What is Going on With the ACNA and the Filioque?

from Stand Firm by Matt Kennedy 

According to the ACNA’s Provincial Meeting Journal, the most recent draft liturgies reduce the filioque to a footnote. Joel Wilhelm does an admirable job (as usual) of summarizing:

ACNA’s Provincial Meeting Journal is out and it shows ACNA talking out of both sides of its mouth on the filioque, a doctrine central to all of Western Christendom. The draft liturgies in this document contain a Nicene Creed that reads:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.

The footnote to this reads:

The filioque clause “and the Son” may be added here. It is not included in the text above for ecumenical purposes, in accordance with the 1978 Lambeth Conference, though the ACNA does not disagree with the theology of the filioque.

So you can do whatever you want, say the filioque or not, because ACNA wants to be ecumenical with a church that explicitly violates Article XXII of the 39 Articles. And how do you not disagree with the theology of something and then drop it anyway? Additionally, dropping the double procession from the Creed violates Article V:

Of the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.

Are the ACNA bishops also going to change the Articles by fiat? What ACNA is doing with proposed changes like this is driving Classical Protestants away from it - not a good move…read more

Not a good move at all. The ACNA claims to “wholeheartedly embrace” the Jerusalem Declaration which states:

“We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.”

The ACNA’s own Theological Statement declares:

“We receive the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1562, taken in their literal and grammatical sense, as expressing the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time, and as expressing the fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief.”

If the current draft liturgy becomes the final draft liturgy it will be difficult if not impossible to reconcile what the ACNA claims to believe with what she professes in worship. And, apparently, we will sacrifice our theological coherence in order to achieve a deeper relationship with various Orthodox churches. I wrote about the problems inherent in such motivations back in 2010. I’ll end with a quote from that piece:

“With their insufficient view of the extent and effect of the fall on human nature and their resulting soteriological deficiencies, I am not at all interested in a rapprochement with the Orthodox (especially after Metropolitan Jonah’s characterization of Calvinism as heresy at last year’s synod). But even more importantly, I think it crucial in a culture beset by religious pluralism to confess that the Holy Spirit does not come to indwell apart from being sent by Father through the Son. I certainly understand that the word “procession” is problematic and I think a compromise with regard to that word would be possible, but the inclusion of the filioque clause affirms the relational role of the Holy Spirit both within the Godhead, within the Church, and between the Church and her Lord and it secures the principle that without the Son one cannot be related to God through the Spirit. And so I think we must keep it, even in the context of ecumenical worship.”