We may consider the great Bishop Charles Gore, the melancholy protagonist in Michael Ramsey’s Anglican Theology from Gore to Temple. Gore wanted to take full account of historical criticism of the Bible and to engage with modernity, in his case in the form of evolution, and from our different perches we would all applaud this. Bishop Gore believed that the Creeds could remain a kind of safe haven from this hurly-burly, though even in his time, and afterward, a more extreme version of that same modernist method had gone to work on the Creeds themselves (as examples of fourth-century power politics, deployments of outdated Greek metaphysics, premodern cosmology, and so forth).
As a result people could keep reciting the Creeds but mean different things by them. In this vein, a generation ago the renowned pluralist John Hick would say that he enthusiastically affirmed the Creeds, though they were for him only a familiar kind of picture-language for the inexpressible transcendent. A more particularly Anglican tack might be to say that the sheer act of praying (or talking, or in this case confessing the Creeds) together constitutes our unity. My point is not to accuse, but only to point out that saying the Creeds together (which I wholeheartedly support) sometimes locates the modernist question more than it solves it.
Unfortunately the same kind of point can be made for some of the other words that are quite rightly used in the responses to identify the distinctive features of our faith. Jesus is indeed unique, but “uniqueness” per se is something that any one of us could claim.
One of the most insightful essays to appear in TLC, and a sort of ‘marching orders’ from an experienced and wise head.
Principal Sumner has written a revealing and important essay that (sadly) might be overlooked. He places in plain view a series of questions that explain why traditional voices in the communion are so upset by TEC. Claiming scripture, creeds and prayerbook as tokens of TEC’s faithfulness to the Christian tradition, what Philip Turner once called the “working theology” of TEC’s clergy is markedly different from the plain sense of any and all these sources of Christian belief and practice. I wonder if there is any way to compel an open discussion between progressive and more traditional voices of the questions Principal Sumner has posed. Discussion would soon reveal the claim that we share more than divides us to be false. The Anglican Communion is faced with a novel understanding of Christian belief and practice that, as it were, hides its novelty behind Scripture, Creed and Worship; and it cannot make progress toward mending the torn fabric of its fellowship until the depth of this divide is brought into the open.
Africanus
The depth of Sumner’s questions versus the hackneyed and tired rhetoric of the other “responses” is simply damning. In particular, the attempt by Douglas and Bailey to appeal to the Baptismal Covenant over the creeds is simply disingenuous. The only people I have heard refer to the Baptismal Covenant as a standard of teaching are clergy and Bishops.