By the Rt. Rev. C, FitzSimons Allison and the Very Rev. William N. McKeachie
Early in the last century, the philosopher Edmund Husserl led the way
in exposing how forgetful Western civilization had become about its
own roots and therefore its true well-being. A few years later, that
century's greatest Anglican poet, T. S. Eliot, asked: "Do you need to
be told that even such modest attainments as you can boast in the way
of polite society will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe
their significance?"
Now, however unwittingly, Adam Parker's articles ("A House Divided" on
Jan. 7) have exposed the extent to which those Episcopalians who
attack the leadership of the Diocese of South Carolina are willfully
forgetful of the roots of the Faith, and therefore the true well-being
of the Episcopal Church.
Willful amnesia, to say the least, is what the quoted views of Barbara
Mann, Steve Skardon and others represent concerning what it means to
be an Anglican. They have themselves forgotten, or do not wish other
Episcopalians to remember, both the Catholic tradition and (in the
phrase of the Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl, one-time rector of St. James Church
in Charleston) the "Protestant face" of Anglicanism.
They have forgotten, for instance, that the Reformation of the Church
of England dates not from King Henry VIII but from Queen Elizabeth I a
quarter century later. Her predecessor, Queen Mary, had tried to
restore England to a medieval and papal form of Catholicism from 1553
to 1558. It was only under Queen Elizabeth that the Church of England
laid claim to Protestant freedom while at the same time maintaining
Catholic order.
Today's re-appraisers (in academic circles they would be called
revisionists of history) as quoted by Adam Parker have willfully
forgotten that the ecclesiastical formularies of the Elizabethan
Settlement - the traditional Book of Common Prayer, the confessional
Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, and the series of sermons known as
the Homilies - are the very bedrock of Anglican identity, unity and
well-being. They cannot be ignored or replaced by sentimental "bonds
of affection" devoid of theological doctrine.
Such willful amnesia leads these revisionists to misappropriate Henry
VIII as the "founder" (an old canard repeated twice in "A House
Divided") while ignoring the biblical Reformation that did not begin
until the reign of Henry's son Edward VI and was not secured until
Elizabeth's reign.
Henry VIII may, for his own sinful ends, have separated the Church of
England from the Papacy, but late-medieval Roman Catholicism required
longer, indeed required the blood of the Protestant martyrs, to be
reformed.
When biblical doctrine is forgotten as being essential to true unity,
the alleged diversity celebrated by today's revisionists quickly
exposes itself as tyranny against biblical Christians. Richard John
Neuhaus has identified this sleight of hand in his dictum: "When
orthodoxy becomes optional, it soon becomes proscribed."
Dozens of Episcopal Church dioceses today, in which biblically
faithful Christians are marginalized, manifest this tragic irony.
Dozens of Episcopal bishops in such dioceses have willfully forgotten
that the original Episcopal consecration vows administered until the
late 20th century included explicit assent to the following questions:
Will you then faithfully exercise yourself in the Holy Scriptures, and
call upon God by prayer for the true understanding of the same: so
that you may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome
Doctrine, and to withstand and convince the gainsayers?
Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away
from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's
Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others
to the same?
The forgetfulness, indeed total disappearance, of such commitment
since the new Episcopal Prayer Book was adopted in 1979 has caused
many Episcopalians to seek the cover of overseas Anglican bishops in
order to remain faithfully rooted in the Catholic order and Protestant
freedom of the Anglican Reformation.
Kevin Wilson's claim that under Queen Elizabeth "no one agreed on
theology" is nothing but another example of forgetfulness and denial.
The disagreements in that era were minuscule compared with those of
Episcopal bishops today who have turned their backs on the theological
content of the very vows they swore at their consecration.
For her part, Barbara Mann has forgotten, in her claim that we are not
a confessional church, the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion as
integral to the well-being of Prayer Book Anglicanism and
"established" by the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Protestant
Episcopal Church of the United States of America in 1801. Her false
claim allows her and others like her to accommodate the church to the
world, rather than the world to Christ, against which St. Paul
strongly warned in his Epistle to the Romans.
Such amnesia leads Barbara Mann to reduce matters of theological
substance to a "power struggle." As George Marsden has observed:
"Without theism ... the only effective arbiter of contested moral
claims is power." Thus these revisionists ironically expose their own
motivation: they have taken power and have proscribed orthodoxy!
But nothing more clearly exposes forgetfulness of the biblical
substance of the Christian Faith than Steve Skardon's "willingness to
reconcile scripture with contemporary society" or Barbara Mann's
assertion that the Holy Spirit and its influence change as people
change. This willful amnesia about the Christian faith divorces such
revisionists from the biblical assurance that the Word of God, Jesus
Christ, is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).
To forget, or rather suppress, the indisputable fact that the
Episcopal Church has lost a third of its membership in little more
than 30 years (the period of its lemming-like dash to accommodate
itself to a post-Christian world), while attacking the leadership of
one of the very few dioceses in the Episcopal Church to have grown
dramatically in the same period, is bad enough.
But what is not merely forgetful but simply false - and implicitly but
also falsely attributed in "A House Divided" to the Rev. Jan Nunley,
who has denied it - is the assertion that "African primates were
instrumental in getting a resolution passed at the 1988 Lambeth
Conference condoning polygamy."
Though polygamy is a fact on the ground among some tribes in Africa,
its active practice by converts to Christianity has never been
condoned.
Thus the condescending dismissal of some of the most faithful,
thoughtful, and evangelically successful bishops in the Anglican
Communion, as though they are intellectually and culturally primitive
simply because they happen to live in Africa and Asia, is based not on
forgetfulness but falsehood. So much by way of dismissal also, no
doubt, of Jesus' own original disciples.
The Diocese of South Carolina, as represented by our retired bishops
and our bishop-elect, has not and will not forget or compromise our
heritage and well-being - Episcopalian, Anglican and biblically
Christian.
The Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison is the 12th Bishop of South
Carolina (retired). The Very Rev. William N. McKeachie is dean of the
Diocese of South Carolina and rector of the Cathedral Church of St.
Luke and St. Paul.
--
No comments:
Post a Comment