Thinking Anglicans

Opinion – 16 January 2019

Jonathan Clatworthy Château Clâteau Can evangelicals evangelise?

Richard Peers Quodcumque – Serious Christianity Candlemas: for schools and homes
The Bible in a Year?: Evangelicals, lectionaries and apps

Stephen Parsons Surviving Church ‘Concerned Anglicans’ in Oxford- who are they speaking for?
and Concerned Anglicans in Oxford. Are they all Anglican?

Trevor Thurston-Smith The Pensive Pilgrim Saving the Best Wine Until Last

Laudable Practice Giving Thanks for Elizabeth I

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Tim Chesterton
5 years ago

Laudable Practice says: ‘Contrary to contemporary Anglican embarrassment concerning the Royal Supremacy, it remains a cornerstone of the Anglican experience’.

As an Anglican who isn’t a member of the Church of England and whose church doesn’t have the Royal Supremacy as part of its governing structure, I find that a very odd thing to say. Are we somehow less Anglican than the C of E?

crs
crs
Reply to  Tim Chesterton
5 years ago

I think for me the question is, just how so, on what theological grounds TODAY, and in the light of an ‘Anglican experience’ throughout a communion which vastly overshadows the present CofE? I have asked this question many times here. Is it, ’cause that is the way it is’ even as 460 years later things have changed dramatically, even within the CofE itself? What is the theological grounding for the ‘cornerstone’? If it was a particular figural reading of the OT, (monarch, prophet, priest) does that still hold today? and by whom? And who is embarrassed and why is that… Read more »

T Pott
T Pott
Reply to  crs
5 years ago

The Coronation Anthem was “Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King”. In the same way Elizabeth was anointed with holy oil and crowned. It was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. It was not Zadok the priest or Nathan the prophet who built the Temple in Jerusalem, it was Solomon the King. Article 37 tells us the Queen should rule all estates and degrees committed to her charge by God whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal. This is our belief. This is the faith of our Church. This is only partly a… Read more »

crs
crs
Reply to  T Pott
5 years ago

I want to thak you sincerely for your effort to respond to my question. As it happens, figural reading is an area of my expertise (see Figured Out, 2001 or most recently, Elder Testament, 2018). I simply wondered if anyone in the CofE (perhaps other than yourself…) could rise to defend this particular pre-modern conception. “We want our church back.” But is your “we” a wish or a bona fide reality? I hope you will continue to seek to understand a coherent “catholic” alternative. In the Holy Roman Empire we had an experiment with authority shared amongst civil rulers and… Read more »

Kate
Kate
5 years ago

It seems to me that Laudable Practice has written one side of a balloon debate. Some balance would have been good. I also see the settlement very much as a father and daughter achievement rather than Elizabeth singularly. Henry and Elizabeth did much. Their joint love of music shines through the ages. Still, ultimately, they took a hierarchical organisation with an elected leader and replaced it with a hereditary leader – themselves and their heirs. Although papal conclaves have a very limited and elite franchise it is hard not to see the move to a hereditary monarch as regressive. The… Read more »

peterpi - Peter Gross
peterpi - Peter Gross
Reply to  Kate
5 years ago

“Ultimately Anglicanism was designed with the needs of the Crown and the English concept of nobility front and centre.” Was there ever any doubt of that? I once had explained to me in great detail by a TEC (USA) priest why the CofE was not founded solely because King Henry VIII wanted (was obsessed about) a male heir, and got into a tiff with the pope and (indirectly) the king of Spain, but that there was a long history of England’s church wanting to go in a different direction, only to be stifled by the popes. That may well be,… Read more »

Tim Chesterton
Reply to  peterpi - Peter Gross
5 years ago

I’m a Canadian Anglican. We pray for the Queen, and when she comes to Canada she attends one of our churches, but she has no position in the governing structure of our church. Not even a ceremonial one.

crs
crs
Reply to  Tim Chesterton
5 years ago

So it is your view that an anointed monarch creates the catholic character of anglicanism, indeed even in Canada, as that alternative to papal and Roman Catholic claims, going back to the 16th century argumentation, such that absent it, the ACoC would be a liberal protestant national religious gathering.

crs
crs
Reply to  crs
5 years ago

Rod, I have not made my views known on the character of catholic anglicanism so much as asked regularly what the traditional claims have been and still are, especially within the Church of England itself. What are these today, and how have historical arguments fared given so many adaptations? I am not clear what anglicans actually believe on this score. You make efforts at changing the subject (“God save the Queen” says next to nothing about the role of an anointed monarch as constituting something essential for anglicanism’s continuity as a catholic entity). Do you believe the anointing of a… Read more »

crs
crs
Reply to  crs
5 years ago

Thanks for all the jargon. So the anointing of the Head of the Church of England had nothing to do with catholicity but was about power politics, and this is a good thing. Enjoy your “meta-narratives.”

Tim Chesterton
Reply to  Tim Chesterton
5 years ago

Hah, good one. ‘Queen and governor’ of Canada, though, not of the Anglican Church of Canada.

crs
crs
Reply to  peterpi - Peter Gross
5 years ago

Martin Luther altered the language of the creed from “katholische” to “christliche” because he believed the church catholic was in exile. He did not argue that there was a German Catholic true church, subsisting within inherited national structures. In part because he believed in a truly Catholic Church and prayed for its return to Christian Truth. If it would do this, he would rejoice and believe in the Holy Spirit’s reforming victory — much as many modern Lutherans believe it has done (Robert Wilken, Rheinhart Huetter, and on it goes) — and become again a happy Catholic. The anglican claim… Read more »

crs
crs
5 years ago

Are there any members of the Church of England presently prepared to argue in favor of a divinely anointed monarch, who is head of the Church Catholic in England, and whose coronation effects/creates the catholic character, based in the historic catholic See of Canterbury, of the Church of England? This was the historic claim at the time of the Reformation. It differs in character to the Swiss and German models, which have maintained their continuous protestant life in different ways.

Kate
Kate
Reply to  crs
5 years ago

I am openly anti-hierarchical but the divine appointment of a king of queen has as much claim to validity as the ordination of priests – in my opinion, either both are efficacious or neither is.

crs
crs
Reply to  Kate
5 years ago

Thanks, Kate, but “either both” or “neither is,” is a nice piece of late modernity, but it fails to describes the life-or-death commitments and theology that put all this on what was claimed an alternative Catholic grounding. Let’s not erase historical claims as if they disappear in the face of forgetfulness, ignorance, or “my opinion.” People died at the stake defending claims, on all sides. Is that logic now in a very distant rear-view mirror and of so, what now replaces the logic and grounding. Surely “my opinion” is just a consumerist default.

Is there any other defense?

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