I watched today a video of a press conference in which the President of the House of Bishops and members of her Council of Advice reported about a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury held at General Convention now in session.  Bonnie Anderson stated that the Council explained to the Archbishop in a short meeting that TEC has a particular and novel ecclesiology which affirms that reactions to requests by Instruments of Unity may only be made by resolution of General Convention. No one may speak for TEC except the General Convention is session every three years. Specifically our bishops as a House may only speak as one House and not for the Church.

If this were the case in matters of negotiations between countries, and countries whose legislature only meets once in three years, what would be produced would be diplomatic paralysis. Yet there is something more vital here than “process”. Years ago I wrote an essay entitled “The General Convention Church” which may still be accessed at “Anglicans Online.”  What seems to be advanced here is a notion once embraced by non-episcopal denominations who advanced egalitarian and non-sacerdotal or episcopal doctrines and were free to do that which their governing bodies decided. Anglicanism at the Reformation stood against such notions even in their most reformed moments.

No one surely doubts that if one wants to know about TEC’s views of global warming, MDGs, even the war in Iraq, on its budgetary priorities, or even its mission priorities, the decisions of General Convention are the literature to access. However if one reads the Ordinal, the language of the service for the ordination and consecration, one reads language which affords to the bishops, individually in their dioceses, collectively in TEC and further in the wider church, for us the Anglican Communion and to the rest of Christendom and the world certain specific duties. They are to “guard the faith, unity and discipline of the Church”. Note the capital “C”. They “share in the leadership of the Church (capital “C”) throughout the world.”

Nowhere in the Baptismal, Confirmation, Reception, or ordination to the diaconate or priesthood is such language used or description of Apostolic function and ministry afforded or described.

Historically the House of Bishops is described and limited adjectivally in its present form in the great compromise which was framed to reconcile New England High Churchmen who were “Episcopalians” with Latitudinarian Southern Church people who thought that bishops were not of the “esse” of the church. The House of Bishops may block resolutions from the House of Deputies. The same is true in the other direction. Yet the veto power of the Deputies in no way compromises the Apostolic duty of the bishops to guard and defend and proclaim the Faith of the Church. Bishops collectively have the special charism to authenticate and proclaim the Faith the whole Church, capital “C” has received.

Of course bishops traditionally share this authority, or rather are advised by priests in their dioceses, and take note of the counsel of theologians and spiritual advisers.

All this is far from the dramatic claim that a synod of a “particular church” alone may exercise an authority which is essentially episcopal. The essential authority of the episcopate is not merely sacramental, as our polity affirms in diocesan government, but is also doctrinal, in matters of essential discipline, and in worship.

If indeed only General Convention,  disturbingly described as self-validating and omni-competent ( “no Supreme Court” as a member of the President’s Council of Advice smilingly advanced in the press conference) what was proposed to one of the most learned scholars of ecclesiology, Rowan Williams, was a form of particularism which is not only novel but thoroughly uncatholic – I here refer to basic teaching and not theological opinion – and unanglican and I would propose a form of ecclesiology much more radical than that embraced by the founders of TEC. In short the compromise embraced to include Seabury Anglicans is now being abjured. In matters of faith the House of Bishops is the Supreme Court.

I find this fundamentally more disturbing than matters of same-sex blessings and the ordination of gay bishops in sexual relationships. The Church has survived all sorts of novelties but in this case, as with much of Mutual Ministry theology we are being pulled far away from Anglicanism and into a quaint form of Puritanism.
View the original post

Here here Fr. Clavier!

Sadly, I can’t imagine that the current crop of “leadership” in our church knows enough about Anglican history - let alone Puritanism - to really understand how such radical iconoclasm is about as Puritan as it could be.  The rather silly caricature of Puritanism as a Biblical absolutism akin to contemporary “fundamentalism” is too central to TEC’s “progressivism” - just as it is too central to the self-perception of our own neo-Fundamentalists.  Of course, all of this further underscores to show how desperately our seminary system is in need of reform.  I say, out with the theologians (falsely so-called) and in with the historians!!!

Amen, Benjamin Guyer. As one who owes much to many of the great and much maligned Puritans I don’t think Tony’s is a helpful parallel. The Puritans took the great tradition of the faith incredibly seriously, those who seem to drive the political process in the Episcopal Church don’t seem to have much understanding of the great traditions of the faith. I think a lot of what we seem to be seeing coming from the GC is the bastard child of the Enlightenment.

Thanks for this excellent and important post, Fr. Tony.  I am glad to see that the Twitter network is broadcasting it now, so many will read it.  And thanks, too, to Ben and Richard for their points about the Puritans.  We owe much to them and it is important that we maintain the distinction between them and modern fundamentalists.

I apologize for the misunderstanding.  I was hardly defending the Puritans (and a re-reading of my post above should indicate that).  Puritans deserve to be maligned, as far as I am concerned, but they ought to be maligned properly.  Puritans a) were known to exclude the illiterate from their meetings; b) repeatedly disobeyed the law and imported bastardized Bibles which taught it was acceptable to kill monarchs; c) launched a revolution in which they murdered bishops and the king, and terrorized faithful lay persons; d) believed that they alone were predestined by God; e) repeatedly attempted to deceive the king about the realities of the New England colonies; f) refused to admit into their churches those whose “conversions” were not consider good enough (resulting, sometimes, in suicide among those who were repeatedly rejected); g) viewed the Bible as a wonder-working charm in a fashion no different than medieval Catholics viewed the Eucharist (i.e., Puritans walked into fallow fields with their Bibles, whereas Catholics walked into fallow fields with the Eucharist); h) produced an anti-Trinitarian, anti-Incarnational radicalism that still exists today.  I do not wish to be unkind, but anyone influenced by Puritanism who overlooks these things is not influenced by Puritanism at all, but by a very strange and imaginary fiction erroneously dubbed “Puritanism”.  Secondary historical work on the Puritans indicates just as much.

The Puritans were a heretical sect, fueled by a genuinely violent and apocalyptic fervor, which deserved to be cast out of Anglicanism.  They ought to be cast out now, root and branch (or, as they did at the Restoration, they ought to have enough integrity to leave).  Puritanism was never central to the Anglican tradition - and a serious study of the Old Regime reveals that.  The only thing that Anglicanism owes to Puritanism is the opportunity for writing polemical literature which helped hammer out our own orthodoxy.  In this way alone can Anglicans claim to owe something to the Puritans, just as in this way alone - heresy as an opportunity for the refinement of orthodoxy - the Church has always been influenced and indebted to heretics in her midst.

Again, I do not wish to be unkind to anyone.  But we do well to approach Puritanism as it was, not as some today imagine it to be.  There is no way forward if we won’t even pay attention to the history books.

Who are you calling the Puritans, Ben?  I think we may well be using the term differently.  We owe a good deal of our liturgical standards to evangelicals.  I imagine you are using the term more narrowly than either Richard or me.  And I imagine your categorical rejection of them will be tempered over time as you are challenged on it by other scholars.  Rarely do such categorical rejections as you offer above stand.

For a more balanced reading of the Puritans’ contributions than Benjamin Guyer presents above, see the work of the former principal of Ridley Hall, Bishop Chris Cocksworth: Cocksworth, Christopher J. “The Legacy in the Puritan Tradition.” In Evangelical Eucharistic Thought in the Church of England, xiv, 283 p. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Is there not a confusion in the broader church (in TEC) over the difference between Puritanism and Evangelicalism?

I would say the major problem with Puritanism is the quest for a “pure church.” When Evangelicalism leans towards Fundamentalism, I flee, but at its roots, Evangelicalism is about things I don’t believe Christianity can do with out (ie Cruciocentrism (sp?)).

The unfortunate confusion makes it hard for the broader church to hear the essential piece of Evangelicalism.

Amen, Charlie.  And I suspect that Fr. Tony and Richard, from our past conversations, would agree.