(John Henry) Newman and contemporary Anglicanism.

As the editorial in our January/February issue pointed out, the Holy Father's exhortation Ut Unum Sint (That They May All Be One, 1995) reiterates that the search for unity among Christians is not a luxury but an essential. But how to go about it? As we reported, divisions among our separated brethren have increased, not decreased (Jan-Feb, pp. 18-19). Yet, members of various ecumenical committees, "professional" ecumenists as they might be termed, often make it appear that only a few minor differences prevent Catholics from coming together with our separated Anglican, or United Church, or Lutheran brethren. This is clearly not so.

The author of the following article, a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, shows that the confusion within the Anglican Church on doctrine was pinpointed by John Henry Newman 130 years ago and has now become much worse.

Editors

In a helpfully wise editorial, the editors of Catholic Insight recently suggested (January/February 1998) that Catholics cannot sit back complacently when leaders of major non-Catholic churches espouse heresy, as Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham and United Church Moderator Bill Phipps have recently done. The editorial goes on to argue that if Catholics are indeed full partners in the ecumenical dialogues with both the United and the Anglican churches, then Catholics have a responsibility to point out the true state of affairs. To do anything less is to give tacit approval of what clearly violates the most fundamental creedal and Christological claims of Christianity from its earliest days.

It is my contention in this article that if Catholics are indeed to be in dialogue with these two churches especially, we need to enter that dialogue with our eyes open and our minds fully informed about the state of affairs in these so-called "sister" churches. And that state of affairs is generally sad and pathetic. While Catholics might rightly bemoan the damage done by liberalism in, and dissent from, the Church in the last thirty years, the fact is that old-line Protestant churches have been selling out the store to theological liberalism and moral latitudinarianism for more than a century. A brief examination of the state of the Anglican Church especially will show how this is the case. Our examination will be guided by the theses against liberalism which are outlined in what is quite possibly the definitive treatment of the topic, namely the first appendix to the Apologia Pro Vita Sua of Father (later Cardinal) John Henry Newman.

The Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) is quite simply the greatest work of English letters of the last century. It is a spiritual autobiography which is also one of the most cogent and compelling critiques of political and theological liberalism. What is "liberalism" and how does it affect revealed religion? I have taken only seven of Newman's eighteen trenchant descriptions of the liberal tenets of the Anglicanism of his day, and applied them to our current situation.

1. "No religious tenet is important, unless reason shows it to be so."

This might be called the argument from pragmatism. Anglicans are famous pragmatists, ready to jettison just about anything which does not pass some unspecified test of worldly usefulness. We see it at work most spectacularly in the recent decision to ordain women to the ministerial priesthood, one of three orders in the church secured by the Apostolic Succession which Anglicans claimed to hold in common with the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches.

In deciding to move forward with this decision, Anglicans abandoned the pretense of Catholicity in the theology of the priesthood as well as that of the Church. The Protestant side of the famed via media was triumphant and the Catholic side was thoroughly and finally trounced, for the Three Branch Theory held that any major change in one of the branches had to be acceptable to all three of Canterbury, Constantinople and Rome. The Catholic and Orthodox position on ordaining women was clearly known and irrevocably taught, yet Anglicans went ahead and ordained women.

                             JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Born                   1801
Oxford                 1816
Vicar, St Mary's       1826
Tracts for the Times   1833
Becomes a Catholic     1846
Ordained priest        1847
Apologia pro vita sua  1864
Cardinal               1878
Died                   1890

Moreover, this change in such a fundamental aspect of Christianity as a revealed religion given us by Christ was brought about in a haphazard fashion with so-called provinces acting autonomously, without regard to a wider authority even within the Anglican community. It was adopted first in Hong Kong during the Second World War, then in 1973 in the United States, in Canada in 1976, and, finally, in the Church of England in 1992. This proves Newman's point of human pragmatism undermining revealed religion. Not being able to counter accusations of prima facie sexism launched by the feminists, Anglicans simply capitulated to contemporary politics, abandoning two millennia of Church tradition.

2. "No theological doctrine is anything more than an opinion which happens to be held by bodies of men. Therefore, e.g., no creed, as such, is necessary for salvation."

Anglicanism, today as in 1864, continues to buy into this view. An egregious example of this was the 1996-1997 so-called heresy trial of Bishop Walter Righter in the U.S. Episcopal (Anglican) Church.

Bishop Righter had ordained active homosexuals to the priesthood, knowingly and willingly.

The ruling of the ecclesiastical court was that the Episcopal Church did not have any real doctrine in matters of sexuality - or if it did, such doctrine was nothing more than "an opinion." The robed judicial masters of the court, in one fell swoop, set aside two millennia of constant and unambiguous Christian moral teaching in order to capitulate to the homosexual movement.

Similar departures from tradition have been evident in Anglicanism all through this century, beginning with the 1930 Lambeth Conference's approval of artificial contraception. This was followed by formal approval for abortion (in England in 1965, in Canada in 1967), and the approval of sterilization, divorce and remarriage.

At the Anglican Church of Canada's 1989 General Synod, the suffragan bishop of my then diocese described his fight in the 1960s for approval of divorce and remarriage. The good bishop said: "I didn't want my grandchildren growing up in a church where such an injustice as not being able to get divorced existed." In hindsight or foresight these developments were inevitable given Anglicanism's structure of "dispersed authority," where rebellious and heretical bishops cannot be checked.

3. "It is dishonest in a man to make an act of faith in what he has not had brought home to him by actual proof. Therefore, e.g. the mass of men ought not absolutely to believe in the divine authority of the Bible."

This might be called the argument against trust of any authority - Scriptural or ecclesial - and in favour of the individual. As the contemporary moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre tells us, the inability to distinguish between manipulative and non-manipulative forms of social relations and thus to trust any authority, is at the heart of Western liberalism.

This tenet has especially eroded trust in the authority of Scripture. Various Anglican office holders in this century, including Bishops John Robinson and John Shelby Spong, have openly encouraged this erosion of trust through wildly ungrounded claims about Scripture and the events of Christ. Spong, for example, has put forward the thesis that many of the gospel texts are a fabrication by the early Apostles, and that stories about Mary being a Virgin, or Christ being physically resurrected, are make-believe. These two bishops, with others such as Bishop Jenkins of Durham, England, have fostered a destructive "hermeneutics of suspicion." This approach was supposed to bring the doubting masses flocking back to the church, but instead people have left in droves. The Anglican Church in countries of the northern hemisphere is set to disappear before too long into the next century. After all, why get out of bed on Sunday to hear the same warmed-over agnosticism that you can get on television the other six days of the week?

4. "It is immoral in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive as being congenial to his moral and mental nature. Therefore, e.g., a given individual is not bound to believe in eternal punishment."

The example Newman gives here is uncanny in its prescience. Only recently a commission of the Church of England issued a report which was headlined in at least one Canadian newspaper, as "Hell Makes A Comeback." Apparently, after much deliberation over whether it would offend modern sensibilities, the Church of England decided that, well, yes, after all, it sort of (ahem) did, if you please, believe in something approximating Hell - but if that gives offence, no one is obliged to believe it, especially if it will make him feel uncomfortable or disturb his or her inner peace. In our therapeutic age, anything which disturbs one's inner peace or frightens one's inner child is strictly forbidden.

5. "Christianity is necessarily modified by the growth of civilization, and the exigencies of the times."

This is the principle which has been behind the liturgical chaos which has haunted the churches of the Anglican Communion for the last 30 years. In a misguided attempt to be more "relevant" to modern man, and to demonstrate its capacity to be hip with the times, the Anglican Church has all but abandoned the solemnly beautiful Book of Common Prayer, which is full of Elizabethan cadences and Shakespearean meter and stands with the King James Bible as one of the single greatest achievements in English literature. In its place we have sundry new liturgical handbooks written by committees. These replacements are full of the airy optimism of the "Jesus is my sunbeam" variety - as anthropologically naive as aesthetically nauseating. The irony is that these new liturgies are being foisted on people in an age when there has been a dramatic return in interest in Gregorian chant and other traditional liturgical practices.

6. "No revealed doctrines or precepts may reasonably stand in the way of scientific conclusions."

The Anglican churches have proven themselves spectacularly competent at capitulating to the so-called conclusions of science. The problem is less with the conclusions of the natural sciences than with those of the social sciences and their "bloated eminence," as Neil Postman rightly regards it. For a revealing example of this, look to the way they have responded to the gay lobby and its trumped up "scientific conclusions" about the immutability of the homosexual condition - conclusions which are without scientific verification. Yet Anglicans are yielding to the ideology that the homosexual condition is genetically preconditioned and, therefore, to be accepted.

Here we encounter the ideology of the "tolerant" liberal who insists that anyone who considers homosexuality to be sinful and objectively disordered is bigoted, and homophobic, and, therefore, should not be tolerated!

7. "There is a right of Private Judgment: that is, there is no existing authority on earth competent to interfere with the liberty of individuals in reasoning and judging for themselves about the Bible and its contents, as they severally please. Therefore, e.g., religious establishments requiring subscriptions are Anti-Christian."

"There are rights of conscience such, that every one may lawfully advance a claim to profess and teach what is false and wrong in matters, religious, social, and moral, provided that to his private conscience it seems absolutely true and right. Therefore, e.g., individuals have a right to preach and practise fornication and polygamy.

These two are closely related, and when all is said and done are at the heart of liberalism's triumph in Anglicanism, and indeed in old-line Protestantism generally. It propagates our culture's fallacious notion of freedom as licence, telling people they are free to believe and practise all manner of "truths" from fornication to paganism - and that this is a good thing! Anglicans especially are never so insufferably self-congratulatory as when they pride themselves on being inclusive of a variety of perspectives (except, of course, the one which suggests that certain "truths" should not be included because they are heretical, pagan or foolish).

Anglicans thus allow individuals the widest moral and doctrinal latitude, arguing that people have an actual "right" to believe whatever and however they want--in complete contradiction to our Lord, who said that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). Anglicans thus replace the story of truth with the story of freedom, thereby exchanging "the truth of God for a lie" (Romans 1:24).

Conclusion

What the world needs is not more "liberalism" but a vigorous confrontation with the splendour of truth in all its transforming fullness. At T.S. Eliot put it in his 1930 essay "Thoughts after Lambeth,"

"The best of the younger generation . . . are not seeking a religion that is watered down or robbed of the severity of its demands, but a religion that will . . . give them a sure basis and an ultimate sanction for morals . . . . There is no good in making Christianity easy and pleasant . . . You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions."

Adam J. DeVille is a graduate student in theological ethics at St. Paul's University, Ottawa, where he is writing a thesis on Alasdair MacIntyre.

Editor's Postscript

Last December, the bishops of the Church of England, in a formal response to Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on Christian unity, took issue with the pontiff's view that the teaching authority of the Christian Church is centered in the office of the Bishop of Rome.

Instead, they said, that authority belongs to the whole body of the Church.

"We consider a living teaching authority witnessing to and interpreting the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds to be essential for the authentic proclamation of the gospel to each generation," they wrote in their 22-page document, May They All Be One.

"We believe that this authority belongs to the body of the Church as a whole, and that the discernment of the faith once delivered to the saints is a function of the whole body in which all the faithful in each particular Church have a part to play at every level," the document added.

From the above article, readers will now understand the words "this authority belongs to the body of the Church as a whole." It claims authority for everybody and ends up with authority for nobody.