{"id":11751,"date":"2011-02-07T11:06:13","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T16:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=11751"},"modified":"2011-02-07T11:06:13","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T16:06:13","slug":"the-important-thing-is-unity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/the-important-thing-is-unity\/","title":{"rendered":"The important thing is unity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some interesting observations on ARCIC, the ecumenical gabfest between Anglicans and Catholics from the Catholic side here<\/a> (my bold):<\/p>\n

The trouble with ARCIC always was (as a former Catholic member of it once explained to me) that on the Catholic side of the table you have a body of men (mostly bishops) who represent a more or less coherent view, being members of a Church which has established means of knowing and declaring what it believes. On the Anglican side of the table you have a body of men (and it was only men, on both sides, in those days) the divisions between whom are just fundamental as, and sometimes a lot more fundamental than, those between any one of them and the Catholic representatives they faced: they all represented only themselves<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And they all, Catholics and Anglicans, quite simply belonged to very different kinds of institution. It isn\u2019t just that Catholics and Anglicans believe different doctrines: it\u2019s that there is between them a fundamental difference over their attitude to the entire doctrinal enterprise. I remember very vividly, in my days as an (Anglican) clergy member of the Chelmsford Diocesan Synod, a debate on one of the ARCIC documents followed by a vote on whether to recommend to the General Synod in London that it should be accepted. The document was accepted overwhelmingly. At lunchtime, standing at the bar with a number of clergy, I asked how they had voted; they had all voted affirmatively. I then asked them if they had read the document. None of them had; and most of them, it became clear, had little idea of what it contained. \u201cWell\u201d, I asked, puzzled, \u201cwhy<\/em> did you vote for it, then?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThe point is,\u201d one of them replied, \u201cthe important thing is unity.<\/strong> The RCs are frightfully keen on doctrine. You have to encourage them: so I voted for their document\u201d. There you have it: what the late Mgr Graham Leonard, when he was still an Anglican bishop, once called \u201cthe doctrinal levity of the Church of England\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And there you do have it: the important thing is the illusion<\/em> of unity. The same affliction assails orthodox Anglicans who remain in the Anglican Church of Canada or TEC for the sake of supposed unity – the ACA<\/a>, the ACI<\/a>, the Wycliffe College bunch<\/a> et al.: they are actually sacrificing their principles to an illusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some interesting observations on ARCIC, the ecumenical gabfest between Anglicans and Catholics from the Catholic side here (my bold): The trouble with ARCIC always was (as a former Catholic member of it once explained to me) that on the Catholic … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2030,2045,2240],"class_list":["post-11751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arcic","tag-anglican","tag-arcic","tag-roman-catholicism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}