Friday, October 07, 2005

Lift up that Base-Ball Cap from covering your eyes! THE CLOSING OF THE ANGLICAN MIND TO ALL THINGS ANGLICAN

I often wear a base-ball cap – in summer to keep the sun’s light and heat off my head (with its small bald patch) and in winter to keep my brains warm so that I can continue to engage in rational thought. It strikes me that too many Episcopalians and Anglicans from all parts of the doctrinal and ritualist spectrum in North America are like people wearing caps that are pulled down right over their eyes, for they cannot see the specific things that are Anglican in Anglicanism. They appear to be blind to that which were for centuries the basics of the Anglican Way. And the blindness is widespread, of the right as of the left, and of evangelicals as well as anglo-catholics, and of conservatives as well as liberals.

Before I say more, here is a true story as told originally by Bishop FitzSimmons Allison. In the 1970s when he was a professor at Virginia Seminary he was asked by a colleague at the University of the South to collect signatures from fellow professors in favor of printing The Thirty-Nine Articles in the new Prayer Book of the ECUSA (approved by General Convention in 1976 & 1979). He managed to collect thirteen signatures out of the twenty-three professors there, and his friend at Sewanee could only manage one signature and that was of a Lutheran member of the Faculty at Sewanee. Let it be clear – those who signed were not saying that they agreed to or liked this Formulary of the Anglican Way, but only that it be included in an appendix! Here we see in the 1970s the closing of the Anglican mind to essential Anglican things in Faculties set up to foster and propagate this mind.

The same attitude was widely present in the 1970s in the ECUSA towards the other two Formularies of the Anglican Way – the classic Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal – and both were discarded by the ECUSA in 1976/79 in favor of a novel prayer book in which are provided novel services for ordinations. Happily, the Articles did get into the new prayer book, but only as a historical document and only in a very small print size so that few can read it without a magnifying glass.

No wonder that the Articles (approved by the Church of England in 1571 and the Episcopal Church of the USA in 1801) are read and examined in 2005 by very few clergy and laity. What they contain is not known by the majority and yet various stories are passed on about their contents which are at best inadequate and at worst erroneous. Anglo-Catholics express hatred of them because of what they are supposed to say negatively about Roman doctrine and Evangelicals think that they are irrelevant because they are not primarily about mission and evangelism and because they are written in a traditional form of English.

May I suggest that especially those who claim to be the “orthodox” remnant in the ECUSA and Anglican Church of Canada ought to pull up their caps from covering their eyes, so that they are able to begin to see the foundations of the Anglican Way and embrace them for what they have been and are. May I also suggest that they need to make the effort to open their minds to “things Anglican,” and to this end consider reading carefully and meditatively the Three classic Formularies of the Anglican Way, and actually using the Book of Common Prayer a little for worship!

To my fellow Evangelicals I say: There is nothing wrong and everything right to be concerned about mission and evangelism, church growth and church planting, as well as to be wholly committed to the Lordship of Jesus and the Authority of Scripture, BUT NOT AT THE COST OF closing the mind to things Anglican! For as Christians we have to belong to a given jurisdiction and to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, and thus to a fullness of ecclesial life, worship, doctrine, and discipline. The Formularies point to this fullness and that is why we cannot ignore them!

Peter Toon October 7, 2005

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