The Dreaded Declaration of Principles

I always struggled with the Reformed Episcopal Church’s founding document called the “Declaration of Principles”. This document was put forth by the founders of the REC as a document that would protect the church from Anglo-catholic errors and it was not to be changed. However, all the things that this document denied, we taught and practiced. I never even mentioned these founding “Declaration of Principles” to Holy Cross parish in Alpine because I knew they were contrary to what we believed as Biblical and catholic truth. I always felt pulled between the true Apostolic faith and what the REC had as a founding document. This was another instance where the beliefs of the parish were not rooted in the church but instead were dependant on the priest. This is an awful position for a parish and a priest to be in. So I began to think, Holy Cross could stay in the REC and continue to be contrary to the REC’s foundational beliefs or join the Orthodox church where we would share a common foundation.

The Plurality of Anglican Theology

One theologian that explains the theological history of Anglican theology really well is Aidan Nichols who has written,

“The theology of the English Reformers was built on both Lutheran and
Calvinist foundations, yet it was never systematically either Lutheran or
Calvinist. Partly from conviction but mostly from political necessity their
theology was poured into an institutional mould which retained large elements of
a Catholic structure. As a result, when, in the reign of Elizabeth, a reflective
Anglican consciousness emerges, it sees itself not as a straightforward
continuation of the Continental Reformation, but as a ‘via media.’ The history
of Anglican pluralism derives from the intrinsic difficulty of defining such a
via media, and from the resultant need to leave wide open a wide latitude in the
construing of doctrine. Thus the via media idea, intended as a unifiying force
for Anglicanism, tended to be disintegrating in practice. It could be used in a
classically Protestant direction or in a Catholic direction; or yet again in a
Latitudinarian direction—on the grounds that where so much is unclear, little
should be insisted on. Again, Anglicans may despair of via media and take refuge
either in Anglo-Catholicism [giving it a much larger keel of Tradition for a
heaving ship- PMB] or in the idea of Western [Eastern?] Orthodoxy, in each case
accepting that the supreme norm for Anglican faith and practice should be
provided from outside Anglicanism—either from Rome or Constantinople. Finally,
Anglicans may choose to regard the incoherences (yet riches) of their own Church
as simply a microcosm of those of Christianity world-wide. In this case they
will argue that Anglicanism has no distinctive contribution to make to the
coming Great Church [an Anglican ecumenical and eschatological idea of the
Church—PMB]: its destiny is to disappear, its triumph will be its dissolution.”-
From The Panther and the Hind by Aidan Nichols p. xix-xx.

Considering Western Rite Orthodoxy

Our desire at Holy Cross Anglican Church (REC) was to build a church that would be around until the second coming of Jesus Christ. We were convinced theologically that ancient, Biblical Christianity was sacramental at her core and we wanted to pass on to our children and the town of Alpine, TX a sacramental worldview.

As I began to think about the future of Holy Cross and what exactly I was doing there, it occurred to me that this sacramental worldview could be shattered by the next priest that came to Holy Cross after me since Anglicanism is not sacramental at her core. The Anglican church allows room for both sacramental and non-sacramental theologies to exist side by side within the same church. For example, there are priests or ministers that understand Holy Communion to be a mere symbol, like J.C. Ryle, and others who understand it to be the very body and blood of Christ like Edward Pusey. Ryle and Pusey hold two theologies that are totally the opposite of each other and yet they are both Anglican theologians.

I began to see that within the Anglican world there was no way to guarantee a continuation of a sacramental worldview because of the plurality of theologies within Anglicanism which has always been part of the character of Anglican theology from the beginning. About this time I remembered hearing about the Orthodox Church allowing the use of the Western Rite. Western-rite Orthodox Churches use the liturgy of St. Tikhon which is basically the Anglican liturgy (BCP) without the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed and a stronger wording that expresses the change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Since Orthodoxy is sacramental at her core and the Antiochian Orthodox church allows for the use of the same Anglican liturgy that we used every Sunday with good improvements, then I started thinking that this might be a more stable place for us to build a church that extends into the future for our children and their children.

I also noticed that in our present Anglican situation that the sacramental worldview depended on the priest being sacramental and not the church. In other words, the foundation of each parish in Anglicanism seemed to be the priest and not the church. In Orthodoxy you have a sacramental worldview because the church at her core is sacramental. So I approached two leaders on our church council (Vestry) about looking into the possibilities of Holy Cross moving to the more consistent sacramental place of Orthodox Christianity. There are more reasons that I had for considering Orthodoxy that I will share in later posts.

Three Things to Remember

As we cross the sea of the world, repentance should be our ship, reverential awe its pilot, and love its harbour. —St Isaac of Syria

Orthodox Nuns Live for God

SATUS PASS — On a pine-covered patch off U.S. Highway 97, the Pacific Northwest meets the Byzantine Empire.
Evergreens shelter a collection of structures that look more like typical Northwest cabins than a Greek Orthodox monastery.
In the wee hours, the woods are dark. So still, so quiet, so peaceful. Elsewhere, bars are closing, truckers are making the long haul, children have been asleep for hours.
At the roadside monastery at the edge of a forest, Greek Orthodox sisters are praying for them all.
From this remote sylvan setting 10 miles north of Goldendale, more than a dozen nuns pray for the world. Their prayers continue until the stars disappear from the sky, the sun rises and shines, and darkness sets in again. Click on title to read more about these Greek Orthodox nuns.

Against the Protestant Gnostics

Gnosticism was an early heresy that challenged Christianity by believing the spiritual to be good and the material world to be evil. The Gnostics believed that salvation involves an escape from the body and the material world to become a purely spiritual being. The way to accomplish this kind of salvation is through higher and higher degrees of knowledge (the Greek word for knowledge is gnosis). A good book on this subject is Against The Protestant Gnostics by Philip Lee. This book articulated for me the Gnostic tendency in some contemporary forms of Protestant Christianity. Many Protestant churches have come to treat the creation as something evil while quoting Genesis 1 which calls the creation good. Some Protestant groups teach that alcohol is evil so that anyone drinking a beer is living in sin. This is treating a created good thing, beer, as evil. Another way some Protestants have some Gnostic tendencies is the way that some talk about life after death. I have talked to many modern, conservative Protestants who believe that they will live in heaven for all eternity as a pure spirit but of course this is in direct contradiction to the Christian teaching of the resurrection of a physical body at the Lord’s second coming. Many Protestant funerals do not even mention the resurrection of the body in their funeral services.

A clear place that reveals the Gnostic tendency of Protestant Christianity is in the Protestant view of Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper. The Protestant view usually denies that Jesus Christ is present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. One view is that Holy Communion is merely a remembering of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. According to this view, knowledge of Jesus is what is important and so what the believer receives in the Holy Communion is simply a remembering knowledge (gnosis) of Jesus. One wonders why we need bread and wine to remember Jesus… could not someone just read their Bible? Another Protestant view is that the believer partakes of the body of Jesus Christ but only in a spiritual manner. This view denies that the bread and the wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. These views in practice assert the spiritual over the material just like the early Gnostics. The Christian view is that the material elements of bread and wine are offered to God in Holy Communion and God changes the bread and wine into the very body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. This is indeed a mystery of God but the point is that we partake of God through matter that God has called tov meod (very good).

As an Anglican I thought that I was avoiding gnostic tendencies until one day I started thinking of Gnosticism in terms of the Anglican view of the church. I later discovered that every Protestant Church including Anglicanism has to define the one body of Christ, the Church, in a Gnostic way. The Protestant has to define the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” as is confessed in the Nicene Creed in a spiritual sense because she does not share any visible unity with the other churches. However, in order to interpret the Nicene Creed in its ancient context, the Church has to be visibly one as Christ is visibly one and united because the Church is the body of Christ. Christ was physically and visibly one, so to define the church as a spiritual unity is in a practical way denying the incarnation of the Word of God and to hold a view that is really Gnostic. There are only two churches that are visibly united and claim to be the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”. They are the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. So there are only two options for those who want to avoid a Gnostic understanding of the church (ecclesiology) and maintain an incarnational view of Christ and His Church. It was when I discovered this that I really started to be concerned about my Anglican ecclesiology because I had been trying hard to avoid Gnosticism. This really leads to an interesting study in seeing how a church’s ecclesiology does or does not fit orthodox Christology which is something I began to struggle with.

Orthodox Christian Cassettes

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A Sacramental Worldview

Man was created by God to be a worshiping being, a priest, who offers the creation to the Holy Trinity as a means of love and communion. I discovered this view from Fr. Alexander Schmemann who says in his book For the Life of the World, “man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life”. The fall, according to Fr. Alexander, consisted of Adam and Eve ceasing to offer the creation to God and offering it instead to themselves and thus cutting themselves off from communion with God. In this context the Word becomes flesh and takes the cosmos into Himself and offers it perfectly on the cross to God the Father not as a satisfaction for God’s wrath but as a restoration of man to love and communion with God. This restoration is primarily experienced in Holy Communion when the Church offers the creation, bread and wine, with thanksgiving to God and God transforms what is offered into the body and blood of God the Son. By partaking of the body and blood of Jesus Christ we are united in love to God through matter. This view of reality is called a sacramental worldview. This sacramental view of reality is what I tried to get across to my parishioners at Holy Cross in Alpine through my introductory course to Christianity titled Tov Meod (Very Good).

As this view became more and more a part of my Christian worldview, I became aware of a sad fact that while there were some Anglicans who shared my sacramental worldview, there were far more Anglicans who did not. While Anglicanism allows for a sacramental worldview, it is not at the heart of Anglicanism, since a theologian can hold to a non-sacramental view of the world and still be Anglican. As I continued to read Orthodox theology, it became clear that a sacramental worldview is at the core or heart of the Orthodox Church. I began to ask myself, should I remain in communion with a church that does not hold the sacramental worldview as an essential part of Christianity?

Fr. Stephen Freeman’s Blog

I highly recommend Orthodox (OCA) priest Fr. Stephen Freeman’s new blog “Glory to God for all Things” for your spiritual nourishment and encouragement. Click title above to read it.

In Appreciation of High Church Anglicanism

I spent ten years in the Anglican tradition and I thank the triune God for the time I spent in her midst. Looking back, I see that God used my time in Anglicanism as a time of preparation for the Orthodox Church and I do not regret a single moment that I spent in the Anglican Church. God brings individuals along many different paths to Orthodoxy and Anglicanism was a necessary part of my journey. There are some very good things in the Anglican Tradition. The one that sticks out in my mind is Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (BCP). The BCP is one of the most beautiful compositions ever written in the English language. One can not help but have a deeper appreciation for beauty and reverence when worshiping the triune God using the BCP. The Anglo-Catholic and High Church Anglican traditions have a great appreciation for the tradition of the Church and the holy fathers that are part of Apostolic tradition. The importance of the church and sacraments are taken seriously and taught in many parts of Anglicanism. It is through the Anglo-Catholic and High Church traditions that I learned the importance of trying to maintain the faith of the church fathers and Holy Scripture and for this I am grateful. (My favorite summary of the Anglican High Church tradition is Vernon Staley’s The Catholic Religion.) What this High Church Anglican tradition gave me was a sacramental worldview which really becomes the very point that drives me to the Orthodox Church. When I left the Anglican Church, I brought the best of the Anglican tradition with me. Now within the Orthodox Way, my sacramental worldview is whole or complete.