Hello Anglican brothers and sisters. Would you be kind enough to share on who decides (in Anglican Church) with finality on matters related to doctrines, faith, morals, discipline if there are issues, controversies and gray areas? Salamat.
In doctrine faith and morals, the bedrock is Holy Scripture, as understood through the tradition of the Church, in a reasonable way. There are always grey areas, for example the morality involved in understanding the stories of Patriarchal Israel abounds in areas where we can but blush and realise that a lot of this stuff is at best untidy.
I think he is asking about who is the authority on these matters, like the Pope is for RCC. I am a new Anglican, but doesn't the Lambeth conference discuss these things every 10 years?
In each Province, the respective hierarchy of the Church. For instance in ACNA the college of bishops handles the day to day decisions and proclamations (see the 2021 statement against homosexual acts). The Provincial Assembly meeting once every couple of years which combines the bishops with the rest of the clergy and representatives of the laity, votes on major changes to the church, like revisions or additions to the canons. Right, the Scripture is our final authority, but it is not a judicial and legislative organ which speaks for itself. For that role God has designated the Church.
I believe if it is to be binding it is a decision made by the highest authority in the particular Anglican church. For example, in the Church of England it would be the General Synod. They can pass canons and measures. I believe the latter have the equivalent authority to a UK Act of Parliament (statute law). If my understanding is correct, where General Synod cannot agree on a doctrinal matter then its House of Bishops has the final say. My understanding of the Lambeth Conference is it can issue statements on which the assembled bishops agree on a doctrinal matter. However, I do not believe it can enact anything binding on the entire Anglican Communion. Indeed, the Anglican Communion lacks any central authority.
Who can say that this is the part of the Holy Scripture that we need to refer to, that this is the tradition that we need to understand?
Is Central Authority necessary for us all Christians to be ONE? I really prayed that in my lifetime all of us will be ONE.
As others have said, the Anglican Communion has no central authority. Each national church/province has complete autonomy. The global community of bishops gather for Lambeth Conference, but they do not vote on canons or rules members of the communion must follow. Lambeth's purpose is more consultative. They gather together to hash out problems facing the Church and agree to general statements of resolution. It's up to each province to then listen to or ignore Lambeth - but naturally it tends to steer the communion in one direction or another. Each Anglican Church in each nation/province will have its own governance models for who has the final say. Generally though, the vast majority have what is called a "General Synod". This is modelled in British Parliamentary style. Historically the parliament was the governing body of the Church of England, and so as other provinces cropped up they mimicked that model - and eventually when the CofE became self-governing it also maintained that historical process. Essentially provinces form either a bicameral or a tricameral 'assembly', called a General Synod (to distinguish it from local synods) to pass laws (canons) and make rulings and review the liturgy just like a parliament would. There is usually a lower house of the laity, an upper house of the clergy, and sometimes a third house of bishops. Usually bishops get automatic seats, and all other members of the clergy and laity must be elected by their diocese. Usually for a canon to be passed it would need majority support in all houses of the synod, but I'm sure there are quirky nuances to the way the General Synod works in every country. Outside of doctrine, e.g. in terms of declaring an official view on spiritual or moral matters, I imagine it varies greatly. In Australia that is also the responsibility of the Synod, but I imagine some provinces might have more executive power in their primates or bishops to make those decision unilaterally. Regardless of how it works in practice, I would expect most (all?) provinces reserve the power of the Synod to overrule an errant decision by a bishop or other member of the clergy if one got the call wrong.
In one sense, all true Christians are, right now, all one... in Christ. Jesus is the head, and we are His body on earth. We are united in Him. When one is at odds with another and falls out of fellowship, it is a symptom that one (or both) are not close to Christ; someone is not listening to Him. If we all were in perfect communion with Him and hearing clearly what He is saying to us, we would also be in communion with one another. Even so, it is Christ who binds all believers together, and this is the oneness that He spoke and prayed about. There will always be some who are "Christian" in name only, and so long as they remain spiritually dead they will remain dis-united and unconnected to the true body of Christ. The biggest problem with ecumenism is that it attempts to lump together the spiritually alive with the spiritually dead, to yoke together believers with unbelievers, which would ultimately harm the true Christians by blurring the orthodox theology and the gospel truth; for ecumenism to work, we would have to give up our principles and accept falsehoods as truth. But God knows the hearts, and He knows his sheep no matter what denomination they are scattered in; He also knows the goats who are intermingled. Visual oneness can never succeed, but spiritual oneness exists in Christ already.
This to me is a great advantage over the Roman communion, because we have no one central place for the progressive globalists to compromise and capture... If one province falls to the attacks of the enemy, the others can rally, exclude it from their ranks, and again rebuild that province from the ground up while the compromised one withers away... it's ingenious
That depends on your perspective. Roman Catholics certainly believe it is vital. However, I was not discussing the necessity or lack thereof for a central authority. It was a tangential statement to my main argument. It was simply to state that the Anglican Communion does not possess a central authority.
From an Anglican perspective this is not the issue. We have a strong view that no part of Holy Scripture should be expounded in a manner that is repugnant to another. It is the whole counsel of Scripture that needs to be brought to bear. We are not a communion of proof texts floating in isolation. This is why we look to tradition and reason in our understanding of scripture.
Did this situation been experienced in Anglican Communion in her History? A Province fall, excluded then rebuilt?
Indeed, it is happening right now. In America, during the 90s and 2000s the situation with Anglicanism was very dire, extremely troubling. You had many of the vestiges of old faithfulness still around, still many faithful clerics and laity; but one defeat after another, the core of the faith was hollowed out and utter apocalypse was inevitable. It felt hopeless, like a RC traditionalist might feel in Rome right now. But fast forward to 2022, and you have someone like me, an Anglican with young family who’s never even been a part of the Episcopal Church. Myself and my children have never ever encountered that stuff. Same is going on in Canada, Australia, and England (our mother church who’s similarly fallen): there are rebirth groups, church plants, reorganization plans going on all the time. Meanwhile the rest of they Anglican would is going from strength to strength. Africa doubles in its Anglicans every 20-30 years. The Church of Singapore is colonizing all of South East Asia with the gospel; their annual missionary budget is $1million and they have single-handedly planted hundreds of churches in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, etc.
Wouldn't ACNA be the excluded party in this example? The Episcopal Church is in the Anglican Communion, ACNA is not.
well I was speaking more of the continuing churches which broke communion with the episcopal church in the 70s... Because of this separation, from the 1970s on there has existed a whole separate branch of Anglicanism that still visibly shows us what Angl0-Catholicism of the early 1900s looked like, without women's ordination, or modernism And you bet they are helping to nudge the wider Anglican tradition, and the ACNA has experienced a considerable lurch toward tradition in part because of those churches Because we don't have a single centralizing authority, on the downside this creates several competing entities, but on the upside it makes the preservation of the anglican tradition that much easier