Bruce Charlton linked through to Lev Gillet’s discussion of why he left Anglicanism. The issues that he identifies have got worse, and have permeated almost every church. Except the Orthodox (to my knowledge). What I find interesting is that the Orthodox have had to fight for their faith, and still cling to it… while being aware that they can be in error.
This quote also nicely leads into the big issue of this day. We are no longer arguing about what is the state of the communion, or ikons or saints. These things are important. Instead we are defending against the liberals who see Christ as but a myth.
I shall never cease to be sincerely grateful for my Anglican upbringing. Never would I wish to engage in negative polemic against the communion where I first came to know Christ as my Savior. I remember with lasting happiness the beauty of the choral services in Westminster Abbey which I attended while a boy at Westminster School, and in particular I recall the great procession with cross, candles and banners at the Sung Eucharist on the feast of St Edward the Confessor. I am grateful also for the links which I formed, while at school and university, with members of the Society of St Francis such as Father Algy Robertson, the Father Guardian, and his young disciple Brother Peter. It was the Anglican Franciscans who taught me the place of mission within the Christian life and the value of sacramental confession.
I shall always regard my decision to embrace Orthodoxy as the crowning fulfillment of all that was best in my Anglican experience; as an affirmation, not a repudiation. Yet, for all my love and gratitude, I cannot in honesty remain silent about what troubled me in the 1950s, and today troubles me far more; and that is the extreme diversity of the conflicting beliefs and practices that coexist within the bounds of the Anglican communion. I was (and am) disturbed first of all by the contrasting views of Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals concerning central articles of faith such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the Communion of Saints. Are the consecrated elements to be worshiped as the true Body and Blood of the Savior? May we intercede for the departed, and ask the Saints and the Mother of God to pray for us? These are not just marginal issues, over which Christians may legitimately agree to differ. They are fundamental to our life in Christ. How then could I continue in a Christian body which permitted its members to hold diametrically opposed views on these matters?
I was yet more disturbed by the existence within Anglicanism of a “liberal” wing that calls in doubt the Godhead of Christ, His Virgin Birth, His miracles and His bodily Resurrection. St Thomas’s words rang in my ears: “My Lord and my God!’ (Jn 20:28). I heard St Paul saying to me: “If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is also in vain” (i Cor 15:24). For my own salvation I needed to belong to a Church which held fast with unwavering faithfulness to the primary Christian teachings concerning the Trinity and the Person of Christ. Where could I find such a Church? Not, alas! in Anglicanism.
These liberals are functionally pagan. Bruce Charlton, arguing from natural law, says that most societies do make distinctions in morality that Christians would eschew. If we want to be pro life, anti infanticide… we need to accept these are Christian, and work the conversion of society. For the secular society, as he says, does not care.
A society based on Christian virtues, Christian morality, is a consequence of a Christian society; and distinctively Christian morality makes no sense in a secular context, as it would not in other religions.
(Distinctively Christian – I am not saying uniquely-Christian.)
Since infanticide is not spontaneously experienced as immoral, for Christians to reverse the current re-emergence of infanticide in modern society, or other behaviors prohibited by traditional and orthodox Christianity, therefore requires that individuals and society – the Church – first become more devoutly Christian.
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Now, there are consequences of letting fallen clerics rule a church. The church dies. The Anglicans have lost that combination of decency, common sense and lack of logic — avoiding taking things to their logical extreme, that made them once great.
What is really worrying for the future of the Church, however, is that its leaders themselves seem to have ceased to believe in it. A sizable number of clergy and several bishops, would be much happier without the burden of establishment. Free of it, they feel the Church has a better chance to reach out to the young and claim its relevance to modern life.
Even the Archbishop of Canterbury and very likely the Archbishop of York, I suspect, are half, if not wholly, of this view. As for Prince Charles, who will become head of the Church when (and if) he succeeds to the throne, he seems thoroughly uncomfortable with the role in his search to be a popular figurehead for all religions and none.
You can see the temptation. In a multi-cultural Britain, why not a head of state that represents all religions? And in a secular nation, why not a church that can battle for souls without the encumbrance of all the conservative connotations of being the established church? I can see Prince Charles inducing a sigh of relief among the bishops – and a cheer from many vicars – if he announced he wanted to do away with the whole thing.
Only that begs the awkward question of what then does the Anglican Church in Britain amount to if it is not the established church? To listen to some in the Church, you would think it a thriving community that is only being held back by its political branding. The truth may well be the opposite. It is only its position as the established church of the country that keeps it going at all.
Born out of political necessity (as Henry VIII saw it), it has survived by reasserting itself constantly as a nationalist bastion against Roman Catholic Europe in its early centuries; as an arm of imperial ambitions in the 19th century and as a spirit of Britishness during the wars of the 20th century. It was what made us different and decent.
The problem is actually not the decency or lack of it. It is the theology. The Anglicans used to be evangelical — or anglocatholic. It was defined by the articles of faith. But this is now lost.
And if you lose your faith. your clergy has fallen, and your branch of the church is sick.
As valid as the institutional question of establishment may be, the more important factor in this pattern of decline is theological. Churches and denominations decline when they lose or forfeit their passion for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and for the Bible as the enduring, authoritative, and totally truthful Word of God. If life and death are no longer understood to hang in the balance, there is little reason for the British people to worry about anything related to Christianity. If a church is not passionate about seeing sinners come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, if there is no powerful biblical message from its pulpits, then it is destined for decline and eventual disappearance.
When a church forfeits its doctrinal convictions and then embraces ambiguity and tolerates heresy, it undermines its own credibility and embraces its own destruction.
Hamilton is surely right about one thing. It is true that the Church of England’s disastrous controversies over gender and sexuality are not the causes of the church’s decline. They are instead symptoms of a far deeper theological disease.
Hamilton’s closing words bear close scrutiny: “The Church of England was founded as a political act against the wishes of much of the population and is now dying out of political irrelevance and popular unconcern. History, as we know, moves on, taking no prisoners.”
Now… this is a warning. For where the Anglicans are, the Presbyterians are also. Fallen clergy drive out health clergy. The congregants leave. And the church, now dying, makes nice websites but loses souls.
Intersting and thoughtful post.
The question is how the Church of England used to work – in particular how it contained both Catholics and Protestants – used to puzzle me deeply; and I tended to assume it was an unprincipled compromise.
But I think I have begun to understand:
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/anglican-spirituality.html
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/truth-of-church-of-england-from-charles.html
When this ‘worked’ properly, it enabled people like Charles Williams and C.S Lewis to (in a sense) get back to something like a pre-Reformation unity of Christianity – since (in principle) some advantages from both Protestant and Catholic perspective could be conserved – advantages which were torn apart by the Reformation and scattered among the Romans Catholic and many Protestant churches.
By having the Book of Common Prayer as its focus, this softened the legalistic doctrinal disputes that bedevil Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches – in this respect it somewhat resembled Eastern Orthodoxy (with its liturgical and traditional focus).
However, as you observe, this was destroyed by the domination of ‘liberal Christianity’ (i.e. Christianity subordinated to the changes of modernity; i.e. not Christianity – un-belief and nihilistic destruction.).
There are now only islands of Christianity in the Church of England in a sea of apostasy. I am fortunate to have found a few. But I don’t expect this to last for much longer.
I was married in an Anglican Church. One of the things I miss is the Book of Common Prayer. But going Anglican does not help. The NZ Anglicans have rewritten the prayers, and the text no longer sings.
When I moved to Dunedin I looked for a health local fellowship: since I am basically presbyterian I was fortunate to find one. (the more prominent Presbyterian Kirks here are high church and liberal).
I have some hope for Anglicanism. Sydney is healthy. Africa is healthy. And there are islands of health left in England. But the liberals will be pruned by time.
That can only happen when you Homeschool. Because although the liberals have trouble reproducing as long as they can indoctrinate young minds through the media and through schools it is continue.
The C of E really did manage a decent ‘via media’ between Geneva and Rome; a pity Anglo-Catholicism (gateway for most to Tiber-swimming) then modernism destroyed that…
Chris, did you ever hear of the Reformed Anglican Church? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Episcopal_Church
Despite the “reformed” in its title [Protestants sure love reforming stuff…], it actually tries to stay as close as possible to the original Anglican Church. So no female clergy, gay marriage [I think the regular American Episcopalian Church does that?] or other liberal concepts.
An example of the church as it should be:
http://www.leadingtheway.org/site/PageServer?pagename=default
You can only do your best to obey the lord in those times. But as it always is leave the rest up to god.
Will S – the role of Anglo Catholicism is not fully clear to me.
Clearly the Oxford Movement was – overall – a Good Thing, an increase in devoutness.
Yet somehow it over-reached with the 1928 Prayer Book (unacceptable to Protestants) and also by its scholarship embraced the idea of revisions and re-translation of the BCP/ Psalter and King James (Authorized version) of the Bible – and in general subordinated the Church to intellectuals hence academia.
Dissent between Catholics and Protestants weakened the real Anglican Church and opened-up space for the apostate Anglicans to take over, from the base in academia (where apostasy is seen as originality) and journalism/ the media (where subversion is a way of life).
CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity was a final (?) attept to hold the C of E together on deep and Holy ground, and there was indeed a mini-revival from 1939 until the 1950s, but then decline.
Nowadays, since the BCP was discarded, ‘unity’ in the C of E is almost wholly a matter of administrative compromise – worldly and pragmatic…
Anglo Catholicism was in part a resurrection of the Arminianist theology of Charles I. But it could live with the more reformed because the BCP and the articles were fairly close to mere christianity.
True enough, Bruce; yet it seemed more of a gateway to conversion, for most of its brightest lights, like Newman and Chesterton. In which case, it might have been better for the C of E as a whole, since that’s what they were bent on doing anyway, if they had just gone, and not pushed the C of E in that direction…
You say that like it’s a bad thing. When Protestants stop protesting and come home sounds good to me.
Svar, it is not the AngloCaths crossing the Tiber.
BF, it is not the reformed leaving for somewhere else.
It is the loss of a tradition of prayer and meditation that was once a great witness. It grieves me. I feel the same way about the methodists: for when a church dies people die with it.
You misread me, Svar: I’m saying if they had wanted to leave for Rome, they should have just done so without dragging a portion of the Anglican church halfway with them, and leaving it there…
But, you’re right, of course I think it’s a bad thing. I am a Protestant, after all. 🙂
The Reformed Episcopal Church (not Reformed Anglican Church as she wrongly entitled it) is far from being truly Reformed; at one time it was, when first founded, but it has steadily moved away from its Reformed heritage, and is now in full communion with an Anglo-Catholic breakaway called the Anglican Province in America. Eventually it will merge, give it time. Then it will be no more, and all one or two faithful will be right in asking, what was the point…
The interesting thing about all this is that the Anglican Church never has made sense to Roman Catholics and Protestants outside of it – since it contained both Catholics and Protestants, and (to those outside) this seemed to be impossible in any kind of principled fashion.
But in fact it did make sense to those within it, up until about the mid twentieth century – because the Church was focused on the Book of Common Prayer, which was written by the literary genius (and Holy martyr) Thomas Cranmer who was – uniquely – able to provide a form of words which were not only of unsurpassed beauty but satisfied Protestants from their Protestant perspective and Catholics from theirs.
As soon as the Church, in a period of much lesser holiness (as well as much lower literary attainment) began to mess with the BCP, the Church began to fall apart; and without the BCP at its core, Anglicanism is merely a bureaucratic structure.
There is no ‘unity’ in the Church as whole (just scattered and few islands), merely expediency and compromise which is very close to pure careerism; and indeed much ‘unity’ is in actuality secularization, dilution and subversion.
There seem to be no grounds for optimism in the Anglican Church – but nonetheless it seems reasonable to remain hopeful, so long as one’s own position is not made impossible.
I have a couple of inflexible points of practice upon which I will not yield, and if these are broached I would go one way or the other, or both ways – into Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism on the one hand and/or into an Independent Evangelical Protestant Church. But I would never stop missing the traditional words of the BCP and Authorized version.
Though I be an outsider, and a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant, I do agree with that; and as I said previously, I thought they did a good job with that ‘via media’ (I hadn’t appreciated the role of the BCP in that, but it makes sense), until the balance tipped with AngloCatholicism, and then subsequent liberalization…
Indeed.
In my view, Anglo-Catholicism had several Achilles Heels – a focus on ‘historical’ and linguistic Biblical criticism was one, but socialism was another – Anglo Catholics were very much of The Left, and became absorbed in social work and political agitation; activities that are (as we now perceive, although it was less obvious then) intrinsically tending to be worldly and anti-Christian.