Commentary
By Canon Gary L'Hommedieu
www.virtueonline.org
6/7/08
Within two weeks several hundred bishops, clergy, and spouses, along with assorted observers, onlookers, and wishful thinkers, will gather in Jordan and Jerusalem for the long awaited Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON).
I am personally very hopeful about the conference and look forward to seeing the Christian configuration that emerges from it. Among those gathered will be the brightest lights and the hottest flames in contemporary Anglicanism, which of course means the brightest and hottest of all Christendom.
Here's the one aspect of my Anglican pedigree that I maintain as a birthright: the lighthearted snobbery of believing that when we're good, we're very, very good, even the best! Our scholars are the most erudite, our expositors the most lucid and well-grounded, our prophets the most inflamed and electrifying. And, of course, our services are incomparable and our hymns irreplaceable. (One or two of us can even preach!) We are a paragon of good taste and good sense, a high water mark of human spirit and culture.
I would insist, with a note of gravity, that this describes Anglicanism at its best and truest. It does not describe any of the many parodies that have attached themselves to that name like leeches, sucking out its lifeblood: beginning with the social and intellectual aristocracies du jour--the Conservative/Republican Party, or for that matter, the Declaration Signers, at prayer--now including the religious connoisseurs who disdain biblical Christianity as socially unclean, along with the self-appointed champions of the downtrodden who inhabit the most heavily fortified confines of American suburbia.
In the US these last ones are rich enough to buy the historic reality known as Anglicanism--or, I should say, well-positioned to steal it and rich enough to buy the lawyers who can draw up the necessary papers to make it all legal. That it bears no resemblance to the historic faith that came from England in the modern era except for its well-placed earthly connections (see the last paragraph) is a bitter irony.
Perhaps there is an element of justice in this. We Anglicans--high, low, left, right, rich, poor--tend to have one thing in common--we are proud of our pride. It has been enough for us to remember that when we're good we're very, very good. We haven't cared enough for our erring brethren to hold them to a high standard of truth and have settled instead for a high standard of living. Orthodox, conservative, old-Prayer Book Episcopalians allowed the Jim Pikes and the Jack Spongs to subvert the faith and replace it with a worldly respectability under the chic label of "prophetic".
Theological conservatives have been content to be social conservatives for too long. Now "conservatism" means conserving a status-quo that is malignantly anti-Christian. We have become the over-eager chaplains to the worst of our surrounding culture. We have sold them short and sold them out. The salt has long lost its saltiness--its true prophetic character--and is rapidly being trodden underfoot.
So what of the future, and what of GAFCON? I predict the conference will be the beginning of something new and vibrant, and the end of something old, dead, and putrefying. I believe it has already signaled the end of Anglicanism.
Learn to say it: Anglican Shmanglican.
What does this word "Anglican" finally mean? The word has a historical and a social meaning, but its history is such that it resists theological definition. Practically speaking, it has come to mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
I keep returning to an exchange I had in the fall of 1978 at the Episcopal Divinity School with the Rev. Edward Steiss, one of the academic deans. He was an old time liberal from an era when liberal meant tolerant and open-minded. I don't think he or many of his peers realized the lethal implications of what they were tolerating or the political commitments implied in the cavalier statements that rolled so playfully off their tongues. It was a twilight moment, just before the American cultural debate moved to a war footing.
I had just returned from a year as an intern in an Anglo-Catholic jewel of a parish in upper Manhattan. That year I learned many things about pride. I tasted the subtle pleasures of being a New York snob and upon my return sought every opportunity to scoff at Boston as a cultural backwater. I also tasted the subtle pleasures of Anglo-Catholic one-up-man ship, which was a conspicuous part of the parish's liturgical life. Indeed, it couldn't help but be. The liturgical team made a point of doing things superbly well, and they succeeded.
I observed how the practitioners of this liturgical tradition, including the faculty and students at General Theological Seminary, simply referred to it as "Anglican". I made some comment to Dr. Steiss about the tawdriness of our "low church" chapel services to draw attention to my adopted pedigree as a "catholic" and therefore a "true" Anglican.
He was very diplomatic and pastoral in his response, replying in a professorial tone that hid a well deserved rebuke. He said he had often heard the word "Anglican" used but could never tell what the word was supposed to mean, except that those using it typically presented themselves as "true" Anglicans compared to some other "false" group. Of all the many areas in which Ed Steiss and I probably disagreed in later years, I will never stop being grateful to him for this candid and truthful comment.
Throughout my lifetime the word "Anglican" has had two distinct meanings, first as a historical and sociological term, and second as social jargon or even code, the kind that signals something between the lines to members of a group. Ed Steiss was referring to this second usage of the word. He could well have commented on the historical usage, since that was the standard meaning. The socio-historical meaning has been elucidated recently by Anglican liberals and conservatives alike and may be summarized as follows.
The word "Anglican" refers to the institutional churches deriving from the Church of England since that Church declared its independence from the Church of Rome in the first half of the 16th century. More technically, these churches are recognized by the Archbishop of Canterbury as being "in communion" with him and his church, the Church of England. Thus while the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches came out of the Church of England, they no longer identify with nor are they fully recognized by it. The same can be said about the various "continuing" churches which broke away from the American Episcopal Church, beginning with the Reformed Episcopal Church in the late 19th century and later to include the churches that broke away after 1976. Many of these churches insist on calling themselves Anglican, even insisting that they are "truly" Anglican whereas their former churches are not.
Their point is well taken. Most of them are truer to the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Church of England at the outset of its missionary expansion than are the contemporary American Church and even the Mother Church herself. Here's the problem: the newer churches are assuming that there is a theological criterion for determining Anglican identity and, furthermore, that there always has been. And of course there was. No one ever mentioned it because no one ever had to. It was always assumed that Anglican meant Christian, even if Christians of all stripes ran the Anglican gamut and if not every Anglican would be willing to recognize every other. But once the churches decided to tolerate non-christological, non-Trinitarian pseudo-Christianity, the identity of Anglicanism was lost. It became a word.
The Anglican Via Media died on the birthing stool. As John Henry Newman lamented, it may always have been essentially a "religion on paper", a beloved hypothesis, yearned for by university elites with an eschatological fervency. It would no sooner manifest itself in reality than it would seemingly evaporate, and its disciples, like Mary Magdalene, would cling in vain to its outer garment. It turned out to be no more a lasting model of a modern church than the Paris Commune was a model of a modern government. If it is destined to become something in reality, it will go by another name, or perhaps by several names, or by no name.
The "via media" trumpeted by the American Episcopal Church is a hideous counterfeit of the hypothesis that gripped generations of Anglicans in centuries past. Its "comprehensive" inclusion of mutual exclusives makes it a yin-yang of Western post-modernism, with its gospel of wishful thinking and its righteousness imputed through Millennium Development Goals. It does not deliver what it promises, however loud and exclusive the voice of inclusion becomes. It succeeds, for a time, in maintaining the old social pedigree--that perpetual shell that has adhered itself to the Anglican genius.
Anglican does not mean whatever we want it to mean. It appears that it may not mean anything at all, except as a reference to history--a history that is static and closed and not to a dynamic reality that soars into a new era. There are Anglicans that belong to such a movement--perhaps the majority--but they are learning that the name "Anglican" is the name of something old, something elegant and true to which they themselves owe a great debt, but which has a future only as an artifact of culture--a high, triumphant culture, but one whose time has come and gone.
I hope the fathers and mothers of GAFCON will not weigh themselves down in some effort to rehabilitate the name. Attaching meaning to the name is a seductive historical puzzle. In order to play the game the player falls back on the meaning he had in mind all along, perhaps unacknowledged and motivated by a limited self-interest. There is no compelling reason why the word should have anyone's preferred meaning.
Anglican Shmanglican. Let us endeavor to make the name "Christian" meaningful and credible. Indeed, the times are such that those who embrace the name Christian will sense that there is a cost involved. Some will pay the price gladly--those who are yearning for something that is more than just a name.
---The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and a regular columnist for VirtueOnline.
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