Thanksgiving ... for "primitive faith, order, and worship"

Each Thanksgiving Day, laudable Practice gives thanks for an aspect of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. In past years I have given thanks for The Episcopal Church in general, for Anglican poetry and piety in the American Republic, and for William White.

Underlying this annual practice is my experience of worshipping in TEC congregations during family holidays the United States, the ministry and witness of friends in US Episcopalianism and Anglicanism, and the hope for a renewed, generous Anglican orthodoxy in the United States.

Today I give thanks for PECUSA's original vocation, here wonderfully summarised in an 1814 sermon by John Henry Hobart, to embody "the primitive faith, order, and worship" it inherited from the Church that is "the glory of the reformed Churches". And, yes, it does sound deeply Laudian.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The particular Origin of our Church - or the particular Christian communion from which she received that apostolic faith, order, and worship, which constitute her a legitimate member of the body of Christ - and that communion, we are proud to boast, is the Church of England.

... in boasting of our origin from the Church of England, he views her merely as a spiritual society, possessing the faith, the order, and the worship which were the characteristics and the glory of the primitive ages of the Church.

We boast then of our origin from a Church, which, in renouncing the despotic claims of the Church of Rome, tempered, with such singular felicity, zeal and ardour, with prudence and moderation, as to reject the errors, the superstitions, and corruptions of that Church; while she retained the primitive faith, order, and worship which those errors, superstitions, and corruptions had debased and disfigured, but with which they were so intimately mingled as to render the separation a work of extreme difficulty and imminent hazard. We boast of our origin from a Church which, in reference to the soundness of her principles, the talents and piety of her clergy, and her efforts in the cause of the reformation, still maintains the proud title which at the first she acquired, of being the glory of the reformed Churches - a Church which Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley, enriched by their blood; in whose cause Chillingworth, and Hooker, and Horsley, exerted the strongest powers of intellect, and employed the most varied and profound erudition; which Barrow, and Tillotson, and Porteus, honoured by their eloquence; in which Andrews, and Taylor, and Horne, displayed the lustre of a fervent piety ...

From such a Church we boast our origin. Church of our fathers! thou hast our veneration, our affection, our prayers - "Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces" ...

My brethren, we honour ourselves, when we discharge the debt of gratitude, by acknowledging, in the words of the preface to the Book of Common Prayer, that, "to the Church of England, the Protestant Episcopal Church in these States is indebted, under God for her first foundation, and a long continuance of nursing care and protection".

And while we discharge the debt of gratitude, it is our duty to show the sincerity of the tribute, by fidelity to the principles of the Church from which we are descended ... maintain[ing] primitive faith, order, and worship.

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders. With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter. The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition). Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical). Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition. A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics". Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics. What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition. Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

'Whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops': Jeremy Taylor, 'Episcopacy Asserted', and Lutheran orders

Amidst the bitter controversies over episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms during the early 1640s, controversies which had become war in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642, Jeremy Taylor wrote his Laudian defence of episcopal order, The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained . He proposed in this work that the non-episcopal Reformed churches could have had episcopally-ordered clergy: Those good people might have had order from the bishops of England or the Lutheran churches, if at least they thought our churches catholic and Christian. Leaving aside the reality that, for example, French Protestants would have been placed in an invidious political position if they had done as Taylor proposed, it is the reference to "the Lutheran churches" which is significant. To begin with, a large portion of the Lutheran churches - those in the German lands - were governed by a system of superintendency. It is almost inconceivable that Taylor was not aware of th...

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