Denomination, Abomination

by Bruce Ford

If the Episcopal Church is a "denomination," it does not matter whether people leave to join other "denominations."

But thank God, we are not a denomination. As theologian John Macquarrie wrote in the 1960s, "Anglicanism has never considered itself to be a sect or denomination originating in the sixteenth century. It continues without a break the Ecclesia Anglicana founded by St Augustine thirteen centuries and more ago, though nowadays that branch of the Church has spread far beyond the borders of England. Our present revered leader, Arthur Michael Ramsey, is reckoned the one hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury, in direct succession to Augustine himself (Ed note: Rowan Williams is the 104th)

"It is often claimed that Anglicanism has no special doctrines of its own and simply follows the universal teaching of the Church. When one considers the nature of the English Reformation, one see that there is strong support for this claim. In England there was no single dominant figure, such as Luther or Calvin, who might impress upon the Church his own theological idiosyncrasies."

We have never regarded the Thirty-nine Articles in the same way that Calvinists or Lutherans have regarded their respective Confessions. When in the 1979 Prayer Book the Articles were relegated to an appendix containing "historical documents," no one raised an eyebrow. Anglicans have for centuries regarded them as nothing more.

The American Anglican Council seems intent on turning us into a "denomination" by imposing confessional norms beyond the Catholic norms to which we already subscribe.

I do not know how to assess conflicting reports about whether ECUSA is shrinking. I would be sorry to learn that it is shrinking as rapidly as some claim because I believe that, for all its defects, ECUSA represents the healthiest manifestation of Catholic Christianity in the US, and I would be sorry to learn that large numbers of people were turning their backs on it to join "denominations" or to embrace Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

But even if they were, I would not necessarily blame ECUSA. I would want, of course, to know why. Often the quest for certainty about everything (which God does not offer us) leads people to embrace imagined biblical literalism, imagined papal authority, or imagined immunity to change. These fantasies are all grounded in dishonesty, dishonesty of a sort that I would never wish to see ECUSA embrace, no matter how many members it lost.

[COVENANT, Number 17, June 2004]

Bruce Ford is a librarian, Newark Public Library, NJ, and a member of the Pratt Institute faculty. As composer, writer, and editor, he has contributed widely to the church's service music. He is a vestryman and former senior warden, Grace Church, Newark.