Considering Anglicanism

Discussion in 'New Members' started by C. Smith, Aug 27, 2019.

  1. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    I meant it to say, it's minimalistic in quantity. It only says the bare minimum of what has to be said, rather than everyone else who said the very maximum of what has to be said.

    If you want to really get down to it, it is a question of epistemology. "How do you know?" "How much do you know?" How much can you know?"All other confessional documents seem to say:
    -we know A LOT, we can discover everything, 100% of Christianity, within a single generation, and we will mandate it on point of complete rupture.

    That mindset has always been seductive, and our Articles sometimes get unfavorably compared because of that. What, we don't know enough? We aren't as confident as the other churches are? Why won't we say more?

    And to answer that I simply give to people the first 5-6 centuries of the Church after Christ. Can people name me a single Catechism binding on all the faithful? What about a tome of Patristic Doctrine, signed by an ecumenical council? That stuff simply doesn't exist. The most that the Fathers could sign all together was the Creeds, which seems so simple and so insufficient to our modern crises, that we don't think of the Creeds as a confessional document at all (even though they were back then).

    I think of how many Fathers disagreed with one another on the nature of Christ's presence in the Sacrament. St. Augustine said it was more symbolic, St. Athanasius said it was more tangible. Theodoret said that after the consecration the elements remain exactly as before. Irenaeus said after the consecration the elements become the Body (without defining what he meant). There are so many differences on the Lord's Supper (and a thousand other doctrines), and the Fathers never felt the need to write a defining Tome that would list the entire body of Divinity, and bind the faithful to it for all time. They had epistemic humility; agree with us on this 1% of necessary doctrine, and we will be brethren.

    But the modern Christians are epistemically proud: I know everything and I will force you to believe what I believe.

    This is where the Anglican genius shone most brightly. They were the only ones to embody the Patristic approach to the Church, and wrote the only truly Catholic confessional document of the 16th century.
     
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