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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: Episcopal Church (United States)

That They May All be One

26 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by Neo in Anglicanism, Church/State, Lutheranism

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Africa, Anglican Church in North America, Anglican Communion, Anglican ministry, Anglicanism, Episcopal Church (United States)

LCMS-ACNA-LCC-1024x384I suspect many here have been surprised over the last few years on how many points of our faith Jessica, an Anglo-Catholic and I, a Lutheran agree on. In fact, we have been surprised as well, not least because Anglo-Catholics are rare in Nebraska, and Lutherans are just about as rare in England. Both exist, but you’ll look a while.

Historic Anglicanism and historic Lutheranism, while not the same, are pretty close cousins. And others are realizing it as well. They always have been, there has always been a rumor that Anne Boleyn was a Lutheran herself. The Lutheran Church – Missouri  Synod (LCMS), the Lutheran Church Canada (LCC), and the new Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the conservative breakaway from the Episcopal church, have been having talks for the last few years. And the thing is, they are finding that there is not that much room between them. We are not the same, and since we are conservative, we tend not to move off of what we have always believed, everywhere. As the committee says, we are not sister churches, in full communion, but we are first cousins.

On the other end of the spectrum, our liberal counterparts, the ELCA, and the Episcopal church have been in full communion for some time. But being liberal, they tend to be more accommodating. Here are some highlights from the report:

Instead of renewing the one historic church of the west as Martin Luther had desired, the Reformation of the 16th century ended up producing several distinct church bodies severely at odds with each other. In this process many sharp words were spoken and negative judgments delivered, by Lutherans against Roman Catholics, Reformed, and Anabaptists; by Reformed against the other three groups just named; by the Church of England in her classic formularies against Roman Catholics and Anabaptists; and by Roman Catholics against all who had left their communion. Remarkably, Lutherans and the church body later called Anglican aimed few if any direct shots against each other.

While not of one heart and soul, neither were our forefathers at daggers drawn with each other. There is in fact enormous overlap between successive editions of the Book of Common Prayer and how it took shape in church life, on the one hand, and the way in which the Book of Concord was reflected in the teaching, worship, and ethos of the Lutheran churches of Germany and Scandinavia. Accordingly, we can ascertain much compatibility between historic Anglicanism and Lutheranism in fundamental doctrine, liturgy, hymnody, and devotion.

For a considerable portion of the 18th century the ruling kings of England (who remained electors of Hanover) were practicing Lutherans and Anglicans at the same time; the Lutheran George Frederick Handel composed his church music mainly in England; and there was much formal cooperation on the mission field between some German Lutherans and the Church of England.

We should not overstate the case, however. The Lutheran chaplain of Prince George of Denmark (1653-1708) refused to commune him after he decided, on certain state occasions, to receive the sacrament alongside his wife, Queen Anne.

Rather than describe ACNA and LCMS–LCC as sister churches, we should acknowledge each other as ecclesial first cousins, closely related indeed, but not yet partaking publicly of the same Lord’s Table. Our church bodies share a common foundation in the Holy Scriptures and in their confessions. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion draw heavily on the Augsburg Confession and other Lutheran influences. Eight of the Thirty-Nine Articles are drawn directly from the Wittenberg Articles1 of 1536, a joint Lutheran–Anglican document. […]

Outsiders had viewed Anglicanism as endlessly pliable in matters of Christian doctrine, a form of church in which incompatible “parties” simply agreed to disagree. This perception has been sharply challenged by the emergence of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which has more adherents than the “mainline” Anglicans that include the Church of England, The Episcopal Church of the USA, and the Anglican Church of Canada. It is apparent that the divide in Lutheranism between the LWF and the ILC is paralleled by the division between GAFCON and the Anglican “mainline” churches of the Anglican Communion […]

Affirmation of the classical creeds goes hand in hand with deep respect for the ancient Fathers and for the practices of the Church of the early centuries. But as Christian antiquity assists us in the understanding of the Scriptures, it adds nothing to their content. We note and affirm the major role played by patristic studies among the Lutheran and Anglican theologians of the 17th century.

From the report, it looks to me as if one of the larger points we dispute has to do with the Real Presence, and yet in all three churches, there are varieties of belief, but we all admire the famous quote from Queen Elizabeth I:

“Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and brake it;
And what his words did make it,
That I believe and take it.”

[Keep reading. . . .The report can be downloaded at this link.]

I’ve merely given you snippets here, the document itself covers much more, including how the evolution of civil power, and the Erastianism of the west since Constantine, has led to the startling fact that the supreme power of the Church of England and the State Churches of Scandinavia is not the Word of God, as understood by either the Anglican or Lutheran confession, but the will of a government that may be of an unbelieving mindset. That is a high price that the churches in our old homelands have, and are, paying for the benefits that alliance with the state may have provided.

I think that we are seeing the same split that has happened in our churches, happen now in the Roman Catholic Church as well, perhaps that means that the respective parts of that church will also draw closer to the corresponding parts of our churches as well. But I see no hope at all of all the splits in any of our churches healing.

Perhaps since we quoted Queen Elizabeth I above, we should also quote Queen Elizabeth II from the forward of a book celebrating her 90th birthday, published by Hope Together (and others) called The Servant Queen – and the King She Serves:

As I embark on my 91st year, I invite you to join me in reflecting on the words of a poem quoted by my father, King George VI, in his Christmas Day broadcast in 1939, the year that this country went to war for the second time in a quarter of a century.

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied, “Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

ELIZABETH R.

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The Great Watershed

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Neo in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith, Politics

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury, Christianity, Decline of the west, Episcopal Church (United States), Great War

Shore ChapelIn his post What has gone Wrong?, Chalcedon told us that the Bishop of Durham noted in 1928 that

I was reading (as one does) some addresses given by the Bishop of Durham in 1928 to his diocese. In it he laments the way in which cries of ‘equality’ are leading some to try to force the issue of women’s ordination on the Church. Foreseeing the day in which women will take on a more active political role, he makes two points: the first is that such women will not be much interested in being wives and mothers, which would mean that ‘the feminine influence which will be brought into English public life will not be the best’; and that it will lead to a ‘collapse of elementary morality’. How, he wondered, in a public disengaging from Christian knowledge, would it be possible for people to understand the real, theological objections, to the idea?

His second worry was the declining number of vocations. In 1914 Durham had had 238 assistant curate; by 1928 it had 96. During that period the number of working clergy had fallen by 142. The old ways in which the Church had kept in touch with the people, through house to house visits, was declining and must, he thought, decline further; and Church Schools, the other main point of contact, were also ceasing to be informed by a Christian ethos. Parson were, he lamented, becoming merely minister of a congregation, not of their parishes.

That  certainly rings bells with us doesn’t it, Catholic or Protestant? it’s pretty much what we’ve been saying for the last sixty years.(seems like forever though. doesn’t it?) Chalcedon’s point, and mine as well, is that these problems aren’t the result of Vatican II (although it may have exacerbated them) or even  Lambeth, which overturned the traditional Protestant teaching on contraception and such.

Historically the Protestant churches were much more pro-family than the Roman church ever was, that was one of the reasons for the (near) end of monasticism in our churches. An easy example, more than ten per cent of the women getting married in pre-revolution New England were already pregnant. Yep. Right there in the heart of Puritan-land.

Writing in The Guardian on 14 April 2015 Andrew Brown says this:

The British have lost faith in religion much faster and more completely than they have lost faith in God. The most recent survey to show this comes from Win/Gallup, which found that Britain appeared one of the most irreligious countries on earth, with only 30% calling themselves “religious”. On the other hand, only 13% said they were atheist – compare this with the Chinese figure of around 60%. It may be that the English, especially, regard atheism as a kind of religion, or at least a manifestation of an unhealthy interest in religious questions. But I think that the explanation is more complex. British Christianity is in trouble because Britain itself is disappearing.

Immigrant religion is still thriving here, whether it is Christian or Muslim. But that is because it has an entirely different relationship to the surrounding culture.

The second sort is not about conscious belief at all, but about assumptions: the things that everybody knows are true without ever needing to think about them. […]

For the past two or three hundred years, at least since the civil war, most British Christianity has been like that. Then, in the last 50 years, it fell off a cliff. In the last 30 years alone attendance at mainstream churches has just about halved. The way this has happened is also important: adults did not stop going to church, but they failed to transmit the habit to their children and now they are dying out. The culture has changed and the Christianity which was so deeply rooted in the old culture has had its roots torn up.

Without disputing his facts, because I think they’re likely close to correct, I think his analysis superficial; this came from somewhere.

I suspect some came from the heated dispute between the Protestant and the Anglo-Catholic branches of the Anglican communion, particularly around the turn of the twentieth century when the Protestant branch tried to use political power to suppress the Anglo-Catholics. in many ways it sounds more like a loss of faith in the Established Church than anything else. But it’s more than that as well, because it is affecting all Europe and to a somewhat lesser extent the United States as well.

So what did it? On Jess’ post Epithets and Wars, Francis made the comment:

[…]It has long been my opinion that Western society and culture suffered a collective nervous breakdown when faced, in 1914–1918, with the hideous reality of what its much-vaunted civilised values had led it to. And while the worst of that breakdown was to be played out in the political sphere, it was artists (in every field) who most clearly reflected it. Dadaism and Surrealism may seem to have little in common with Kipling, but (in the pieces you have quoted) there is the same fundamental loss of faith in everything which had been an unquestioned reference point in the pre-WWI world.

And we are still living with that cultural/ideological nervous breakdown. Western Christianity survived that breakdown longer than most other elements of the culture, but is now in headlong collapse as the consequences of that breakdown catch up with it. Those of us who reject the new value system which is our society’s misguided attempt at a coping mechanism are in for a rough ride.

If she’s right, and I think it a fairly strong possibility, what we are seeing is not some crisis of faith in God or even the churches, as it is simply a loss of confidence in ourselves, our societies, and especially our so-called leaders.

That it would happen about a generation after our societies tore themselves apart for the second time in thirty years is not really all that surprising, is it?

So maybe we again come back to Yeats’ and The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

Perhaps Churchill’s “small men and great events” did more damage than we could perceive.

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a scrap book of words and pictures

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reflections, links and stories.

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reflecting my eclectic (and sometimes erratic) life

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walkonthebeachblog

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Reflections, comment, explorations on faith, life, church, minstry & meaning.

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A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you ... John 13:34

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Faith, life and kick-ass moves

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Ahavaha

On This Rock Apologetics

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Quodcumque - Serious Christianity

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ignatius his conclave

Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Journalism from London.

Ratiocinativa

Mining the collective unconscious

Grace sent Justice bound

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