Nielsen’s Nook

I am a member of The Inclings, a most wonderful reading group at Church of the Incarnation. The group is modeled after The Inklings, the reading group of which C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers and J. R. R. Tolkien were part.

The Inclings hosted a dinner with Archbishop Josiah Fearon last Thursday, September 27, that I was quite interested in attending. This past Sunday, September 30 was the deadline given by the Archbishop of Canterbury for the Episcopal Church USA to repent of their irregular ordination of the openly homosexual Bishop Gene Robinson and submit themselves to the 2006 Windsor report.

As many have said, this issue of the ordination of Gene Robinson is ‘not all about sex’. It is about the authority of scripture, consideration to the tradition of interpretation of scripture by those Christians who have come before, submission to those in authority, the failure of bishops to discipline their dioceses and simply doing what one says one will do. While this is a very brief summary, it is not my intent to get into the intricacies of the controversy in the Anglican church here. Rather, I want to remind my readers of the gravity and most basic nature of the controversy.

Over a hundred years ago Presbyterians were going through a similar controversy, the Modernist Controversy. Scripture was being denied as authoritative and consequently doctrines that the church catholic has confessed for hundreds of years as orthodox were being jettisoned. The controversy then in the Presbyterian Church and now in the Anglican Communion have the commonality of being fought over the authority of Scripture. It is my hope that the outcomes of the two controversies will be radically different. The Modernist Controversy sent the Presbyterian Church into a splintering spiral as you will see in the “Presbyterian Family Connections” diagram to the left.

In that fracturing, from my limited Presbyterian perspective, at least two significant and perhaps unexpected things occurred in the course of the century that would follow. First, the parts of the Presbyterian Church that resisted the Modernist Hetrodoxy have become precisely modernist. We resisted the notion of “I think therefore I am” and in resisting it, as Focault reminds us, we have become the very thing we resisted, saying now “I think therefore I believe.” Second, and relatedly, the Presbyterian Church has lost sight of its historical richness, settling for a broadly evangelical blandness, something that John Williamson Nevin and the Mercersburg movement were seeing when Princeton Seminary was still historically orthodox.

It is not that belief is somehow unrelated to thinking, but that the foundation of our belief has subtly shifted to a conservative form of modernism, which is other than the Spirit working through the Word, Sacraments, Prayer and the mystery of Providence to convict and convert sinners.

So what will be the case for the Anglican Communion? Will they splinter into a self-extinguishing spiral? Archbishop Fearon had some poignant words to share last Thursday evening. The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas has become significantly less conservative (for lack of a better term) because three large parishes have pulled out of it. This makes it far more difficult for those orthodox churches remaining.

In the address, Archbishop Fearon said that Americans do not like to be told what to do and that they have a propensity for trying to find simplistic solutions to any problem regardless of how complicated it is. “When America sneezes,” he said, “the rest of the world catches a cold.” The answer for the rest of the world is not “Advil.” The fight is going to be long for the Anglican Communion. The question is whether or not the orthodox elements, estimated to compose 70% or more of the Communion will stick together and persevere in prayer. I commend to you this informal address by Archbishop Josiah (linked below) and to pray for the Anglican Communion in this dark hour.

If the audio file cannot be listened to successfully using the player above, please visit the audio page containing this address and others at the Church of the Incarnation website. There is also an interview with Archbishop Josiah at the Anglican Planet that you may informative.