The Vatican says more Anglicans have expressed an interest in joining the Catholic Church. E-mail to a friend. Mixx Facebook Twitter Digg del. Sound Off: Your opinions and comments. Post a comment iReport. Post a comment Name. Comment Submit.
From the Blogs: Controversy, commentary, and debate. Sit tight, we're getting to the good stuff. From psychiatrist to 'Butcher of Bosnia'. Why trial could take years. Budziszewski, R. Reno, and Thomas Howard. Yes, they could have joined one of the small continuing Anglican groups, but after leaving one global communion, I understand why they joined another.
Members of the Roman Catholic church, on the other hand, will sit with one another and break bread together anywhere around the globe. The Anglican Communion may be the third largest after Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy , but fractures have developed around issues of Christian orthodoxy.
As Paul said, there must be factions at times 1 Corinthians What is more, there are certain historic Christian teachings that Protestants have abandoned. The Roman Catholic teaching on the sanctity of marriage is very attractive, as is their high value of celibacy. The historic Christian teaching against birth control is likewise difficult to find outside of Rome.
They tend to be clearer about the roles of tradition and Scripture in the life of the church, while Protestants try to insist their traditions are based entirely on scripture when they clearly are not. Rome is also honest about what you will be excommunicated for. Yes, it is difficult to have to assent to everything that Rome tells you to believe, but at least you know what you are signing up for — and what everyone else is signing up for.
It is difficult to have friendships ruined because people disagree about an obscure Bible passage something I would wager most Evangelical fundamentalists have experienced , so a church where people have a standard they are agreeing to sounds almost like a utopian myth. And the legend can sound even more appealing when Evangelical pilgrims find in Anglicanism the same Protestant pitfalls they are trying to flee. When you see certain Anglican groups branding themselves and using advertising techniques, it feels fake.
Maybe there is no escape, but some of us hoped Anglicanism would offer a taste of actual unity — the sort Jesus prayed for in his High Priestly Prayer John But if Anglicans behave like just another Protestant sect, it is little wonder that some swim the Tiber.
I have sympathy for any Christian struggling to find a place in our very dysfunctional catholic Church. Candice Gage is a freelance writer and blogger from Southwest Missouri. She holds a B. She blogs at Incandescent Ink. November 10, November 8, November 5, May 11, am Kevin Davis. I agree with everything Candice writes here and reflects my experience precisely. By contrast, as a Catholic I could attend any number of churches, many with beautiful liturgy, architecture, and faithful priests — such as the cathedral here.
And, of course, the Episcopal churches are varying shades of heterodoxy and declining, while the Catholic parishes are actually at least here bursting with energy and growth. And as someone who loves to travel, both in the US and Europe, the catholicity of the Roman communion is another very attractive feature. May 16, am Greg. You may be interested to know that Anglicanism is alive and growing in France with the Church of England having over 83 congregations there, many of them meeting in unused or under used Roman Catholic church buildings.
Additionally ,the Episcopal Church has a number of congregations in France and other Anglican jurisdictions such as the Free Church of England and the Anglican Catholic Church also have a presence there as well. So rest assured if you do ever end up living in France there is a good chance that there will be an Anglican congregation not too far away at all.
May 11, pm Kent Haley. Again, why? To answer this question, we have to consider the ways in which modern Anglicanism differs sharply from Anglicanism in the past. Of course, in a worldwide fellowship of churches representing roughly 85 million Anglicans, there are sure to be profound differences.
It is, of course, a small denomination, with an average Sunday attendance that is only a small fraction of the combined attendance of its geographic rivals, The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. But it has an outsized influence in the Anglican Communion, and for all of its fractures, the ACNA is trying to offer a coherent vision of modern Anglicanism. This vision, for those who share it and those who do not, is worthy of consideration.
Ask two questions: What is the relationship of Anglicanism to other churches? And what would draw disaffected American evangelicals to Anglicanism in the twenty-first century? For each question I will start by sketching an answer rooted in pre-twentieth-century Anglicanism, and then I will offer for comparison the answer that is being prominently advanced by the ACNA. Then, at the conclusion, I will venture a suggestion about why the answers given by the ACNA make it so susceptible to being a pipeline from evangelicalism to Catholicism.
Whether the Church of England is one of the churches of the Protestant Reformation is not an open question. Its formularies, including the Thirty-Nine Articles, leave no doubt on this subject. The church sent a high-profile delegation to the Synod of Dordt, which signed the canons on behalf of the English Church—which is consistent with how that church saw itself as part of the international network of Reformed churches.
True, among the churches of the Reformation, the Church of England had some distinctives. One was the retention of bishops like another church of the Reformation, the Moravian Church of Bohemia. Another was liturgical uniformity as a primary instrument of reformation. Another was sustaining for a longer time the patristic emphasis that characterized all of the magisterial Reformers.
The contrary view, that Anglicanism is historically a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, has been so often debunked [3] it only lives on in potted histories for Anglican rookies. It borrows the title of a famous book by C. Lewis, Mere Christianity , and uses this as its descriptor. This idea of Anglicans as Mere Christians has had a wide influence.
It is central to how many ACNA churches describe and present themselves to would-be worshippers. It is part of how many ACNA clergy think of themselves. Many of our fellow Christians find their beliefs distinguished and decisively rejected in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Black Rubric, and the exhortations in the Communion service. These Christians—including Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Anabaptists—would be rightly surprised to learn that what was rejecting their views was just Mere Christianity.
This is putative humility; in reality it has more of hubris and self-congratulation. It takes a theme from Anglo-Catholic sources, which try to present the Church of England as an essentially pre-Reformation church, and then slaps on a popular label from a writer widely revered by all sorts of American evangelicals, C. But the claim is pure P. Barnum, with no basis in the Anglican formularies or historic Anglican practice.
Anglicanism as Mere Christianity is mere marketing. There is obvious anachronism in asking what pre-Newman Anglicanism might offer to American evangelicals today. But one possibility is a saturation in the Scriptures. Anglicans have traditionally been marked by an enormous diet of Bible reading.
Every minister was canonically required to say the daily offices, which in a typical day would mean reading about ten or eleven chapters of Scripture. Not only was the Scripture read, but there was a strong emphasis away from individualism in interpretation. After every psalm, the Gloria Patri affixed a Trinitarian and thus a Christological interpretation. The Thirty-Nine Articles sided—by name—with St. Jerome and St. Augustine on contentious questions about the canon and the sacraments, showing that Anglicans are supposed to read the Scriptures with the church fathers.
And the widespread reading of the Apocrypha in the daily offices underscored that we accept the value of extrabiblical works that have been read over the centuries by the Church. The English reformers were of course not the only ones who appealed to patristic interpretation and claimed the mantle of true catholicity—the same appeals were made by Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon, for example. But these appeals have been an enduring characteristic of Anglicanism.
In other words, one thing that historic Anglican practice could offer to disaffected evangelicals today is vastly more reading of Scripture, and also a turn toward less subjectivity in interpreting it. But there is another kind of appeal to tradition that is widely made by the ACNA, and it is central to how broad swathes of the ACNA think of what they have to offer disaffected evangelicals: ceremonies.
There are ceremonial additions to the ordinal, including for example vesting with a stole and chasuble neither of which was in mainstream Anglican use before the twentieth century, because of their strong associations with Roman sacrificial understandings of the eucharist. There are still more ceremonial additions in the controversial new ACNA altar book. It is standard practice in many ACNA churches for the service bulletin to offer some kind of explanation of some of their ceremonies.
A large portion of the posts on Anglican websites, especially for newcomers to Anglicanism, are about ceremonies. This state of affairs would seem very strange to most Anglicans throughout history. The English reformers hacked away at the medieval ceremonies with a vengeance. Archbishop Cranmer banned all of the Catholic sacramentals—no candles at Candlemas, no ashes at Ash Wednesday, no palms at Palm Sunday. He prohibited lighted candles on the Communion table. Not only did he remove all crossings in the Communion service, he even revised the text of the service to remove the places where late medieval priests had been in the habit of making the sign of the cross.
The mass-associated eucharistic vestments—the chasuble and stole—were gone. Now Cranmer was no Puritan. He fought for the surplice. He retained the sign of the cross in baptism. He prescribed kneeling at Communion and resisted the last-minute insertion of the Black Rubric.
But he also thought that the medieval ceremonies were not simply an indifferent matter to be left to the consciences of priest and parishioner. And according to the canons, ceremonies that were not prescribed were excluded Canons of , iv.
The overriding question was edification. Sometimes it was tied up with Catholic eucharistic theology, but often the significance was not in itself objectionable—for example, ashes because of our mortality, or lighted candles on the table either because Christ is the light of the world or from the example of early Christians in the catacombs.
And yet the English reformers still rejected these ceremonies, and overwhelmingly they were rejected by all Anglicans before the twentieth century. Much more could be said on this point, but one of the hallmarks of the historic Anglican approach to ceremony was simplicity.
On the one hand, edification was served by certain ceremonies that enforced decency and order—these included kneeling for Communion and the impersonality afforded by the surplice. On the other hand, edification was served by avoiding multiplication of ceremonies. The traditional Anglican practice strips away much of the outward trappings, fixing the attention on the Word of God, prayer, and music the one place where ornate elaboration in the service was most characteristically Anglican.
In short, before the twentieth century Anglicanism was a religion of the word. It appealed constantly and pervasively to the ear. The reading and preaching of Scripture, the reading of the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer, and the reading, chanting, and singing of psalms and hymns—these were the regular staples of devout religion.
Sights and smells were not. In ceremonies as in theology for can they really be separated? Far from being distinguished by its retention of pre-Reformation ceremonies, the Church of England was distinguished by the reverence and modesty of its ceremonial. On both points discussed here, there is a difference of opinion in Anglicanism today.
Some think of Anglicanism as the hallway in Mere Christianity ; others think of it as one of the churches of the Reformation. Some think the more, the merrier for ceremonies; others think the traditional Anglican simplicity is more edifying in the long run.
But these alternatives do not simply stand alone. They cluster together not, perhaps, irresistibly. The historic Anglican position represents one set of answers to these two questions: Anglicanism is one of the churches of the magisterial Reformation, and what could be offered to disaffected American evangelicals today is a vastly greater emphasis on Scripture and the humble reading of it with the Church.
The vision of Anglicanism that is currently being advanced in the ACNA represents a different set of answers: Anglicanism is simply a form of mere Christianity, and disaffected American evangelicals should be drawn by the heightened ceremonial of modern Anglicanism.
Set to one side which of these clusters better fits the Anglican formularies. And which cluster is more biblically grounded and spiritually sound.
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