Advice For the Church of England
February 13, 2010
I’ll make this short and sweet.
The Episcopacy is Universal.
The Episcopacy is Geographical.
The Episcopacy is NOT ideological
So pick one or the other. Either you are going to let ladies be Bishops and suffer the consequences internally OR wait for now and do so at a later date.
If you sacrifice universality or geography you change the meaning of the Episcopacy. It’s not that I don’t think accomodating difference is unimportant, I most certainly do. But, I’m convinced that you’d drastically shift the meaning of having a Bishop if you created non-geographical diocese’.
That is all.
Division and Toleration
September 6, 2009
For the first 1500 years, the Church tolerated buckets of divisive crap.
The New Testament itself tells us of the varying factions attempting to coexist in the burgeoning Hebrew turned Gentile movement. The Church fathers exhorted the body of Christ to stick to its bishops as a primary instrument of unity. Eventually the five patriarchates developed, all with unique cultural contributions to the Christian experience, and all with a degree of tolerance for the others. This toleration was aided at least in part by ignorance. Without a railroad, a printing press or an interweb these churches were often unaware of what the others were doing—especially when Christianity began to spread more extensively in geography, custom and vernacular.
It took many generations for a big movement to develop that might threaten another corner of Christian Orthodoxy . Thus, certain factions would occasionally gain too much influence and the thundering decree of a church council would have to intervene. There was, of course, that slightly embarrassing schism bit in 1054 that resulted in two Catholic churches—divided. And admittedly, in the later medieval era, Rome’s teaching magisterium flexed rather too much authoritative muscle. But when compared to today’s modern smorgasbord of gooey, western protestant nonsense—such disagreements can be put in better perspective.
Luther, in spite of his original intentions, changed all this.
Old categories were re-imagined for determining what a Church did and who Christians were. If one (even just one person!) disagreed on how these categories were to be interpreted, they had every right to institute their own rival Church. Make no mistake, the Reformers still operated with this presupposition of a single, true Church. Zwingli, Luther, Rome—someone had to be right (one’s own side of course) while the others were definitely wrong. Faced with such blatant self-justification, the Church resorted to the logical end of its unavoidable division … War.
This didn’t work. So John Locke and other Empiricists came along to rescue the western Church from the bothersome necessity of killing each other. They explained how the truths of Christianity were discernible not just via revelation but by reason as well. Each individual could discern for themselves just what it was they found most preferable to believe.
The Christian Pluralist market was born! Like today’s browser wars, competition between faiths would only improve what faith had to offer to the modern society and the modern man. Never mind those bothersome Roman Catholics with their silly exclusivist claims—this was a reasonable society, an environment of independence and free will. Faith, just like anything else, was a voluntary choice—and each particular sect had to repackage itself as the best of these choices.
Come the turn of the century, with secularism in full swing, optimism for creating the perfect society reached its zenith. Empirical Science had sliced away the mythic husk surrounding Christian faith, revealing the golden nugget of truth at its center: (something like good morals, education and democracy). Meanwhile faith had spared Science from slipping too far into cold-hearted, inhumanity. With this double-edged, Enlightened sword, the western church marched into the wilderness, into the slums and into the very crevasses that once divided it—determined to spread this new gospel.
But the vision couldn’t last.
Two world wars shattered the enlightenment vision in Europe and by the later half of the twentieth-century this disillusionment had begun to spread to North America as well. The Gospel of Reason hadn’t met universal approval and liberalism had failed to free the world of the fundamentalism it had underestimated.
At the close of the century, the hopelessly idealistic Ecumenical Movement and its ilk have reached the end of their lowest-common denominator unity and face efforts at re-identification which are sure to exclude some. Fundamentalist Islam, no longer a glimmer at the horizon, stares the Church in the face and demands attention—though it speaks a completely different language.
In just three hundred years, voluntary churches have managed to assemble 30K Protestant denominations. What hope is there for a Christian who hopes to be truly catholic? What is Orthodoxy contextualized in a world where more Christians live South of the equator than North of it? At this point, I have no idea. The best answer I’ve found is buried in my BCP, in the collects for Various Occasions.
Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed
for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one:
Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and
obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit,
that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your
Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in
the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Flux II: Why Old Stuff Matters
May 29, 2009
“Flux” is a continuing series on my year visiting churches of various Christian traditions.
|
I first experienced Eastern Orthodoxy as a 21-year-old traveling through Ukraine. Even then, the tradition enchanted me. At the time I was interning with a missions organization working in Eastern Europe. I knew that many of the churches we were helping to plant were located in heavily Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic areas. It was also become increasingly clear that these traditions were undoubtedly Christian, perhaps in some ways even more Christian than me. So why are we evangelizing Christians? I wondered.
It was the opening spark of a lesson that took me a few years to learn: old stuff matters.
By “old stuff,” I mean the bulk of the ancient practices and symbols many modern Evangelicals (both intentionally and unintentionally) learned to de-emphasize or ignore. In my studies, I realized there were a number of questions I’d never fully explored: where did the Bible come from? who first outlined concepts like the dual-natures of Christ and the Trinity? what is our modern conception of hell based on? Many of the answers to these questions were found in studying the first few centuries of Christianity, an area of scholarship sometimes called Patristics or a little more broadly, Christian Origins.
I learned that whether one recited the creeds in church or not, they were formative and part of our shared Christian heritage. Whether one appreciated liturgy or found it dull, it was influential in shaping modern forms of worship. I learned that Sacramental theology left a precedent for how we expected to experience God–even if one didn’t look for Him in Eucharist anymore. Most importantly I learned that issues like church governance, division, authority, human sexuality and the role of the Church in the world were problems as old as Pentecost.
Perhaps most poignantly, however, I was struck by how bewitching the tradional forms of worship could be. The ancient liturgies enchanted me, the Icons arrested me–I felt myself being pulled into something older and bigger and altogether more enveloping than my previous, more individualistic Church experiences had been. All my life, I had endeavored to maintain the right belief or “Apostolicity*” of my faith. But it wasn’t until my year of visiting Churches, that I was first introduced to its commanility or “Catholicity**.”
* (Apostolicity in this case, just means the faith of Apostles, or what was handed down to us.)
** (Catholic not in the Roman sense, but in it’s older meaning of ‘universal’ or ‘entirety).
Authority Clarified
January 13, 2009
Several commenters on my last post indicated that they though me too hard on “Free churches.” Wordiness, and not clarity, is sometimes a hallmark of my writing and I wish to clear up what I said and what I intended to communicate.
My post was made in the context of those in the blogosphere and bookosphere, involved with the so-called Emerging Church movement who feel that denominations are due for a systemic failure. It is said that since we all have different interpretations, and we all can only interpret as our uncontrollable paradigm dictates, then a hierarchical structure only serves to oppress and control. Foucalt would be proud.
My main point was a reaction to this. It was not to denounce free-churchmanship as a theological and ontological truth, but to be at least one voice in the EC who thinks there are appropriate places in Christian life for the sort of fellowship and accountability which a group can offer. I am not sold on the word “denomination.” As a good post-modern I know that words only have the value which we determine to give them. So call it a denomination, call it a fellowship, call it a Village; the point remains. That organization needs to exist whereby those things which denominations have traditionally brought us can continue into posterity.
It is my contention that often it is a distatste for authority which manifests itself in assertions such as some have made, and not a truly thought out theological argument.
That being said I would like to point those concerned to an old post whereby I think I argued for a radially free-church ecclesiology in response to Reeds posts asking how source(s) of authority can be active in an incredibly diverse Christianity.
My ecclesiology in a nut-shell.
A person “becomes” a Christian by faith in Jesus Christ as the crucified and risen Lord.
When some Christians regularly get together to proclaim that Word, take the Eucharist, operate in the giftings and fruits of the Spirit, and live as disciples including compassion for the poor and abused etc… then that is The Church operating. I do not suppose for one moment that a bishop or a prebytery or a president makes one more of a Church than another.
I hope that clears anything up, but we are always open to sustained debate here!
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
