What I have found to be interesting is that the ACNA and the EO churches, outside of women in the priesthood seem to pretty close together on most of the most important issues to me. I don't know a lot about the OO churches but the Continuing Churches appear to be more Rome like.
In the early period the church in Britain was probably more Eastern, and Bede's discussion on the date of Easter and the reconciliation of the British Church with the Roman Mission led by Augustine (AD 600) seems involved some give and take, allowing some practices to continue but conforming to the western date for Easter. Following the Conquest in 1066 the British bishops were deposed and the liturgy replaced with an entirely latin liturgy. Inevitably some parts of the English tradition survived, (The Collect for Purity and the Prayer of Humble Access likely examples), so at the time of the reformation to focus was to remove the Pope, though in the main a relatively western liturgy survived with perhaps a more eastern understanding of episcopacy. I have enormous respect for the OO, and relative outliers of eastern christianity they make good family for Anglicans as relative outliers of western christianity. The oecumenical dialogue with the OO has been very productive.
Indeed so, although I would note that in 600 AD there was no “Eastern date for Easter”; Quartodecimianism and all other means of calculating the date of Pscha were replaced by the Paschalion or Computus at the Council of Nicea (in Asia Minor) in 325, and the few people who refused to adopt them and celebrate Pascha with the rest of Christendom were considered schismatic. Indeed there was after the harmonization of the British church with the Nicene Paschalion under St. Augustine of Canterbury (who is venerated as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox), all of Christianity celebrated the major feasts including Pascha on the same day, until the Gregorian Calendar, and later, the disastrous Revised Julian Calendar introduced under the peculiar Patriarch Meletius Malarkis (which celebrates fixed feasts on, usually, their Gregorian Calendar day, but the RJC is theoretically more astronomically correct, so the two will eventually diverge; Pascha is celebrated on the Julian Paschalion, and this causes a heap of problems, such as too many Sundays after Epiphany and before Septuagesima, and the Apostles’ Fast, which customarily starts shortly after All Saints Day - the Sunday after Pentecost in the Byzantine Rite - until The Feast St. Peter and Paul, to in certain years end before it begins, that is to say, having a negative length due to aforesaid feast occuring before the fast was to begin, or in other words, vanishing like the 29th of February. To say this is liturgically undesirable is a great understatement; it would be like if the Rogation Days in the Anglican Church Year did not happen in some years, resulting in some parishes historically not beating the bounds in a timely manner and forgetting their ancient boundaries).
By that I mean that they h Could you tell me more about how the ecumenical dialogue with the OO has been going?
https://www.anglicancommunion.org/ecumenism/ecumenical-dialogues/oriental-orthodox.aspx https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/103487/AOOIC-Agreed-Statement-of-Christology.pdf https://www.anglicancommunion.org/m...greed-statement-on-christology-cairo-2014.pdf https://www.anglicancommunion.org/m...f-the-holy-spirit-dublin-agreed-statement.pdf Hope these links help. The Dublin Statement on Procession is well worth reading more than once. The term ‘monophysite’, which has been falsely used to describe the Christology of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, is both misleading and offensive as it implies Eutychianism. Anglicans, together with the wider oikumene, use the accurate term ‘miaphysite’ to refer to the Cyrilline teaching of the family of Oriental Orthodox Churches, and furthermore call each of these Churches by their official title of ‘Oriental Orthodox’. The teaching of this family confesses not a single nature but one incarnate united divine-human nature of the Word of God. To say ‘a single nature’ would be to imply that the human nature was absorbed in his divinity, as was taught by Eutyches. Section 7 of the 2014 Agreed Statement on Christology One of the things that I have learned is that in the East they cut theology with a fine surgeon's knife while in the west we are inclined to trace in out using the flat side of a round of camembert.
Short answer in no. That may in part be due to the problems that Anglicans have with themselves - and in no sense do I say that to denigrate the historic Anglican position, but rather to acknowledge that things are a bit stretched at the moment.
Actually Syriac Orthodox and Antiochian Orthodox routinely commune in each other’s parishes, and there are several other cases where EO priests have communicated OOs; most but not all OO priests will communicate EOs. Edit: I thought you and bwallac were talking about EO-OO relations.
That's fine. I think most smart EO's and OO's recognize that the split was unfortunate and a lot more than theology was a play. I was actually however referring to OO Anglican relations which I believe has been a very positive area of late. In truth however I suspect most Anglicans have no real idea that there is an OO Church as against an EO Church, and tend to regard anything east of Rome as being ineffable.
Indeed so, and this is actually fortunate for preserving the Anglicans in terms of keeping the traditionalists in; Rome for most is unpalettable and the East is a mystery. The unfortunate fact is that a disproportionate number of converts to Orthodoxy are disgruntled Anglicans. I would rather Orthodoxy convert the SDAs, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on, which it has also done, very successfully, and have traditional Anglicans focus on regaining control of Anglican churches, and then accomplshing the communion that was first proposed by the Non Jurors in the 18th century, and which later prohably would have happened in the US if talks involving St. Tikhon of Moscow and St. Rafael Hawaheeny (who had become partially disillusioned by discovering the existence of low church Anglicans, and wrote an encyclical to that end, but was starting to return to the table, as evidenced by a subsequent directive that members of the Antiochian diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church attend Episcopal churches if out of range of an EO parish). Then the Russian Revolution happened, Patriarch Tikhon was recalled to Moscow and made the first Patriarch since the 17th century, and was subsequently arrested by the Soviets, and also the EP decided to expand itself in the US, resulting in a division of what was predominantly ROC territory, and this was a bad thing. Also, because of concerns that the Soviets would misdirect foreign parishes, St. Tikhon directed that all churches outside Russia operate independently of Russia, which resulted in some becoming ROCOR, some becoming the OCA (including the Alaskan church), some joining the EP in Europe (for example, the Russian Orthodox in Britain under Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, memory eternal, were under the EP, but are now under the MP), and in the late 1930s, a group of parishes in the Northeastern US decided to rejoin the MP under Patriarch Sergius. All these groups hated each other, and the Antiochians rejoined their own Patriarchate, so discussions of communion were impossible. But since then, ROCOR reunited with the MP and is now an autonomous part of it, and very good relations have been built up between the MP, the OCA, the Antiochians, and the four smaller churches in the US (the Serbians, Romanians, Bulgarians and Georgians). Relations are very bad with the EP, but alas, they are shrinking and closing parishes in the US, owing to excessive ethnocentricism in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, unlike the other churches mentioned. So in the US, there exists a unified group of EO churches that could be talked to, but first the Episcopal Church must be repaired somehow or ACNA or another jurisdiction would have to attempt communion without it, which would be unfortunate, and also increase the chances of assimilation. We do not need another tiny Western Rite Vicarate, but a vibrant organic Western Orthodoxy, which only Anglicanism has ever had entirely (and possibly, some Lutherans and a few others, and also the Hussite church; Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague are now venerated as saints and hieromartyrs in the Czech-Slovak Orthodox Church). With the Oriental Orthodox, it is much easier because most Oriental Orthodox, except two of the competing jurisdictions in India, actually like each other. And the Anglican Communion, it may surprise you to know, is in communion with the other Oriental Orthodox church in India, the one not in competition with the other two, the Malankara Independent Syrian Church or Thoyizoor, which is in communion with the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, a member of the Anglican Communion and itself probably more thoroughly Anglican than either the Church of South India or the Church of North India, as it was established by Anglican missionaries in league with a disgruntled Orthodox bishop, and did not experience the integration of most other Protestant churches in India with it (which has caused some degree of controversy I have heard...I myself can’t imagine how the CSI was able to get the Baptists to join, even allowing for their continued practice of believers’ baptism, but that is another topic). But the Anglican Communion is in communion (albeit indirectly) with an Oriental Orthodox church! This fact makes me extremely happy. Alas, Thoyizoor is not in communion with any other OO church, as far as I know, but the situation is fluid; prior to the 1960s only the Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox had regular contact with each other. The Armenians and Syriacs (in the Levant, Mesopotamia and India) must have seemed impossibly remote, except for those monks assigned to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (where a portion of the terrritory allocated to the Armenians is subdivided between the Copts and Ethiopians, and the Syriacs have an altar in a small chapel elsewhere in Armenian territory...you may or may not be aware of the Status Quo imposed by the Turks to ensure peaceful coexistence between the Greeks, Armenians and Latins (Roman Catholic Fransiscans) at the Holy Sepulchre.
By the way, to clarify on this post, the ACNA has to move past having female priests for communion to be possible, because the Eastern Orthodox (or the OOs, or traditional Anglicans for that matter; I believe my Anglican badge owing to the male gender in the Ordinal would preclude me from supporting female clergy even if I wanted to, which I do not) would never accept that; conversely, if too small an Anglican church attempts to enter into communion, they run the risk of being dismissively invited to become part of the Antiochian or ROCOR Western Rite, with the codescending and only recently adopted view that Anglican orders are invalid. If, on the other hand, ACNA can remove female priestesses, that would be good, but the ultimate goal, in the US and every country, has to be for us to take back control of the incumbent Anglican church, by any means neccessary. For in every English speaking country, except Scotland, one will find in every major city two great cathedrals, one Roman Catholic and one Anglican. And it is imperative we ensure these Anglican Cathedrals are bastions of Orthodoxy, because to the extent Rome had been improving, for example, under Pope Benedict XVI, it is now regressing under the intolerable misrule of the Heresiarch Francis Bergoglio (who also from an Anglican perspective is further disagreeable due to his strong irredentist sentiment concerning the South Atlantic). In some countries like England and Australia, we are blessed that some of these cathedrals do represent bastions of Orthodoxy, including but not limited to those of Chichester and Sydney. Elsewhere, in Scotland and Ireland, for example, the situation is grim. At the moment, there still remain traditional Anglicans in the Episcopal Church, but they are disappearing, owing to liberal control of most of the seminaries (Nashotah House is cited as a possible exception). I also worry about traditionals being threatened by increasingly strident liberals, for example, I am concerned that Fr. Byran Owens took down his blog Creedal Christian; I haven’t spoken with him yet and it might well be that he has been too busy to update it in recent years, but I would not be surprised if at least some traditional Episcopalian clergy have been threatened. And when a priest is dependent on the church for the wellbeing of his family and for his pension, particularly an older priest nearing retirement, unlikely to be able to get a job in another church, and perhaps in decreasing health, a condition that does affect the traditional demographic in TEC, this is a problem.
I think the ACNA should forget about the Episcopal Church. We should realize that we are the new church in the US and should seek to act that way and then swoop in to reap the property when the Episcopal Church crashes and burns
The problem is, they won’t sell to you. Now, they will sell to other churches, so a deal with another denomination to buy up Episcopal churches as a proxy for ACNA as they close might work, but it would require much subterfuge. But the Episcopal Church needs must be fixed, because it is spreading errors; it is malfunctioning. We traditional Anglicans have a moral obligation to seize control of it so as to stop the problem. Because eventually, ECUSA congregations will stabilize; we are starting to see this with the United Church of Christ, which is more liberal, after the largest membership collapse of any mainline church, numbers are recovering in parishes like First Congregational in Los Angeles, and meanwhile the Faithful and Welcoming and other confessional, traditionalist groups in the UCC are in poor health. The Unitarian Universalists, the most liberal church, are growing, even in their congregations like King’s Chapel which are ostensibly Christian. The solution is, without abandoning the ACNA and other traditional Anglican groups, to take advantage of the extremely relaxed rules on membership in TEC, entering via one of the remaining traditional parishes and then fanning out, operating in a coordinated manner to reinforce both the traditional dioceses and the vestries of traditional parishes, and to seek to take over at least one liberal diocese. There is a silver lining to the black cloud of the $40 million Katherine Jefferts-Schiorri spent on litigation during her disastrous tenure as Presiding Bishop, and that is, if the Traditionalists take over, the liberals are stuck, or else loose their property. Of course, a lot of newer Episcopal parish churches are rather ugly, and many of the more beautiful ones have already been sold, and some, like the former Episcopal church in Chico, CA, are in the hands of traditional Anglicans. But it is the cathedrals we really want. Building replacements would be fiendishly expensive, and the old ones would be transformed into houses of indoctrination in heresy, if we just surrender TEC to the liberal element. I am, to reiterate, not calling for ACNA or the other churches to be abandoned, but for a new strategy of confidential dual membership to facilitate the theological harmonization of TEC with the ACNA. Except to the extent that female priests must be abolished. In this one respect the ACNA must improve.
Yes. New proxy organizations have to be established. I have heard of Episcopalian churches whom their bishop would rather sell to a mosque, than to a fellow ACNA congregation.
At the ACNA church I go to there population is highly under 50 and most under 40. Us younger people outnumber the old people. That is hope for the future.
Sound like religious discrimination, which is illegal and could be prosecuted both criminally and civilly.