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  Orthodoxy in perilous times
 
    

What Really Ails the Anglican Church in Canada

GG.K. Chesterton wrote, “people have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There is never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It is sanity and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” (1)

There is much that appears to the casual observer to be madness occurring in the Anglican Church of Canada (“ACC”) as evidenced by recent front-page headlines and editorials in the nation's newspapers. Surreptitious changes of locks supervised by a Victoria Bishop and his CEO are followed by court orders enjoining him from doing so. Bemusement is expressed as to why Anglicans are fighting in court over what are perceived as trivial issues of dogma related to matters of sexuality and control of properties, when larger issues of poverty and disease seem relegated to the back burner. The public's imagination is captured but for all the wrong reasons.

The rector's Christmas Eve sermon in an Anglican parish we attended for a time on Vancouver Island is revealing of what lies at the heart of the conflict between orthodox and progressive Anglicans. This priest told his flock (emphasis his) “this is a night of strangeness. Savour your unfathomable strangeness. Experience your complexity and improbability.”

He went on to say “we live in a time of crippling certainties. Warring polarized factions who know they are right and everyone else is wrong. The greatest threat to civility and ultimately to civilization, is an excess of certitude.” How can you be so sure, seemed the obvious question to ask him?

In a meeting this same rector admitted he was not convinced of the divinity of Christ, he did not believe in the Atonement, he did not believe Jesus was the “truth the way and the life”. He told me he sympathized with and had no answer for those who concluded Christ could not have come to earth with the intention of dying for our sins on the cross, since after all any God who would sentence his son to such a fate would be guilty of cosmic child abuse. He opined that only His being caught up in a volatile political situation in Palestine caused Christ's untimely death.

My wife's and my experience led us to conclude that holding orthodox beliefs in the ACC in these times is highly dangerous if one dares raise one's head above the parapet of political correctness. We were forced from the parish on trumped up harassment charges because we had the temerity to question the rector about his understanding of scripture and we urged consideration of such revolutionary changes as putting bibles in the pews and creating and encouraging the growth of small bible study groups. We later learned that the diocese had warned the parish priest to be wary of us because we came from an orthodox parish.

There is no place in most ACC congregations for living out the kind of unity T.S. Eliot wrote about when he said, “Christendom should be one … but within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas - for it is only by the struggle against constantly appearing false ideas that the truth is enlarged and clarified, and in the conflict with heresy that orthodoxy is developed to meet the needs of the time.”

As Flannery O'Connor wrote, “the very notion of God's existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean that God ceases to exist---the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” The Christian message of our sinfulness and of our dependence for salvation on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is a hard message and one that has ceased to be proclaimed in too many of our churches.

The progressive liberal message is that God is love. Thus we must love one another and not judge one another, leaving that only to God. Many modern progressive Anglicans have forgotten that there are in fact two Great Commandments (Matt.22: 30-51). Love of God is first and foremost and the second "is like unto it" but it is second. As eminent Anglican theologian J.I. Packer has written, love of God must be the first thing throughout our lives, and the other gods the world throws up for us such as money, work, fame, sex, power, pleasure, good causes, must not be allowed to replace the Love of God.

The ACC has concluded that “the old order where spiritual control had as its final source and sanction the doctrine of grace” (2), is to be replaced with a new order. In this new paradigm “limitless choice and uninhibited self expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as Nature, that we are our own creations.” (3)

This new order has spawned a movement that has convinced the majority of Anglicans in Canada that the blessing of same sex unions is a justice issue and not a spiritual one. The leadership of the church has lost sight of the fact that at the individual level, justice should limit desires that are in themselves insatiable and impose upon them the law of measure. These church leaders have failed to see that the social justice movement arose because individuals lost their inner strength.

W.G Sebald wrote “we take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious” (4). Over the past 25 years or more theological schools have triggered such slight inner adjustments in the hearts and minds of those who became licensed as priests in the Anglican Church.

The result is a humanly irremediable division in the ACC between those orthodox Anglicans who wish to embrace the historical tenets of their faith as recognized by the overwhelming majority of Anglicans worldwide, and the real breakaway group which is the majority of Canadian Anglicans who wish to radically transform the faith from one based on a divine Christ, to one based on justice and love as represented by Christ the uber-man.

This split is not over the same sex blessing issue, which is only a symptom of a much deeper malaise that has gripped our church and our culture. Orthodox Anglicans in Canada are miscast as being fixated on sexual issues and the retention of properties, while ignoring more important issues facing the world.

Anglicanism is exploding throughout the poorest parts of the world as the gospel message of a divine saviour whose love was so great that he died for us, is embraced. Anglicans in Africa and South America and the Third World are the ones sending out missionaries to assist orthodox Canadian Anglicans as they seek to escape the wreckage of the ACC as it abandons belief in the authority of scripture and the divinity of Christ.

What more important issue for Christians can there be than to seek to be reconciled to God? Christians believe God exists independent from man. The goal of the leaders of the ACC is to seek to reconcile God to man, to fit God into our culture. Through breakthroughs in science and enhanced human enlightenment they believe ours is a much more advanced culture from the one in which Jesus lived. And so they have come to believe that God needs man in order to work out His plans for the perfection of man here on earth.

In 1942 in Warsaw, Jerszy Andrzejewski wrote to Czeslaw Milosz - “that which is independent of man is inseparably connected to his earthly fate and cannot perish, and although sometimes it shines with great radiance and other times fades into the faintest shadow of light, it exists at all times, even despite human will, and always carries with it the hope of renewal.” (5)

We live in a time of shadows. All that Anglicans who remain faithful to those imperishable promises of Christ ask is that they be allowed to remain in their places of spiritual worship, and to be in fellowship and communion with their brothers and sisters throughout the world who share the beliefs upon which Anglicanism is founded and defined.

Anglican bishops like Michael Ingham and James Cowan may believe locksmiths are the new centurions who will guard the sepulchral church buildings from which worshippers have been evicted and against whose doors the stones of human authority have been rolled. Followers of perilous orthodoxy are strengthened by the vision of astonished centurions kneeling before an open tomb. It provides us with an irresistible hope.


Ben Buan
Mill Bay, Vancouver Island, BC


(1) Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
(2) Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt
(3) First Things June/July 2004, David B. Hart
(4) Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
(5) Legends of Modernity – Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland - Czeslaw Milosz



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