For those non-Anglicans attracted to traditional Anglicanism who may be looking in here and who have followed the recent dumpster fire about Fr. Hart, Mrs. Wagner and me, and who therefore find themselves ready to abandon their investigation, please take heart and reconsider.
Such brouhahas happened in the earliest church and in the centuries that followed. Consider Jesus' angry words against the Scribes and Pharisees. Consider St. Paul's angry words against the heretical Judaizers. Consider the account of St. Nicholas of Myra slapping the heretic Arius. That account is likely legend, but it reveals the mind of the Church about it. Consider the irascible St. Jerome, one of the Church's first biblical scholars. He minced NO words, which is one reason he is one of my favorites.
Consider the Old Testament's list of saints. Sinners and fighters, though saints in their deepest heart, and yearning for the peaceable kingdom of God. Here is C.S. Lewis on Christian chivalry, from the book Present Concerns (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986):
The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things - from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as a distinct ideal from other ideals - if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il fant which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture - we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Mallory's Morte Darthur. "Thou wert the meekest man, says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. "Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest."
The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, "he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten."
What, you may ask, is the relevance of this ideal to the modern world. It is terribly relevant. It may or may not be practicable - the Middle Ages notoriously failed to obey it - but it is certainly practical; practical as the fact that men in a desert must find water or die. . . . (Brute heroism without mercy and gentleness) is heroism by nature - heroism outside of the chivalrous tradition.
The medieval knight brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate toward one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. . . .
If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections - those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be "meek in hall", and those who are "meek in hall" but useless in battle - for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. . . . The man who combines both characters - the knight - is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.
In the world today there is a "liberal" or "enlightened" tradition which regards the combative side of man's nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the "false glamour" of war. And there is also a neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a "modern invocation". . . .
(However), there is still life in the tradition which the Middle Ages inaugurated. But the maintenance of that life depends, in part, on knowing that the knightly character is art not nature - something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen. And this knowledge is specially necessary as we grow more democratic. In previous centuries the vestiges of chivalry were kept alive by a specialized class, from whom they spread to other classes partly by imitation and partly by coercion. Now, it seems, the people must either be chivalrous on its own resources, or else choose between the two remaining alternatives of brutality and softness. . . . The ideal embodied in Launcelot is "escapism" is a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable. . . .
"Those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be 'meek in hall, and those who are 'meek in hall' but useless in battle." If I may be so bold, speaking as a man who was never a soldier but who has long been a Christian controversialist, those who know me well can tell you that in my online debates I deal in blood and iron but am meek in hall, and I am always ready to reconcile, because that what God bids us all to do. And though the Fathers, the Saints and Doctors of the Church often got caught up in (necessary) acrimonius debates, at night I believe they likely prayed for their adversaries, and for reconcilation and peace.
So, dear non-Anglican inquirer, do not despair in your investigation of Continuing Anglicanism when you see this kind of thing. What is happening among us happened in the New Testament Church. There were necessary battles on the one hand, but on the other there was this impetus, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, to transcend all that ugliness and to:
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace."
As a priest of the Orthodox Anglican Church, I can assure you that you will find this quest for Jesus here with us. Our motto is, "Proclaiming Christ in Word & Sacrament". That, at the end of the day, is what we're all about. Fr. Thomas Crowder, who recently joined us, thus testified in so many words.
And with that, I hope to be done with this whole matter.