Anglican Identities: Centrism, Good Order, a different Broadchurch(wo)manship for our time, or Christ the Center and Circumference?

I deprecate anything that tends to harden and emphasize the lines that already mark out the various schools of thought in the Church. . . Antagonisms there must always be in the Church, but organized antagonisms ought . . . to be avoided. . . If you do map out four distinct parties, and name them ritualistic, high, low and broad, I am a good deal in doubt where I properly belong. . . I have never called myself a Broad Churchman, pure and simple, for the reason that there are several features of what is commonly known as Broad Church theology, e.g. the contempt for the dogmatic principles and the unconcern for visible unity in the Church, with which I have no sympathy whatever.
(William Reed Huntington)

For this type of reasoning, I have myself found myself putting together a paradox of labels, to break open each that I might not be pegged by party. I have not joined any particular organizations perceived as partisan or as lobbyists within The Episcopal Church officially, though I am sympathetic to some. I will not and cannot do so because though each offers its own share, I worry that in so doing, I will cut myself off from those who are not loyalists to this or that line. I am simply a baptized member of a parish in a diocese. The only particular organization churchwise that I belong to outside of my parish is a local Benedictine community in which our diversity is held together by practices of silence and prayer; we almost never talk politics, muchless church politics, and our diversity is so held in God that we treat one another quite kindly despite our sometimes uneasiness with one another’s positions or ways of life.

To the surprise of some here, I don’t always agree with Integrity or Claiming the Blessing, nor however, am I comfortable with any number of parties, some of which I deem quite schismatic and even wicked. I am gay, partnered, Christian, Anglican, Episcopalian, creedal, monastic, Benedictine, neo-Platonic, Patristic, Reforming. No single party can contain these contradictions, and rather than locate myself within a single party and cut off myself from the greatest part.

If one must label me, call me a Lenten Anglican, one who recognizes that the heart of Anglican life is that Benedictine want to make all of life an observation of a Holy Lent, and as such is seeking to make of her life a pilgrimage through, with, in, and toward Christ in response to the hospitality, courtesy, and generosity first shown her in God’s self-revelation and self-offering. And that my response is itself complex, not always sugary nice, yet not always blunt or rebuking either, being sinner and saint and seeing not in myself what may constitute the Greater and my End as God works in me his hidden ways and sanctification.

Centrism is Political and a “Side”, if Not a Party

The more I have engaged with those professing “centrism” as homologized with our “via media”, the more I recognize that “centrism” largely reads as a “liberal” to “moderate” Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology on the one hand coupled with a strong centralizing impulse from certain of the Evangelical wing (+Wright for example). The result is a consequent attempt at forging some kind of institutional unity based in a centralized form of governmental unity and structuring coupled with a closing up of theological and practicable diversity in order to hold us together in the midst of crises. The institutions themselves become the good news and God is tightly constrained to prevent further outbreak of the Holy Spirit.

Pastoral and local considerations are to take a backseat to institutional conformity and uniformity in practice and theology, paralyzing the ability of Churches in particular locales and of particular persons to do the work of Christ. The survival of the institution becomes imperative above all other considerations and cannot seem to abide a restructuring that would be top-down and lateral in its contestedness—the traditional Anglican polity with all its incumbent mess. Centrism is itself an extreme side, though I’ve yet to read any centrist acknowledge their own perspective as political muchless a serious break with Anglican polity.

Yet it is quite political: Once one names oneself and one’s perspective “the center” one declares oneself more objective, less partisan, more concerned with the whole, and the rest without having to own one’s own will to power or having pushed Christ quite aside for one's perspective on institutional maintenance. Because our polity is both top-down and sideways, however, others will be happy to point this out for them. Let the contestedness begin.

Centrism in that sense has been an impulse within Anglicanism at least since the Puritans and Oxfordians, but is itself far short of our comprehensive roominess, our pluriform polity, and our painful history, indeed, fails the via media. Centrism just like those on the “two sides” threatens to destroy our roominess and comprehensiveness as signs of our apostolicity and catholicity by imposing a tight, closed up system of institutional bindings as our salvation by holding together the greatest part, even if this or that organ must be pushed aside, pushed down, and pushed out for lack of the freedom of a Christian and the freedom to declare the Good News of Christ not merely and only in word but in deeds that take measure of the whole person.

Yet our roominess and comprehensiveness have historically cast quite a wide net such that we can find quite a rich variance and disagreement within that termed reforming and catholic. Indeed, it is precisely our being able to debate, fight, conflict, within a broad tent of regular worship, within God’s own service of us Sunday by Sunday, that we are a middle way. We make God’s service of us the main thing across our divides, conflicts, party lines.

Our via media is a sum of these conflicts, parties, nations, peoples held in Christ who is more than any of these, not a middle-of-the-road milqe toast moderation or a centralized governance based in consensus, largely meaning those who themselves have power and control the “center” as well as the discourse and direction of the institutions. Indeed, who gets to call themselves “the center” is largely a function of who has institutional power in the present discourse, and is self-defining as it works to cut off all that would destabilize this self-positioning by calling them “two sides”, “extremes”, “five sides”, etc., largely defined with their views on one particular ethical disagreement or how they size up in wanting more centralized or more flexible institutional structures, but in the lateral thrust of Anglican polity, it cannot help but find itself destabilized for there are many eddies and centers in the one Center. And rather than two sides or even five sides, we have a multitude of eddies, streams, and nuances that can only be held together if our eyes are facing East.

The Danger of our Via Media

The danger to the middle way both in Benedictine and Anglican terms (for we are in great part the child of Benedictine practice and evangelization) is a middle-of-the-road moderation or a temptation to centralization to prevent further inquiry, insult, and injury, what Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM would call feminized Christianity (this has nothing to do with men or women by the way, but a stance if you will) that never sails out on a new adventure, takes a risk, steps out on water, faces the stormy seas, rises up to defend those being abused not necessarily in raucousness, but in quiet strength that does not budge but does no disrespect.

The conversation among centrists is largely about institutions, clerical roles, structures, agreement, consensus (among those in control) without acknowledging that it is precisely because of our broken-open structurings that we are in a special position to be bearers of the Good News far and wide that Christ might become incarnate and redemptive and transformative in the widest possible number of cultures and peoples, times and places. Consensus means absolute agreement on a maximal number of matters as determined by those at the center of institutional structures and will end close the wounds and close the doors.

Our institutions become self-serving and inward, concerned about our own good name and survival, about how we hold ourselves together in the midst of crises, missing opportunities to share the Good News and bind up others’ wounds in Jesus’ Name. Centrism reads as crisis management by another name and largely reads as centralization provoked by painful crises which, yes, do threaten to get out of our control, but calls for centralization will themselves only further the divides and may themselves finally lead to schism because the flexibility of our structures has been severely if not fatally compromised for the sake of good order.

Centrism will be the end of our living into God’s Great Commission as Anglican Christians, and very well attenuate God's Great Commandment. That is why again and again I continue to raise the concern that this organized tendency, centrism, rather than the “two sides” is the greater threat to Anglican Christianity when it becomes concerned more with centralization and crisis management rather than building bridges—for this is a charism of those who want to hold us together and no one should ignore this charism or hold this gift in contempt. Indeed, the reconciliatory bent coupled with the honesty of those who vehemently disagree is healthy and something we should all welcome as perhaps the healthiest type of Church we can be in a world filled with Christian bodies who use “nice” and “denial” and “silencing” and "removal" and "disagree without practicable differences" to effectively eliminate the mess of being the Body of Christ in the real world. The failure at flexibility cannot help but lend itself to breakage.

But when centrism becomes wrapped up in its own martyr complex rather than takes up its cross to pray us across the divide, and holds primarily responsible those who feel themselves caught in the minefields because issuized, problematized, and thus dehumanized left, right, and center, indeed conflates our pastoral needs and care with institutional concerns writ-large, it shows itself to be a side all its own willing to use fellow human beings as a means. Centrism is more akin to centralization than to a diverse center, a problematic notion all its own. More akin to Rome and Geneva than to Canterbury as classically Anglican Divine, muchless classically missionary and Benedictine.

Archbishop Williams largely falls into this centrist category and as Fr. William Carroll assesses here and here, to my mind, it is his ecclesiology which carries with it quite a lot of Oxfordian Anglo-Catholic fantasy that makes him dangerous.

++Williams has been brilliant throughout his theological career for pointing to Christ in the persecuted in a way that prevents any of us from responding in kind to our persecutors without ourselves recognizing the possibility that we too might persecute Christ, and yet, ++Williams has been more than willing to offer up queer Christians as the necessary sacrifice to save the Communion if needs be. This sacrificing impulse is the first indication that we are dealing with something less than godly.

The problem is Archbishop Williams, like most centrists, continues to speak from an understanding, however, masked or unrecognized that places our structures and governance and control at the center, would put an end to our mess. Christ almost becomes an afterthought as the crises unfold and the need for order becomes seemingly more pressing, and rather than appeal to the angels in our nature, to a broad spectrum of Anglicans on the ground mostly laity for common mission to reweave our bonds of affection (for I think our Primates are making rather more of themselves when you can almost guarantee that people on the ground are far more varied in their opinions and willing to live and let live and build bridges), he binds us up in Primates’ meetings and committees where egos run high and press releases that cannot be deemed as anything but insulting to queer Christians, to the TEC and ACofC, and subtly to all who are too afeared to disagree at this moment, but who nonetheless would find themselves next on the chopping block (Many are presently in a furor over +Wright’s tone. I can only say, “Welcome!”, now you’re getting a taste of the tone he’s generally reserved for queer Christians until now.)

I write this from observations of both ++Williams’ mealy-mouthed words when responding to hate crimes and persecution of queer persons, and his silence in the face of brutal oppression and calls for persecution and imprisonment at the hands of fellow bishops. In so doing, ++Williams has failed his own theology, and I am grieved, grieved because I like ++Williams, knowing that he is a brilliant thinker, a good man, a fellow Benedictine who has succumbed to the particular weakness of our Benedictine and Anglican spiritualities because he wants to save Communion for the greatest possible part and is willing to sacrifice an entire group of people God is bringing into the Body with gifts without which the Body will fail to thrive. Whether he likes it or not this IS about the persons and gifts of queer Christians in the life of the Church; it IS about our response to the Good News of God reconciling all of the world in Christ. And it IS about holding up a mirror to the rest of the Body.

We cannot save Communion ourselves, though we are valiantly trying to say that we can do exactly that, for our communion and unity are not ours to begin with, but God's gifts to us. By sacrificing anyone, which is not the same thing as someone leaving because they cannot abide any longer differences/disagreements/plurality, the Communion of Christ becomes the unity of Babylon. It's the difference, as MadPriest brilliantly noted, between real and unreal, real suffering and hypochondriasis.

Persecution of human beings, even more of fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, is, however, a chutzpah moment, it’s what Lutherans would call a status confessionis—a grave moment when the Gospel must be proclaimed and held to no matter the consequences. Here I stand, I can do no other! That centrism under such conditions stands to become a stumbling block and a scandal on the world stage willing to sacrifice others to save institutions, however, simply will return us again to looking at ourselves in the mirror. The Gospel will rise out of such a stranglehold in rebuke and repentance and newness of life.

I think it quite telling when I queried self-proclaimed centrist Fr. David at Ayia Iluvatar in his declaration, “This IS My Church!” about what he personally sacrificed, for example, at GC2006, and he was honest enough to say very little, but was quite willing in his writings repeatedly to justify that queer folk sacrifice and be sacrificed without joining us in the low place by offering a sacrifice proportionate for straight Christians to that which he asked of us, and all the while wringing his hands in apologies. No, this is Christ's Church!

Rather than a theology of glory, we need to embrace the theology of the Cross found in our common prayer inheritance. As I wrote: "It is clear that lgbt folks were repeatedly being asked to take up their crosses by others who were unwilling to join them in the cross they recommended to us."

A centrism worthy of reconciliation across division must be willing to move to the low places, move on down a little lower (as a reverse of that African-American Gospel tune), the going out of oneself for another, rather than speak from the center from on high and places of power and authority and institutional concern that is willing to let others bear the cost. Only then can those speaking for a need to continue together be in a place to hold us together because then their positioning is in the wounded Heart of Christ.

Good Order Serves the Gospel not Vice Versa

Being neither a progressive, for I’m too reticent of sanctification muchless our perfection in this life, too cognizant of Sin, and suspicious of any thought that we can build God’s Kingdom in the here and now in such a way that our justice doesn’t also do injustice, nor being a conservative, for I’m nonetheless clear that change as development is traditional, too cognizant of Sin, and suspicious of claims that somehow God has stopped the conversation and isn’t still leading us into all Truth as the tradition unfolds and is carried forth generation by generation, I find common ground with centrists. Indeed, this hesitance and roominess seems bog-standard, what has been called the diverse center, though this term too is problematic, for there is One Center, Jesus Christ.

Centrism seems to be largely concerned with good order. And I am not unsympathetic to their concerns. We humans need order being limited and finite creatures; order provides us with a rule of life or rules of life for focus on Christ. And in our present circumstances there are those who proclaim that the Kingdom has arrived so press on in such a way that we will impose a uniform understanding no matter the cost rather than live with disagreement and there are those who can no longer abide our structures and refuse to agree to disagree and rather than be honest, honorable, and simply leave, wish to destroy our structures no matter the cost. The fears of centrists are very real. The fear of chaos and complete anarchy are not without supporting evidence. But let us be clear, fear is driving our responses, not faith.

Rather than start a movement that builds up all who are willing to stay together across disagreements and differences, centrists are willing to impose an new order that cannot help but lead to further quarreling, hurt feelings, and the sense that we must tear someone down in order to save everything else. As I mentioned to Fr. Knisely, I’m tired of feeling like the Body regularly tears queer people down, and reading blogs of other queer Anglicans, I know I’m not alone in that feeling. I’m sick to death of being tossed about as an issue by the right and left while being sold down the river by the center when I want more than anything to be able to go up to a house of the Lord and give thanks for what Christ is doing in my life and be surrounded with rejoicing rather than lament for my mere presence or greeted with condescension and hostility should I ask to name my blessings and bless God within the context of worship. It’s as if we have a game of chicken in which the Body is quite willing to peck at the already bloodied to finish the job.

Our good order, nor our structures, nor our governing bodies and leadership is the whole, muchless the root of catholicism as the Reformers knew well. The root of catholicism is the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For it of Him and His Liturgy for us that is the Main Thing.

The Gospel is the root of catholicism, and it is proclamation of the gospel upon which the Church rises or falls. Councils have erred. Bishops have gone astray. The Church has at times failed catholicity. We Anglicans have been honest enough to recognize that we make mistakes and because we make mistakes to keep our latitude far and wide and our claims for truth modest lest we lose something of the whole of Christ our Truth, lest from error we might gain greater insight. Lest we put something other than the Gospel forward as good news and be incapable of self-correction.

But in making self-correction, in no wise have we generally been sympathetic to utopian claims. All of the Reformers, both English and Continental, in breaking with institutions and structures and lines of authority found themselves curiously arguing for these same things in terms of good order as chaos in various enthusiasms and revolts broke forth. This is the paradox of the Reformation. Though imperfect themselves, the concern was that good order serve the Gospel, that good order itself always be amendable if it obscures God’s Great Commission, and so a reticence arising from a recognition of the power of Sin though we are now Christ’s reconstituted our institutions. Our institutions and structures and lines of authority have thus been deliberately left broken-open rather than closed off from further reforming so that arguments from episcopal or conciliar authority or from evangelical, apostolic, and prophetic impulses have been allowed to remain in tension that God can get through. Where these become inflexible, reform will come as break.

As Anglicans we’ve lived with both top-down and lateral movements, often contested and conflictual such that no particular party has been able to enforce its will without resistance—our will to power is variously checked; our own history has argued for limited institutions, structures, and lines of authority. And that frankly, has been to our benefit. Our brokenness has been our strength though others have often scorned our untidiness. Yet, in making Lambeth or Windsor law rather than advisory or a process, we are in danger of putting to an end our provisionality and tendency to generosity and humility for the sake of resolving crisis in the moment. We may in fact endanger God’s ability to get through under such an inflexible structuring.

At heart the Gospel is this: God loves each and everyone of us this much +, and loves us so much God returns even our want to crucify not with vengeance or punishment but with forgiveness, mercy, grace, new and eternal life, and being thus, this God Who is revealed in Christ Jesus draws each of us up into a relationship with the Father by the Spirit. Our lifelong pilgrimage of conversion begins with an infinite Valentine: “I love you”. God’s Valentine is without measure and is no respecter of persons.

I have not, nor would I argue that we need no order, that we can live without order. Indeed my own frustration is that those proclaiming order are quite happy to let my own life bear our disorder by failing to provide rites and acknowledging a need for a rule of life. The history of human beings would rightly smack me across the face as foolish to say we have no need of order, nor am I by nature a revolutionary who would dismiss history as irrelevant (indeed it is our history upon which I draw for much rethinking), but I am radical in my traditionalism—at the heart of our rich traditions and our inheritance is a root, Christ Jesus and the News of Him. All else is commentary, good though it is, it isn’t the Main Thing and if it rather than He is preached, it’s time for reform.

Yet as I’ve said we do in fact need order, and our episcopal-style of governance locally adapted seems to me inspired, what Anglicans would say of the esse or perhaps more accurately pleni esse of the Church for Hooker himself was ready to acknowledge that each nation should order themselves in a way best fit to their situation (I think locally adapted works quite nicely) and we've never been quite snobby enough (though we try) to tell other Christian traditions they're defective, so that in the German territories where no bishop remained for the Reformation after Köln was removed, bishops indeed, fighting the Gospel, bishops disappeared—the Gospel remained proclaimed in Word and partaken in Sacrament. Had our reformation not involved bishops, we may have either never had a reformation, or we might not today have bishops ourselves. As a Benedictine sort, good order is flexible, capable of being adapted to different times and places, capable of a large variety of persons and cultures, bridles each and all comers into a lifelong conversion to the Gospel, is pastoral rather than legal in orientation, concerned with rules of life rather than commands.

But good order as the catholic spirit of our reformers rightly observed serves the Gospel, not the other way around. When our order fails to serve the Gospel, begins to speak of one Gospel for one sort and condition and another Gospel for another sort and condition, begins with Law or works and moral preconditions rather than the unconditional love of God in Christ by the Spirit, our good order has and is failing the Gospel. Under such conditions, we are under judgment and God will raise up reformers—it’s a guarantee. God’s promises will out. Prepare yourself for an uncomfortable ride.

We are at present in such a moment. The Gospel proclaimed to queer persons is radically different from that declared to straight persons, the former is one of preconditions that we become in advance something we are not before we can even respond to Christ’s love for us—indeed proclaims the latter as our Good News rather than Christ, the latter are offered God’s unconditional love in Christ by the Spirit as they are and left then as they are to through the slow seep of time become more Christlike. This is a God who is a respecter of persons and is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

This is a grace that on the one hand if queer calls for radical break in the person(what we would term Evangelical in its approach to grace), for our sexuality is not separable from our relational capability and capacity but central to it, but on the other hand calls for a gradual approach that works with what is at hand if straight (what we would term catholic) so that through relating with another as the usual way (celibacy being a rare gift) one takes up a life of ascesis. One basically calls for the destruction of the person at our connective/relational capacity, the other does not, and one cannot help but deeply question in an institution deeply plagued by heterosexism such a Gospel that declares a grace that destroys rather than builds upon through gradual and lifelong conversion working with what is at hand and available rather than saying we must be something and someone else from the outset. James Alison has written extensively on this radical difference in understandings of God’s grace with Original Sin as starting point.

I think where so-called “liberals” are suspect is their right proclamation of God’s unfailing love without then recognizing that all who respond to God in Christ will undergo conversion and must take up a suitable rule of life appropriate to their particularities and circumstances in lifelong ascesis, though I think this is largely a caricature even though I see the underemphasis. Conservatives are right in that queer folk experience conversion, it’s just generally not the conversion they demand. Instead, we commit to partners or take up celibacy if so gifted, become mindful of what in our own subcultures is less than Christlike, reassess our own participation in such, and begin to have a more queer Christian lifestyle, etc. I think where so-called “conservatives are suspect is their right concern for lifelong ascesis and conversion without first recognizing that they don’t get to decide prima facie what God’s conversion might be in another’s life, muchlesss the lives of an entire sort and condition of people, an entire “nation” as precondition to even encountering the unfailing love of God as the starting point for conversion at all. Such is a form of self-will carefully disguised by morals and ethics, and reads from here like an outbreak of Original Sin at its worst: sin wants to become righteousness, Luther would say. Liberals are right that the experience of the love of God is the beginning.

As I’ve said before, our response to God’s hospitality toward us which we do not merit of our own accord but only in Christ’s own infinite honor, His justification of us by grace, is a live lived toward Christ in going out of oneself for others. These will be rich and diverse respona as we might expect within the body of the entire human race with all of our gifts, peculiarities, traits. Our response is lifelong and steeped in conversion to Christ. We should expect differences, varied responses, and experiments. Indeed, the desert elders, monasticism, and many other lifestyles were experiments in leading lives of conversion to Christ.

Our Anglican good order has been brilliant because of its conflicts, messes, conversations, disagreements, comprehensiveness, and roominess precisely because it is broken open enough and painful and varied enough that God’s Good Word can get through to the greatest number of comers and within the broken-open space serve all comers Christ’s own self in Word and Sacrament and lead them into lives of rich and manifold responsa.

Centrism, however, noble its intent, places one sort and condition, at the center, closes the doors on responses for the sake of saving particular structures and governing bodies as vital and the main thing, and threatens in its centralization to itself harden up matters in such a way that folks will need to leave to imbibe God’s love. It seeks to bind up, close, stop the bleeding, rather than enter into the Cross and partake of self-lowering by taking a place with those considered of no account in the community. At heart fear is overcoming faith that no matter what, God’s promises will out. Even should the Anglican Communion fall apart, the Episcopal Church break to pieces, God will not let us go, but will be with us as we struggle, bind up ours and others wounds, and reconfigure our response to the Gospel in new institutional forms.

Centrism is good order proclaiming itself as the main thing hidden under the language of via media without the struggle and variation of the via media which is a sum of many movements in Christ who raises them to a rich and varied harmony in the End though we often hear only a cacophony.

Centrism is political in its own right, as is all of life, without being completely honest of its own party loyalties to good order above all else, and centrism cannot help but fail because God’s Good News for all the world, for all human kind, will out even if God has to raise up stones as priests and apostles or proclaim the Good News from the mouths of donkeys.

Christ our Center and our Circumference

Christ is an infinite sphere of whom the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. (paraphrase of Pascal on Nature)

For, finally, what is man in nature? He is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing. He is infinitely severed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their principle are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he arises and the infinity into which he is engulfed.

What else may he do except to perceive some appearance of the middle of things, eternally despairing to know their principles or ends? All things arise from nothingness and are carried to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes? The author of these marvels can comprehend them. All others cannot. (Blaise Pascal)

I once would have thought of myself as fitting somewhere within Anglo-Catholicism. I was wrong. I’m neo-Platonic, Patristic, and Benedictine in orientation, and I have an evangelical, apostolic, and prophetic streak not ameniable to Anglo-Catholic want for a Magisterium (I’ve been down that road as a Roman Catholic; it was one of a number of reasons I became Anglican to begin with). Anglo-Catholicism, at least in its Oxfordian variant, is Scholastic, Aristotelian, and Thomist and tends to be driven with a concern for institutions such that institutions rather than Christ’s instituted, instituting, will institute and the Spirit’s now and always constituting are what make or break being catholic, ignoring as if in romanticized fashion our own break with Rome, our own isolation from England after the Revolutionary War, and any other visible break in the Body, to justify now in this time a singular, unified, centralized structure as “catholic”.

My Neo-Platonic emphasis resists and prevents such a collapse that would reduce the Church to historical terms in such a way that the horizon is closed or reform even break is unthinkable because the Neo-Platonic emphasis recognizes that, yes, God works in history in our structures, and yet the perfect and fully catholic Church is eschatological, is in Christ, and only to the degree that we participate in Him are we ourselves becoming catholic, and we are not yet fully catholic, and are always being drawn further up and further in as each generation, each person contributes his or her life to the work of the Body. Only to the degree that we declare the News of God’s love to all the world and welcome all into discipleship do we so participate and to that degree in closer fullness. I can imagine that even in our breakages and schisms, various bodies are participating in the Church in Christ and to the degree they fling wide the doors in drawing all into the reconciling the work of God’s owns self, they are becoming catholic. Catholicity is not first a marker of the Church, but of Christ, just as is holiness, apostolicity, and oneness, and is eschatological, a bearing forth out of God’s own self as gift of unity and comprehensiveness to us as Real Presence here and now from the Beginning to the End, rather than simply a bringing forth from the historical past and memorialistic and focused on human response rather than God’s work for us. Thus, can fractures and schisms in the Body still all be becoming catholic and rather than worry about our preserving our catholicism as institutions, for we cannot, we’d be better concerned for God’s Great Commission and Great Commandment, for only in these are we becoming catholic.

I am not Anglo-Catholic as such, therefore, and refuse to collapse catholicism with unified institutional structures though I don’t think we should take breaks at all lightly, but I would chastise the romantic to get honest about the already multitudinous breaks and a want to create a Babylonic institutional unity sacrificing someone or group if needs be, and as consequence, sacrificing God’s charges to us. Ironically, in their concern for historical continuity, Anglo-Catholics become radically ahistorical: see no mess, hear no mess, speak of no mess. I’m closer if anything to the catholicism of Benedict, Hooker, Maurice, Temple, or even the Wesleys. Good order serves the Gospel and lives being converted to the Gospel and can tolerate quite a breadth of expression within a flexible framework or frameworks and a variety of interwoven bodies, peoples, cultures, and tongues.

Rather than centrism, we need to bow together toward Christ the Center and trust in Christ our Circumference in Whom we are held across our disagreements in all of our plurality. We need a new understanding of broad churchwomanship and broad churchmanship that avoids dogmatic indifferentism without becoming doctrinally maximalist while living uncomfortably with our differences beyond first things, which I would say are summarily given us in the Creeds (for these show us what is “all things necessary to salvation”) knowing that only in a multivaried cacophony and spaciousness can we find the most for the most comers and the space to be instruments of reconciliation.

I think William Reed Huntington, the proponent of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, provides us a way through in his insistence that we do hold to a minimal dogma, but to this and no more, but it requires that all of us sacrifice making our agendae the center (including Anglo-Catholics), or rather, it requires that we live with our competing, disagreeing agendae, practices, and theological emphases in such a way that we leave one another enough respect and give one another enough courtesy and offer one another enough hospitality and provide one another with enough room to practice our convictions, so that we can be all things in Christ to all peoples.

Huntington once wrote, My whole effort in connection with the doctrinal legislation of the Episcopal Church has been to reduce the required dogma to a minimum, while yet insisting upon that minimum. What has ailed the Church, it seems to me, has been, not the principle of dogma, but the multiplication of dogmas.

If we cannot do this, the pain-causing, bloodying, clashing, interweaving experiment of overlapping eddies and currents which rests at the heart of our via media will have come to an end. This is why I have continued to emphasize coming to the Table together as God’s unity for us across our divides, but I cannot force others to come, and in some places, I would be barred at the gate if not shown to the police station. Under such conditions, we must be honest enough to recognize that no settlement may be workable, and we should attend to spiritual bullying by carefully and respectfully agreeing to disagree without feeling the need to let others run roughshod over ourselves or someone else. If we cannot even do that, better to be done with our noble experiment.

For we would have something called “Anglican” but it will no longer be recognizable as that which our ancestors came to through struggle, sweat, blood, and tears and a whole lot of agreeing to disagree because we didn’t want to suffer too much ourselves or find ourselves sitting with the lowly or make room enough that all might go up to the house of the Lord and offer their thanksgiving for what Christ is doing in their lives without placing upon them our own preconceptions and preconditions or worse willing to sacrifice them or even join in persecution however subtle and genteel our own violence might be.

In other words, we will find ourselves finally inflexible, controlled, and closed such that we cannot let the seeds of Christ begin to grow and bear fruit in cultures and peoples unlike ourselves and it will be better for us all then to live into wider gaps and fractures and divides that the Gospel can reach as many as possible under the banner of Anglicanism and not within our Center and Circumference, Jesus Christ, who shall hold us still even when we attack, shun, and despise one another.

I highly recommend Fr. Haller’s essay, Shadows of Unity which provides us with some historical insight for our own situation.

We naturally believe that we are more capable of arriving at the center of things rather than embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world surpasses us visibly; but, since we surpass small things, we believe ourselves capable of possessing them, and yet it requires no less capacity to reach nothingness as it takes to reach everything; the one is just as infinite as the other; and it appears to me that anyone who comprehended one of these extreme principles of things would have also arrived at the knowledge of the other infinite. The one depends on the other, and the one leads to the other. These extremities touch each other and reunite by going in opposite directions and find themselves again in God, and in God alone.(Blaise Pascal)