Episcopal church without gay marriage

I’m sorry, it’s not clear to me because you aren’t using Anglican terminology. We already cleared up that “dogma” is a muddled RC concept. In reality there is only doctrine, and it’s eternal. There is no development of doctrine, and if doctrine is that secure, you don’t need an additional RC concept like dogma. This is what St Augustine meant in the title of his work, De Doctrina Christiana. You can still use the patristic word dogma, but that’s just the Greek equivalent to the Latin doctrina.

Secondly, particular churches do have the legislative authority to decide on matters of faith, and declare something to be heresy, even if others particular churches do not.

So you can find the Anglican doctrine of the family, which is exactly the same as the patristic doctrine of the family, following on the Scriptural definition of the family. And departure from any doctrine is heresy. That seems to me pretty clear.

Yes, this is a medieval hangup, that only the sacraments can be considered the things sacred. But that’s incorrect, and there can be many sacred things which aren’t sacraments. I started a thread, “does everything sacred have to be a sacrament?”
https://forums.anglican.net/threads/is-marriage-a-sacrament.4032/

We consider marriage to be sacred, even if it doesn’t fulfill St Augustine’s definition of what a sacrament is (“outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace”).

 

Also, this is incorrect if you are a Protestant. Roman Catholics believe that the Magisterium has the power to "officially" interpret the Bible, but Protestants reject that belief. No Christian is bound to obey a teaching of the church that runs counter to Scripture. Article VI of the 39 Articles of Religion is the Anglican formulation of this principle. Scripture is the supreme authority.

EDIT: I should add that this is why consensus is important to the Anglican church. We do not dictate the truth to our Christian brethren; we meet and debate and come to a consensus about what biblical truth is and how we apply it to a given situation. The power of the Anglican church is, sadly, the one they rarely use in modern times -- the conciliar decision-making process. (Happily, that his changing, at least from the ACNA standpoint. We have a diocesan synod coming up in November that I'm planning to attend.)

 

Not really. Actually, this is a paraphrase of Bp. Gilbert Burnet’s commentary on the 39 Articles: “scripture is the rule of faith, not the judge.” I’m confident this will make not the slightest difference here since it states a conclusion you’ve apparently already decided on your own is wrong, but it is not something I invented, nor does it come from a non-Anglican source, nor is the source obscure. Burnet’s work was a standard dogmatic text in Anglican seminaries for many years.

 

We understand what you said; we just don't agree with what you said. That's why I played off your word, "discipline," in a tangential manner.

Like Ananias says, Scripture is the supreme authority. And Scripture teaches us that (1) intimate relations between people of the same sex is wrong, and (2) marriage is between a man and a woman. Doesn't matter what label you want to put on the teachings of Scripture, because those teachings are supposed to govern our beliefs and guide our actions. It is Scripture that guides us to oppose same-sex marriage and same-sex relations.

No need for me to have a dogma in the fight (so to speak).

 

Oh that’s a good one haha!

 

One added note about the use of commentaries to buttress some point of theology: I generally don't do it, because even the best commentaries are simply somebody's thoughts about Scripture; they are not Scripture themselves.

Thus the doctrinal authority of Biblical commentaries to me is zero.

I have read far too many bad commentaries to have much respect for the genre. There are some good ones -- the NICOT and NICNT are pretty good, and I'm quite fond of some of the Baker Exegetical Commentaries (particularly the Schreiner commentary on Romans). But in general I think that theologians should just lay off of writing commentaries for a century or two, because when they aren't simply rehashing the same stuff over and over, they act as vehicles for whatever newfangled academic fad is currently in vogue. The last commentary I read that was actually interesting from a theological standpoint was Barth's commentary on Romans. (I didn't agree with some of it, but it was interesting and had new things to say.) And that book was written a century ago.

I'm not saying that Biblical commentaries are, a priori, bad. I'm just saying that in terms of doctrine, that at best they only exist to illuminate and clarify, not to establish. And seriously, use maximum shields when reading modern commentaries, because man! There is a lot of trash coming out of the university presses these days.

 

Your statement was,

I have provided a counter-example. My statement was not incorrect. Strictly speaking, people are “authorities”; books are not. Books contain rules and principles, which living, breathing judges then have to apply to concrete situations. A fundamentalist understanding of the Scriptures is thus antithetical to historic Anglicanism. If you or others think Anglicanism ought to be something different from what it has been, that’s fine, but the Reformers’ understanding of sola scriptura was most certainly not along the lines of, “we’ll just let everyone say it means what they think it means and we’ll hope it all works out.” It meant that Scripture was the sole source of universally binding teaching; it did not mean that the Church relinquished its role as authoritative interpreter. Read the Lutheran Confessions, the writings of Calvin and his history in Geneva, the 39 Articles, etc. There is no indication that for any of them, sola scriptura represented some sort of “free for all” when it came to biblical interpretation or that there was no such thing as ecclesiastical authority that ultimately came from Christ. There is nothing ‘Anglican’ about such a view. Bishop Burnet died over three centuries ago. I’m having a hard time seeing what modern biblical commentaries - many of which are extremely good - have to do with anything, especially when Burnet’s work was so widely used in the formation of clergy, and for as long as it was.

 

Put this statement to your priest, exactly as you have written it here, and see what he tells you. I think you will be surprised by the answer.

 

I doubt that very much, since what I have stated is simply the historic Anglican (and, by implication, Protestant) view. What you’re describing is just the fundamentalism peculiar to America. And if my priest did tell me that, I would remind him of the historic Protestant confessions which explicitly teach the Church’s authority, just as I’m doing here. I didn’t write them; they say what they say.

 

Think of it as a way to prove me wrong, then. I'd still be very interested in what your priest has to say on the matter.

 

1Pe 2:9 But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light:

 

I already have, by citing the 39 Articles and the Augsburg Confession. But I’ll ask him at some point anyway. All this assumes you’d believe what I reported, but I suspect that’s true only if it happened to agree with you.

 

You have my promise, as a Christian brother, that I will take your word as a true and honest record of your conversation.

 

I'm not sure how this conversation went into the topic of Church authority, but it is an undisputable fact of Anglican understanding of church that "the Church is an authority in matters of faith, and can settle points of doctrine". Article XX. Burnett in his commentary on 39 articles is a good historic statement of this.

The sacred Scripture is authoritative, but it's not an authority insofar as the latter has to be an active agent. Obviously Scripture is a passive resource, not an active agent.

The Church must ground all of its doctrine only on Scripture, and that's why we say that Scripture is authoritative. There is no higher source that can overrule it. But the active teaching function has been entrusted by God to the Church, "the pillar and foundation of the truth."

 

A Christian man is not bound to follow a church teaching if it varies from Scripture. This is the core of Sola Scriptura, and is the basis upon which Protestants separated from the Roman church. As I read it, the Anglican position is a conciliar one -- doctrine is established as a consensus in the communion, written into canon law, and then enforced through oversight by Bishops and Priests. But ACNA's very existence proves that this process is often flawed or fails to function as intended. A church should ground its teachings in Scripture, sure enough; but what happens when it becomes corrupted and fails to do that? Our own recent history stands as a warning.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. My argument isn't that the Anglican church shouldn't grant bishops "teaching authority" on matters of doctrine. This is the purpose of episcopal governance, after all. But I'm saying that if this teaching authority drifts from a Scriptural grounding, it not only prompts but requires Christian believers to oppose it. That is the heart of Article VI, to my mind. If Bishops abandon their grounding in scripture, they abandon their teaching authority as well.

 

No objection from me. The Church cannot contravene Scripture, because the Church can only base itself on revelation, and the only revelation we have is Scripture. So the Church has no choice but to ground itself on Scripture, and when it doesn't, it acts as the church of the Anti-Christ.

All I'm saying is that while Scripture has this awesome constitutive role, there is another role it cannot perform, namely of being an active agent which directs Christians in day to day life. That's what the Church in its capacity of having teaching authority, was given to us for. We were given the gift of ACNA bishops giving us teachings on current events; recently they came together and issued a teaching condemning not just the concept of gay marriage, but even of the phrase 'gay Christian'.

That's something a passive resource like Scripture cannot do. All Scripture could do is passively write against 'men laying with other men', and then individual Christians would try to figure out how it applies to the 21st century America. Differing opinions would fly. The liberal Christians would interpret that verse one way, we would another, and there would be no authority to settle the issue. But when the Bishops come out and say, here is how "the ACNA" understands this verse, then the church functions in the role that it's supposed to.

 

I think we're saying the same thing.

Also, the "active agent" in Scripture is the work of the Holy Spirit!

Though I dislike sports metaphors, I've always thought of the job of a Bishop as being akin to that of an Umpire in a baseball game. He's there to call balls and strikes. He's got the training and insight to do his job well, and he has a certain latitude in application ("ground rules" being specific to a given playing field), but he cannot by fiat overturn the rulebook the game is played under. A player has the right to complain if the Umpire fails to follow the rulebook, but can be ejected from the game by the Umpire if he violates the procedures established for complaints. When a close call happens, the various umpires may convene a session on the mound to establish a consensus, and once they have it, the ruling stands (right or wrong). An Umpire's power to control the game is large, but not plenary, and always is subject to the rulebook. (I understand that there is a Pastoral dimension in the work of a Bishop that is not addressed here, but...well, that's why I don't like sports metaphors.)

 

This afternoon my wife will be out shopping. I'm going to pop next door and have some fun with the rather vivacious widow who lives there. It's fine with my conscience. So I'm assuming you could find no fault with that.

 

I never said anything of the kind.