The Crisis in the Anglican Communion

The crisis in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA), and soon in the Church of England, is because of the split, not so much (as is often claimed) between would-be Catholics and hardline Protestants, but between the Anglican tradition and the C of E tradition.

The Anglican tradition is that of those who looked at the circumstances of the Church of England's breach with Rome and decided to make the best of that bad situation, allowing themselves to be shaped in many and various ways by the (Continental-influenced) Reformers, the Caroline Divines, the Evangelical Revival, and the Oxford Movement, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively.

The tradition thus shaped is Anglicanism, which sent out missionaries across the British Empire and beyond, is wholly committed to the doctrinal and moral essentials common to Catholics and classical Protestants, and was able to participate in the twentieth century's Liturgical Movement, Charismatic Renewal, and even Ecumenical Movement (at its best) in that phenomenon's long-ago heyday.

By contrast, the C of E tradition derives uncritically from Henry VIII's divorce in order to "marry" his pregnant mistress, and is no more than dimly aware of the existence of Anglicans outside aristocratic or upper-middle-class England and pockets of socially comparable Anglophilia elsewhere in rich Anglophonia. It either denies outright the doctrinal and moral essentials, or else regards them as optional, an option of which those essentials themselves do not admit.

It wildly misrepresents the Reformers and the Caroline Divines (especially Richard Hooker) in its own interests, and has been shaped by outright rejection of the Evangelical Revival and the Oxford Movement, utterly in the former case, and in all but the most superficial ways in the latter case. There is also no real depth to its involvement in the Liturgical and Ecumenical Movements (each of which it has effectively destroyed, a remarkable achievement for so small a faction); and it is fanatically anti-Charismatic, undoubtedly because of a profound disbelief in any supernatural reality. It sometimes affects an interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, but the Orthodox themselves would have, and increasingly do have, some very choice things indeed to say about that.

Its main rationale is the via media theory, according to which Catholicism and classical Protestantism are defined as opposite extremes (they are in fact neither opposite nor extreme), so that anything characteristic of either of them must be rejected in the name of "the sane middle ground". Of course, what is therefore rejected includes the entirety of classical, historic, mainstream Christianity, and the whole Augustinian patrimony of the West. This "ground" is often extolled for its "breadth", but a very "broad" body of people cannot stand on it: Catholics, Orthodox, Confessional Lutherans, Conservative Evangelicals, Anabaptists, Pietists and those in the Holiness tradition, Pentecostals and Charismatics: whom does that leave?

That ground is so infirm that to stand on it is to be moved by pretty much anything. Those who so stand have bought into every part, and even invented several parts, of Biblical criticism, with its frankly atheistic and secularising presuppositions and aspirations. They have accepted that if women can be doctors then they can be priests, and (in principle in Britain, but both in principle and in practice in America and elsewhere) that if women can be Prime Ministers then they can be bishops. The less said about homosexuality, the better.

The Anglican tradition and the C of E tradition co-exist within the apparently Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical and Central schools of churchmanship. If people in the Anglican tradition knew what the Catholic Church really stood for (and perhaps especially what have been the great themes of the present Pope’s academic an episcopal ministry), then many (perhaps most) of them beyond the Evangelical wing, and even some on it, would be over like a shot. However, they have been brainwashed by the via media nonsense, and we have not helped ourselves by the "Spirit of Vatican II" carryings on that are now mercifully coming to an end.

In England and America, there have also been naked social-climbing attempts to conform the Catholic Church to the C of E tradition in order to gain for bishops and others admission to the public school, Oxbridge, Clubland world of the Church of England's Court Party, or to the blue-chip, Ivy League, Country Club world of ECUSA's. Indeed, this seems to be the whole point of the otherwise stupefyingly pointless ARCIC "process". People who wish to continue with this travel agency should now be made to pay for it themselves.

For all that is passing away. There will still be public schools, and Oxbridge, and Clubland; and there will still be blue-chip stock, and the Ivy League, and the Country Clubs; but none of them will be of the slightest ecclesial importance anymore, insofar as they ever really were. They were, and are, the C of E tradition, soon to be no more. What clearly matters now is what really always mattered: the Anglican tradition.

Dr Rowan Williams is on record as believing that that tradition has something distinctive to say to Catholicism, to classical Protestantism, to Fundamentalism, and so on. Indeed it has. We do not have to agree with it to listen to it: as with other forms of Christianity separated from Petrine Unity, we can and must point out how its best aspirations are met by aspects of the Tradition in every sense defined by that Unity, and how that Unity itself precludes or remedies that separated form's faults and deficiencies. Such a process would be as good for us as for anyone else.

But in order to begin it in relation to the Anglican tradition, we must be absolutely clear about what that is, and about how and why it differs from the C of E tradition, so that both we and the former are made able, once and for all, to disregard and to forget about the latter.