Company Men Who Work Iniquity
Samuel L. Edwards on Lessons from the Battle of Accokeek
It is marvelous, though it is not much fun, to have opponents who keep making my case for me: I have been telling people for years that the principal object of our adversaries in the ecclesiastical wars is the acquisition of power, and they just keep proving me right. The principal symbols for power are property— “the kingdoms of the earth”—and money—“the glory of them”—and we know who offers them, and to whom, and what his answer is, and that it must also be our answer.
I have been in the middle of a test case, with significance for all those in similar situations. In mid-December of 2000, the vestry of Christ Church, Accokeek, Maryland, called me to be its rector following a search of more than two years. It is a small parish in rural Maryland, but part of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, D.C. Following the retirement of Bishop Ronald Haines, the “bishop pro tem” is Jane Holmes Dixon.
At the end of the canonically defined period of 30 days in which the bishop must raise any objections to the call, Dr. Dixon had raised no objections, and the vestry and I entered into a binding civil contract. Afterwards, on March 6, 2001, Dr. Dixon informed me that she would not approve the call. Being advised that she was acting outside the canons, I came anyway and took up my duties as rector in late March.
After unsuccessfully attempting to eject me in late May, she set up a competing congregation in my parish and on June 24 filed a federal lawsuit against me and the vestry. It is worth remembering that, in efforts by corrupt religious establishments to get their way, the use of secular magistrates is nothing new: Consult John 19, or refer to the accounts of any number of Paul’s scrapes with the religious and civil authorities of his day.
After hearing arguments in August, the court ruled against us on October 29 and ordered me to vacate the property and the position immediately. We appealed to the Federal Circuit Court, and I moved to temporary quarters in late November. The appeal was argued before a three-judge panel in late January, and a decision is pending at this writing.
The Conflict
While this matter is being fought out on legal grounds, it represents a genuine conflict between two different views of central theological matters. On the one hand, there is Jane Dixon’s revisionist approach to ecclesiology and the doctrine of revelation. In an article published in the diocese’s official newspaper in January she dealt with both.
Ecclesiologically, she subscribes to the modernist misreading of the sixteenth-century Anglican divine Richard Hooker on Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, saying that “Hooker did not ascribe primacy to one over the others, nor do most Anglicans/Episcopalians today.” We, on the other hand, believe as Hooker himself did (and all Anglicans until very recently), that Scripture has the priority and the supremacy, and that reason and antiquity are its servants, not its vice-regents.
As to revelation, she thinks that “most Anglicans agree that God reveals God’s self completely in Jesus of Nazareth. The debate in the Church is that there are those who accept that God continues to reveal God’s self in the world and those who do not accept the idea of ongoing revelation.” Dr. Dixon’s actions (including her claim to Episcopal office) place her squarely in the former group, while we affirm that the revelation of God himself in Jesus Christ was, is, and remains definitive and complete.
Our situation in Accokeek is a microcosm of the larger situation—the contest between truth and power— as it has developed not only in the Episcopal Church and in the first-world portion of the official Anglican Communion, but in all the mainline churches of the West. I would like to reflect on the dynamics and significance of what has been going on in my parish over the last few months.
Samuel L. Edwards (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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