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...I find it helpful to realize that the brand of 'Anglicanism' that we find in some of the places where churches that are in Communion with Canterbury are thriving (e.g. Nigeria) is not really 'Anglican' in any classic sense, but amounts to a kind of mutation of that norm brought about by theological inertia and ignorance. Thus in the overall Anglican context, it represents a departure from our tradition. So, while most of us in ECUSA (and many also in the Church of England and elsewhere) have allowed ourselves to be led by the Spirit to a deeper understanding of the essential message of Jesus and the rich equivocalness of scripture, many of the newer 'Anglican' churches of Africa and Asia are stuck in a 19th century paradigm that, while it is no doubt sincerely embraced and expressed, has the effect of trivializing both the Bible and the notion of "God" as such in the context of contemporary Anglicanism These flaws are not likely to be recognized by many adherents of these newer churches since the cultures to which they belong also tend to embrace various forms of fundamentalism that in turn rely on primitive notions of reality. Among these fundamentalisms is biblical (and, presumably Koranic) literalicity, a mythology that has been largely abandoned by mainstream Anglicanism. As a result of this inadvertent fixation with the theology of the past, the 'Anglicans' in question have distanced themselves from classic (and I would say authentic) Anglicanism, which consists in essential part of rising above any myth of orthodoxy that eliminates the rigorous necessity of living with ambiguity, distortion and contradiction, as Jesus did. For them there is no Via Media, only a fixation with "what has always been believed". Yet it is the Via Media now, more than ever, that represents the essence of the Anglican ethos. What this suggests is that they are the ones who are out of step, for whatever reason, maintaining what is in some instances a form of denominationalism that is 'Anglican' in name only. That being so, is there any harm in their being allowed to separate themselves, at least administratively, from classic Anglicanism, with its essential untidiness? ...this is not the only time in the history of the Church that this has happened. Could it not be argued, in fact, that the Church of England itself was born as an expression (admittedly amid the kind of flawed circumstances in which we Anglicans seem to specialize!) of resistance to an ecclesiastical hegemony not unlike that of Archbishop Akinola? The Reverend F. Hugh Magee |