Welby responds to the primates of Nigeria, Uganda, and Rwanda regarding Lambeth conference

But that's not true. The trinitarians didn't withdraw themselves. They stood in the same church buildings and professed their Trinitarian doctrine, unconcerned by potential persecution by the majority. They didn't form their own separate church council, they attended the unified council with all the Arians. The Church remained unified when discussing the very divinity of Christ.

It was only when the Trinitarians won, twice, that the Church went into schism. And it wasn't because the Trinitarians left - it was the Arians who stormed off to make their own club (and how did that go for them?).

If Saint Nicholas could stomach attending Nicaea with Arius himself what's the argument for a supposedly catholic bishop refusing to sit with Welby in Lambeth? Is saying a woman can teach a worse offence than saying Christ is not King?

 

You may be right, and I may have the wrong idea about 'how it all went down' back then; I've never read anything that dealt specifically with this. Do you have any references that support your understanding of this history? (I'd prefer online, free and brief versus expensive, thick tomes, but I welcome your recommendations.)

 

This wasn’t directed to me, but if I may chime in, the most thorough history I know of (by far) is Bishop R.P.C. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God. It’s excellent.
https://smile.amazon.com/Search-Chr...efix=hanson+search+doctrine+god,aps,83&sr=8-1

 

It is a touch more complicated than that. Their were expulsions, riots, the firing of duly elected Bishops, and sections of the church that stood firm (such as the Latin West). There was also the argument over the terms of the creed and what they meant after the Nice an Creed was formulated. Arianism stood form with the Germanic people and when they conquered you did see to hierarchies and the people did not worship together.

 

Are you familiar with the history of the 4th century Church? I am honestly not trying to sound condescending. Have you ever read the ancient church historians? The amount of persecution and suffering on account of the Trinitarian controversy was comparable to the persecutions of all Christians put together by the pagan Diocletian. People were beaten, killed, executed. St. Athanasius himself was excommunicated 5 times by the heretical bishops. He was just a lowly deacon.

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with this famous quote:

"What saddens you [my bretheren] is that they have seized the churches from you, and kicked you out. It is a fact that they have the buildings – but you have the apostolic faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true faith. You stand outside the places of worship, but the faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the faith? The true faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in this struggle-the one who keeps the buildings or the one who keeps the faith?

“True, the buildings are good when the apostolic faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way …You are the ones who are happy: you who remain within the church by your faith... They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis...

“The more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray.

“Even if Catholics are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ.”

-Saint Athanasius​

And since the Trinitarian party was miniscule, (~75-85% of all bishops were Arian), the case was a foregone conclusion. The Arian Council of Ariminum concluded with a peaceable, peaceful, quiet, and amicable rejection of the trinity.

As Saint Jerome wrote after the conclusion of that Council: "The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian."

This was it, the defeat, the end of trinitarianism; were it not for providential events, which later snuck victory out of the jaws of defeat.

 

With respect, your own retelling seems rather simplistic if not outright hagiographic. I would hope you realize that there’s a lot more involved in producing an accurate historical account than merely citing rhetorical statements from a couple of biased participants.

The substance of what @ZachT said was correct, as I can confirm from years of my own study of the 4th century controversies, in both the primary and secondary sources. It’s also important for having a proper understanding of the evolution of J.H. Newman’s thought (a subject whose relevance needs no defense).

The original point stands: the proper catholic response to perceived error in the Church is not to break away and start a rival one from scratch. That is not what the Fathers in the 4th century did, nor did they insist on relying on statements of the earlier Fathers. What they were facing was a new situation that required a series of very non-traditional solutions, in the defense of a minority position at the time. But they pursued those solutions within the existing ecclesiastical establishment.

 

Am I to understand that you are of the opinion that the ACC ordains homosexuals? I think not, if that is what you think. Archbishop/Metropolitan Haverland is very specific in his writings of not supporting such actions.

 

He meant Anglican Church of Canada. They use the ACC abbreviation as well.

 

One of the biggest issues for me with the Episcopal Church and this touches strongly upon their jurisdiction is that they have women as bishops. Apostolic succession follows the bishops. If you have woman bishops well you don't have a bishop. They don't have jurisdiction, they can't ordain, and it calls into to question their sacraments. That is something that the early church never had to deal with although their situation and our situation is different if similar and it changed over time. The response in the 4th century was not the same response as the 7th century when different churches and bishops were set up while under Arian occupationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_Baptistery

I know it is wikipedia but it is the best I can do pre caffeine to show my point

 

Correct. I should have made that clear.

 

This is a more sophisticated version of the "they aren't really a Church, therefore there's no violation of jurisdiction" argument. With respect, this is not Anglicanism; this is crypto-Catholicism, and I'll explain why presently.

I do not want to rehash arguments over whether women can be pastors. I think we've each made our respective positions on that clear, and neither of us is going to change the other's mind at this point. So let's instead look at the matter in terms of the process:

1. Church x begins ordaining women;
2. Laity (and perhaps some clergy as well) object to women exercising the office of ministry, leading to one of two outcomes:
   1. Aforementioned laity/clergy bring their grievances to the national Church, which decides against them.
      1. This group of laity dissents, breaks fellowship, and forms their own (rival) ecclesiastical organization.
   2. Aforementioned laity/clergy break fellowship, and form their own (rival) ecclesiastical organization, in advance of any Church-wide decision on the matter.

Replace "ordaining women" with "teaching the equal deity of Christ" in the above scenario, and then try to tell me that the dissenters acted like catholics. This is not the way ecclesiastical truth is arrived at. Securus judicat orbis terrarum ("The judgment of the whole world is secure" - Augustine). The Church of England, and its daughter church in the U.S., the Episcopal Church, were from their origin either true and genuine particular Churches within the Church Catholic, or they were and are not. They either possess jurisdiction and a right to be obeyed within their respective spheres, or they do not. To assert that a particular judgment on a specific matter (e.g., women pastors), renders their jurisdiction null and void is to assume either that another jurisdiction claims greater allegiance, or that the Episcopal Church never had legitimate jurisdiction to begin with. Only one organization in the world claims the former kind of jurisdiction. Precisely because there is no defined dogma on the subject from the age of the "undivided" Church, Anglican opponents of women pastors are forced to rely on Roman Catholic arguments to support their position, and insistence on the rightness of that position logically terminates in some form of crypt0-Papalism, whether "Anglo-Papalism" or conversion to Roman Catholicism (just as it did to Newman), or crypt0-Orthodoxy. In neither case is the conclusion Anglican, whose formularies are clear that the national Church(es) "hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written" (Art. 20).

Determining just what is "contrary to God's Word written" is the task of exegesis, not poll-taking, whether of present congregations or patristic quotations. As the history of the Arian Controversy makes clear, what the Church ends up recognizing as the truth may have been a minority position, unclear, or entirely unaddressed by prior ages; there is no way to know the content of future ecclesiastical judgments in advance of their actually happening. And that means the exegesis that must form the basis for such judgments is something that happens now and is ongoing.

Your argument also appears to make the assumption that proper administration of the sacraments is limited to the historical succession of bishops and those ordained by them, a proposition the Anglican and Continental Reformed and Lutheran Churches flatly and uniformly rejected. The authority to celebrate the sacraments is something the Church delegates to whom it will. It is best for the sake of Church unity if this is done within the confines of the historic succession but there is nothing in the Scriptures to suggest that the sacraments either are or must be limited in this way. This is a crypto-Papalist/crypto-Orthodox assumption, not an Anglican one, whether we're relying on the formularies themselves or the writings of prominent Anglican divines like Cranmer, Hooker, et al. The hypothetical Lutheran pastor down the street celebrates no less valid a Eucharist than the local Orthodox bishop or the vicar at the Roman Catholic cathedral or the Presbyterian elder at the church next door to it.

 

Your argument also appears to make the assumption that proper administration of the sacraments is limited to the historical succession of bishops and those ordained by them, a proposition the Anglican and Continental Reformed and Lutheran Churches flatly and uniformly rejected. The authority to celebrate the sacraments is something the Church delegates to whom it will. It is best for the sake of Church unity if this is done within the confines of the historic succession but there is nothing in the Scriptures to suggest that the sacraments either are or must be limited in this way. This is a crypto-Papalist/crypto-Orthodox assumption, not an Anglican one, whether we're relying on the formularies themselves or the writings of prominent Anglican divines like Cranmer, Hooker, et al. The hypothetical Lutheran pastor down the street celebrates no less valid a Eucharist than the local Orthodox bishop or the vicar at the Roman Catholic cathedral or the Presbyterian elder at the church next door to it................. I am not going to hash out what the initial reformers thought. What I am going to say that what ever they thought has to be judged by the scriptures and tradition and reason. Scripture, tradition, and reason leads us to the conclusion that we can't throw the baby out with the bath water. You can't just reject things because our earliest reformers were not 100% solid on it even though they kept it. We had to correct our course because we started out way to reformed and over time it does appear that we did correct that course. Our earliest reformers did err and those errors had to be corrected. One of those errors, if they did make that assumption, is that you don't have to be ordained in Apostolic Succession to have valid sacraments. With that being said the hypothetical Lutheran down the street might or might not have valid sacraments as might the local Presbyterian elder, but we can't know that for sure. But we can know that woman can't be ordained and when they are ordained their sacraments are not valid and when they become bishops they are not really bishops and negates their apostolic succession and the seat now is vacant. If the church does that long enough and h as enough woman bishop and priests then that church eventually becomes the like the local church down the street. No one knows if the sacraments are valid their any more, they could be but we just don't know.

 

I'm writing neither to agree nor disagree with what you've written here (although I'm leaning in your direction) but to inquire. Would you extend this concept to the baptism performed and Communion celebrated by the Methodists, the Baptists, the Assemblies of God, etc.? And whether yes or no, what is your reasoning? Also, if "the authority to celebrate the sacraments is something the Church delegates to whom it will," in your view would any of the churches you named be able (at least in theory) to delegate the authority to laypersons?

 

I won't speak for the other Church groups you've mentioned, because they have a messed up understanding of the Church. But I don't find any evidence for your view in Anglicanism, especially after the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal. We don't view every Lutheran sacrament, or every Roman sacrament, as necessarily invalid, because we simply don't know. Those church groups are grievously in error and confusion, so we simply can't state with confidence that they are in every instance a valid sacrament. That's as far as it goes. The only sacraments that are confidently valid are Anglican; those within Christian traditions we leave to God to sort out.

This is radical anabaptist heresy.

The ministry of the Church is not controlled by the Church; but by God. Anyone outside of the parameters of that ministry is not a minister, no matter what he's called by people. The ministry of the Church is a fundamentally divine, not a human institution. You have a radically secular, quasi-atheist understanding of Christian ministry (which was introduced by the anabaptists at Munster).

Implicit in your statement is the belief that Christian truth ultimately does not matter. What are sacraments, what is ministry, sure we can all have our beliefs about it but ultimately it does not matter, and there is no answer that we must hold others and ourselves accountable to. This is radical secularism dressed up in Christian language. Episcopal Church formation.

 

No reputable Anglican says this.

As for the Church and its Ministry, the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican confessional understandings at any rate are one and the same:

What the Church Is:
Augsburg Confession, Art. 7
The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

Belgic Confession, Art. 29
The true church can be recognized if it has the following marks: The church engages in the pure preaching of the gospel; it makes use of the pure administration of the sacraments as Christ instituted them; it practices church discipline for correcting faults.

Articles of Religion, Art. 19
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance...

Who May Celebrate the Sacraments:
Augsburg Confession, Art. 14
Of Ecclesiastical Order they teach that no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments unless he be regularly called.

Defense of the Augsburg Confession, Art. 14
The Fourteenth Article, in which we say that in the Church the administration of the Sacraments and Word ought to be allowed no one unless he be rightly called, they receive, but with the proviso that we employ canonical ordination. Concerning this subject we have frequently testified in this assembly that it is our greatest wish to maintain church-polity and the grades in the Church [old church-regulations and the government of bishops], even though they have been made by human authority [provided the bishops allow our doctrine and receive our priests].​

Belgic Confession, Art. 30-31
There should be ministers or pastors to preach the Word of God and administer the sacraments...By this means everything will be done well and in good order in the church, when such persons are elected who are faithful and are chosen according to the rule that Paul gave to Timothy.

We believe that ministers of the Word of God, elders, and deacons ought to be chosen to their offices by a legitimate election of the church, with prayer in the name of the Lord, and in good order, as the Word of God teaches.

Articles of Religion, Art. 23
It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preaching, or ministering the Sacraments in the Congregation, before he be lawfully called, and sent to execute the same.​

Tradition and the Unity of the Church
Augsburg Confession, Art. 7
And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike.

Belgic Confession, Art. 28, 29, & 32
But all people are obliged to join and unite with it, keeping the unity of the church by submitting to its instruction and discipline, by bending their necks under the yoke of Jesus Christ, and by serving to build up one another, according to the gifts God has given them as members of each other in the same body.

In short, it governs itself according to the pure Word of God, rejecting all things contrary to it and holding Jesus Christ as the only Head.

Therefore we reject all human innovations and all laws imposed on us, in our worship of God, which bind and force our consciences in any way.

Articles of Religion, Art. 34
It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners, so that nothing be ordained against God's Word. Whosoever, through his private judgment, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.

Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, so that all things be done to edifying.​

I rest my case.

The rest of your post is so wildly off the wall in terms of its assignment of beliefs/motives to me, and ignorance of history in general, that it frankly isn't worth responding to any further.

 

As long as it's baptism in the name of the three persons of the Trinity, I can't imagine what the problem would be. There are some Pentecostal groups out there that are explicitly anti-trinitarian, so anyone received from such a church who had been baptized in it, would in that case need to be rebaptized (otherwise rebaptism is forbidden). But I can't imagine what the issue would be with a Methodist, Baptist, etc. As for Communion, I would say that if the intent is "to celebrate it according to the Lord's ordinance", which is the criterion given in the major Confessions, it's not for me or anyone else to say that those things aren't true sacraments. I think in this regard we ought to be no less generous than Barth was to Schleiermacher:

Schleiermacher, as we know, on his death-bed celebrated Holy Communion with his family: with water instead of wine, which the doctor had forbidden him to drink, and recalling that Christ, in blessing wine, had also blessed water. It can be asked whether the water in the wine was blessed in order that in the last resort it could take the place of wine, or whether it all ceases to be the Lord's Supper when the one is exchanged for the other in this way. But there can be no doubt of the fact that Schleiermacher wanted to celebrate the Holy Communion. He wanted in his Christology, whose content might perhaps be compared with the water, to proclaim Christ. And the fervour with which he did it, as a dogmatician and preacher, is also beyond all doubt in the minds of all who know him. If anyone was most deeply in earnst in this matter then it was Schleiermacher. That cannot of course be regarded as the last word upon the subject; the theological question of truth must remain open here as everywhere, even in the face of the greatest personal sincerity, which cannot be overlooked, just as we must bear in mind the other indications. Ultimately we can only believe that Schleiermacher, too, was a Christian theologian; that, I repeat, is something he has in common with Luther and Calvin and (lest it be forgotten!), upon the lower plane, with all of us.
Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, (London: SCM Press, 2001), 418.
https://postbarthian.com/2017/07/07/friedrich-schleiermachers-last-meal/
​

As to the layperson question, my opinion is that if they've been publicly authorized to celebrate them then by definition they aren't laity. I do not believe, in other words, that a layperson can just decide on his/her own to celebrate the Eucharist. There has to be some public authorization for it by the Church, according to whatever rules it has set.

 

I would just like to point out that those statements did not actually come from me

 

The problem with this position is that what you refer to as "errors" of the Reformers are in fact enshrined in the Protestant Confessions themselves, including the Articles of Religion. Anglicanism has historically denied the necessity of apostolic succession for sacramental validity (see my response to Stalwart above). In fact, neither apostolic succession nor sacramental validity are mentioned in the Articles of Religion (or the Ordinal) at all.

Not only was there never any declaration by the Church of England that the Continental Reformed had either invalid Orders or sacraments, but in fact the voluminous correspondence we have available to us from the time clearly indicates quite the opposite. The view you are espousing is not an Anglican view of the ministry and sacraments at all, but rather a crypto-Catholic one (the Orthodox don't spend much time talking about things like "validity", etc.).

As Edward Norman, who later converted to Catholicism himself, put it,

Anglicans who rely on the existence of an authentic priestly ministry are not really helped either. The technical line of Apostolical succession and regular ordination procedures may or may not have been preserved within the Church of England, and passed to the subsequent lateral Churches, but it scarcely matters when it comes to determining the capacity to order doctrine. The whole issue was clouded by the priority given to the question of episcopal ordination at the Savoy Conference in 1661, and then, in the nineteenth century, by the Tractarians, in their hurried belief that the authenticity of a Catholic identity for the Church of England could be recovered by proving an episcopal succession. This itself had simply revealed, once again, how varied were the opinions held within Anglicanism, for it had not mattered to most of the leadership before. Those whom the Tractarians believed to be successors of the apostles, in the 1840’s, rushed into print (in the form of published episcopal charges) to deny that they were. [note 13] The absence of any abiding sense that Anglicanism was anchored in apostolic orders was revealed, for example, in 1817 when a Church of England minister (A B Johnson) was appointed for Sierra Leone by the Church Missionary Society: he was ordained by Lutheran pastors. And the row over the Jerusalem bishopric in 1841 indicated how little the matter of regularity in episcopal jurisdiction depended on a Catholic pedigree. Overseas bishops - the very foundation of most of what became the world-wide Anglican Communion - were until 1864 named by the Colonial Office under Letters Patent.
(Note 13. See W S Bricknell, ed, The Judgment of the Bishops upon Tractarian Theology, Oxford, 1845)
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/misc/norman98.html
​

I recommend reading the various episcopal letters in the source cited by Norman. Anyone interested in the topic at all will find the bishops' published opinions to be most interesting.

 

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Following up on the layperson question, I have in mind a specific, real-life example of which I'm aware. A duly ordained minister taught his congregation that all true followers of Jesus Christ are "priests" before God according to scripture (Rev. 1:6 for one), and that any one of the congregants may celebrate Holy Communion at any time, whether with a group of Christians or alone at home. The same minister taught that any congregant could baptize new converts in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. At minimum it seems like a "public authorization" from the minister in authority, and at maximum it suggests that any and all true disciples are ordained by God to serve people with Sacraments. Your thoughts on this?

 

It's been a while, but I have come across this before as well. It's mainly an evangelical thing, i.e., the church is just a collection of equal and autonomous individuals, whose mark of authenticity is a conversion experience, etc. But even those congregations have very specific rules that determine just who is a minister and who is not. I can guarantee you that there is no confusion about who writes the church's checks and who picks the music that will be sung at the various worship services. Whatever those rules are, the Protestant Confessions are clear that if we're going to be faithful to what the Word of God requires, public preaching and administering of the sacraments requires fulfillment of those rules, whatever they may be. If a congregation decides to formally ordain every member, so be it. That would be extremely unusual, to put it mildly, but if they follow the same process they would for their "regular" ministers, that's fine. Otherwise, no. At least that's what I take the Protestant Confessions to be saying. As the Augsburg Confession puts it:

And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike.
​

That being said, I don't consider it my place to pass judgment on whether what other churches do is or isn't "the real thing". The original Eucharist had no ordained clergy under the system that existed at that time; anyone that could participate in a Passover meal (i.e., anyone who was Jewish, regardless of age) could partake of it. That's important to remember, I think. The rules we have were made for us, not the other way around.