If we define ‘Confession’ as merely speaking words without conviction, and is a card-carrying member of church through the ceremonies of baptism and confirmation, then everyone who says the creeds is a Christian.
But ‘Confession’ is much more than the above, it is coming into agreement with God...about the veracity of His Word, the unchanging pure righteousness, trustworthiness and justness of God’s Character ...AND about the outcome (separation from God), the evil, harm and destructiveness of sin.  Confession is also owning and admitting our sin and taking responsibility for the consequences of our sin.  Confession is also owning and living Christ and His Cross, His crucifixion is our crucifixion and sacrifice of the passions and desires of our fallen nature/flesh.
Confession is much more than a short 3 minute prayer within the liturgy...I am afraid these truths about Confession have not been emphasized in the Anglican expression of Christianity, especially in proud and prosperous TEC.

"A trumpet with an uncertain sound...”
Nathaniel Hawthorn forsaw all this in his delightful “Celestial Railroad,” an alegory based on an update of “Pilgrims Progress”: when passiing the cave previously occupied by Pagan and Pope two modernist transendentalist came out and shouted at them with words so vague and not understandable that they knew not wheter to rejoice or despair.

"Catholicity” has two important elements, general application or acceptance; universality with both Church Triumphant and Church Militant. Cruciform if you will.

There is no way an acceptance of an innovation by a very small but extremely wealthy sect that disregards centuries of Christian though and majority of the whole can in any way be called catholic. Period.

Matt,

You make a good point.  What is it about the folks at ACI?  They seem to go on at length with modern versions of the “how many angels can dance on the head of pin” argument.  Is it because they appear to have no personal risk in the current situation; i.e., inhibition/deposition, loss of income & health insurance are not a factor for them?  I like good exegetical writing as well as anybody, but their musings seem to be overly cerebral and oddly detached for what has become a bare knuckled situation.  What say you?

Hi Daniel,

Well, I’m not sure I would get into what motivates them other than to say I think they do desperately care about the Communion and that, in itself, is admirable.

I suppose that there is a detached sense about much that they write and it is off-putting to many. The sense of detachment is strange because they have been in the trenches before even if they are not now and they do know what it is like.

They seem to assume the church is of a certain nature and argue on that basis but the problem is that they have not, I don’t think, established their premise and so their conclusions are not persuasive.

Dr. Turner has posted a very topical article on the Anglican Communion Institute web site entitled:
The Presiding Bishop of TEC:  Does she know what she is doing?
It is the first thing of consequence from ACI on the topics discussed here in quite a wwhile.

Cross-posting from an Iker thread:

A serious question on the nature of “catholicity” in our Church, directed especially to priests and religious.  When I read statements like this:

“We might not agree on every position or action, but it’s that diversity that has attracted us to remain Episcopalians,” [Walter Cabe] said. “That’s an important witness.

I wonder whether we are not listening to the nature of our calling as a Church. 

Terms such as “inclusiveness” and “diversity” and the ring in my ears as a modern argot.  But what of the word from our Creeds:  “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church?” The true Church must be universal and open to all people.  Not of, course, to all doctrines, or all practices, but certainly to all people.

Is the current quest a corruption of our basic nature as the Body of Christ?  or is it a genuine reminder of a neglected principle of our faith in action?

Let me accept Philip Turner’s typology of confessionalist-conciliarist-pluralist and then draw attention to how this plays out in terms of Anglican Communion politics. Dr. Turner makes the following caveat.

There is little evidence that the covenant design group actually contains any real confessionalists, to use my term of art. Rather, it is more likely that the group is made up of a combination of pluralists and conciliarists (to coin another term). There is a real danger that some kind of compromise will be struck between these parties that ends up subverting the purpose of the covenant as such—a purpose I have argued entails mutual subjection in Christ of a sort consistent with WR.

I think it fair to mention that more than one confessionalist was nominated to be a member of the Covenant Design Group. I for one, along with Bp. Zac Niringiye, was nominated by Abp. Henry Orombi in a letter of 1 November 2006, who noted that “he is familiar with the Anglican scene; he has also lived in the context of the Global South context; and he is a sound biblical scholar.” Not to toot my own horn, but I had also been serving on the Global South Covenant Drafting Group and had presented earlier that year a paper on The Global Anglican Communion: A Blueprint.

Well, I did not make it onto the A team, but I was made a “correspondent,” along with Bill Atwood and others. In the end, there was no representative from Uganda, and as Philip Turner notes, no “confessionalist.” In my role as correspondent, I have made several contributions to strengthen the Covenant, e.g., Evangelical Commentary on the Anglican Communion Covenant, all of which have been totally ignored.

So Philip Turner is certainly justified in his concern about the trajectory of the Covenant process. I truly hope that a coherent theological Covenant will some day help focus the mission of the Anglican Communion. But I strongly suspect that that will happen only at some later time. For the present, it’s on to GAFCon.

Let me now turn for a moment to Matt’s main case, that a catholic understanding does not preclude, indeed encourages, clear judgements and discipline on certain matters of plain biblical teaching. Philip Turner says the following:

The authors of WR anchor their understanding of communion in Ephesians and First Corinthians wherein the koinonia of Christians within the Body of Christ is understood as an expression of the Trinitarian life of God and as an aspect of the larger plan of God to unite all things in heaven and earth in his Son.

I am more than happy to affirm Paul’s exalted vision of the Church found in these Epistles. But this is the same Paul who goes on to say this:

Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11

and

Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person-- such a man is an idolater-- has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be partners with them. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.
Ephesians 5:1-8

.
Is Dr. Turner saying that St. Paul himself would have to hold his horses in racing from ecclesiology to church discipline? Or as Matt has said elsewhere, is it not the case that Paul’s willingness to deal with the specifics of Christian behaviour two thousand years ago relieves us of the necessity of retreading the same ground? Matt is right: the case is closed.

Thanks Dr. Noll for making the point so succinctly and well and for the links to your articles. What a different Covenant we might have had had you and Bishop Atwood been included in the design team.

Thank you Matt!

What ever happened to the “faith once delivered”?  In the Lutheran Confessions the authors kept referring back to the church fathers as well as the Scriptures. They insisted that they taught what the Church had always taught, and that Rome was the innovator (along with Geneva).  Whether or not you agree with them, at least they were making the argument from the correct perspective.

It is in no way “catholic” to tolerate a church or province that has officially embraced a soul-destroying behavior condemned plainly by both scripture and the tradition of the church until the “community” comes to a final decision. When a province or church presumes to bless and promote behavior that God condemns and the Church has always forbidden, then that church or province is no longer part of the Church whether the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates, the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Council say so or not.

Really, what part of quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est… do the folk at ACI not understand?  Catholicity. It is a truly terrible thing to waste.

Re the tone of ACI’s missives:  Once someone in an essay has coined not one but two new terms, and also used the phrase “as such,” I quit reading.

As Dr. Noll has pointed out, the Church has not heeded Ephesians 5:1-11.
Contrary to all the unscriptural propaganda, tolerance and inclusivity of repentant sinners is not a recommended practice for church leadership in Scripture.  After reproval and pleas to repent, if they remain unrepentant, they are to be set apart with gentleness, care and humility, love, prayers and weeping according to Matthew 18; II Timothy 2:24-25; Jude 24; Revelation 2:20...and so on throughout all the letters to the churches.

I am beginning to wish, more and more, for an Anglican “pope” elected by an Anglican college of bishops (or even Archbishops).  If the global leader of the Anglican Communion were elected by a conclave of all the bishops every ten years, we wouldn’t have this problem.

Same goes if he was elected by the primates.

We need leadership and authority.

"We need leadership and authority” not nearly enough - we need *accountable* leadership who are *holy* and full of the Holy Spirit, who are *reverently submitted and wholly dedicated to the Truth of Scripture*, who live *holy and humbly*, *speak with courage, conviction and clarity* and have the boldness to and WILL PUNCTUALLY and appropriately *act within Scriptural authority* whose only fear is God and whose first love is Jesus Christ.

Well, I would argue that if the primates and/or bishops (all of them from the whole of the Anglican Communion) elected our communion-wide Primus (or ecumenical archbishop, whatever you want to call him), all those adjectives (and adverbs!) would be taken care of.

It is in no way “catholic” to tolerate a church or province that has officially embraced a soul-destroying behavior condemned plainly by both scripture and the tradition of the church until the “community” comes to a final decision. When a province or church presumes to bless and promote behavior that God condemns and the Church has always forbidden, then that church or province is no longer part of the Church....
When a church or province presumes to violate the plain teaching of God’s Word and established doctrine and refuses to repent, there is little need for “consultation” or study. The only council that is necessary is the council that meets to issue the formal anathema and excommunication. The substance of the matter has already been decided.

This is precisely why the theological anglocatholics—at least the ones who understood what was going on in PEcUSA as a whole—left back in the late 1970s.

It’s very welcome to see a new generation of laity and churchmen, as they confront what PEcUSA has become, to rediscover the proper catholic response to heresy and apostasy—to realize that spiritual schism requires institutional separation, rather than pretending that institutional union can some how paper over or excuse spiritual schism.

The fact is, though, that this principle has been applicable to PEcUSA for decades now—arguably since 1962, and certainly since 1976.

pax,
LP

Matt & Dr. Noll, thank you for the clarity once again.

Dr. Noll (#8 & 9),

Thank you for the links, and for your important testimony.  It’s highly significant that no “confessionalists” like yourself were appointed to the CDG, and even more significant that your input as a “correspondent” has been completely ignored.

That is very telling and revealing, but hardly surprising.  Perhaps, you were even mercifully spared a lot of frustration and misery.  For it seems all too clear that Cantaur and the powers that be in the AC’s current leadership posts have decided to opt for the futile attempt to maintain the outward appearance of unity rather than any genuine unity, which must include real theological coherence.  And that chasing after a mirage of false unity is inherently self-defeating.

In a strange way, in the providence of God, it may have been a very good thing that neither you nor +Bill Atwood or anyone else of your type and stature was appointed.  Among other things, it leaves you free to critique the work of the CDG in a way it would be hard to do as one of its producers.  Or put another way, the complete lack of reflecting the “confessionalist” viewpoint may be a blessing in disguise, helping all of us “confessionalist” types (myself included) to see that the whole process is fatally flawed and doomed to failure.  I suspect it always has been.

David Handy+

Matt+,

I too welcome this clear and forthright post; “Catholics do not dither” indeed.  Here is how I would put it.  “Catholicity” includes TWO complementary aspects.  For while, on the one hand, the “catholic Church” is universal, encompassing people of “every tribe, language, people and nation” (to echo one of our canticles, from Rev. 15), it is no less important that historically, “the catholic church” has always meant the orthodox church, as opposed to all heretical counterfeits.  The catholic faith is the universal and orthodox faith.  It is both, or it is neither.

Any claim to a catholicity worthy of the name must include both aspects, the orthodoxy of the church as well as its universality.  Or put another way, the universality must extend through time as well as through space in the present.

You are absolutely right, Matt.  Faced with blatant heresy, of the obvious sort we are now facing in the western world, genuine catholic Christians don’t dither.  They don’t hem and haw and hesitate.  They bite the bullet and exercise clear and effective discipline, as lovingly as possible but also as firmly as necessary.

David Handy+

To expand on what 22 said, many liberals in the Anglican Communion seem to get Universalist and Catholic mixed up.  The “Catholic Faith” is universal in part because the same faith it applies to everyone.  It is not universal because it incorporates every whim and strange doctrine that anyone might come up with.  That would be univeralism, which is most certainly not Catholic.  I’ve actually heard people say that by including more people in the priesthood (say, for example, non-celebate homosexuals) one making the church more Catholic.

It strengthens our hand to quote passages such as I Cor. 6 in accurate versions. There is pretty certainly no reference anywhere in the New Testament to male prostitutes, whether cultic or commercial, and certainly not here. One must assume that the reason is the same as that for the absence of any censure of the female prostitute: no-one can be asked to repent of a manner of life that one has been sold into. In I Cor. 6 the reference is to consensual relations, and to men who act respectively as receptive and penetrative partners. This is just the same as in the Holiness Code, to which Paul makes a clear back-reference with the compound hebraizing noun ἀρσενοκοίτης.

Acts 15, which in 1996 I interpreted to mean a prohibition of ‘first-order’ or ‘core’ πορνεία/unchastity, is I now believe more likely to refer to ‘second-order’ or ‘fringe’ sexual offences, such as marriage within the Jewish prohibited degrees. It remains the case that first-order offences are banned a fortiori.

Here is more detail.

[24]Priscilla Turner. In your post you link to “The Malakoi and Arsenokoitai...”
What is the source or cite for that article? I know I have read it before, but forget its origin. Thanks

Tom, the article originates with me. It is an excerpt with transliteration from an updated and expanded on-line edition of my 1997 article P.D.M. Turner, ‘Biblical Texts Relevant to Homosexual Orientation and Practice,’ CSR 26.4, 1997, 435-445. This original printed text seems to have been seminal in some sense: it was cited three times (once without a proper grasp of Greek grammar!) by Rob Gagnon in his big book, notably as HIS source for the conviction that Jesus could not in fact have “said nothing” about this whole matter. My central point was and is the teaching and practice of the Lord Jesus as they must have been both logically and historically.

I have had to expand the original printed article, because I was allowed far too few words, and no bibliography at all. Not only have I needed to elaborate the argument in the face of misunderstandings, but my own understanding has deepened at certain points.

The expanded article, plus several other bits of writing, may be found on my little website under Spirit&Sex;. To get to this document, please cut out all the semi-colons which the system mysteriously inserts.

So sorry: this address is still wrong even minus the extraneous semi-colons. Try pasting http://nwnet.org/~prisca/Spirit&Sex;.htm . Though that too has an extra semi-colon, floated in from the depths of cyberspace.

Pope Benedict XVI is meeting with the ABC tomorrow, Monday, May 5.  This is definitely an occasion for prayer.

This is a very interesting article and well worth the read:
Catholic Herald
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/articles/a0000273.shtml

I am not sure if this is the best place to post this. I apologize if it is not. I just found a web site if any one is interested that lists the churches that have left TEC. It is update.
http://tecarrivalsdepartures.blogspot.com/

I’m not sure how up to date it is. In Georgia, I believe a church in Thomasville has also left? And isn’t there an Anglican church in Moultrie now? But I may be misinformed - my main source of diocesan news is, alas, the diocese.

The site was updated April 21st, 2008. I can’t find any information on those churches you mentioned as departing or splitting. Do you know when they might have left?

So there is no need to dither. If, in the face of damning heresy, orthodox provinces, dioceses and parishes were to wait about for certain hapless structural entities to come to a common mind before acting, as Dr. Turner suggests, they would only endanger souls and destroy the witness of the Church.

The conciliarists are trying to follow canonical procedures and maintan some semblance of proper order. More important, they are trying to ensure that any church they enter will be more structurally sound than the one they are leaving. That this would be seen as “dithering” demonstrates the sin of impatience that dominates the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism. The “I-want-it-now” attitude preached as the birthright of all Americans by Madison Avenue has found a secure home here.

In rushing for the exits, the confessional types are not even coming to a common mind among themselves, let alone with the conciliarists. If they do not come to agreement before bolting, they will certainly never come to agreement after the fact. The inevitable result will be not the reform of the Anglican Communion, but its disintegration.

Moreover, the present actions of the confessionalists, combined with the emerging institutions they are creating, reflect an implicit ecclesiology that can never be reconciled with a conciliar/catholic ecclesiology. Whether intentionally or not, the Evangelicals are creating a church (or, more realistically, churches) incompatible with the catholic ecclesiology of traditional Anglicanism. For those who have no particular attachment to the Anglican tradition and would just as soon attend the local protestant mega-church, that’s not a problem. But for those who, like the ACI, are committed to remaining Anglican, and therefore catholic, these new post-Anglican protestant denominations are not an acceptable alternative to TEC.

In the end, this is just another expression of the usual protestant/catholic divide in Anglicanism. Protestants are willing to sacrifice ecclesiology for morality, and catholics are not.

Hmmm. The italics should have encompassed only the word ‘churches’ inside the parentheses - not the last six lines of the post.

Sorry Roland, the “conciliarists” as you call them are dithering because they cannot seem to grasp that there is no Church where heresy is officially embraced and the Word of God is not rightly and truly proclaimed. There is no need for patience and conversation with unrepentant and defiant heretics. Compromising and conversing with those whose teachings lead souls to hell does nothing for ecclesial structure.

martin4 (#30,32),

Thanks for posting this list of “arrivals” (new Anglican church plants) and “departures” from TEC.  It’s a clever idea.  But the list is plainly incomplete.  For instance, one of the “arrivals” is my home church now, Eternity Anglican, in Richmond, VA, which truly began from scratch, in Nov. 2006.  It’s affiliated with Uganda.

And among the departures should be Holy Apostles Anglican, Brandon, MS (outside Jackson) which left TEC in the fall of 2004.  It is affiliated with Kenya (led by my friends, John+ and Ruth Urban+).

Sorry for the off-topic detour.

David Handy+

David, at the Arrivals and Departures blog there’s a comment capability to make additions and corrections. Some already have been made. I’d invite you (and any others) to add your comments at this fine resource to bring it up to snuff.
Br_er Rabbit

Thank you #36 and #37. I was trying to gather the information myself and after finding 85, stumbled on to this site. I thought in the light of TEC’s reaction to our insignificant minority, I wanted to know how insignificant we really are. My next step is to look at the numbers.
One of the things that ++Venable said when he was in Fort Worth and I am sure in other areas ... Is that what we need in leadership. If we had, I believe that TEC would have been kicked out and another Anglican province would have emerged. TEC would be happy because then they could do whatever they want. The orthodox would be happy because they would no longer have to deal with 815! It might lead to a closer relationship with the Catholic faith (I am not a pope fan). We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church....

Thanks, Br_er Rabbit (#37),

I hadn’t noticed the comment feature.  I went back and made an update.  But rather than clutter up this thread with further additions and correctionsk, I hope SF starts a whole thread deoted to this topic.  It would be very useful to have a complete, up-to-date list.  Especially, if it included other valuable info like average ASA (Sun. attendance), and contact info for the priest or some lay leader at each church.

Thanks again, martin4, for calling our attention to this resource.

David Handy+