A great essay on N. American Anglican Orthodoxy and the challenges it faces.

The Confessing Reader, a blog that I am new to, but VERY impressed with (F.W.I.W.), has put up an essay written by an AMiA priest named Kevin Donlon.

This essay reminds me of just how far I have to go, before I could with any honesty claim to be theologically “learned”.  I don’t want to give either an impression of false modesty, nor modesty.  I’m not a modest person, but I have also been kicked in the teeth enough to know all to well my flaws and inadequacies.

And a great inadequacy is not really “getting it” like Fr. Donlon illustrates.  I have that shallower understanding, that limits me and my “positing”.  I’m trying to go deeper, but the MBA has a way of getting in the way (funny, that).

Anyhow, some selections:

If Anglican orthodoxy in North America affirms that Christ founded the church as the people of God of the New Testament who framed the mission with boldness, than that boldness must be embraced. In the 1st Letter of Peter we are reminded: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Pt 2:9). As a chosen people we have an inheritance which is the fruit of Christ’s loving sacrifice. “He loved the church and gave himself up for it, that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:25-27). Disunity amongst the faithful is a mark that devalues the holiness of the church.

OK.  This is easy.  Unity is a goal, a desired trait.  Immediately, though, “at what cost?”

Anglicanism has been so fractured and disabled by the historic choices for stories over scripture, innovation over tradition and relativism over reason; that it is possible orthodoxy may need to revisit its roots so as to forge a way forward. Some would argue that the case for the unity of the church was best framed by St. Augustine in Sermon 229. Using 1 Corinthians 10:17, Augustine focuses on the church as the Body of Christ with a particular emphasis on the case for unity.

“However many loaves may be placed there, it is one loaf; however many loaves there may be on Christ’s altars throughout the world, it is one loaf. But what does it mean, one loaf? He [Paul] explained very briefly: one body is what we, being many, are. This is the body of Christ, about which the apostle says, while addressing the church, But you are the body of Christ and his members (1 Cor 12:27). What you receive is what you yourselves are, thanks to the grace by which you have been redeemed; you add your signature to this, when you answer Amen. What you see here is the sacrament of unity.”[2]

Clearly, there is a delineation asserted; there is a point at which you MUST cease complicity in the name of unity.
Lastly, I’ll add in this, as this is simply golden:

North American Anglican Orthodoxy needs kenotic leaders who do not fear the darkness, nor the lack of property, nor the absence of pensions funds, nor the antipathy that may await them in the ecclesial culture when they take a human step to walk away and a take a divine step to walk into the promises that are afforded to those who are faithful to him!

Point and match to the Fr.