Ask me anything: Episcopalian Edition

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I differ. Henry’s last set of articles were the Six. And death penalties could follow from them. Henry didn’t mess around.
 
Caesaropapism is a firm of polity not unique to the CoE. As we all know.
 
Oh, sure. I just mean that the 39 Articles should not be taken to understand the foundation of all Anglicanism, not that Henry was opposed to Caesaropapism.
 
GKMotley said:
And is TEC one that requires assent to the Articles? Assuming one can give credence to their current statements? Hmmm? And how about considering the British or any other monarch, as Supreme Governor, or anything analogous?
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OK. I see an implicit conflict between the COE’s foundation as an English monarchical state church (eg. as placed in the Articles and in its history) and the American ECUSA’s historic and current Republican rejection of the role of the British monarchy in society.

The English Republicans in Charles’ time chopped off Charles’ head and the COE considers him a martyr. The English State and the COE back in the foundational period and Elizabethan settlement would have considered Republicanism a grave offense to the King. The Right to Execute idea or whatever you want to call it in the articles probably found its principles in things like Paul’s claim that the Roman emperor was given the sword by God (ie to execute people and fight wars). It’s like the idea in the Old Testament that the (bad) Babylonian king was in a sense “anointed” by God. It has to do with the Divine Mandate and beliefs about both good and bad monarchies being put in power by God as part of the world’s destiny or whatever.

The American ideals of Democracy and Republicanism I think are in conflict with the monarchist and state-church ideology running throughout the foundations of the COE as a State Church set up by the English monarchy and imposed on the nation by the force and power of the throne.
 
You do understand why the historic episcopate was brought to TEC, post the Revolutionary War, from the Non-Jurors and nor the Church of England?
 
GKMotley said:
You do understand why the historic episcopate was brought to TEC, post the Revolutionary War, from the Non-Jurors and nor the Church of England?
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Regardless of that, the state-church ideology, the Articles, the claim of the king to be the head of the church, the claim to be the institutional church of the English nation and royalty are all foundational to Anglicanism. And the See of Canterbury is essential to “The Anglican Communion”. Orthodoxy is not founded on “The Church of Greece” or essentially united into “The Constantinopolitan Communion”, in contrast.
 
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Ok, regardless of all that, indeed. If you don’t see it’s application to what you had previously posted.

All the following you list are foundational to the CoE. And the CoE is the mother church of Anglicanism. And ++Cantuar (in one of his three offices) is the figurehead of the Anglican Communion. But Anglicanism and the Anglican Communion, and all the various offspring of Henry’s taking the Church private do not depend, follow, or spring from the Act of 1558, lean on or follow Canterbury. They are, for those that are, a Communion. In communion.

The Communion is not like the Empire. It is a fair analogy to the Commonwealth, but spreads far wider.
 
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GKMotley said:
The Communion is not like the Empire. It is a fair analogy to the Commonwealth, but spreads far wider
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Is it a fair analogy to compare it to Eastern Orthodoxy? I know theologically it’s less tradition-based but I wonder if maybe, socially, it functions as a similar but less intense international faith coalition.
Of course, like most Americans I know little about Anglicanism in the global South, so maybe it is just as “intense” overall as EO.
 
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I see the point but I think it looks most like the Commonwealth of Anglicanism.
 
rakovskii said:
OK. I see an implicit conflict between the COE’s foundation as an English monarchical state church (eg. as placed in the Articles and in its history) and the American ECUSA’s historic and current Republican rejection of the role of the British monarchy in society.
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I don’t see that at all. I’m currently reading the biography of Thomas Cranmer and found interesting information on his views of Royal Supremacy and his reasons for supporting it.

Cranmer did not really believe in the traditional Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession. Instead, he saw the history of early Christianity as a struggle to create new authority structures. In his view, a Christian ruler had just as much right to appoint priests as bishops did because ordination and consecration were simply ceremonies necessary for good order, not for imparting any special grace.

But, what concerns the Episcopal Church, Cranmer also had to begrudgingly acknowledge that the people might also choose their own priests by election. In his analysis of the early church, he found that sometimes the apostles sent ministers, sometimes the people chose their own.

Now, for obvious reasons, Cranmer believed that the most appropriate form of governance in the Christian commonwealth of England was one where the king was supreme in both church and state, but in the absence of the king (such as in the case of the Episcopal parishes after the American Revolution) and any American bishops (colonial Anglicans were under the nominal authority of the Bishop of London but there were never any bishops consecrated for the colonies) then the Episcopal congregations would be thrown into a “state of nature” as it was and would be free to create their own authority structures that were compatible with the new republican government they found themselves living under. This is still true in cases where Anglicanism was established by law in the Southern Colonies because after the Revolution Anglicanism was swiftly disestablished. Therefore, in all the colonies, Episcopalians were free to create new authority structures, which they did through state conventions.

This is essentially what William White (later to become the first Presiding Bishop of the new Episcopal Church) argued in The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered (1782) where he writes, “All former jurisdiction over the churches being thus withdrawn, and the chain which held them together broken, it would seem, that their future continuance can be provided for only by voluntary associations for union and good government. It is therefore of the utmost consequence to discover and ascertain the principles, on which such associations should be framed.”

And he cites the Article 34 specifically, which says: “Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.”

Since the United States was now a sovereign nation separate from Britain, the American Episcopal Churches had a right to change man-made rules and customs.
 
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Yeah, his bio of Cranmer. I’m really enjoying all the detail he goes into. For example, he does some interesting things with the available evidence to reconstruct discussions and debates surrounding all of the confusing back and forth between Catholic and Protestant policy implementation. After a while, you get a sense of how just confusing it must have been to live in that time period. Whether a traditionalist or a reformer, you never quite knew where you stood.
 
I need to go over the book again. I never absorbed it.
 
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Yeah, there is one person I want to read more about and that is Bishop Stephen Gardiner. He comes across in both MacCulloch and other sources I’ve read as almost a Machiavellian figure. Almost a Catholic Cromwell. It seems like it would be fun to read about his life.
 
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