On the new ACNA's Party Divisions

CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters features a senior devil called Screwtape writing to his nephew, a junior devil named Wormwood, giving him advice on how to entrap a human called “the Patient.” In my reading I noticed again this passage (from letter XVI) as relevant today as 67 years ago when first published:

I warned you before that if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better. And it isn’t the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’, in any form which would hold water for five minutes.

And all the purely indifferent things-candles and clothes and what not-are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men’s minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials-namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples.

You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the “low” churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his “high” brother should be moved to irreverence, and the “high” one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his “low” brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility,

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

If you've never read The Screwtape Letters, I highly advise it. There are reading guides aplenty, and a Sunday School discussion group would be excellent. This book will give you excellent insight into the ways the EVIL ONE uses our religious impulses against us, even in the true religion of Christianity.

The mainline denominations flagged and failed under the weight of making party distinctions the sine qua non of ordination - while ignoring whether the candidate for ordination was actually a Christian. Dogmas like the physical resurrection of the Christ, the Triune Godhead, and original sin could be thrown under the bus so long as you held to something sounding like a distinctive of your denomination.

So the Anglicans let in all sorts of poppycock in the name of the Oxford Movement (which also re-introduced plenty of fine practices). Just harp on the tactile succession of bishops and the place of the church as steering society, and you're in! You don't have to actually believe the faith of the apostles...just get in line and touch somebody who touched somebody who touched somebody that might have believed the witness of the Apostles and carried on that deposit. You'll be qualified to teach with apostolic authority (even if you teach contrary to their doctrine) and you may get to touch some special people yourself (when you aren't lapsing into alcohol abuse). Do enough of this, and you get to be the presiding bishop-ess and teach people about a new divinity known as mother jesus!

The Reformed allowed universalism to creep into their midst through an appropriation of God's sovereignty in the salvation of humanity. As long as you held that it was God who made the decision, you could attribute to him whatever decision you wished - ignoring Jesus' warning that not many will enter into eternal felicity or trod that narrow road. And of course the desire for a highly-educated clergy meant that often times the pastor could outwit the congregation into thinking that Church has been wrong about all sorts of things...as long as s/he footnoted enough and threw enough jargon at them. You may even get to start changing language about God, once you've skewed the whole concept of language in your favor.

Lutherans turned their confessionally robust Christ into a zeitgeist infused prophet by virtue of the kenotic theory. Once Christ is no longer Lord, you needn't reverence or obey him...that's "law" and not grace. And so you end up knowing God through a defanged Jesus, and suddenly God is no longer the Most Holy, Undivided, and Consubstantial Trinity, but a being of your own making...maybe even a Goddess! The resultant antinomianism speaks for itself.

Are we noticing a pattern that all of these wrong turns, mis-steps (which is another translation of the Greek word the New Testament uses for TRESPASSES and TRANSGRESSIONS) lead to the same place? Abandoning God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ for some strange goddess! Has the church - the new Israel - still not learned the lessons about dancing around the asherah (Ashtaroth / Astarte) poles?

All this is to say that if we are to serve Christ faithfully, and not simply seek to be bound to a party-line, then we must recover the fullness of the Catholic Orthodox Faith that has been shared by all Christians - especially as seen in the Apostles, Niceno-Constanipolitan, and Athanasian Creeds.

My Report on the FiF-NA Missionary Diocese of All Saints

At the recent FiF-NA assembly, I was called upon to act as recording and reporting clerk for the sub-group meeting to discuss the new diocese in formation, now known as the Missionary Diocese of All Saints. Below is my report as given to the assembly on Friday morning.

The consensus of the meeting was that the name - Missionary Diocese of All Saints - aptly sums up our understanding of our calling.

We are to be missionary: overhead structures will be light. There isn't concern for building an extensive diocesan staff or headquarters. Rather, all funds and energy will be channeled into reaching the world for Christ with the unchanging truth of the catholic faith. We wish to move forward, in faith, instead of back into the bureaucratic nightmares and top-heavy structures of TEC.

We are a diocese: a Eucharistic community of clergy and laity gathered around a bishop. The bishop is to be the servus servorum Dei - servant of the servants of God. He sees his calling to be a Father to the Fathers, especially in shepherding the families of the clergy. The diocesan will be just as concerned about the spiritual life and growth of the priests as he is about the numerical and programming growth of the parish. It will be a true communio sanctorum.

We are there for All Saints: the diocese collaborates in its mission with the saints of God in ACNA, and especially with the dioceses who share our concern for integrity of sacramental orders and catholic mission. We seek to embody and pass on the catholic tradition that we have received from the saints who went before us - adding nothing, neither taking anything away from the faith once delivered. And we do this because we are convinced that this is the chief way in which Christ has chosen to sanctify his bride - washing them in the word so that we all become saints of the Lord.

The Missionary Diocese of All Saints seeks to be a truly catholic community - according to the whole church, working in the whole USA, for the wholeness of the Anglican witness to the good news in Jesus Christ.

And we need your help. We've already received startup funds, and we're likely to need more. But we also need you as saints to come to our aid with what Benedict described as ora et labora - the prayerful and practical.

Prayer: nothing we do can be effective if it is not covered in prayer. Please covenant to pray for the unity of the whole church, and the usefulness of the Missionary Diocese in specific. We've already seen what a church looks like that tries to minister on its own power and wisdom.

Practical: We also need your expertise - those areas in which you are well practiced. There are canons to write, postulants to pursue, and ministry to be done. Without your expertise in these areas, we will be forced to make our own wheels - and that's not catholic. We wish to receive from your hand the good things that God has shown you so that we may carry them forth in our missionary enterprise, for the perfecting of all saints.