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the tyee
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Mar
27
EMG labours mightily…
March 27, 2007 |
and produces the second part of his response to our earlier conversation. It is a sweeping document and one which anyone the least interested in the origins of the dispute between the so called “traditionalist” wing of the Anglican Church and the modernist side of the Church arises.
It will take me several days to fully respond to Mr. George’s remarks but I think what maybe the pith of his position is contained here:
And thus the great and ever-widening divide within Anglicanism (and, nearly as terrible, the only conceivable reason I can make out why JC refuses to put me on his blogroll). One side believes itself to be the reformed Catholic Church, the other—following Henry VIII’s lead—Whatever. A platform for social reform, social engineering … emg
I think Mr. George characterizes one line of traditionalist Anglican thought correctly - there is the belief that the Church of England is, somehow, the Roman Catholic Church without that nasty pope and with a few other minor changes. This position, when fully worked out, leads serious thinkers to, like their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors, eventually, go over to Rome as they realize that you cannot have two Roman Catholic Churches.
(Another line of traditionalist thinking in the Anglican Church are our evangelical friends who seem to think that the Baptists and other American inspired fundys have it right. Unfortunately there is no well established tradition of these happy clappers going over to Atlanta or Albuquerque or wherever the Holy See of American Protestantism is these days. And yet another, and rather more powerful traditionalist line, rests on the rejection of modernity by assorted Third World bishops for reasons having largely to do with the cultural conditions found in their respective dioceses.)
This reformed Catholic Church strain of traditionalist thinking is almost exactly analogous to the largely extinct view that America was just England reformed - without that nasty king and with a few other minor changes. This view might have seemed plausible in the very early days of the Republic but quickly lost its plausibility as America developed a history and a culture divorced from the mother country. And while there were certainly vestiges of the English political and legal system which formed the foundation of the American enterprise, those elements became less and less important as America became its own nation.
While a yearning for the authority of Rome has certainly characterized some elements within the Anglican Communion over the last 500 years, it has certainly not been the majority position of either the clergy or the laity. Like the Americans, Anglicans soon realized that their rejection of the certainty of Roman authority meant that they had no choice but to work out the doctrine, liturgy and approach of the Church of England for themselves.
That work has occupied the prayers and the intellectual facilities of many generations of very smart - and sometimes godly - people for five centuries and has produced many of the things Mr. George and I would no doubt agree are spectacular adornments to English Culture: in particular the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible as well as the old hymnal.
However, this was not the Roman Catholic Church reformed anymore than America is England 2.0. Too much blood and treasure, too many learned disputes, too many sermons, books and lectures have flowed under the bridge for that argument to hold.
For better or worse, the Anglican Church is not the Roman Catholic Church and while the rich tradition of Catholic teachings are open to Anglicans, they have no authority over us. Mr. George seems to want to pretend that because Henry VIII was not himself any sort of Protestant, the Church he founded somehow exists outside the historical whirlwind of the Reformation. It does not and this condemns Anglicans to having to find their own way towards God.
About which more later.
(On the blogroll - I am lazy not malign; after all, a roll with KMG and Relapsed Catholic on it certainly should have room for Mr. George. And it will shortly.)
Comments
2 Comments so far
You know, I really resent the speed with which you are able to work … It’s hardly fair.
I want to say a couple of things here about these–in many ways, really fine points–but I concede that I’ve had my chance, that you’ve been exceptionally patient with me, and that it is now my turn to quietly take a beating. I’ll only ask that you consider the problem of using political/historical developments as analogies to explain the developments of the church. It has been politicized, of course, but what I really wanted to drive home in my last ramble was that, fundamentally, it isn’t supposed to be. That reform seeks to beat the politics out of the place of God’s people.
More Christ, less Rorty!
… And if you’ll allow me to make one more little qualification:
I know that it’s difficult to extract my obvious Roman bias from my overall position, but it’s worth noting that when I speak of the “reformed Catholic Church” I’m using Catholic in the non-partisan sense of term. I mean “universal”.