Divorce and Remarriage

“One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries, that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith” Lancelot Andrewes.

 

The Patristic era itself is an anglican concept, we have to begin with that. Jean-Louis Quantin is one recent scholar who points this out in “The Church of England and Christian Antiquity”. That came out in 2008 or 2009 or thereabouts.

The concept of a Patristic era is not inherently obvious if you think about it: why should there be a cutoff at some point? And that’s why neither Rome nor the EO historically have thought of Church history in terms of some sort of specially privileged era whose fathers are better at explaining the faith to us. The EO are more than happy to label John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas as church fathers. The Church of Rome sees no fundamental distinction between St Augustine and Duns Scotus (a gap of ~1000 years). These are all “doctors of the church” to them. Quantin points out how peculiar it is that the Anglicans first of all created this uniquely privileged era, and then injected it into the wider Christian discourse. Now every denomination, be it the EO, or Rome, or the Presbyterians are happy to claim the fathers if they can find something helpful in them for themselves.

For us Anglicans however this is no mere cherry picking of quotations. This ties into our doctrine of Scripture—how we know what the Scripture means, and what the Church in its purity looked like. The Church Fathers are uniquely privileged most especially because they help us interpret scripture. The further in time they go, and especially after the Roman Empire falls, the less context they retain for what the Scriptures originally meant. They lose cultural associations, linguistic metaphors. They become essentially more like us. In order to know what the original Church and the Scriptures actually mean, we need the original text and the men who understood it in its original language. That’s what makes them privileged. Thomas Aquinas may be wise, but he didn’t study under John the APOSTLE, unlike someone like Polycarp, or Clement, or Ignatius, who saw the Apostles in PERSON.

A corollary is that this makes Anglicanism inherently the most anti-progressive Christian denomination in existence.

-if you’re Rome, the Magisterium can change and teach something else tomorrow (as we’ve seen).
-if you’re EO, you’re shielded by conservative Slavic nations but inherently your sacred Tradition isn’t written down anywhere. If progressives come to power tomorrow, they can make it teach something different, as with Rome’s Magisterium.
-if you’re a “me and my Bible” Baptist, that’s the easiest one to corrupt of all. Just unroot the Bible from its history. Doesn’t it teach “there shall be no male or female”, thus promoting Transgenderism? Checkmate. The Bible has a danger of being a wax nose which you can turn any way you wish, as Luther said.

You need both the text to be fixed (excluding Rome/EO), and it’s interpretation to be fixed (excluding Reformed/Baptists).

 

But Rome did not fall in the 400's. The East lived on until 1453 and they spoke Greek and lived more in the Culture that the Scriptures were written in.

 

I like the Byzantine Empire as much as anyone but there are valid arguments to be made that it fell centuries before 1453 (and of course at the time there were plenty who said that the fall of Constantinople was merely a temporary setback, the empire lived on in Trebizond from which it all soon would be liberated).


Certainly there was cultural continuity, but that can be overstated, there is cultural continuity between the Mercia of Æthelflæd and the England of Elizabeth II, but I would be hesitant to say that we should accord the opinions of an Elizabethan English scholar much additional weight for living more in the Culture of the Mercians than someone else.

 

What valid arguments are you talking about? The 4th Crusade sacking and capturing Constantinople for less than a century but finally being defeated by the remnant of the Empire that was based out of Nicea? Trebizond did not liberate anyone. It was weak and fell soon after 1453. I believe in the 1460's.

YOu have a change of culture really beginning with Heraclaus.The language of Empire moved to Greek and at the end of his reign you had the losses to Islam. Even then it was not an abrupt change in the lost lands but a gradual one.

 

We're not talking about an abrupt vs. a gradual change. The rate of change does not matter. The day turns into night, even if we can't (nor do we have to), pinpoint the exact minute when it happens. There doesn't have to be a specific day-night minute. There may not even be a day-night hour. And yet we do know that day does differ from night.

The Roman Empire, the classical Roman, Greek and Hebrew world, effectively ends in the century from 400 to 500 AD. We take the fall of the Western Empire as a convenient simplistic moment, but it's that whole era that we really point to. It is understood that even the age of Justinian was an altogether different culture from what the Roman Empire was. Forget about the 900s AD, where the gulf between Byzantium and ancient Greece is practically identical to the gulf between *us* and ancient Greece. Those people by then already had nothing in common, understood none of the metaphors, and already had lost 99% of the ancient literature. Even the Greek was quite different.

For one specific example, the role of images in Christian worship. We all know that Christianity was and is essentially a form of Judaism, originated by the Jews, to worship the Jewish God, and follow the Jewish Messiah. The attitude of the apostles and the early fathers towards images and depictions of God was essentially that of the Jews today -- reluctant if not outright antagonistic. Here is St. Epiphanius:

I have heard that certain persons have this grievance against me: When I accompanied you to the holy place called Bethel, there to join you in celebrating the Collect, after the use of the Church, I came to a villa called Anablatha and, as I was passing, saw a lamp burning there. Asking what place it was, and learning it to be a church, I went in to pray, and found there a curtain hanging on the doors of the said church, dyed and embroidered. It bore an image either of Christ or of one of the saints; I do not rightly remember whose the image was. Seeing this, and being loth that an image of a man should be hung up in Christ’s church contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures, I tore it asunder and advised the custodians of the place to use it as a winding sheet for some poor person. They, however, murmured, and said that if I made up my mind to tear it, it was only fair that I should give them another curtain in its place. As soon as I heard this, I promised that I would give one, and said that I would send it at once. Since then there has been some little delay, due to the fact that I have been seeking a curtain of the best quality to give to them instead of the former one, and thought it right to send to Cyprus for one. I have now sent the best that I could find, and I beg that you will order the presbyter of the place to take the curtain which I have sent from the hands of the Reader, and that you will afterwards give directions that curtains of the other sort—opposed as they are to our religion—shall not be hung up in any church of Christ.

Fast forward to the Byzantine Era, and you have a completely different religion:

 

I would say the major cultural change came after the reign of Justinian. He still dreams of the West, Latin was still his native language, his was still a large and powerful empire. Rome in 400 was remarkable similar to Justinian but not so to Heraclias but I get your point.

 

While it is accurate to say that the patristics were more divided on the issue of icons, Epiphanius' views even for his own time were not unanimous.

 

I know there are a bunch of paintings left over from that era, but I am yet to see evidence that they were left from the Nicene/catholic party. Let’s remember that most Christians from that era were heretical, either Arian or Donatist or any number of the heresies assailed by St Irenaeus.

The only solid thing we have to go by are the writings from known Church Fathers. And those I’m afraid were pretty one-sided, from what I have found. I’m open to seeing evidence opinions opposite of St Epiphanius. Have only seen sentiments which agree with him. St. Augustine is also pretty fierce on this issue. Images/icons play absolutely no catechetical or devotional role, in St Cyril, or the Didache, or the Apostolic Constitutions, or what have you. But again I’m open to being educated more on this.

 

St. Epiphanius did not actually make a blanket iconoclastic statement. Rather he objected to a specific depiction of our Lord on the curtain of a church outside his diocese, prompting him to tear it down and send them money for its replacement. There are a number of possible icons of our Lord that the Orthodox would consider uncanonical and would wish to remove.

For me the most compelling evidence in favor of icons comes from the house church in Dura Europos, destroyed by ISIL, and the Roman Catacombs, and also the fifth century icon of Christ Pantocrator at St. Catharine’s Monastery in Sinai. The iconoclasts destroyed most of the Byzantine icons, and the Muslims destroyed most of the rest, so we do not have a lot of ancient iconography.

One interesting bit featured on New Liturgical Movement was a recovered glass paten depicting our Lord without a beard. This became a preferred Arian depiction: if you look at the Orthodox Baptistry and the Arian Baptistry in Ravenna, the painted ceilings are nearly identical, the main difference being in the Arian baptistry our Lord is depicted as beardless (and also, disturbingly, there is more visible from what we might call an anatomical perspective).

 

Actually the Tradition of the Eastern churches is mostly written down, and the most important parts of it are the liturgical services. And any time someone tries to change the liturgy, it causes a huge schism, even in the case of very minor changes such as those Patriarch Nikon tried to make in the 17th century.

So if someone wanted to read Orthodox tradition, I would tell them to read a number of Patristic works, and then read the councils, and then read the service books, which are in many cases incredibly ancient. Not counting troparia and kontakia composed for the saints, and various related services like akathists, the average age of Orthodox liturgical texts is about 1,300 years. The service books themselves generally tell you who composed a given prayer or hymn.

Since a full Orthodox liturgical library with a Pentecostarion, a Triodion, a monthly Menaion and so on is very expensive, in the case of Eastern Orthodoxy (a Coptic Orthodox liturgical library you can get via an app on the iPad for under $200, whereas the Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian Rites have not been fully translated into English, sadly), if one wants to deep-dive into Orthodox tradition, there is an anthology of the propers for the most important services called Orthodox Divine Services, by Fr. Seraphim Nasser, also known as the “Nasser Five Pounder” because it is a massive book, published as a quarto (they should have gone with a folio, IMO). Then there is a book containing all the sacramental services by Florence Hapgood which is public domain.

I am working, in addition to my Anglican related projects, on amalgmating public domain Orthodox liturgical texts for ease of access, but in the interim, Fr. John Whiteford has the best resources: http://www.saintjonah.org/services/

Orthodoxy does operate, like Anglicanism, on the basis of lex orandi, lex credendi, the chief difference being we’re a bit like the Prayer Book Society on steroids when it comes to changes to the liturgy. You just can’t push them through without a large scale schism. Indeed, the only reason there aren’t more Old Calendarists is probably the inconvenience of the Old Calendar combined with the fact that the Violakis Typikon, which does not depend on the New Calendar, but as far as I am aware, everyone on the New Calendar is using it, more accurately reflects the Greek liturgical usage in parishes in 1800 than the Sabaite-Studite typikon used on Mount Athos.

Actually, my love for traditional Anglicanism comes from its focus on lex orandi, lex credendi. I believe it is the destiny of at least an Anglo Catholic remnant of Anglicanism, but hopefully more than that, to be in full communion with the Orthodox, and I would observe that this probably would already have happened were it not for the disastrous takeover of the Episcopal Church by liberal bishops like James Pike and the subsequent decision to ordain women, and the failure of the Anglican Communion to do anything about it.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware in The Orthodox Church cites that event as the turning point which made Orthodox-Anglican dialogue cease to matter in terms of a possible reunion.

But I am of the view that since we have all of these beautiful traditional Anglican churches that reject that error, we should discontinue our theoretical discussions with Lambeth in favor of engaging with the traditional provinces and the Continuing Anglicans.

 

Wow! Tough one for you. Best wishes.

 

I am ACNA now, coming from the CofE, and I think they are doing great work.

 

I am in a similar situation. My former wife cheated on me and we divorced. We had years of counseling and she cheated multiple times. Fast forward a few years and I am remarried with a toddler. This is both of our second marriages. My first marriage was convalidated in the RCC, this second marriage took place in an ELCA parish. If I were to return to the RCC there would be a lengthy annulment process for me, possibly shorter for my wife as she is currently unbaptized (but wishing to do so soon). What (if any) process would need to take place in an Anglican parish? I am happy to provide more details if needed.

 

You would need to pursue an annulment, I imagine.. the best thing to do would be to contact your bishop, as things are still settling down in ACNA and I dont know what the rules are across the entire province

 

Truth be told, 90% of Anglican churches are going to assume that if a Lutheran body married you it's probably okay. Few are going to investigate any further than that unless you discern a call into holy orders.

 

Thank you, I do not feel a calling to orders at this time.

 

In other words, "Don't ask, don't tell," eh?

Floridaman1, if your wife asked to be baptized in an Anglican parish, I don't know that the question would ever come up. We all would just be glad to see her get baptized!

 

Yes divorce is a horrible thing. I am divorced against my will as she left, told me over the phone she was divorcing me so we both filed for divorce. Oddly enough she was killing me slowly with her abuse. ( I can actually provide evidence to prove said abuse in all ways but sexual.) I am actually healthier and doing better without her but do get lonely and miss being married. I have one son but I tell people and I do mean it that one of my greatest sadness is not having the family I desired like 3-5 kids and a loving wife.

 

I get that, however I would encourage to treasure the family you do have, and who knows what is around the corner.