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Renewing An Interest
Your passing reference to heresy caught my eye. What does it mean to be a heretical Christian in the Church of England today? Heresy requires orthodoxy, a set of doctrinal beliefs, which in turn requires an authority to define those beliefs. Where does that authority lie in the Church of England? It’s a harder question to answer than it would be for the Church of Rome, which does at least have a worked-out position. In practice, authority – and the responsibility for upholding “orthodoxy” – in the Church of England tends (unfairly) to be identified with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Blessed Justin, who is still discovering late in life that it’s not possible to be all things to all men. So we have today’s live issue, whether the Church of England should allow same-sex couples to get married in church. Justin has brokered a compromise, which allows the participants to be individually blessed in a church setting while denying them the same matrimonial right as a man and a woman. For this he is denounced as a heretic by the Global South, which appeals to an orthodoxy whose authority lies beyond the governing structures of the Church of England – in effect to a widely-held interpretation of scripture. What does the future hold? I predict, first, that the Anglican Communion will fracture into its conservative and modernist halves, and second, that the modernists will enact a right of same-sex marriage in England. The question then arises, should that position be binding on its members? Theoretically yes, in that the only people remaining in the Church of England will be those who can at least tolerate a progressive future. Which is why I am concerned to learn of conversations about a compromise future in which a conscience clause will permit those objecting to same-sex marriage to be overseen by bishops who share that view. This will be women’s ordination all over again, this time with a licence to continue to discriminate against practices officially deemed lawful.
ReplyDeleteI would prefer to be very sparing with accusations of heresy, and confine it to denying what's in the generally accepted Catholic Creeds. The Anglican Church's position has always been in the past that 'it has no doctrine of its own', which is clearly not true as far as (you mention) its approach to orders and now human sexuality, as well as some other matters. I would want to argue that these are not 'doctrines' in the way that the CofE has always intended the term. For instance, there has always been a range of opinions within the Church in the area of soteriology, but nobody departs too far from the credal statements about how Christ saves, which are minimal enough anyway and leave a lot of wriggle room.
ReplyDeleteYou're probably right about the future for the Anglican Communion. The Global South's appeal to, as you say, interpretations of Scripture held beyond the Church of England is parallel to trad Anglo-Catholics basing their positions on a notion of 'the Catholic Church' which also lies elsewhere than those provinces in communion with the See of Canterbury. And I can't imagine any position the CofE reaches on same-sex marriage will be enforced universally - the bishops gave up enforcing anything other than safeguarding training a long time ago.