On 'Are Episcopalians Anglican?' and other questions.
For background, see the recent piece in Living Church - https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2024/01/23/is-the-episcopal-church-anglican/ - and the thoughtful response by Ben Crosby, https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2024/01/23/is-the-episcopal-church-anglican/
Perhaps another way to start thinking about this would be to go into a PCUSA church and ask, ‘in what sense is this Presbyterian?’ or walking into an ELCA church and ask ‘is this Lutheran?’. I am not sure that the answers would vary significantly in comparison to TEC and Anglicanism. Mainline liberalism’s selective regard for tradition is well known and not especially new. It is not immediately apparent that the Episcopal church is special here. But we can actually go much further than this with the problem of tradition. If I go a mile into the next town there is a large church in a non-descript office building called ‘Renew’. It prominently uses a symbol that sort of looks like a recycling sign. What is this? Would it at all be recognizable in the context of past traditions? Or I could offer my own experience growing up in a baptist church in the evangelical sub-culture of the 80s and 90s - engagement with the Christian tradition was mostly non-existent or negative - and I don’t think this was untypical. When I asked where baptists came from I would get various stories but no one really seemed to know or care. The Bible was important but subsequent Christian history was mostly irrelevant. Why?
I was fascinated with history from a young age. I was so interested that when I got to college I actually switched majors from engineering to history after a couple years, and to medieval history at that. This was back before worries about employability had destroyed enrollment in the humanities. Still the dominant response that people gave, when I conveyed this to them, was to the effect of ‘why? Isn’t history boring? I guess I am glad that some people still study that’, with that being the entirety of the human past. The effect was made worse when they were told that you were studying the middle ages. The response was often not just ignorance but also prejudice.
One could spend a lot of time trying to parse out exactly why people have the attitudes and types of (lack of) engagement with the past that they do. Is it a human thing, an American thing, a modern civilization thing? No doubt there are some good arguments for each. The experience of studying the middle ages was particularly instructive. The very notion of the ‘middle ages’ is something of a romantic invention, and just as enlightened moderns might project back on the catholic millennium of Europe an image of darkness and superstition, so romantic antagonists of modernity might invert this with an image of a more authentic and beautiful form of life. Both images have some truth and falsity to them, of course, but one thing that became apparent in the course of studying all of this was that modern westerners had a fairly antagonistic relationship to their past and they tended to doubt its value. Moreover this is different than the relationship of others to their respective pasts, whether it be the Chinese to the past of China, Indians to the past of India, etc. Why is this? Why was Romanticism able to generate so much frisson from inverting this antagonistic relationship with the past? Might the development of history as a critical discipline in the the protestant west be related to it? Might the general myopia in regards to the past also be related?
Again, this is I think a complicated question. A historical question. But is hard to avoid the conclusion that the transition from the middle ages to modernity and also the modern secular West’s antagonistic relationship towards its medieval catholic past, has something to do with what we now call ‘the Reformation’ and its numerous after-affects. This is something certain Roman Catholic apologists have been arguing in various forms for a long time and in inverted form also various Protestant apologists, with the inversion being that modernity is an unalloyed good and modern forgetting is not such a bad thing since it is progress that really counts after all. If it seems harder to sustain such belief in progress nowadays (pick your favorite crisis issue), perhaps this does something to explain mainline decline.
The simplest form of an explanation, I think, looks something like this - that the only really durable glue that protestants could find to hold themselves together in the heat of all the upheavals that shook early modern Europe was a negative one, namely anti-Catholicism. Confessionalism was tried again and again but it didn’t really work. It produced as much argument as agreement. Anti-Catholicism worked. But it was a negative unity, a unity of the least common denominator, iconoclastic in character. And it cut protestants off from their catholic past which they could no longer truly acknowledge. And secular modernity largely retains all these characteristics even if it no longer retains the faith that originally formed them.
Does this have anything to do with Anglicanism and the Episcopal church? Actually I think it does. Like Ben Crosby I have grown fond of the Anglican tradition and studying its past has become a hobby of mine. I could agree with some sort of recovery of the formularies though I do not think, like him, that that is the central issue. Unlike Ben reviving magisterial protestantism and confessionalism is not a goal I have. There were some things the reformers were right about and also some things they got wrong. Rather it is that the Anglican story is itself a sort of counter-story to the story about modernity I told above. Anglicanism is a product of both the reformation and its catholic past, of course, but it is also the product of late 16th century and early 17th century intra-protestant struggles that forged a different, and much more constructive relationship to that catholic past than did protestantism writ large. The conformist protestantism of that period ended up having to defend aspects of the catholic past and its relation to it against the challenge of more radical protestant currents. That also ended up nuancing their anti-catholicism and prompted the recovery of aspects of the patristic legacy. The via media can mean many things but one them is this more positive, if still critical, relationship to the catholic past of protestantism. It is a relationship to our past that is worth retaining and recovering, valuable not just for Anglicans and Episcopalians but for protestantism as a whole. It is encouraging to me to see so many others online who are interested in doing that, whether in the Episcopal church or outside it.