In an earlier post, I had described how the very foundational beliefs of my heritage churches had actually led me away from those churches to the Orthodox Church. Another important influence in my turning toward Orthodoxy is the Anglican Tradition and, in the U. S., the Episcopal Church. I have twice started to write this essay, but both times deleted the many words that I had written. It is difficult, given my history with the Episcopal Church, not to come off as rantingly offensive. Although I discovered the Orthodox Church prior to my leaving Anglicanism, that transition out of the American Anglican Church into Orthodoxy went more quickly and with less ambivalence than might otherwise have been the case. There are many positives that the Episcopal Church has given me, all of which find their fulfillment in Orthodoxy, but the primary impetus derived from my experience in the Episcopal Church is largely negative. With that proviso, I beg the indulgence of my Anglican readers. I will be as respectful as I can be within the bounds of honesty, but I ask to be given the benefit of the doubt where I fail to find the proper words to communicate that honesty with respect.
In strong contrast to the way my heritage churches shaped me for the Orthodox Church, the Anglican tradition did not so much shape my beliefs or fundamental practices, so much as provide an ethos in which to develop them. Prior to becoming an Episcopalian, I had already accepted the sacramentality of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. The sacramentatlity of Baptism was simply my heritage beliefs given a new vocabulary. That of the Lord's Supper was mostly a rational conclusion to an honest appraisal of my heritage churches' hermeneutical practices and a fresh look at the biblical texts, wrapped up in my developing experiences. The rest of the Sacraments followed quite easily. And although my practice of observing the daily office was shaped specifically by the Episcopal prayer book even before I became an Episcopalian, the practice itself derived from my study of and attraction to historical Benedictine monasticism. I did not seek so much, in the Episcopal Church, a new mind about these things as--what was for me--a new experience of the historical Church. And it was the disappointment in this objective, coupled with an examination of early Church history and Orthodoxy, that ultimately led me foursquare into the Orthodox Church.
When I was exploring the Episcopal Church I was struck by two things: the claim to historical Church connections (i. e., it was the Church in England, not so much the Church of England, and the historicity of the See of Canterbury), and the use of the via media as both an ecclesiology and doctrinal boundary. The former claim is what both attracted me to the Episcopal Church and provided me with a canon by which to judge it. The latter claim never did set well with me, though I at first attempted to embrace it lukewarmly, and ultimately it is also that claim that helped bring about the dissolution of my ties with the church.
The Episcopal churches which I frequented during my ten years of investigation of and life in them, all wanted to make the connection with the apostolic Church, primarily through aposotolic succession. There was an apologetic here: that kings don't invalidate sacraments or history, and that connection to Rome is not the sole determination of what constitutes Christ's Church. But lineal descent is not the sole criterion of apostolicity, and it was here that the second claim of the via media intruded. It was one thing to maintain historical connections to the Apostles through the valid consecrations of bishops--and goodness knows, Orthodox do not maintain a connection to Rome--but it is something else altogether to distance oneself from the valid evangelic Tradition within which those bishops (at least during the first millennium and then some) were consecrated. If the Episcopal Church claimed historical descent, could it validate that descent not just by consecration but by the Tradition?
Here, for me, the record was clear. The mandatory acceptance of the ordination of women to the Eucharistic ministry was clearly not historical, and further was opposed in the present by Rome and the Orthodox. The acceptance of sexual morality that did not conform to the norm of one man and one woman united in holy marriage for life could not validate a claim to the historic life of the Church. The androgynization of the liturgy was yet another step away from the historic Church. And ultimately the failure not only to discipline outright heresy, but the rewarding it with celebrity and pensional remuneration further delegitimized the claims to historicity. One could hardly see the historic Church allowing retired widows and widowers sexual congress outside holy matrimony so that their respective inheritances could be kept unencumbered. Nor can one imagine St. Nicholas of Myra greeting Bishop Spong with smile and handshake of a fellow traveller on life's complicated way in the name of the Ground of all Being.
It his here that the claim to the via media undermined the claims to historicity. The historic Church did not seek a "middle way" between doctrinal claims. The historic Church had one question: did the Apostles teach it? If the answer was affirmative, then it mattered little of a doctrine was "fundamentalist," rightist extremism, or "liberal," leftist radicalism. If the Apostles taught it, that settled the question of belief. Indeed, the via media is uniquely Anglican, a political expedient to avert the bloody religious conflicts which had raged between Catholics and Reformers. It was a middle way which veered neither sharply toward iconoclastic Protestantism nor papally loyal Catholicism, but steered between them remaining dogmatically uncommitted on controversial doctrines.
But this political bandaid, necessary though it may have been in its historical time and place, could never become an ecclesiology. At its best, all it could accomplish is a loyalty to an institution. Two Anglicans could receive the elements at the communion rail, and both believe completely contradictory things about the Eucharist (that it was the Body and Blood of Jesus; or that it was merely, and nothing more than, bread and wine, symbolic of a remembered historical event), leaving only their attachment to their Anglican parish as their only meaningful common bond. But here one has quickly devolved from apostolic ecclesiology to congregationalism. All that was left was the historical implications of the working out of the consequences of the via media, which we have seen in the events leading to consecration of a bishop who avowedly and unrepentantly engages in homosexual acts and the reactions consequent to that consecration within the international Anglican community. Of course, this consecration is not, itself, the precipitating event which has created the Anglican crisis. Rather, it serves as a microcosm of the entire corpus of the failures of the via media as an ecclesiology and determiner of dogmatic boundaries.
No, the via media is the failure to adhere to the so-called "Vincentian canon" which has guided the Church since the time of the Apostles. It cannot work because it creates a shadow "church," an institution which can look and sound like the Church, but which ultimately is an idol which must fall before the Holy Ark, its broken hands and feet on the threshhold.
Of course, I can state this with something that I hope resembles clarity now in hindsight. All of these thoughts and criticisms were those things with which I wrestled, if I did not all at once see the connections. Indeed, part of my reason for staying within the Episcopal Church for as long as I ultimately did after being confronted all of the deeply troubling issues I've written of elsewhere, was that I still hoped that my desire for an historical connection to the Church could be fulfilled in the Episcopal Church. I did not then see the paradigm of the via media as the failed ecclesiology that it was and is. To me at that time, the via media largely represented dogmatic instability or even cowardice. But I saw the ecclesiological implications even then, if I did not tie them so directly to Anglicanism's great modernist claim.
In short, Anglicanism could not deliver on my hopes. Though I have friends I could never have made had I not become an Episcopalian, and though I can only always be ever grateful for the time and space the Anglican tradition gave me to "try out" those things that have been fulfilled for me in Orthodoxy, my leaving Anglicanism has been necessary. The Anglicanism I came into the Episcopal Church for is not Anglicanism so much as the Church. And the Anglicanism that the Episcopal Church is today is, in my experience, a repudiation of that Church. The implication, if one holds such a view, is obvious.
But since I had discovered the Orthodox Church almost simultaneously with the failures of the Episcopal Church, on leaving Anglicanism, it was both natural and obvious where my journey must next take me: my final destination in Orthodoxy.
As my blog readers know, this journey is still incomplete, as I am working to bring my entire family in with me, rather than forge in alone. But I have hopes and visions that the journey will one day be fulfilled.
Posted by Clifton at January 2, 2005 07:25 AM | TrackBack