Exclusion of the Episcopal Church From the Anglican Communion? Who Cares?

The Prayer Book Society and Dr. Peter Toon do not get it. Who cares if the Episcopal Church is excluded from the Anglican Communion? With the advent of liberal theology and Anglo-Catholicism, not to mention the early departures from the English Reformation by the Carolingians, the Anglican Communion splintered into a thousand sects within the umbrella of the church. The pretended unity at last shows signs of fracture.

Moreover, there is no real authority with either the primates, the Anglican Consultative Council or the archbishop. Basically, each province does what it wishes. The only authority that functions is with the bishops in their dioceses. Other than that any pretended unity in the "communion" is a total farce. The Lambeth Quadrilateral is a complete and total failure since no one can agree on doctrine. With the rise of Anglo-Catholicism the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were shanghaied and re-interpreted totally out of their historical and textual context.

With the rise of modern higher criticism, the Bible as well has been interpreted so loosely and in so many ways that it has practically become something like the Rorschach Inkblot Test. "What does this text mean to you?"

The certainty of language, theology, or even plain interpretation of Scripture is out the window. One can see the effects of modernism even in the news and in modern politics. Remember Bill Clinton's famous rhetorical lie? "What does 'is' mean?" The short of it is that we are basically in a propaganda war. Words mean whatever the opponent wants them to mean and that could be just about anything.

Whatever happened to objective truth, evangelical theology, and the five solas of the English and Continental Reformation? Who knows? The one thing I do know is that the Anglican Communion is rotten to the core and beyond salvage. For one thing, the Archbishop, Rowan Williams, is just as pro-homosexual as any liberal in the Episcopal Church USA. I would include the vast majority within the English Province and the Canadian Province, etc.

But even if we examine the Global South and the Asian Provinces and the conservatives left in the USA and the UK, we still have the subversion of the Gospel by Anglo-Catholicism and other in house heresies that have compromised the integrity of any "common cause" agreements.

The fact of the matter is that there is no way to reconcile forty different interpretations of the Bible and the Christian faith. There is no via media between the truth and lies. If there be any hope left, it is a return to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as a statement of faith, a return to a confessional understanding of the Anglican church. The idea that Arminianism, Amyraldianism, Anglo-Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Latitudinarism and Reformed/Calvinist Anglicanism can all be reconciled by reducing doctrine to a bare minimum will only result in the rise of a similar crisis in the near future.

As I see it, the only hope for Anglicanism is a return to the Augustinian/Calvinist roots of the English Reformation and a return to an understanding of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as a creed or confessional document that binds us all to obey it as our common faith. This does not mean that we are free to re-interpret Scripture or the Thirty-Nine Articles any old way or that we are free to distort Scripture to our own destruction (see 2 Peter 3:15-16). It means using our faith, reason and tradition within the parameters of a conservative use of critical scholarship and hermeneutics. It means rejecting the Kantian/Barthian philosophy/theology which attacks the idea that Holy Scripture is a direct revelation from God rather than merely a book that contains the Word of God in some mystical encounter. It means taking Carl F. H. Henry's theology of propositional truth expressed in written form as the literal Word of God which is to be reverenced and obeyed with God's grace.

Will the Episcopal Church be excluded from the Anglican Communion? I do not believe it will because the leadership at Canterbury is all for the same agenda held by the Province of Canada and the Episcopal Church USA. Do I believe the Global South will pull out and start a conservative Anglican Communion in competition with Canterbury? Hardly. Why? Because the same rot has infested the Global South and the conservatives left here in the US through the continuing Anglican movement. This rot is the idea that there is some middle way between the Protestant Reformation and "Catholicism", i.e., Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodoxy. There is no middle way. Either one believes the Bible or one believes in the church as the final authority. To choose a middle way is to compromise the very Gospel that Jesus died for on the cross. The bottom line is that the Global South could have done something solid about this decades ago but they refused because they are enamored with being a part of the "Anglican Communion". If the Global South were serious about the Gospel, it would not tolerate false gospels like the Anglo-Catholic/Tractarian movement.

Evangelical/Calvinist Anglicans should be looking for the exit stage right. Sectarianism is the result of papal usurpation. Until Christ returns the church will continue to splinter and even to go into outright apostasy as history repeatedly shows us over and over again. The solution is not compromising with co-belligerents and fighting a culture war against immorality. Co-belligerency is fine when dealing with the society at large. However, we should and must never forget that fighting a culture war against the erosion of family values is not the same thing as defending the faith once delivered to the saints. That faith, my friends, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ which was handed down to us through the apostles and prophets and written down for us in the canon of Scripture. The Gospel is so simple that anyone, including a child, can read the Bible and be saved. Yet, the wealth of theology is so complex that we could spend a lifetime fine-tuning our understanding of who Jesus is and what God's will for us is. Let us never give up fighting for the true Gospel and a right understanding of the teaching of Christ in the Bible.

Peace!

Charlie