Anglican upheavals

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While the internal squabbles within the Anglican Communion do not directly concern Orthodox Christians, some have expressed concern about them.

Interfax-Religion:

The Moscow Patriarchate has expressed concern about the Anglican Synod’s decision to ordain women.’This decision is of course painful in the inter-Christian dialogue, as it is further alienating the Anglican community from the Apostolic tradition,’ Priest Igor Vyzhanov, secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, said in an interview with Interfax-Religion on Tuesday.

Father Igor also said that the Anglican Synod’s decision to ordain women ‘is a very painful blow on the unity of the Anglican community, as it is worsening a split among the Anglicans.’

Father Igor was referring to the Church of England, as other Anglican churches had ordained women bishops long ago.

Another (Roman Catholic) blogger has summed up the issues clearly and concisely, and I don’t think the Orthodox approach would differ very much:

The Church of England yesterday voted to ordain women to the episcopate. The arguments against this decision were the classic Catholic ones: that there is no precedent or authority for the move, either in Scripture, Tradition, or in the Anglican Communion itself acting in isolation from other churches that see their authority and the truth of their sacraments as based in the apostolic succession. The victorious women, on the other hand, or at least some of them, claimed that the vote in their favour constituted an end to the discrimination that had been practised against them. This sort of language is totally inappropriate, inaccurate and misplaced. It’s nothing to do with discrimination. Who do the women think were discriminating against them, and for what reason? It’s supposed to be about discerning the will of God, not untapping previously denied job opportunities. This sort of response shows a complete lack of concern for Church unity; and, in that, it seems to me to betray an absence of the Holy Spirit.

And the point is, this decision does introduce profound disunity into the Church. There are many bishops, priests and laypersons who just won’t be able to accept it, on theological grounds not those of discrimination. Many of these will end up leaving the Church. Many who stay will be faced by terrible dilemmas about who they can worship and serve under and with. It’s not just a case of some male priests being unable to accept the authority of a female bishop; but also, they and many laypersons won’t accept the authenticity of the priesthood of those ordained by a female bishop. Over time, this could spread enormous confusion and fragmentation into the day-to-day life of the Church; or else, the thing will just prove unworkable, and the men and women concerned will either just leave or split off to form their own continuing and – in their eyes – authentically apostolic church.

The same blogger goes on to point out that this is a much more divisive issue than the ordination of homosexual male bishops:

The thing is, the question of women bishops is a more fundamental issue of doctrine than that of gay bishops; and it introduces more disunity into the Church, in ways I’ve attempted to outline above. The teachings about the Church itself, and the apostolic foundation of its authority and sacraments, are absolutely integral parts of Catholic dogma. If you start introducing bishops who, by virtue of that teaching, cannot be regarded as authentic, then the whole edifice is literally subverted from within. A male bishop whose morality is questionable, and certainly would be regarded as sinful from the standpoint of traditional Catholic moral teaching, is nonetheless still an authentic bishop if he has been chosen by his peers and consecrated in accordance with tradition. (This is leaving aside, for a moment, the question of the Catholic Church’s denial of the belief that the Anglican Communion actually does have the apostolic succession!) So his morality is more a matter of discipline and moral example than fundamental dogma.The fact that the issue of female bishops introduces more division into the church than sexually active gay clergy is illustrated, for me, by the fact that the breakaway conservative evangelical movement, GAFCON (discussed in my previous post), is potentially going to end up being just as divided over this as over the anti-gay-clergy sentiment that unites it. So far, GAFCON has glossed over this issue so as to prevent a united front. But there are undoubtedly going to be African dioceses and conservative evangelicals that will be unable to accept the authority of women bishops; and so you’ll end up with at best a two-track break-away GAFCON Church, with parts of it happy to accept women bishops and others who elect to come under the authority of male bishops only. The geographically dislocated character of the GAFCON movement – with some Western dioceses or individual churches choosing to come under the authority of bishops from other continents – could be the thing that facilitates this dual approach. However, it will break up the traditional association between a bishop and the geographical territory over which his pastoral mission extends.

Much of the discussion about this has spoken of two camps, “liberal” and “conservative”, but, as I have pointed out elsewhere, such terminology simply obscures and confuses the issues. Perhaps another quotation can help to clarify the issues a little, this time from David Ould, an Evangelical Anglican:

I’m an evangelical, there’s no surprise about that, but it occurs to me that as an evangelical I haven’t really got my head around quite how big a deal the decision by the Church of England General Synod not to provide legal protection for dissenters on the matter of women bishops is. Let me explain.The decision is, of course, a big deal even if you’re an evangelical. For many of us it represents another step away from Biblical authority. But, if we are honest, the impact upon us is not as great as it is for our High Church colleagues. The reason why lies in our ecclesiology. Evangelicals have generally understood that we don’t need bishops (as an example see this article from last year). We like bishops, especially when they do their job properly, but we don’t consider them vital to the church. That’s why we are the most ecumenical of creatures, able to join hands with evangelicals of all denominations.

For our High Church friends, on the other hand, bishops are vital. They are not just symbols of unity – they are in one sense the essence of the church. They understand that the Church has thought this way ever since Ignatius insisted on the priority of bishops. Furthermore, bishops are sacramentally important. To be fair, I have never 100% understood this in all its detail but I have long since accepted that this is how they make sense of ecclesiology.

And perhaps one more clarification is needed, especially for those unfamiliar with Anglicanism. You will notice that David Ould refers to “High Church” friends, he does not refer to “Anglo-Catholics”.

In the 19th century two movements arose within the Anglican Church, the Tractarians and the Ritualists, which were linked with the old “High Church” tradition and by the 1920s they had pretty well joined forces in the Anglo-Catholic movement. But by the 1960s they had begun to separate again. The Evangelicals, as David Gould describes them, were pretty much “Low Church”. The terms “High Church” and “Low Church” describe what is now called “ecclesiology”. And it was the High Church Anglicans whose ecclesiology came closest to Orthodoxy of all the Western Churches — closer even than the Roman Catholics according to Fr Igor in the quote at the beginning of this article. They were called “High Church” because they had a high view of the Church as more than a mere human organisation, but something founded by God. For high churchmen, the church is not just a nation at prayer, or a club for people who happen to be religious, but something of divine origin, which people tamper with at their peril.

Since the 1960s, however, Anglo-Catholics and High-Church Anglicans have been drifting apart. Anglo-Catholics like dressing up for services, but care little for ecclesiology or episcopacy. Most do see no objection to women bishops, because they don’t think episcopacy or apostolic succession are very important. The office of a bishop is modelled on that of a CEO of a commercial concern, and if a manager in a secular business can be female, or gay, or both, why not the manager of an ecclesiastical business? The only difference is that the latter sometimes wears fancy dress. As David Ould has pointed out, the “High Church” concern is more theological than this. The Anglo-Catholic approach is sociological rather than theological.

Why should Orthodox Christians be concerned about this? High Church Anglicans may be concerned about the Anglican Church losing apostolic succession, but from the point of view of the Orthodox Church they can’t “lose” apostolic succession because they never had it in the first place.

To answer the question, I don’t think that Orthodox Christians ought to be concerned about it at all. The vast majority of Orthodox Christians, who live in Russia, the Balkans and the Near and Middle East, are unlikely to have much contact with Anglicans of any variety. It is mainly Orthodox Christians who live in countries where English is widely spoken who are likely to have much contact with Anglicans — in Eastern and Southern Africa, Britain, North America, Australasia and a few other places.

I am interested in the matter partly because I was an active Anglican for 25 years, though for much of that period I was attracted by Orthodox theology, and when it appeared that the Anglcan Church was moving further and further away from Orthodoxy theology, I decided to become Orthodox. As much as anything else I felt that I didn’t have the desire or the energy to fight the kind of battles that are splitting the Anglican Communion today. I’d rather get on with the job than spend all my time and energy arguing about what the job is, especially since the arguments seem to be getting nastier and more vituperative as time goes on. So I’m glad to be out of it. I’ve got my work cut out battling against the world, the flesh and the devil — I don’t need to be squabbling with others in the church as well.

That’s not to say that the Orthodox Church is perfect; it isn’t. There are plenty of arguments and disagreements, but they are usually arguments and disagreements over methods rather than goals, over the “how” rather than the “what”, and nobody seriously wants to argue about the basics of the Christian faith or the nature of the Church.

I don’t much care whether the Anglicans ordain female bishops or not. I won’t regard them as bishops within the apostolic succession, but then I don’t regard the male ones as bishops within the apostolic succession either. As David Ould points out, that is so not important to the evangelical Anglicans either. It is of decreasing importance to Anglo-Catholics, as they shift to the sociological model of episcopacy, and it only matters to the small and ever diminishing number of High Church Anglicans.

I have friends who are Anglican bishops, Methodist bishops and Zionist bishops, and the fact that their understanding of episcopacy differs from mine (and, in all probability, each other’s) does not stop us from being friends. It does, however, mean that I don’t receive the holy communion from them.

Some of the disaffected Anglicans may want to become Orthodox, or at least think about it. If God chooses to interest them in Orthodoxy, I’ll be happy
to share what little knowledge i have, if necessary, but I won’t actively try to proselytise them. I’d rather urge them to look before they leap, especially if what drives them is the simplistic categorisation of things as “liberal” and “conservative”. Anglicans who regard themselves as “conservative” won’t necessarily be happy in the Orthodox Church, even if they perceive it as “conservative”. There is a sense in which the Orthodox Church is conservative, since we believe that it has conserved and preserved and continued in the “apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42) from the day of Pentecost AD 33 until today, and that that continuity constitutes the apostolic succession. But others may find that too conservative, or even too liberal.

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Tags: Anglican-Orthodox dialogue, Anglicanism, ecclesiology, episcopacy, GAFCON, Orthodoxy