DOG BITES MAN

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Damian Thompson observes that the Church of England has just admitted something about itself that most of us figured out a long time ago:

Tonight the Church of England finally acknowledged something that has been obvious since 1992, when it decided to ordain women priests: that it remains, despite the Oxford Movement, and as John Henry Newman came to believe very firmly, a Protestant Church.

As such, it enjoys the freedom to follow the example of its Reformed counterparts in other countries and ordain women to the highest level of ministry, whatever it chooses to call it. (The fact that England’s established Church calls its senior presbyters “bishops” is a matter of historical accident: had circumstances been diffferent in 1558, it might have gone the way of Scotland.)

Now that this freedom is to be fully exercised, what will happen to Anglo-Catholic traditionalists? Many will quietly, without ever admitting the fact, come to terms with their Protestant identity and stay in the C of E. Others will leave for breakaway Anglican denominations or join the Orthodox.

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” If your church decides that it can ordain women, then there really is no good reason to prevent them from becoming bishops.

Similarly, if you’ve got no problem serving alongside a female minister or working closely with the female vicar in the next town over, your objections to a female bishop ring a bit hollow. The Episcopalianization of the Church of England can now proceed accordingly.

So what happens now? Will all those liberal British who have insisted that the C of E needs to keep up with the times now flood back into Anglican churches and proclaim the greatness of Anglican Christianity unto all the world?

What are you, high?

Thompson probably has it about right. Some will go this church, others to that one. A breakaway Anglican group may form in Britain and perhaps establish a loose “alliance” of some kind with the Anglican Church in North America.

Meanwhile, the Church of England’s House of Bishops will find itself graced by the same sorts of theological airheads that adorn its American counterpart. Under their leadership, whatever’s left of the C of E’s “theology” will dissolve into the same kind of universalist sludge that New York preaches.

Which is all to the good. I’ve said over and over again and I still believe that if what has been called the “Anglican tradition” is to have a chance at long-term survival, it needs to seriously reinvent itself.

What form that reinvention eventually takes is unclear. But it has to happen. And it has to involve the putting away of childish things.

Like attaching any importance whatsoever to the Canterbury connection.