The recent, splendid Living Church article by my friend Kenneth Aldrich \u201d\u201c “Confessions of an Episcopal Fundamentalist” \u201d\u201c has provided timely food for thought and prayer,if not indeed something very close to manna from heaven, for Episcopalians committed to the “fundamentals” of orthodox Christianity, and in particular for those on that Anglican front-line which is what the Diocese of South Carolina seems to have become!<\/p>\n
In my own preaching and teaching at the Cathedral in Charleston I have used Father Aldrich\u2019s article, as well as the recent widely controversial edict of Pope Benedict XVI (nothing new there and therefore nothing for us to get bent out of shape about!), to undergird my conviction that the way forward for us in this Diocese and at this Cathedral should be to focus on two ecclesiological bottom-lines.<\/p>\n
The first, always, is the trustworthiness of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as God’s Word Written, in terms of which the identity and integrity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is constituted by the Spirit of Christ Himself. The second, for Anglicans, must be the apostolic witness and continuity of this Church Catholic, embodied and passed along by bishops who commit themselves to be faithful guardians of “the faith once delivered to the saints” as contained in the Bible and expressed in the Creeds of the Church\u2019s conciliar tradition. To put it in the words of one of the first Reformation-era Anglican bishops, John Jewell: “We have planted no new religion but only have preserved the old that was undoubtedly founded and used by the apostles of Christ and other holy fathers of the primitive church.”
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Our current priority must be praying and working towards getting Mark Lawrence re-elected and consecrated as such a bishop, with (God willing) his service of consecration and “seating” in this Cathedral next January.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, as we witness the tragic, if gradual, break up of the Episcopal Church as we have known it, we can console ourselves that, on the one hand, Jesus promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against His Church but, on the other hand, He said nothing about the putative claims of modern denominations as such or their “autonomy” (nationally or provincially) \u201d\u201c which are, after all, nothing but modern institutional fictions.<\/p>\n
Anglican Christianity is surely in the process of re-aligning itself around relationships of apostolic faithfulness, integrity, and collegiality among and between bishops and dioceses committed not to humanly institutionalized structures (which in the long course of church history wax and wane) but to the divinely constituted One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ.<\/p>\n
As one of my own mentors in cathedral ministry, a British Dean put it: “Hold fast to Christ, and for the rest remain uncommitted.” May it ever be so for the Diocese, Bishop, and Cathedral of South Carolina \u201d\u201c and indeed, as a matter of fervent prayer on behalf of all of us, for the See of Canterbury itself and its occupant, that the re-alignment of Anglicanism should not lose that historic rootedness through so many centuries of church history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent, splendid Living Church article by my friend Kenneth Aldrich \u201d\u201c “Confessions of an Episcopal Fundamentalist” \u201d\u201c has provided timely food for thought and prayer,if not indeed something very close to manna from heaven, for Episcopalians committed to the…<\/span><\/p>\n