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A
Unique Church, Catholic An
"I commend you because you remember me in
everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you".
(1 Cor 11:2)
Discovering
our identity by examining our past and exploring our present traditions can be
difficult for Anglicans. Of all the denominations we are perhaps the most
diverse. Our Church contains Christians more radical than many protestant
denominations, and others more Catholic than most Roman Catholics. Some
say that this is our special gift to the worldwide church, to hold together all
the different ways of worshipping God in one body of Christians. Its
origins lay deep in our history. During the Reformation in England, our
ancestors in the faith made a conscious decision not to wipe away the good
things of the past, nor to ignore the good things of the Reformation. So
we find ourselves today a church both Catholic and Reformed.
On the one hand
we are a church possessing the Catholic tradition and continuity from the
ancient church, and our Catholic tradition and continuity includes the belief in
the real presence of Christ in the blessed sacrament; the order of the
episcopacy, the apostolic succession, and the priesthood, including the power of
priestly absolution. We possess various institutions belonging to Catholic
Christendom like monastic orders for men and women.
But our
Anglican tradition has another aspect as well. We are a church which has
been through the Reformation, and values many experiences derived from the
Reformation, for instance the open bible: great importance is attached to the
authority of the holy Scriptures, and to personal conviction and conversion
through the work of the Holy Spirit.
As if this were not enough diversity, Anglicans have also always placed a high
value on scholarship and learning. We have been eager to explore the new
insights which an intelligent reflection on Scripture and history can offer.
This desire to think is sometimes called 'liberalism'.
It is the glory
of the Anglican church that at the Reformation she repudiated neither the
ancient structure of Catholicism, nor the new and freer movement. Upon the
ancient structure - the creeds, the canon, the hierarchy, the sacraments - she
retained her hold while she opened her arms to the new learning, the new appeal
to Scripture, the freedom of historical criticism and the duty of private
judgment.
So we are a Church full of ‘living stones’-rock solid in
traditions, but open to new developments. We are a Church, which perhaps
more than any other, lives in the creative tensions between Catholicism and
Protestantism, tradition and innovation. Spend some time thinking about
your parish, either alone or with some friends. Try to identify where is
it placed in these tensions; what is Catholic, what protestant; what traditions
do you retain, where have you 'opened your arms to the new learning'?
Acknowledgements:
Text adapted from Saint
Mary's Church, Battersea (this
material no longer online)
Image from
the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland