Friday, October 24, 2003

ECUSA - Bridge-Church & Liberal, Liturgical Denomination

Philip Turner, the former Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, has recently written:

"From the point at which this history has placed me, it seems most clarifying to say that, by its action [in confirming the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop-elect of New Hampshire], ECUSA has confirmed a decision taken unconsciously some time ago to find its primary identity as a liberal but liturgical option within the spectrum of Protestant denominations that make up America's religious kaleidoscope. In making this decision, ECUSA has at one and the same time (perhaps again unconsciously) made marginal for its self-understanding the significance of its membership in a worldwide communion of churches that jointly claim to be a part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. In fact, it has placed its membership in the Anglican Communion under threat, and, rather recklessly, brought that communion itself to the verge of a split between the churches of the global South and those of the North."

Dr Turner is surely right to identify the recent, innovatory decisions of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church as having their roots in earlier decisions, by which the nature and character of this American denomination were determined.

What is now called the Episcopal Church is called in its constitution "The Protestant Episcopal Church", a title which was intended in the 18th century to distinguish it from the Roman Episcopal system but to tie it to the Reformed Catholicism of the English Protestant Reformation. In the 20th century the word "Protestant" was dropped in order to satisfy (a) anglo-catholic or high churchmen who wanted this denomination to be seen as distinct from popular American Protestantism and also (b) ecumenical churchmen, who saw the Episcopal Church as a bridge-church between Rome and Geneva/Wittenberg.

In the 1960s and 1970s when the liberal theology, especially from German, had permeated much Episcopal teaching & preaching, the leadership of the Episcopal Church proudly presented it as a denomination that was unique in the American religious supermarket -- it was liberal in doctrine and social theory, but had catholic ceremonial and liturgical forms, claimed an apostolic ministry, and was also a kind of bridge-church between the old and the new, the Catholic and the Protestant. (Not a few at that time and a little later went on "the Canterbury trail" as it was called.)

It is in this general context that one has to place the new prayer book produced by the Episcopal Church in the 1970s and called "The Book of Common Prayer, 1979", although strictly speaking it is not Common Prayer at all. It is a mixture of the old and the new in language, doctrine and liturgical structure & content and it has options so that the uniformity of the past gives way to the pluriformity and variety of the present. It presents the prayer of the denomination that has emerged in new dress in the post-World War II era and is now intent on providing a liberal yet liturgical religious option to America. And this 1979 book and the supplements that followed it, reveal that this denomination is open wide to the winds of modernity that blew through America so strongly in the 1960s and into the 1970s.

What the new prayer book reveals as to the emerging nature and character of this liberal, liturgical and well-heeled Church is confirmed by the rush by this denomination into the ordaining of women, the use of inclusive language for human beings and then for God, the giving permission for the re-marriage in church of divorcees and the gradual granting of full church rights to "gay" people. In this rush into the absorbing of innovations, there is revealed a deeper commitment - to a view of human beings that sees them as having basic rights before the God of love and justice to self-fulfillment, included in which is the central right of self-autonomy. Thus Gene Robinson has in 2003 the right to be what he is, to do what he feels is right for him, and to be promoted to any church position open to him. To deny him this right is to deny what God stands for! And likewise the evangelical Episcopalian who is divorced has the right to remarriage in church as part of his self-realization and fulfillment.

If there is to be ever any genuine reform of the Episcopal Church, or even of parts of it, then there must surely be first of all a search for the root causes of its recent commitment to innovation upon innovation and its departure therein from the classic, historic, biblical and orthodox Anglican Way. Prioritizing the homosexual issue may be good for instant publicity, but it does not truly help the cause of genuine reform, for this involves much more than merely removing the innovation of blessing "gay" unions. The Episcopal Church has strayed far from the narrow way that leads to Life and this means that all within this denomination partake to some degree in this straying. To return home, to reform the household, to reclaim the heritage, to recover the Anglican Way of Christianity, is a task for people of commitment, consecration and humility. It ought to begin right now!

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.)

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