The strange part of …[the New York Times] account is the statement that this move “threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion.” That fragile unity was shattered by the actions of more liberal churches in North America to bless same-sex unions, ordain homosexual ministers, and elect an openly-homosexual bishop. The lack of unity is what has prompted the establishment of this new denomination.
Indeed, this division among the Anglicans and related national churches can be traced directly back to the Anglican Communion’s failure to establish and maintain doctrinal boundaries and a clear affirmation of biblical authority. Liberals and conservatives have been increasingly at odds over a host of issues related to biblical authority.
The action of the American church, the Episcopal Church USA, to elect and consecrate an openly-homosexual man as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 set the stage for what now appears to be a schism in the church.
All true, to be sure, but there is another level not yet examined thoroughly, namely, that the Episcopal church was never really an American church. It’s not just that its roots are in Europe and England, though that’s certainly true, but that its cultural vision is European too. TEC’s love affair with homosexuality is a microcosm of th European view of human relations, that everything is at last permissable. The American cultural history is quite different. We have inherited from our Puritan ancestors the belief that self-restraint and self disicpline should mark both public and private behavior – and English practice the Puritans brought with them – but we added to it an expansive view of the world and its possibilities which has never left us, and we may add to this a strong streak of rebelliousness that is a mixture of the frontier mentality and the Puritan ethos. I should call it a certain kind of faith.
To be sure, liberal America has seemed to have changed all this. This image is much like present day France, Germany or Denmark.
But there is a ground tone from the past that moves our culture that the liberals have been bitterly anxious to extirpate – and cannot. The vote on prop 8 is a case in point. Old America is simply unwilling to be destroyed. So the new province seems to echo and old refrain, a particularly American one. For this reason (among others) I suspect it will succeed, for there are only continuities that are distinctly American, and these will surface yet again. Larry
The orthodox refugees from TEC having established the ACNA as a theologically based, non-geographical alternative to TEC has ipso facto recreated TEC, without any overt action to that specific effect on TEC’s part, as a theologically based non-geographic province, as well. This result gives North American Anglicans a true choice of theologies that span the range of Anglicanism from Jesus Christ very nearly to the Anti-Christ.