Aside from my contempt for these kinds of lists – I don’t think any list of propositions can get at the essence of something like Anglicanism… unless you’re talking about the creeds, and they’re not lists! – it got me thinking about what Anglicanism essentially is. Back when Orombi wrote his like op. piece for First Things (which they’ve still not provided a counter piece to, thank you very much!), I wrote about it here, alluded to it here, and argued about it at Per Caritatem. Orombi lodges the essence of Anglicanism in the Scriptures and the Martyrs. I pointed out then that it’s unusual, I think, for him, an Anglican Archbishop, to provide a definition of Anglicanism which omits any reference to common prayer. Moreover, as one Anglican theologian today will say, if you want to know Anglican theology, read Anglican poets. It’s a messy state of affairs, but it’s Anglicanism. Not having a CDF or a Curia is not a dispensable part of who we are. The prayerbook, however, is indispensable.

JADR in a recent manifesto wrote here:

Catholic Anglicanism is the Christendom of the imagination. It’s a utopian project. It’s a church that never was and never really has been. You can’t find it in the phone book or even on the web. And you definitely can’t find it in the newspapers. I read in the UK´s Guardian the other day about the alternative conservatives: GAFCON. It´s a conservative gaffe, all right. Read the signs. It’s time for Anglicans to come clean. We’re the church of the drunks, the homos, the dandys, the dreamers. We pray like Warhol made paintings. Because we like images.

Here at TLOU, it seems it’s becoming our claim that there’s something important about images, art, and prayer that must be reckoned with before you throw up a smoke screen of propositions. So, that said, I think it’s as good a time as any to pick up the question that Cynthia began last year. But I don’t want to ask just what is Anglicanism, but rather what is at the core of Anglicanism? Jump in…

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Bishop Mwamba described the situation as it had been in Uganda, “where a special Synod is organised and provision passed which would penalise any bishop coming to the Lambeth Conference. That denied freedom of expression in terms of any individual bishop. The invitation to Lambeth is in the gift of the archbishop and it is up to a particular bishop, not a particular province, to say I will come or I won’t come.

“What are we saying about our leadership styles? It was the same in Nigeria- many would have been glad to come. So when they say 200 of our brothers have boycotted the conference – definitely no. Maybe given the freedom, one or two would have stayed behind. It must be clearly understood: the reason why they didn’t come is that they were forced not to come.” He finds it therefore a paradox that while they stay at home, some of the American allies who have been working with them – for example, Bishop Robert Duncan and others – are here…

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ADDITIONALLY: a link offered by 3rd Mill. Catholic analyzing the GAFCON.

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Anglicanism has never made a claim of ecclesial ultimacy, and so defines itself not as the Catholic Church, but rather as a catholic church, and thus recognizes the other two communions as legitimate branches of “the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Unlike Fr. Kimel, I see this as Anglicanism’s greatest strength, not its weakness. And if it survives the present struggles, then it will only be that much stronger. You see, believe it or not, I still believe in “common prayer catholicity,” which, contrary to Al Kimel’s reductionism above, is more than just the formal retention of ancient creeds and apostolic orders. Neither is my position merely a “strategy,” failed or otherwise, for the orthodox to stay put in TEC/Anglican Communion. I don’t need a reason or a strategy to stay in TEC. Indeed, the burden of proof is STILL on those who insist that I should leave! Rather Anglicanism is a way of being catholic, or living into catholicity, that has proven itself very effective and extremely resilient over the last nearly 500 years of this independent Anglican experiment. I still believe that Anglicanism is a movement of God. I may be wrong. But why should I give up on it now?

Read more here.

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Giles Fraser has an interesting reflection in the most recent church times on the recent vote for women in the episcopate. For me, it confirms that one of the most significant yet unexplored issues at play here is a fundamental miscommunication over what orthodoxy is and is not. And not merely in terms of the issues – ie. women or no women in the episcopate. Instead, the question should be “how do we conceptually (dare I say, metaphysically?) go about the business of articulating orthodoxy.” On the one hand, you have a group of traditionalists who think of orthodoxy in a transcendental apriori fashion. For them, orthodoxy is something contained in itself that we can “get at” conceptually in more or less exhaustive ways. In other words, its best grasped propositionally. On the other hand, you have a group comprised of social gospellers, progressives, more moderate leaning conservatives, you name it, of whom many, in one fashion or another, tend to think of orthodoxy as something that grows, that either changes as our circumstances change or are access to it changes as our circumstances change. What’s more relevant for them is holding on to a tradition that they think of as a living (i.e. growing) tradition.

It seems to me that, after we recognize these fundamental differences in talking about orthodoxy, a middle way has to be fashioned that allows us to not only be a both/and group, but that finds a different way of thinking of orthodoxy that not only accepts both factions but also draws them closer to real orthodoxy which, if we take God’s transcendence seriously, is closer to what William Desmond would call overdeterminate – orthodoxy is not simply either graspable or beyond our grasp. Rather, it grasps us.

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In any case, as an Episcopelian theology student and instructor who considers himself to be practicing orthodoxy, I’m getting a little tired of the straw-man claims that TEC and the Anglican Communion have been possessed by the heresy demons. It seems that there’s an implicit understanding that what constitutes orthodoxy among a communion necessarily includes not only no women in the episcopate, but also, if you will, a “roman” idea of infallibility amongst the decisions makers. So, the reasoning goes something like this: the C of E has necessarily made a mistake in affirming women in the episcopate, and we all know what kind of blunder TEC made with Gene Robinson and their apparent unwillingness to repent and atone for their sins, their resistance to the work of the Spirit via the splinter factions/alternative oversight from the southern cone, and let’s not forget Abp. Williams’ “failures in leadership” as one commentator so charmingly put it. All of this equals a failure of orthodoxy, or again as one put it today, a tolerance of heterodoxy in the name of catholicity.

Yet, this reasoning errs on two levels, I think. First, the church has never been comprised of a 100% orthodox episcopate. Orthodoxy has always resulted from the decisions of councils when faced with risky moves by theologians and by changing demands in the world. This necessitates at least two sides, usually more. One side often gets labeled heretical, and more often the not the winning side even gets chastened a bit. To borrow methodologically from William Desmond, orthodoxy is not a mediation determined by one side at the expense of the other. Rather, orthodoxy is a true mediation of the spirit, and is therefore a truly theological, and therefore is a spiritual/liturgical practice. In other words, Arius and Athanasius were both involved in a community of right spiritual practice (orthodoxy). Both were necessary to the process.

Second, the above view also errs in its omission of the orthodox and often conservative views of Bishops like Tom Wright and many of the southern cone bishops. Often this view acts as if orthodoxy in the communion is an aberance and must come from outside the communion. This fails in seeing that theologians, like priests, bishops, and lay people are all formed by their participation in the communion of practice. They don’t develop their ideas in a vacuum or apart from the church, despite how much they try. And this is not an excuse for heretical theology, but rather a realistic description of the contexts in which both orthodox and heterodox theology is formed. Once we’ve recognized this, it becomes harder to relegate an entire church to heterodoxy or failed catholicity pell mell.

Lastly, this view errs in its ability to locate orthodoxy in anything but polity decisions at a second or third order levels. if we go with a traditional understanding of orthodoxy starting in first order theological issues (Trinity, Christology, etc..), and then second order (soteriology, harmartiology, angelology, anthropology, etc..), and then third order stuff like polity decisions, one fails to see the crisis of orthodoxy in the Anglican Communion. Show me a lack of Orthodoxy among leaders in the communion like Apb. Williams, the Abp. of York, and NT Wright, and maybe then I’ll start to concede to something like Lambethgate. Until then, you Rush Limbaughs of theology, chill out.

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The best I could gather is that even as (indeed because of his being) a historical figure, Christ bears no relationship to the WWJD Christian. His historicity places him in a group that has been sealed in a tomb of metaphysical irrelevance. Reality is dichotomized between the historical and the now, the two forever reft of the other. In fact, the only way Christ becomes relevant to us is in his moral example, which (strangely enough) is a kind of historical existence. But in terms of human nature, or salvific action, or the significance of resurrection (he does defeat death after all), many of my students could find no way to integrate Christ into their thinking about politics, ethics, the quality of life, the nature of life and death, the list goes on; they couldn’t bridge the historical gap. I wondered aloud why his humanity wasn’t a connection, or rather why the connection of human nature to Christ was limited to a moral significance. Why does Christ’s triumph over death for humankind rank below a mere moral imitation in Christian decision making? Why the lack of intimacy with Christ’s human nature and the resurrection consequences thereof?

In Why Study the Past, Rowan Williams suggests the answer to these questions might come from our intentions toward history. If studying Church History leads one to a dichotomized identity between the historic church and the present church, then of course, then we’re left primarily with making judgments, the criteria of which will come from the standards of research we have today, and not the standards by which previous Christians might have had. “Eusebius and John Foxe,” Williams states, “were not trying to write good twenty-first century history” (26). And if our standard of truthfulness, aka good history, leads us “to suppose that biblical chroniclers had no recognizable sense of truthful narrative” then, Williams argues, we’ve failed to realize that “there is a somewhat different kind of enterprise being attempted in which canons of history-writing alone will not tell us everything” (26).

For Christians, our role in reading the history of the church, our “enterprise”, is not merely to chronicle the history in our terms, but more so to engage in a community, an identity which stretches behind and beyond us. “In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself or himself as a member of the Body of Christ…. Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully on the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ” (27). On the next page Williams says, “For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge [of understanding the church's life] is at last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past” (28).

This concept of the body of Christ, and our participation in it, seems to me to be the fruitful way forward in jettisoning the overly simplistic aspects of “what would Jesus do” moral reasoning. Following Williams, I think the harmful aspects of WWJD thinking is in the way that it misses the ecclesiological and metaphysical ways in which we’re not connected to Christ through a flat, modern notion of imitation, but rather through the Spirit’s intimately drawing us together into one body through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Thus, it’s not a matter of only looking to Christ for an example, but living as Christ, indeed being Christ in the world.

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Alan Jacobs is cool, almost unassailably so (his leaving TEC, considered), and shows us how it done Anglican style in the current issue of B&C, here. Jacobs points out, as I agree, that this is an exciting, yet trying, time to be Anglican; a time, he quotes Bonhoeffer here, for “prayer and righteous action.”

A choice excerpt for your reading pleasure, and then, later, after the alchohol has worn off, read the rest of the article. While I might not feel as pessimistic as he, his final thoughts are worth getting to.

…I remind myself that the churches of the Anglican world are governed by bishops, and I am not a bishop. One of the chief reasons I have held firm to Anglicanism over the years is that I believe that the threefold order of ministry—bishop, priest, and deacon—is the model taught by the apostles, the governance particularly approved by God. In this model I, as a layman—even though I am also a member of the priesthood of all believers—have a highly circumscribed role. If my pastor asks me to teach, I teach; otherwise I shut up. In the unlikely (and unwelcome) event of a bishop of the Church asking for my thoughts I would share them; otherwise I keep them to myself, at least in public. The decisions that will shape the future of the Anglican Communion will be made by bishops, not by laypeople, nor even by priests; if I care about that Communion—and I do—I had best be praying for those bishops, and not repeating the error of Job in darkening counsel by words without knowledge.

I told you he was cool.

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