If anyone is interested in understanding the heart of Anglicanism I leave you with this quote from Vic--a very nice fellow who is an Anglican priest who visits this blog.
...two positions within that church that might appear to be contradictory should perhaps not be contrasted with each other, for each will exist only as an attempt to relate to that perfect truth about God that is still in process of being revealed. Two people, looking at different sides of the same coin, may offer descriptions of what they see that appear to have no correlation with each other at all. And all of us in this life see only as in a glass, darkly; and different expressions of the same truth, as St Paul well knew, are needed for different people.
He sums it up nicely. Allow me to recount what this means in real life within the Anglican Church: at St. Margaret's Fr.Spike reserves the Blessed Sacrament, leads Eucharistic Adoration and believes that the consecrated host really is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At St Luke's Bob the Vicar, who is a committed Evangelical, pours the leftover wine down the vestry sink and puts the leftover bread out for the birds.
I have deliberately chosen the two extremes of churchmanship in the Anglican Church to make my point. It is nevertheless a reality. Most every deanery in the Church of England will have such extremes. If you are an Anglican you must therefore conclude that Fr.Spike and Bob the Vicar are simply "two people looking at different sides of the same coin." They are offering two different descriptions of that same ineffable truth that no one can really define.
To put it another way, they are climbing the same mountain, but by different (and we must assume equally valid) paths. This is because, for the Anglicans, Christianity is not essentially a dogmatic religion. Even the creeds were only one way of saying it--written at a particular time in history when certain things needed saying.
Anglicans therefore not only adapt the Christian faith according to the place and time in which they live, but they believe this to be not only inevitable, but necessary. Truth for the Anglican, is constantly morphing into new expressions and new formations. Societal pressures on Christian truth are to be welcomed. They help the Anglican Christian to 'see things from a new perspective'. The Holy Spirit, after all, blows where it wills.
All of this, the Anglican sincerely believes, is good and healthy and vital. This is the life of faith! The adventure is not to be bound by dogma and canon law and regulations, but to live in a free flowing exchange of ideas, and if we sometimes stumble and fall and make mistakes it is so much better than being bound by outdated dogmas, rules, regulations and something as arcane and out of touch as an infallible authority.
There. So now you know.
At what part of their liturgy do they all hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
ReplyDeleteI think we call this moral relativism.
Michael
Thank you, Father, (should I really thank you?) for taking my comments so completely out of the context in which they were written. I was addressing, you may remember, remarks made by someone else in the combox who was caricaturing the differences in belief plainly evident within the Anglican Church. I was suggesting, you may understand, that such differences were not ideally suited to direct comparison with each other because (this is not too difficult for you?) they were not set up in opposition to each other but as genuine attempts towards understanding some of the great truths of God. I did not, indeed can not, say that each is equally valid, nor may I judge which is nearer to God's truth (though I know which of your two chosen extremes is closer to my own heart and understanding): after all, history does not record what happened to the left-over bread and wine at the Last Supper...
ReplyDeleteAnd then, cheerfully ignoring St Paul explaining that he really had to be all things to all men, you spin my words to suggest that Anglicans 'adapt' the Christian faith. This I find, Father, to be not far short of being offensive (especially after you told me I shouldn't dissimulate. Cheek!). What I actually wrote was, 'different expressions of the same truth, as St Paul well knew, are needed for different people.' The truth that we are able to articulate according to the understanding God has given to us, the truth that Jesus promised his Spirit would lead us into, is the truth we have to communicate. Paul spoke in philosophical terms to Greeks and in Old Testament theological terms to Jews - but it was always the same truth. He adapted the expression of that truth, not the truth itself; and it is a little uncharitable of you to suggest that Anglicans apparently make up their truth as they go along.
No, we don't claim to possess an infallible authority: perhaps it's natural English diffidence, perhaps it's dislike of what can sometimes seem like we-possess-the-truth-and-you-don't smugness, perhaps it's too much like a comfort blanket. But we do possess, I think, an honesty in our disagreements - an honesty, sadly, that sometimes makes us want to knock heads together and may yet even rip us apart.
So then Vic, do you believe in such a thing as objective theology otherwise known as dogma?
ReplyDeleteIf not, then I did not take your words out of context. Indeed your words were a good summary of your Anglican non-dogmatism
If, however, you do believe in dogma, then you will have to suggest what authority exists for you to define both that dogma and its proper interpretation.
I don't believe such an authority structure exists within Anglicanism. Consequently you must relax into the nice, vague open-endedness that is both Anglicanism's greatest strength and greatest weakness.
Do I believe that propositional truth is the only way God communicates himself to his people? Do I believe that theoretical theology can in any meaningful sense be objective? Do I believe that in all instances dogmatic theology must take precedence over all other forms of truth? No, I do not.
ReplyDeleteDo I believe that God through the Holy Spirit is in process of leading his people into all truth? Do I believe that the historic creeds, Councils and formularies of the Church have been a part of this process? Do I believe that this process is on-going, and that therefore nothing is yet to be regarded as 'finished' or 'perfect'? Yes, I do.
Does this imply that the struggle continues, the struggle of how faith and tradition and scripture and emotion and vision and blindness and light and darkness within us all contend with the people and problems of our everyday living? You bet it does! And does all this add up to 'nice, vague, open-endedness'? Well, I guess you have to make your own mind up on that one...
Not all Anglicans believe this balance is healthy, appropriate, or tolerable. Some of us have, in the interest of self-preservation, continued away from that incoherent madness and returned to a theology that is fully coherent and cleaves closely to the undivided church prior to the Great Schism in 1054.
ReplyDeleteIt is, of course, far more fun to set up the straw men, lump everyone together, and try to wrestle with Anglican fudge, just as it's far more fun to ignore the internal divisions of one's own polity. "We have coherent theology and liturgical standards that half our clergy like to ignore, especially in our seminaries," is hardly a fair characterization, but one that can just as easily be made, you know.
Father -
ReplyDeleteIn the Anglican church we affirm the same Creed you do
"I believe in God, the Father Almighty... "
Enough divisiveness. Time for toleration.
Let me just see if I get this straight.
ReplyDeleteFr Longenecker apparently needs to stop being divisive and learn tolerance, yet the Anglican Church, which in total defiance of Scripture and 2000 years of Church teaching has:
- been the first church to endorse artificial contraception
- allows abortion
- openly remarries divorced people, no questions asked
- ordains women
- ordains people living in a publically known homosexual relationship
- ordains openly homosexual bishops
- has prominent bishops who publically question the existence of God, without censure
- etc etc
is NOT being divisive???!!
Keep going Father, some people really do not like hearing the truth.
All the Truth necessary for salvation ended at Christ's Accent into Heaven. What is on going is that each generation is trying to learn those Truth's and that is an ongoing journey.
ReplyDeleteLady hawk
ReplyDeleteAnd therein lies the problem. Christ left the Church in Peter's hands, and he and his successors assembled the words, and clarified the teachings over many years. We do not have to try and learn these truths over and over again. We have to look to the Magisterium of the Church, where it is all very clearly presented. Nothing has changed about the Truth.
There is nothing relative to time and space with this. Jesus is not bound by either time or space, and the teachings He gave to His Bride, the Church are not moving with the times, but remaining a beacon for us all to follow to the foot of the Cross.
An interesting comment;however the path to truth is also in a similar vein undertaken by the Catholic Church as underlinned by Blessed Cardinal Newman :"No one can go straight up a mountain;no sailing vessel makes for its port without tacking" .Errors-'they are sometimes the way to truth and the only way'.But 'in extremis' the Pope will make the ultimate infallible decision as Christ will not allow The Church to drift into error.Similarly ,Science progresses the same way -through trial and error but without the spiritual guidance of infallibilty.Hence Science may be readily summarised as 'organised sceptiscism' re recent speculation about the speed of light -is it absolute still?
ReplyDelete