FT. WORTH: The Congress and Restoring the Anglican Mind.
As Middleton explains, this article was read to the Catholic Congress of Anglicans, which is now in session, in lieu of him being there personally to deliver it. Defenders of women's ordination in the Realignment are not going to like it. Excerpts:
The Church of England's General Synod celebrations after the vote for women bishops indicated that the members had not realised how the vote signalled the death of the Church of England, becoming what Richard Hooker would describe as a sect of politically correct ideology. Fundamental in this Anglican Communion Crisis is the emergence of two incompatible and competing religions within the Church, that are not mere differences of "emphasis" but profound differences about the content of Christian belief and the character of Christian life. They express themselves in the authority of experience, over against the authority of Divine revelation that is the basis of Christian orthodoxy.
For the orthodox Christian "Truth" (with a capital "T") has been definitively revealed in Holy Scripture, and authoritatively interpreted in the Christian Tradition. The Christian's response is in terms of belief, understanding, and obedience. "Relevance" then becomes a matter of seeking to apply established doctrinal and moral standards to the situation in which he finds himself. He sees his church as divinely commissioned in faith and order to maintain the faith "once for all delivered to the saints", with the responsibility of maintaining those standards essentially unchanged from one age to another. The issue of women in the Apostolic Ministry is fundamentally a matter of order and not of human rights, which is not surprising, when we speak about the Apostolic Ministry as Holy Orders. As the Preface to our Anglican Ordinal puts it:
It is evident unto all men diligently reading Holy Scripture and ancient Authors that from the Apostles' time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ's Church: Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. {Book of Common Prayer (Canada, 1959), p. 637.
Their divine source and authority is God to whom they belong and not men which explains why these ancient Orders are called holy, because they were given by God and because they were not devised by humans. Our Prayer-book Collect for Ember days which is a prayer for Ordinands acknowledges this in praying to God, who of His "divine providence hast appointed divers Orders" in His Church.' . . .
The process that has promoted women in the apostolic ministry is a management exercise determined by politically correct ideology and not theological principle and it reduces Holy Order to a functionalism, alters God's plan for Holy Order and ignores our paramount duty to the universal Church. In England the appointment of a Reconciler is part of the management method which according to the ACAS style of settling Trade Union disputes, is to reconcile differing views. But this issue is not about human relations. It is about deeply held theological convictions that are diametrically opposed to the politically correct ideology. There can be no reconciliation.
The vote signifies that the Church of England and where this has happened in elsewhere in other provinces of the Anglican Communion, Anglicanism is not being true to her Anglican mind. She has rejected the Judaeo-Christian Tradition, the historic episcopate, and in other matters of fundamental doctrine and morals this can happen again. She has ignored her own Formularies expressed in Canon A5 of the English Church, the BCP and the Ordinal where Apostolic Order is therein enshrined. She has ignored her membership of the universal Church and has been in a process of creeping schism from it for years. The ecumenical achievements of the past century, including ARCIC, have been destroyed for there has been a total disregard for Christian unity and an unwillingness to take seriously the warnings of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. So what is the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury's words to his ecumenical partners stressing the fact that we need each other and the importance of unity, after an action that has placed an insuperable obstacle in the way of full Communion. Actions speak louder than words.
Professor Owen Chadwick wrote of Anglican divines in the seventeenth century (Preface, From Unifomity to Unity 1662-1962, edit, Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick [SPCK, London 1962], pp. 13ff), '... if High Churchmen of that age like Bramhall or Thorndike had been asked what led them not to compromise, they would have replied in terms like the following:
Our paramount duty is to the Catholic Church; our sub¬ordinate and derivative duty is to the Church of England as the representative of the Catholic Church in this country. The Catholic Church is known by its faithfulness to the primi¬tive model. The Church of England has no choice but to follow that model, must seek to apply the principle rigorously and exactly.
"I am satisfied", wrote Thorndike in 1660," that the differences, upon which we are divided, cannot be justly settled upon any terms, which any part of the Whole Church shall have just cause to refuse, as inconsistent with the unity of the Whole Church ("The Due Way of composing Differences on Foot," Works, vol. v. p. 29)
Chadwick went on to say that any act which divides the Church of England from the universal Church of the centuries is to be eschewed, even if that act offers temporary or local advantage; and the test of universality, in this sad, divided state of Christendom, may be found in appeal to the ancient and undivided Church of the first centuries. . . .
It has always been the Anglican claim that in faith and order the Anglican Communion is continuous in identity with the Primitive Church. It is no new Church. Today's contest is between modern liberal ecclesiology and the Anglican mind in a time when the majority of people in the Church and the nation have been brainwashed by the secular mind, which they use to displace the claims of the Anglican mind. It is the presuppositions of this secular mind and its politically correct ideology that is determining the Faith and Order of the Anglican Communion that must be displaced. This is not a matter of politics but a matter of faith and theology. Like the divines of the seventeenth century the way forward is by pursuing the Anglican way back to prescriptive sources by upholding Canon A5 which states that the doctrine of the Anglicanism is grounded in the Holy Scripture and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal.