For years, I thought I was called to be an Anglican priest. My wife and I wanted to plant an Anglican church in Minneapolis. To that end, I attended a beautiful Anglican seminary couched in the forests of Wisconsin. There, surrounded by men and women much holier than myself, I was challenged to grow up in Christ. During the course of my studies and discernment, I came to believe that Christ intended his Church to be apostolic””and also that Rome had greatly exaggerated Peter’s role in the apostolic college. I had many opinions about the papacy, most of them clouded by exaggeration and fabrication, and considered myself to be more Catholic than the Catholics.
“Are you Episcopalian?” people asked.
“No, I am Anglican,” I said.
“But aren’t Episcopalians Anglican?” they asked.
And I would try my best to explain how the Anglican communion is full of national churches and independent provinces that are out of communion with one another. By my senior year, I was tongue-tied.
Schism””however sincerely felt, conventional, or culturally imperative””remains schism. Anglicanism has not essentially changed since the moment King Henry VIII had, in the most frightening sense of the phrase, an original idea. Time and habit””together with popular acceptance and the enduring appeal of fresh breaks (I was in the ACNA, a break-off from TEC)””do not transform the Church of England into a “branch” of the Catholic Church. Time’s passage does not a Catholic Church make. In fact, just the opposite happens: the longer Anglicans remain out of communion with Peter’s successor, the pope, the longer the principle of decay can take effect. As in the moment of the original break, the result of schism is something schismatic every single second.
We should not mistake the gradual numbing of our awareness of schism with its disappearance or release from our ongoing responsibility for it; much less should we excuse such visible disunity by appealing to an invisible “unity in Christ”””at least not while we’re praying “on earth as it is in heaven.” The Church is more than a surface-level illusion.
Tyler Blanski makes some basic mistakes, so it is just as well that he gave up being an Anglican priest. To give just one example, when he writes of Matthew 16:18:
“To translate it into Greek, Matthew did something practical: he took a feminine word, petra, and “masculinized” it …”
No, he didn’t.
The Greek words “petra” and “petros” existed long before Jesus walked this earth, and they had distinct meanings. Petra means a very large rock, such as the rock that a city is built on. Petros means a rock small enough for a single person to lift, i.e. “a stone” in common parlance. This usage is found in many places in Ancient Greek texts, in poetry and prose, from the time of Homer up until New Testament times.
Thus when Matthew translated Jesus’ words into Greek he used terminology that any educated Greek speaker could understand. In effect, the meaning of Matthew 16:18 is:
“And I tell you, you [Peter] are a stone, but upon this huge rock I will build my Church.”
The reason that Anglicans don’t become Roman Catholics is because the clear teachings of Jesus and his Apostles do not require them to do so.