Dr Sheridan Gilley, formerly Reader in Church History in the University of Durham, somewhere describes the Anglican Church as a Noah’s Ark where all kinds of weird and wonderful species of Christian belief have come on board. The point could perhaps be made more gently than a comparison with an ocean-going menagerie. Certainly there is a variety of currents in the theological history of Anglicanism and it is necessary to discern among them. That was the aim of my 1992 study The Panther and the Hind. A Theological History of Anglicanism, in whose conclusion I floated the notion of an Anglican ”˜Uniate’ Church drawn from particular elements within the wider Anglican patrimony.[2] In the interpretation of the history of Anglican theology which is there laid out ”“ and, as in the present essay, I confined myself almost entirely to the Church of England, which is not only more familiar to me but crucial for Anglicanism at large ”“ I distinguished between three basic currents. There is a Catholic stream; there is a Protestant stream; and there is a stream which is enthusiastic for neither Catholicism nor Protestantism as such and which I generally labelled ”˜Latitudinarian’….
The prevailing question for oppressed Anglo-Catholics is whether the Ordinariate will be a sort of Noah’s ark where all sorts of weird and wonderful varieties of Christians are welcome aboard, or whether it will be “my way or the highway.” There is a lot of telescoping in this history and certain facts such as the former attempt of the Papacy to be a form of idealized world government (much like Nichols’ Israel escaping from Egypt to form a utopia references) are pretty much overlooked. Then, too, a lot of Anglo Catholics rely on the Bible more than their higher-order ministers, as bishops from generation to generation have tended to become removed from ministry and tend to set up various “pride structures,” building proud towers that cannot reach to heaven. Also Catholics tend to underplay how Protestant reforms have renewed Catholicism as well. Witness, for example, reading scripture and worshiping in the vernacular.