Ecclesiology and Apostasy

I wish I held the answers in my hand. I don't. Ecclesiology has always been a difficulty for Anglicans because I suppose it was thought that one just substituted the monarch for the Pope. But it hasn't worked that way (quite) since the Seventeenth Century.

Interestingly, the subject has become grist for two very different mills: the liberals (discussed here) and the quasi-conservatives (found here). Just as in philosophy, when you try and address one question, you quickly discover yourself entangled in twenty-seven tangential ones.

Also, just as in modern bureaucracies, some people think that the right structures and the right policies will (auto-magically) produce the correct result. I suspect it is the other way around and I find (perhaps incorrectly) echoes of this in the following, from Gavin Ashenden. That is to say, whatever the structural deficits, the reasoning must proceed backwards, from the correct conclusion, to the structures that will support and nourish that conclusion.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

The Church of England is an episcopal Church. Episcopacy is not just one form of Church structure or Government over another. It has claims to be rooted in faithfulness to the patterns the Apostles laid down, and the teaching the Apostles bequeathed.

It was until a very short time ago, male, heterosexual and faithful. Feminism and equality have changed it to promote and include female, homosexual and faithless.

This is more than a shift of culture. It is the surrendering of Scripture and the diminishment of the authority of the Holy Spirit to the claims of the Zeitgeist, and a wholly different spirit; an opposing spirit in fact.

This is not then a structural deficit only. It is an abandonment and an apostasy.

Too late for tears.

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