Models of Communion: Performing Our Christian Identity
Dear friends,
I wanted to let you know about an essay I wrote that I hope you will take time to read. It is published by the Anglican Communion Institute right here.
There is a preface that talks about a vocational change for me - about me seeking ordination within the Episcopal Church. That part was edited by Ephraim Radner, and he knows something about my future that I don't know. He may have found a bishop within TEC willing to take a risk on a conservative, but I don't know that yet. The fact is that I withdrew from candidacy for ordination in the ACN in protest of their public statements disavowing Canterbury and embracing global schism. The preface explains this briefly, and the essay develops the theological case that led me to that decision. And many of my friends have urged me to be ordained instead within TEC, but there are many ways to skin a cat, and I feel quite confident that the Lord will give me both the skinning knife and the cat he wants me to skin in due time.
One question I have of you. It occurs to me that I arrived at Duke in 2005 a liberal Protestant who thought Catholic was a dirty word, and the free church mentality was simply the Gospel truth that Saint Tom (Jefferson) had achieved for us. Now I find myself a frickin' catholic! Did this happen to any of you? And if so, how did this happen? Is it in the water?
This essay will require at least two tylenol and 20-30 minutes to read. All of you will recognize that nothing in it is original, but is standard Duke-ese. But I think you may find it provocative, particularly in light of Tom's question about the nature of being a Christian.
I wish you all God's richest blessings, and I can't wait to be reunited in just a few weeks.
Craig
I wanted to let you know about an essay I wrote that I hope you will take time to read. It is published by the Anglican Communion Institute right here.
There is a preface that talks about a vocational change for me - about me seeking ordination within the Episcopal Church. That part was edited by Ephraim Radner, and he knows something about my future that I don't know. He may have found a bishop within TEC willing to take a risk on a conservative, but I don't know that yet. The fact is that I withdrew from candidacy for ordination in the ACN in protest of their public statements disavowing Canterbury and embracing global schism. The preface explains this briefly, and the essay develops the theological case that led me to that decision. And many of my friends have urged me to be ordained instead within TEC, but there are many ways to skin a cat, and I feel quite confident that the Lord will give me both the skinning knife and the cat he wants me to skin in due time.
One question I have of you. It occurs to me that I arrived at Duke in 2005 a liberal Protestant who thought Catholic was a dirty word, and the free church mentality was simply the Gospel truth that Saint Tom (Jefferson) had achieved for us. Now I find myself a frickin' catholic! Did this happen to any of you? And if so, how did this happen? Is it in the water?
This essay will require at least two tylenol and 20-30 minutes to read. All of you will recognize that nothing in it is original, but is standard Duke-ese. But I think you may find it provocative, particularly in light of Tom's question about the nature of being a Christian.
I wish you all God's richest blessings, and I can't wait to be reunited in just a few weeks.
Craig
Labels: Anglicanism, Craig, Emmaus, J. Kameron Carter, Missiology, Prodigal Sons
posted by Unknown at 3:38 PM
15 Comments:
Craig,
Did you not arrive at Duke as a Protestant liberal Methodist? What makes your decision to abandon the ACN not lead you back to your Methodist roots where you began?
Tom
P.S. If your answer is longer than the length of my screen, I probably won't read the whole thing. :)
Tom I am still a Wesleyan. I did not leave Anglicanism. I withdrew my candidacy for holy orders thru an organization that is suddenly advocating a break with Canterbury and global schism within Anglicanism (I did not go with CANA or AMiA because they already advocated that, in my view). So that means I must find a way to be ordained that I believe allows me to maintain my integrity based on all this postliberal theology that was in the koolaid we've been drinking. That means being a part of a diocese that treasures the global Communion and our Anglican heritage OR it means following Wesley by working outside of orders while staying committed to the global Communion. I am confident the Lord will provide.
Craig,
I wasn't suggesting that you left Anglicanism. I was suggeting that you left the UMC. What about your decision to stay with the Anglican world-wide communion does not also entail you reflecting on whether it was right to leave the UMC in the first place? Would it not be better to stay in the church you have been in and work toward some kind of union with other chruches (small "C")?
As for our conversation today on brevity...I'd suggest that length and depth can take place over an entire series of comments in response to one blog. But if you must, write a a long comment responding to this one. :)
P.S. It was great to see you today.
A second thought to my previous comment: yes, I have become "catholic" and it means that I'm sticking with the UMC (until they kick me out) and working toward unity.
So Craig, i enjoyed your essay and my only comment on that is what do you think is particularly Anglican about what you have written, other than its location (web address) and the bishop you cite extensively?
This is curiosity more than criticism.
Not a damn thing.
Recently an African Archbishop said something like this. "The way to the Kingdom of God does not go through Canterbury; the way to the Kingdom of God is by the cross of Jesus Christ."
An Anglican nobody in Durham recently said this. "As the Church of Rome hath erred, so the Church of the decadent West hath erred."
Please, someone tell Emmanuel Kolini, to his face, that he is a schismatic. As for me and my house...
Are you confident that the author's purpose was to say the ++Kolini is a schismatic? Or is that eisogesis?
I hope that's not what you meant.
I deeply admire ++ Kolini.
My focus was clearly on those advocating GLOBAL schism as the way to be free of those they have certified to be "heretics," and "apostates."
Specifically, let's break with Canterbury and form a new communion consisting of 6-8 of the 38 provinces, splitting Africa right down the middle, and walking away from 1400 years of continuity centered on that little house St. Augustine built.
I only hear Americans seriously proposing this.
There isn't 1400 years of continuity, there was a break. The see of Augustine changed because it was no longer invited to Church Council's by the Bishop of Rome. If there is further schism within your Church, it might actually be more continuous with the last 500 years than not.
Well, that's not the way they narrate our story at the Canterbury Cathedral. I think I will use my private judgment to ignore that minor detail you just raised. Man, I walked the ruins of the abbey. I climbed on top of the Roman fort. Can you keep quiet with your version, which betrays your own dubious ideological commitments?
Actually, there were bishops in Brittania by (at the latest) the early 4th c., they sent represtatives to a council in 314 (Arles?). And actually, the papists kept trying to get Elizabeth to send her bishops to Trent before it wrapped up, but she wouldn't bite. Now, of course there was a break with Rome and with the Roman Church, and if the Romans are left to define the Church then we've got problems. (What an understatement--need I really note that Anglicans have got problems?) But the problem with papist Rome is the East, and their claims look more and more tenuous the more you think about how little the Partriarch of Constantinople thinks that the Pope's jurisdiction is universal, and the more you realize just how absurd it was when Boniface VIII said that submission to the bishop of Rome is necessary for salvation. The (visible) Catholic church was broken in half 1000 years ago, and ever since beggars Eastern, Western, Roman, Protestant have been receiving whatever elements of catholicity they can get their puny little hands on. "And he gives more grace" (James 4). This, I think, is true, whether or not most have been willing to admit it.
Phil, you love to bring up the East/West divide but we are westerners by every imagination. When Gregory VII did the dirty deed and the fourth crusade finished it the lines were drawn geographically but also continuously. There was not an abrupt split, there is no one date where we can say east and west stopped being one. This history is dramatically different from the one of Protestants (the east doesn't think Rome even needs to be protested against) and the with England, protestants who mainly moved from the authority of Rome to the authority of the Crown. The magisterium became Caesar.
Well done my friend, to be sure the great schism is older, deeper, and originated more gradually than I suggested: this only proves the point, that we've been less than catholic beggars for a good long time, longer even than 1054. And I'd like to say for the record that my pining for the East is over, because as Wilson says, we're westerners. And I'm glad I am, because the East is just plain wrong about grace, they just aren't sufficiently catholic, they can't be without you know who (whose Pope, so his prefatory epistle to De Trin, was the bishop of Carthage). Now I get sensitive about caesaro-papism, generally speaking, but after reading a little book Craig lent me this summer, I have two brief remarks. First, Wycliffe and Lollardy had sufficiently softened the ground that when the earliest English Lutherans (1520s) started singing their song--this is when HVIII was given his title 'Defender of the Faith'--they were surprisingly well received; surprising, that is, if you're only story about the English Reformation is the story of Henry's love life. Second, I have to confess that I'm a little enchanted by some of the arguments for caesaro-papism (yes, I admit it!), and, in that vein, I must also confess that my least likely favorite reformer is Thomas Cromwell, the great benefactor of the English Bible.
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