The Beached Whale
An Empathetic Lament
by Patrick Henry Reardon
The August edition of The Episcopalian, the semi-official paper of the Episcopal Church, U.S., was largely news concerning the General Convention in Detroit and the Lambeth Synod. To many a devout Episcopalian it was awfully depressing stuff about the ordination of sodomites, the alteration of Trinitarian doctrine, AIDS in the Church, a new Committee on the Status of Women to “maintain advocacy for women’s ministries and monitor women’s participation in the Church,” and, perhaps saddest of all, the publicized willingness of Anglo-Catholic bishops to celebrate Eucharistic and other sorts of fellowship with notorious heretics. News of this kind has long been standard fare in The Episcopalian.
In the two central pages of that paper the new bishop of Venezuela, Onell A. Soto, devotes an article to the old theme “The Anglican Communion: What binds us together?” Meekly, of course, and with a charming sense of reserve, the bishop argues that Anglican unity has something to do with being “inheritors of the apostolic Church and bearers of the catholic faith.”
Oh really, Your Grace, spare us. A little respect for reality, please. Anglicans themselves know better. The folks in the pews have heard too many of their bishops and priests question or deny the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the historicity of the Resurrection, the virginal conception and miracles of our Lord, and the permanent validity of this or that component of the Decalogue. Dissenting groups like Episcopalians United, the Evangelical Catholic Mission, and the Prayerbook Society have been fairly bellowing their anxiety about even the survival of the catholic faith within Anglicanism.
The question posed is not, however, “Do Anglicans generally profess the catholic faith?” but “Is it the catholic faith that is holding the Anglican communion together?” Now that is a different matter.
Whatever glue deserves the credit for effecting the present and perhaps uncertain cohesion of Anglicanism, one would be very hard pressed to exhibit that it is anything so massive, so solid and definite as the catholic and apostolic faith. Awesome adjectives are these, appealing to the patrimony of the New Testament and the Ecumenical Councils. Whatever the achievements of contemporary Anglicanism at its official levels, an enhanced reverence of the authority for Holy Scripture and a devoted maintenance of Nicene and Chalcedonian doctrines seem not to be conspicuous among them.
One needs to remember that the Anglican communion is really a modest enterprise, an unambitious and free confederation of national and regional provinces, each enjoying absolute autonomy and acknowledging no central or general authority. Its health requires genuinely polite behavior and a sense of deference. Its survival exacts from all constituent parties a mutual respect and mammoth reserve, a stable adherence to shared assumptions, and the energetic reluctance to rush things.
Quite other were the arm-twisting and power plays at Detroit and Lambeth this past summer. At the latter, for example, over forty American bishops refused to offer the Holy Eucharist, by way of protest that England has no female priests. The Body and Blood of our Lord was made a political football.
Without a unified idea of the theological nature of its ordained ministry, lacking a clear and final authority for its teaching, incapable of closing the simplest doctrinal or ethical question, powerless to warn the erring or to discipline the recalcitrant, a quarry to every preying fad, the victim of whatever exegetical sleight of hand happens to be in vogue, and now for over a decade unable to recognize the validity of its sacraments across national borders, or even from parish to parish, the Anglican communion seems to many observers a sort of beached whale, a lost creature much to be pitied but terribly hard to help. To bewildered but compassionate non-Anglicans staring at this wreckage the only compelling Bible verse may be: “Despise not the Edomite, for he is thy brother.”
Few Christians, outside of the rather unique little world of The Episcopalian, are likely to salute Anglicanism today as the obvious heir to that Church which produced the New Testament and the Creeds. The morning after Archbishop Runcie’s major speech at Lambeth, an eminent Orthodox scholar, Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamos, responded that “a church which is not able to speak with one mouth is not a true image of the Body of Christ.” In more insouciant tones, but pretty much to the same effect, the Anglican bishop of Colorado, William Frey, quipped several times recently that Anglicanism has become so vague and undefined that no person could be really sure that he was not, by inadvertence, an Anglican.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on protestant from the online archives
20.4—May 2007
A Short & Surprising History of Protestantism & Contraception by Allan C. Carlson
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
The Critical History Before, During & After Martin Luther by James Hitchcock
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
