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Once Removed
S. M. Hutchens on Sectarian Endurance & Women's Ordination
Not long ago, Touchstone received for possible review a book of positive reflections on GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, established in 2008 as "a global family of authentic Anglicans standing together to retain and restore the Bible to the heart of the Anglican Communion" and working to "guard and proclaim the unchanging, transforming Gospel" against "moral compromise, doctrinal error and the collapse of biblical witness" in parts of the Anglican world. What Christian of Touchstonian temper could possibly quarrel with such a praiseworthy reason for existence?
One of the considerations GAFCON found it necessary to place to the side for the formation of its fellowship, however, was a large part of the disagreement upon which the whole struggle against communion-breaking innovation in modern Anglicanism was founded: women's ordination. The Conference is dominated by—and can make its claim to represent the majority of Anglicans only because of—its African bishops, who despite their doctrinal and moral conservatism have for the most part no objection to it. In this matter at least GAFCON joins the provinces whose apostasies it was formed to oppose.
This circumstance makes a book that praises GAFCON for its orthodoxy while, in the fashion of the Conference itself, placing women's ordination to the side, difficult to review with enthusiasm, for it seems we have here a good modern reflection of certain of the churches the Lord himself reviewed ambivalently in the first few chapters of the Apocalypse—"I know your virtues and praise you for them, but have this against you. . . ."
Gift of Perception or Expression of Another Faith?
In this GAFCON is far from alone, for the ordination of women to the presbyterial office (the biblical term "presbyter" is used here to include the priest of the catholic traditions with the pastor and ministerial elder among Protestants) is a church-historical novelty that in many places has shown itself able to survive the presence of conservative temperament, loyalty to the Creed, adherence to traditional ethics, and church upheavals in the wake of defections such as those of which the GAFCON documents complain. In a sense, it can be seen as rising triumphant o'er the fray as the one great gift of perception the egalitarian enlightenment has given a historically anaesthetized Church.
Against this Touchstone has taken a stand numerous times as representing a fellowship that does not think the Church got it wrong in finding itself established as a patriarchal institution that reflects the life of the Holy Trinity, in which equality in essence does not in any way oppose hierarchy in persons, in which hierarchy the Father is the arche, the font of divinity, the Everlasting Principal, and First in the Articles of the Creed, and by which the sexual division into male and female is not adventitious, but carries a cosmic meaning taught in the Bible, recapitulated in Tradition, intuited rightly by the historic Church, and expressed in its male presidencies. If this is correct, the appearance of women presbyters is a psycho-spiritually profound, symbolic denial of an eternal Fact, the expression of another religion altogether.
And yet, we cannot deny that assemblies where this has happened enjoy sufferance and blessing from the Lord that includes good and godly women in the presbyterial office, for they still bear the marks of his wisdom, truth, and mercy, as did the Asian churches that were given time to repent before their light was removed. We say this standing in witness of churches where this removal appears already to have happened, whose light has become darkness, and where women's ordination is a fundamental and constituent part of a wholesale rebellion against divine order in doctrine and ethics. For finer detail, see James Altena's remarkable essay later in this issue.
The Journey Back
What women's ordination has done in churches—Lutheran, Reformed, and Evangelical, for example—where such ordinations are a recent departure from historical practice and where there is still a real devotion to Nicene orthodoxy—is in effect to confect a new sect or sub-sect a further step removed from catholic Christianity. It will eventually have to be abandoned if such sects wish to undertake a journey back to a historically defensible consensus on what has been believed by all Christians in all times and places and that bears any sort of ecumenical promise—if, that is, women's ordination is not in fact what its champions believe it to be: a fresh and commanding wind of the Spirit, a new enlightenment following a long and universal history of error and misunderstanding of the true and egalitarian character of the gospel and its ministry.
Such sects have shown themselves to be remarkably durable, lasting sometimes hundreds of years, but what cannot endure in the end is what J. W. Nevin identified as their invariable profession of strict loyalty to the Bible and anything that can credibly pass as Apostolic Tradition. Abandonment of the sectarian mind, once it has become fixed as the key to heaven and the only true arbiter of the gospel, becomes so unsafe to its people that the sect -becomes fixed in incorrigibility, and will not leave its place in the world by repentance and correction, but only by the natural death to which all human institutions are subject. In the case of churches, this normally entails loss of institutional vigor through increasing disinterest in its original reason for being, while scapegoats are sought to blame for the crises of decline.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on ministry from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena
more from the online archives
24.5—Sept/Oct 2011
on Wondering or Wandering Through College Education by Anthony Esolen
33.2—March/April 2020
Christian Pro-Family Governments?
Old & New Lessons from Europe by Allan C. Carlson
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