hand of the Clergy.
- They will not kiss the Icons, but they will bow before them.
- They will not use the liturgical books at the time of prayer.
- They will not receive the Antidoron from the Clergy, but on their own as they leave the church.
- The Agape Meal will not be served following the Sunday Liturgy.
- The various group meetings of the Faithful as well as the Catechumens will not take place.
<www.orthodoxkorea.org/instructi…>
After the vote reaffirming the decision to oust Saddleback, Warren said in a YouTube video that he wasn’t surprised and that he made his appeal “knowing we weren’t going to win.” He compared the movement to that of William Wilberforce, a British politician who lobbied to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain and triumphed after 17 years.
“I wanted to push the conversation,” Warren said. “I wanted to speak up for millions of Southern Baptist women, who I believe their spiritual gifts and their leadership gifts and talents are being wasted. And we can’t complete the Great Commission if 50% of our population sits on the shelf.”
Warren highlighted that the vote wasn’t unanimous.
“The next generation of Southern Baptists, they’re not here,” he added. “I can guarantee that change will happen at some point.”
Source: Southern Baptists finalize ouster of O.C.’s Saddleback Church - Los Angeles Times
A few points:
Warren said. “No one is asking any Southern Baptist church to change their theology. I’m not asking you to agree with my church, I’m asking you to act like a Southern Baptist, who have historically agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines.”
“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members."
[…]
“It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.”
I believe that without such clarity and catholicity in theological method the ‘conservatism’ of, say, ACNA on sexual morality or of a traditional Old High Churchman on the ordination of women will prove to be merely the slow lane to the destination already reached by TEC, the CofE, and the Anglican Communion in general.
Source: Old High Churchmen and Continuing Anglicans – Anglican Catholic Liturgy and Theology
We who are Evangelicals recognize the need to address the widespread misunderstanding in our community that sola scriptura (Scripture alone) means nuda scriptura (literally, Scripture unclothed; i.e., denuded of and abstracted from its churchly context). The phrase sola scriptura refers to the primacy and sufficiency of Scripture as the theological norm—the only infallible rule of faith and practice—over all tradition rather than the mere rejection of tradition itself. The isolation of Scripture study from the believing community of faith (nuda scriptura) disregards the Holy Spirit’s work in guiding the witness of the people of God to scriptural truths, and leaves the interpretation of that truth vulnerable to unfettered subjectivism.
The danger of departure from the hermeneutic of the Anglican Reformers has already become clear. The Kigali Commitment promises to “affirm and encourage . . . leadership roles of GAFCON women in family, Church and society.” This statement implicitly ratifies women’s ordination to the diaconate, priesthood, and episcopacy. All three are already being practiced in several GAFCON provinces, and the first two in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA).
We believe in ministry for women in a large variety of roles that the ancient fathers endorsed, including the order of deaconesses. But the ordination of women to sacramental ministry violates the plain sense of Scripture, which the English Reformers prized.
Disagreements among Anglicans about women’s ordination (as well as homosexuality and other controversial issues) make clear that this plain sense can be arrived at only by reading Scripture through the lens of the tradition of the Church.
Furthermore, women’s ordination breaches the conciliarism that the English Reformers practiced and esteemed. They knew that the rule in the early Church in resolving disputes was to accept only rites that agreed with Scripture as understood by the whole Church. The biblical authors insist not only that Scripture is the Word of God, but also that the Church of the living God [is] a pillar and buttress of truth (1 Tim. 3:15). Their criterion is Scripture as understood by the whole Church.
Rites for women’s ordination have been approved without the consent of the whole Church. They have come primarily from a minority of the world’s churches, those that are heretical and dying. This is a new and (mostly) Western development. The ACNA College of Bishops insisted upon this in 2017 when it concluded that women’s ordination is a “recent innovation” with “insufficient scriptural warrant.” This salutary statement recognizes that the recent departure from the traditional understanding of man and woman within the Bride of Christ deviates from the way the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church has understood Holy Order for two millennia.
Source: Is the Anglican “Reset” Truly Anglican? | Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, Greg Peters | First Things
The truth is that the GAFCON primates have expressly chosen language that shows they are bent on forgetting that there is still great division, especially on issues of the ordination of women to the episcopate. They have chosen instead to move forward in a way that relegates these very serious issues to secondary, adiaphora, hang-ups. The problem is, if I may be utterly clear, they have even misrepresented the language of the Jerusalem Declaration. This is particularly dangerous.
Source: Convenient Forgetting and the Jerusalem Declaration - The North American Anglican
The ordination of women has halted Anglican-Roman Catholic negotiations, for now; but if Anglo-Catholics have a place in GAFCON, they could bring Grafton’s dream of reunion with the Old Catholics and Orthodox closer to fruition. GAFCON has essentially exorcised latitudinarians from the Anglican picture, leaving them to fade away in their Canterbury ghetto. It is undoubtedly an evangelical-dominated movement. Nonetheless, that leaves a significant Anglo-Catholic minority, particularly in the U.S. and Africa. That minority could be all that is needed to graft the majority of Anglicans firmly onto the apostolic vine. The Union of Scranton founded by the Polish Old Catholic hierarchy that Grafton once courted is already moving toward reunion with some Anglo-Catholic jurisdictions, and the Anglican Church of North America, which split off from the U.S. Episcopal Church in 2009 to join GAFCON, could become a bridge between the Old Catholic movement and the worldwide Anglican majority. This could help GAFCON to decide whether it is just evangelical, or both evangelical and Catholic. If it opts for the latter course, then Grafton’s thesis may not yet be a dead letter.
Source: Anglicans and the Reunion of Christendom | Thomas Plant | First Things
Excellent thoughts, although I believe that the PNCC halted discussion with ACNA because of its unresolved policy on gender & holy orders.
let us remember that we are fighting for God’s Truth: truth revealed in Holy Scripture; truth more fully shown to us in modern discovery; and for the liberty of the sons of God; liberty ecclesiastical, political, intellectual. The Anglican Communion, and the Anglo-Catholic Movement which is its spearhead, its only consistent manifestation, are the only hope for the re-union of Christendom and the reconciliation of the modern world to Christianity. Roman propaganda, both inside and outside the Church, is an effort to pervert and ultimately to destroy that movement. I have avoided making accusations, but I cannot but warn you, that there are very sinister elements in what we are fighting against. If there is a “Protestant underworld,” as we are sometimes told, there is also an Anglo-Catholic underworld, and a very queer region it is. The use that is being made of the confessional and of the retreat movement in certain quarters, may lead to very disastrous results; and some of our smaller religious communities need watching carefully.
Source: English Catholicism, by CB Moss
Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, successfully cursed a hotel when a friend complained that it ruined the view at his lake house. The hotel burned down — twice. Thoroughly pleased with his success, the Archbishop went on to curse other minor items, such as ugly windows, when asked by his friends and fellow clergy. Anecdotes such as these might suggest that, if Anglicans were dabbling in the occult, it was all nothing more than the idiosyncrasies of strong personalities.
In truth, Anglo-Catholic involvement in the occult is much broader and deeper than most would suspect. Take, for instance, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, established in 1887. Devoted to the Western esoteric tradition, and practising various forms of initiatory ritual magic, the Golden Dawn recruited heavily from the clergy. Some of these men were, indeed, simple eccentrics.
Although the Golden Dawn and its daughter organisations had a notable contingent of clergy and Anglican laity, the Order was necessarily restrictive. It remained, primarily, a phenomenon of a very select elite. Theosophy, by contrast, was more widely diffused within the Church of England. At the turn of the 20th century, there was a popular interest in “mysticism” which took various forms. […] ANGLICAN clergy were not immune to this wider cultural force. Sermons on Theosophical topics could be heard in some early Edwardian parishes. Many Anglo-Catholics of the era were able to blend beliefs in the astral body, reincarnation, and root races with Catholic doctrines and ritual practices. But the Anglican liaison with Theosophy was not to last. At the 1920 Lambeth Conference, Theosophy was formally condemned, alongside Spiritualism and Christian Science. Some Theosophical Anglicans, such as J. I. Wedgwood and C. W. Leadbeater, eventually decided to leave the Church of England and start their own Theosophical churches as episcopi vagantes.
This long-held sacred principle called the Seal of the Confessional should be upheld whenever possible. However, according to the guidance of many dioceses, an exception may occur when the life or well-being of the penitent or another person is in potential danger. This exception is becoming more prevalent as many states have attempted to pass laws that compel clergy to breach confessional privilege in these situations. — Jacob Davis
Following the recent article from Anglican Compass, it is worth remembering that many ACNA dioceses, including The Diocese of Western Anglicans no longer honor the seal of confessional.
This is a notable departure from not just Catholic tradition, but the classical Anglican tradition itself. Such is a capitulation to culture versus the authority of the church, both reformed and catholic.
Note that in addition to a permeable seal, this practice includes recording confessional meetings.
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will be adding supplements here:
A Parent’s Prayer from the St Augustine’s Prayer Book
From the composer:
It is a combination of the Collect for the Heathen and the Collect for Heretics from the Solemn Collects for Good Friday from the People’s Anglican Missal.
In that reluctance to come to grips with “Classical Anglicanism” (despite protestations to the contrary), the ACNA project remains strongly entangled with the theological, historical, liturgical, and institutional perspectives that so disastrously reshaped the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Anglican Church in Canada in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Source: A Curate’s Egg - The ACNA Prayer Book of 2019 - The Anglican Way
the modern English liturgy is clueless about the wedding ring: ‘I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage.’ Whether at a coronation or a wedding, if you have to say that something is a symbol and a sign, it is not a very good symbol and it fails to signify. ‘With this ring I thee wed,’ says nothing about a symbol but actually symbolizes. ‘This is a symbol’ merely asserts something that is not in fact the case. Source: The Coronation of King Charles III – Anglican Catholic Liturgy and Theology
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.
Msgr Jeffrey Steenson, P.A, who also worked on the Anglican Service Book when at Good Shepherd Rosemont
Peter Toon Memorial Lecture This lecture seeks to articulate contemporary challenges and to point to the archaia agape (‘ancient love’) as a way to engage with the contending groups that are part of the modern church.
“… noble, but bare and quiet, without the lofty aspiration of the French Gothic or the devotional intimacy of an Italian chapel … the dignity of an architecture that speaks for itself and largely without the benefit of images” — Roger Scruton on the Anglican parish church
In what does this joy consist? It is a hard concept for us, because we live in, and are heavily influenced by, a culture that defines happiness as possessing stuff. The Puritan concept that God materially blesses those whom he favors leads in a direct line to the Prosperity Gospel. Yet, despite the affluence and consumer goods, the nation seems increasingly unhappy and angry. Millions get through the day only by dulling their psychic pain with mountains of legal and illegal drugs to stave off anxiety and depression. Is it time to reject the Puritans and Prosperity Prophets? Jesus notes that Mammon is a hard master, not a source of joy.
To use the Pauline analogy, as newborn babes can only tolerate milk, perhaps we can only begin with small steps to recapture the joy. “You must be joyful” is, of course, an exhortation of no value. Joy is not an obligation any more than it is a consumer product. Our source of joy is not found in religion, cultic observance, nor obedience to commandments. It comes from the power of the Resurrection, from that single, transforming fact, both historical and contemporary, “Christ is risen.”
Without that single fact, even the richest world is desolate. With it, even the most hopeless world is rich. Therein lies the joy.
American 1928 Revisers keeping the ‘national church can do whatever’ ball rolling.
Some selections both of Epistles and Gospels which seem less happy have been emended in various recent Prayer Book revisions, as we shall see. While such changes are sentimentally regrettable, as putting sister branches of the Anglican church out of step with each other, and with Western traditions of some eleven hundred years, on certain occasions, yet plainly there is nothing in the history of our liturgical lectionaries which entitles them to more respect than their intrinsic merits deserve; and it is quite within the competence of any National Church to make such further improvements as may be demanded in the lections for our cycle of Sundays.
from Parsons & Jones, The American Prayer Book: Its Origins and Principles, p.85
“Often we have prided ourselves since the formation of the Anglican Communion on being delivered from being a national or regional sect when all that we have really become is a world sect.”
– Wolf, p. xxxii, Kingdom of Christ
“Three Streams” is a phrase that has come to the fore in the last 10 years or so, especially amongst Anglicans in the ACNA and in continuing Anglican churches. The phrase is meant to suggest (a) that there are three historic “streams” within historic Christianity — the Catholic, the Evangelical, and the Charismatic — and (b) that Anglicanism embodies these in a distinct way that can serve the renewal of the Church.
Prof. Gillis Harp has suggested that the notion may have its origins in Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God (1953) or possibly an article by Richard Lovelace in Charisma magazine in 1984. Regardless, it was brought to prominence by the late Wheaton College professor Robert Webber in his wide corpus on “Ancient-Future” worship, sometimes called the Convergence Movement. In an article for ACNA’s newsletter Apostle, Trinity School for Ministry’s professor emeritus, the Rev’d Dr Les Farfield writes:
The genius of Anglicanism is that for five hundred years it has held in creative tension three different strands of Biblical Christianity. Those three streams are the Protestant, the Pentecostal/Holiness and the AngloCatholic [sic] movements.
I must say I find this a problematic argument from a historical perspective: How many Anglicans before the twentieth-century charismatic movement would have found recognizable the claim that the “Pentecostal/Holiness” stream is an integral part of Anglicanism?
Source: Three streams (but not the ones you’re thinking of) – Covenant
The Protestant movement recalled the 16th century Church to the primacy of the Word—written, read, preached, inwardly digested. The 18th century Holiness movement reminded the Church of God’s love for the poor. The Anglo-Catholic movement re-grounded the Church in the sacramental life of worship. All three strands are grounded in the Gospel. Each one extrapolates the Gospel in a specific direction. No strand is dispensable. Other Christian bodies have often taken one strand to an extreme. By God’s grace the Anglican tradition has held the streams in creative tension. This miracle of unity is a treasure worth keeping.
From the Anglican Church in North America website. Rather than the sometimes-given definition of “three streams” being Evangelical, Charismatic, and Sacramental; Three streams in Anglicanism is Reformed, Wesleyan/Holiness, and Catholic.
The revival also appears to transcend the normative Anglican tribal divides of ‘High’ and ‘Low’ church. A few church schools have taken to assimilating the Book of Common Prayer into their curriculums, providing the prospect of growing future Anglican leaders fluent in the deepest parts of their heritage. Even Roman Catholics are having a go. For the Ordinariate – an enclave for ex-Anglicans, including the former Bishop of Rochester Dr Michael Nazir-Ali – the Vatican has assimilated an adjusted 1662 text.
It would be a mistake to misinterpret renewed interest in the Prayer Book as a purely aesthetic enterprise, a sort of religious Classic FM. What is clear is that the appeal is not just about Shakespearean language, beautiful though it evidently is. The Prayer Book is theology at its best. It is a manual of spiritual disciple that is as far removed from modern, cringe-inducing ‘wellness’ gobbledygook as can be. Its uncompromising opening, ‘We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts’, is a brick through the window to many facets of modern living including narcissism, egotism and the crocodile tears of identity politics.
– Rev Daniel French, Why millennial men are turning to the Book of Common Prayer
“if this plan or this work is of men, it will come to nothing; but if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it—lest you even be found to fight against God." Acts 5:38
What of the state of global Anglicanism? Thinking on the difference between the two: of men, or of God: from the perspective of the adherent, the faithful minority (or remnant) and the ‘losing side’ of the ‘movement’ appear similar; the difference may not be known in a single lifetime. How does this awareness change one’s spirituality?
Minimizing Eastern Customs, Retaining Catholic Practices. (from Feb 2020)
Interesting news from the Orthodox Church in South Korea. With the imminent threat of COVID-19, they are recommending modified church customs:
For this reason, we urge all believers to follow the following instructions until the problem ends:
Note that modifying Eucharistic practice to something more ‘modern’ is not mentioned.Certain practices that are difficult for Westerners are more negotiable than some Orthodox might otherwise express, and this shows at times of challenge rather than ease. I have been in relaxed and uptight Orthodox contexts, so those that are already relaxed should be able to keep on truckin'.These observations do not diminish the importance of the practice but rather, that these are interesting hints at how Orthodoxy itself could be contextualized for different cultures and customs (we all have a terminal illness, after all).
3. Reduce or remove The Peace. Anglicans, Catholics, everyone. Theologically, The Peace is a moment of reconciliation, not a meet-and-greet or chance to catch up / make plans.
4. Many Anglicans and most protestants would be very uncomfortable with this, even after catechizing the role of Clergy and usefulness of a blessing.
5. Similar to #4. Modern westerners generally feel weird about kissing stuff, but can show proper reverence in other ways.
6. Bring your own prayer book & Bible to church. No more pew bibles, handouts, etc. Save church funds, encourage liturgical familiarity, uniformity to published works, and personal ownership of your communal faith.