Vee Have Vays of Making you Choose
7 May 2008 - 3 אייר 5768 by Huw
Here’s what the Romans are are telling Anglicans this week (as opposed to a couple of years ago when Anglicans were not really a Church):
Ultimately, it is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong? Does it belong more to the Churches of the first millennium – Catholic and Orthodox – or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century?
I like that - “First Millennium” as if the churches of the first 1,000 years were so uniform as to be called “all one church”.
We need to get over this fetish we have with “early church”. All we have is “church now”. And the Pope will be lign in drerd un bakn beygl before real Anglicans give up their freedom from his despotism.
We’re not a real church anyway so why should he care?
“Freedom from his despotism” Echoes of the “Deformation” as Dr Johnson called it :)
Never forget the short-lived part of the Great Litany … the petition that the Lord deliver the congregants from “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all of his detestable enormities.” I think it stayed in the BCP only from 1549 to 1558.
Lee
Brian - you hit the nail on the head. I still think the reformation was a good thing: I question if the increasingly enforced conformity and hierarchical lockstep (in the East and the West) of the 1000 years from Nicea to Wittenberg was a good thing. And I wonder if the “great schism” and the Reformation were not the hammer of the Holy Spirit shattering a near-satanic ossification of God’s people.
Not that much bad hasn’t come of the Reformation as well: we are humans and we will mess anything up.
If we could only learn to recognise each other as Christians, “corporate unity” would be revealed as unimportant. Rome could lead the way by saying “Oh, hell, ok, you’re a church too.”
Lee: I LOVED the detestable enormities line. A very Orthodox complaint against the Roman Vicar.
Sorry but I tend to agree with Dr Johnson’s sentiments about all things Reformation. Woeful mistake.
I figured you did. ’sokay. As I keep saying of Women Clergy: If it is of the Holy Spirit it will last. In the mean time, God will sort it all out.
Indeed :)
Eamon Duffy’s book which you have in your future reading makes a very cogent argument as to why the Reformation was a pretty bad idea.