Disestablishment of the Church of England

Should the Church of England be disestablished?

A few weeks ago Archbishop Justin Welby stated that he would rather the Church of England be disestablished rather than split over same sex marriage:

Welby ‘would rather see C of E disestablished than split over same-sex marriage’

However, it looks like even the mere issue of same sex blessings is likely to cause the Church of England to split in the near future, considering the new London Deanery et cetera.

There is also plenty of people within GAFCON and GSFA who question why the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion - the Archbishop of Canterbury - should be chosen by the secular British government, rather than by the Anglican archbishops themselves.

 

What sign is there that the CofE is in any way split over the issue? My impression of the CofE is that they're pretty much set on their course and without much dissent. It's Anglicanism that is split over same sex marriage. But those Anglican churches which are preserving the sanctity of Biblical marriage are not the CofE (which is just in England).

 

I fail to see the link between the church of England being established or not and it splitting over same sex marriage. Being disestablished won't stop splits, just look at American Anglicanism.

From what I remember the church chooses two nominations to go before Parliament, and they pick the A.Bishop. Presumably all people of the UK can petition their MP to chose a particular candidate.
Do and did the good citizens of the Papal states have this sort of power and rights?

 

Interesting idea. Given that the notion of the nation is anchored in the crown and the crown is invested in the Christian Faith as expressed in the Church of England, it would seem to me it would be a big change in the idea of the nation itself. The relationship between Church and State is complex in many places.

Single Gender Matrimony is a matter that for some, is a simple matter of justice, and for many others the destruction of the absolute heart of the faith. We have not been able to listen to one another well on this issue. It is not easy, for we have to be involved in life while assessing it.

 

Yes, but phrasing the matter in this way obscures the real issue: that of Biblical authority in the Church. A plain reading of Scripture rules out any kind of homosexual behavior in a Christian believer, as well as any other kind of aberrant sexual behavior. But porneia is not the core issue -- the real issue is that since the Bible speaks plainly about this, how much authority does it have in the life of the Church? Do we subordinate Biblical teachings to other authorities? Do we allow our governments or philosophers or activists or scientists to determine how much of the Bible is important and how much we can safely ignore? Do we subordinate the word of God to the judgement of men?

Any orthodox Christian of whatever worship tradition must say no to this idea. There is no Justice outside of God's will. Any teaching or action that goes against the express will of God cannot be just, even in principle.

Liberals often accuse the orthodox of being overly focused on sexual behavior at the expense of a focus on other areas like caring for the poor and the infirm, or the nebulous "social justice" briar-patch (where Liberals mean a very different thing than the orthodox do when they use that term). God is Love, they say, and his forgiveness is vast. Yes, we say, but his wrath is likewise vast, and it will be unleashed against those who do not repent of their sin. God is love, but not love only; God's wrath is just as much a part of himself as love, because God hates sin. He cannot abide it. Those who live in sin are thus exposed to God's wrath (Rom. 1:18-19).

But Jesus paid for our sins on the cross, didn't he? Yes, he did, and we must be eternally thankful He did so. But Christ's sacrifice was not a blanket invitation to continue in sin, confident that God's grace will protect us. Paul disposes of this notion in Rom. 6:1-2:

Also in 1 Cor. 6:9-10:

Christ himself teaches that those who die in an unrepentant state will end up in Hell (see Luke 16:19-31).

As I have said many times before, Jesus was a hellfire preacher. He did not teach universalism, the idea that everybody eventually will be saved regardless of their spiritual state when they die. He did preach love, but he also understood that not all love is holy. He preached agape, a selfless and sacrificing love. Misdirected love is sinful since it is a kind of idolatry, and violates the "do not love the world" teaching in Sripture. See 1 John 2:15-17:

Homosexual behavior is a sin, just as fornication, adultery, and bestiality are sexual sins which require repentance if you wish to enter the kingdom of Heaven. This is true of other sins of the flesh: gluttony, habitual drunkenness, transvestism, deliberate mutilation of your body (voluntary castration, transgender surgery, whatever). Your body is not your own, but belongs to God (1 Cor. 6:19-20).

So this is the teaching of Scripture. Scripture is not written in code, and is not some esoteric metaphor that only the learned can understand (this is Gnosticism). Scripture must be read in context of course, but Scriptural teaching is universal and eternal. It applies to us just as much as it did to those first-century Christian converts that Jesus and the Apostles ministered to. There is no "new revelation" that overturns it (Deut. 4:2, Rev. 22:18).

The Bible that we have in our hands now is God's last word on the issue, until Christ returns. Amen.

 

Recent scholarship says otherwise. “Plain” doesn’t mean “uneducated” or “disregarding context” or “ahistorical.” And your own words make it clear that it is not the Bible, but the Bible read according to the way you think it should be read, that ought to be decisive for everyone. But why should your particular, decontextualized reading be prioritized? It is authority itself, not “biblical” authority, that must justify itself. The real issue is how ACNA/GAFCON intends to turn back the clock and hermetically seal its more curious members from the wider intellectual world, while still appearing to be “Anglican” in any recognizable sense. After all, anyone curious about these matters can read good scholarship at minimal expense. Religious authoritarianism has been done before.

 

I do not advance my reading of the Bible because my reading is not idiosyncratic or innovative. I advance the view of Scripture that has been held by orthodox Christians for the past 2000 years, and by the majority of Anglicans from the founding of our Church to this day. The Bible is the Very Word of God written. So we believe. So we teach and preach. If you are in disagreement with this, then it is you who have left historically-grounded reading and exposition behind. You read the Bible in the same way you read Aesop's Fables or Bulfinch's mythology or the orations of Cicero or the poems of Ovid. This is a colossal error. The Bible is God's revealed Word to his people. It is not the work of fallible men singing songs and telling stories and fables about God.

You cannot retcon Christian history or Divine Revelation. Nearly the entire Anglican world has just finished repudiating the very ideas you are advancing here. Most Christians reject the revisionist view of Scripture western liberals espouse, because it is unanchored from doctrine, from theology, even from good textual criticism.

Look, I understand that liberals and the orthodox are never going to agree on this issue. It is an axiomatic difference at this point. It lies at the root of the currents tearing apart Christian congregations as we speak. All I can say is that a Christian church unanchored in Biblical teaching is no Christian church at all. If you cannot accept Biblical authority, then you do no honor to God with your worship because Holy Scripture was given by Him whom we serve. Men do not act as judge over Scripture because God gave it. It cannot be overturned or refuted by any work of men. This is not only my view, but the view of the vast majority of global Anglicans who just gave explicit voice to this conviction. It is now a creedal and doctrinal cornerstone of the reformed Anglican Church.

No one's going to stop TEC or the C of E from doing whatever they want at this point. Global Anglcians have moved on. "Authentic Anglicanism" is not what you say it is, or what I say it is, but what the majority of the world's practicing Anglicans say it is. Lex orandi lex credendi. And they have just affirmed everything I have said here.

 

Regarding disestablishment itself, this is probably the most thorough treatment of the subject I’ve seen recently. There would have to be a strong popular desire for it, then the legislative will, and then a carefully thought-out and well-executed plan. The UK’s recent experience with Brexit doesn’t inspire much confidence in the short run. In the long run, disestablishment is probably inevitable. Whether it would be good for the Church of England, of course, remains to be seen.

 

You didn’t answer my question. How are the fundamentalists in ACNA/GAFCON going to prevent the works of orthodox liberals from ending up in the hands of more curious parishioners?

 

"Orthodox liberal" is a purely notional creature in my experience, like the unicorn. Assumed by many to exist, but never actually observed in nature.

And to think that the reformed Anglican Church is somehow going to tear liberal literature out of the hands of orthodox congregants provokes little more than a laugh from me. Feel free to share your theology and doctrine among the faithful! It's not as if liberals haven't been doing this already for the past several decades, and you can see where it's gotten you.

 

Opinions vary. To be ‘orthodox’ is to affirm the Creed, and to be ‘liberal’ is to be open-ended in one’s method of inquiry. I fail to see any contradiction; there are plenty of theologians who have done just this. If you’ve never read any such orthodox liberal Anglican authors (or even just orthodox liberal Christian ones), then I would seriously question the value and breadth of your learning.

It seems like what you’re saying is that the success of your movement is premised on the notion that a multitude of people will continuously read a book and come to the same conclusion about what it means, and that this conclusion will somehow be recognized to be the “correct” one. That’s already been done, and we’ve seen how poorly that worked out.

 

If they have been properly catechized and discipled, with the true doctrine being preached from the pulpit, we have nothing to fear. Lex orandi lex credendi.

The "my movement" gave me another chuckle. I am a Johnny-come-lately to this scene, friend. I simply got aboard a train that was already filled to near capacity when I arrived. As to study, I became an Anglican by conviction and did an enormous amount of study and reading before making the jump. I've done a lot more work on the liberal side than you've done on the conservative side, I'll wager, and by necessity: for the past several decades the orthodox have had to marinate in liberal heterodoxy being shouted at us constantly and from all quarters.

The people in "my movement" are not some dodgy strangers who showed up out of nowhere and stole your church out from under you. We've been here all along, sitting in the pews, growing more unhappy and dismayed with every year that went by. We did not steal the church or the doctrine that anchors it. We took these back from those who proved unworthy guardians of the treasures they held in trust.

This wasn't a coup. It was a rescue mission.

 

I actually started out on the conservative side; I switched sides, largely as a result of becoming Anglican. To this day I am probably still far more familiar with the literature and arguments on the former side than the latter. Just as there is no inherent conflict between adhering to orthodoxy while adopting a liberal approach to theology, there is also no inherent conflict between taking a fundamentalist stance and teaching heterodoxy. It happens all the time. In the case at hand, confusing Discipline with Doctrine, and ascribing the attributes of God to the Bible - the latter of which amounts to ‘Bibliolatry’ - are not only most definitely instances of heterodoxy but of ‘heteropraxy’ as well.

 

To a great extent, to be an orthodox Christian is to be a conservative Christian.

An orthodox Christian values the pure Gospel message of Jesus and the spiritual truths handed down through generations. He doesn't want the church to become corrupted by evil or by perversion (including subtle revisionism) of those truths. He wants to conserve (keep without change) and hold dearly to the historically-held understanding of the Christian faith because he thinks that those early Christians, the ones who had an opportunity to learn first- or second-hand either from Christ or from those who knew Him, possessed a wider and better-informed view of what Jesus said and did. (After all, we are told that Jesus said and did far, far more than the small amount recorded in the N.T., and many of those things probably were communicated only by word of mouth, but after the first couple of centuries we can be confident that the bulk of those insights were lost; therefore the orthodox Christian places a premium on the value of the earliest writings and tends to discount modern scholarship's "innovations".)

A liberal Christian values new insights and ideas. He values modern scholarship over the scholarship of centuries past and is willing (even eager at times) to see the church set aside old concepts in favor of new ones that seem to make more sense in context of the changing world. He places contemporary intellectualism on a high pedestal in the belief that mankind today is so much more enlightened and more wise, not just in terms of science and advancement, but in his ability to reevaluate the ancient truths of scripture and the understandings of the early church. The liberal Christian is a revisionist and a progressivist. He idolizes knowledge, and the newer the knowledge the better.

Personally, I think the liberal side of Christianity, with its emphasis on modern intellectualism, is little better than Gnosticism. I don't mean that it is like the Gnosticism of centuries past. But it is a sort of "neo-Gnosticism" born out of man's hubris. Man is so full of himself, he believes he can outdo all of the previous generations in every way.... even when it comes to deciding what the Christian faith really is (or in his opinion should be) all about. Modern man even dares to redefine God... as if God were capable of being molded into a kinder, more tolerant, more cuddly-cozy deity who would never allow an unpleasant denouement to any self-respecting and self-absorbed, hedonistic, "modern and enlightened" human being's existence.

 

The UK Parliament does not appoint C of E bishops. They are appointed by the sovereign. The sovereign does everything on advice rather than make a personal choice. The sovereign appoints C of E bishops on the advice of the prime minister. A body called the Crown Nominations Commission submits two names to the prime minister listed in order of the Commission's preference. Since the premiership of Gordon Brown (2007-10) prime ministers have always advised the sovereign to appoint the Commission's first choice candidate. Parliament is not involved. Consequently, there would be no point in anyone writing to their MP. Even if Parliament were involved MPs are not bound to follow the wishes of their constituents.

 

Thanks for the clarification PDL. I knew the P.M. sent forth the names of the two nominees , with recomendations to the sovereign, so in effect the P.M. choses the archbishop, from a choice of two. But I would have thought (wrongly as it turns out) all the M.P.'s could have a say. Perhaps this happens informally but it is not a requirement of the P.M. or the system.
Perceptive people may have figured out that this means a Roman Catholic P.M. could send forth the nomination persons names for A.Bishop or indeed any Bishop to the Sovereign.
In practice this has never happened as there has never been an R.C.P.M. (Roman Catholic Prime Minister). Tony Blair had the good grace to convert to Catholocism after resigning his office.

Ain't that the truth, and they wonder why people get disenchanted with politics.

 

It is the prime minister who is not bound by the Crown Nominations Commission; although, since the premiership of Gordon Brown every prime minister has selected the Crown Nominations Commission's first choice. The sovereign is bound by the prime minister's recommendation.

 

I can understand this sentiment. However, first we have to remember that MPs are elected as our representatives not our delegates. I believe I have that right. That means they are not elected to serve in a legislature to do as we may tell them to do.

If that were the reason we elected them think of the huge problems it would cause. If two groups of constituents were to lobby their MP with diametrically opposed views on the same topic what is the MP to do? It would be impossible for any MP, even the best ones, to be able to satisfy every one of their constituents. If we don't think an MP is doing a good job we have to be patient and use the ballot box as our judegment on the MP's performance.