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It's amazing how many notes of encouragement, advice and condolence I received after posting my cookie disaster story...imagine if something really awful had happened. Of course, to bite into one of those cookies is pretty awful. This week I'll be attending another conference, this one from the liberal and catholic end of the Anglican spectrum (the previous having been conservative evangelical). That's one of the funny things about Anglicanism...there's no overall rule that dictates how a parish ought to worship, so long as its done from the Book of Common Prayer. That book is different from national church to national church and in some places, such as Canada, a supplemental book has pretty much replaced the actual BCP. Still, so long as a parish worships using an approved prayer book, Anglicans are free to shape their worship how they will. You'd be amazed what variety can be achieved using the same words...just attend three different productions of any one of Shakespeare's plays and you'll see what I mean. Or, better still, attend church at three different Anglican or Episcopal parishes. This is why, at the last conference, people were going up to the stage for faith healings, falling over and talking in tongues - something neither Amy nor I recognize as Anglican - while at this next conference I will be participating in the Eucharist as thurifer, swinging incense, and the worship will be very stately. It's part of the culture of Anglicanism that, so long as you show up and pray from the same book, you're Anglican and we're not going to pry into how you worship or what you believe. Let me clarify that. There are standards of belief in Anglicanism. They're known as the Nicene and Apostle's (and to a lesser extent, Athanasian) Creeds, and they are spoken by the congregation during worship. The creeds outline major Christian dogma (which comes from the Greek word for "belief" and is not an inherently bad thing) and are sufficient statements of the Christian faith. The Creeds have been with the church for centuries, and anyone claiming to be Christian ought to have no complaint with anything found therein. These are bolstered by some of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. (I say some because a few of them deal exclusively with power relations within the Church of England, and are moot in a country such as the U.S., which specifically tossed off the monarchy.) The Articles of Religion address certain items of doctrine...for example, Article VI says that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation." Nowhere in the Articles, and certainly not in the Creeds, does it say how to believe Scripture. We're never told that Genesis should be taken as a literal description of events, or that we shouldn't interact with the text and find its meaning for our own lives. This is part of what Queen Elizabeth meant when she said, "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls." How you read Scripture is your business, and it is not Scriptural agreement that binds the Anglican churches together. Yet this is precisely what some members of the Anglican Communion, those angry over same-sex marriage and the ordination of homosexual clergy, want to enforce. They want to impose their reading of Scripture on the entire church. At that last conference it was actually said that agreement on Biblical interpretation ought to be the sole grounds for communion. Whether or not you agree with the Anglican "hands off" approach, you must see that demanding such agreement is entirely contradictory to Anglican tradition. It steers toward the "confessional" church model which is completely at odds with the Via Media, the middle way which allows Anglicanism to be both catholic and reformed. By demanding adherence to a certain interpretation of Scripture, the die is cast for the church to become the extended shadow of one man's (and believe me, it'd be a man) idea of how to be Christian. And to think, I started this entry hoping to keep things short and to the point. |
