Some Anglican Bishops Need a Lesson in Logic

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

In 2011, I wrote an article titled Impressions of North American Anglicanism in which I state that the body that broke from the Episcopal Church and came to be known as the Anglican Church in North America is essentially an evangelical body, not a catholic body. Were it catholic, it would not have bishops who ordain women to the priesthood contrary to Scripture and Church Tradition. 

Fr. Jay Scott Newman is a Roman Catholic priest and a good friend. In response to my article on the New American Anglicanism, he wrote: 

One of the signal differences, it seems to me, between Evangelicals and Catholics is that the former believe that the nature and number, the origin and efficacy of the sacraments are secondary or even tertiary questions in Christian faith and life, while Catholics hold these questions to be primary because the sacraments are the ordinary means of grace for our justification and sanctification. Get the sacraments wrong, Catholics hold, and you’ll get the Gospel wrong.

This being the case, the truce which has been called on the question of women in the priesthood as a condition for bringing into being the new Anglican bodies in North America seems to me more than a bit like the truce over slavery that was required to bring the United States of American into being. But the latter truce could not hold, and neither can the former. Eventually, the disagreement must be sorted out, and that almost certainly means that the battle must be joined. And when that happens, then the great gulf between Evangelicals and Catholics on the nature and number, the origin and efficacy of the sacraments will once again be a church-dividing gulf.

That seems to me to be the fatal flaw in all present efforts to conjure up new Anglican jurisdictions from the wreckage of the Episcopal Church. Alice Linsley’s impressions only verify my conviction.

He also wrote: 

No Catholic, including no Anglo-Catholic, can accept that there only two sacraments, and to dismiss the other five—most especially the sacramental priesthood of bishops and presbyters—is, in effect, to deny the sacramentality of the Eucharist. My point was simple: Evangelicals (including Evangelical Anglicans) and Catholics (including Anglo-Catholics) have a fundamental disagreement about the nature and number, the origin and efficacy of the sacraments. Moreover, for the moment, that disagreement has been set aside in the interest of co-belligerancy against the enormities of the Episcopal Church, but it is inevitable that this disagreement will again come to the fore and prove the undoing of whatever institutional unity is contrived for new Anglican jurisdictions in North America. Put most simply: an Anglican who believes that there is a divinely instituted priesthood in the Church on which the celebration of the Holy Eucharist depends and that women cannot (not should not, cannot) hold this priesthood, cannot receive the sacramental ministrations of an ordained woman. When that dispute returns to center stage, as it must, then Evangelicals and Catholics in the new Anglican jurisdictions will find themselves back where they have ever been—divided by a matter of faith."

For a Catholic, to say that a sacrament was not instituted by Christ is to say that it is not a sacrament of New Covenant. Also for a Catholic, there is no possibility of the Eucharist without the sacramental priesthood. That is why Catholics insist that it is logically impossible to talk about the Eucharist as a sacrament without also talking about the priesthood as a sacrament. I realize that Evangelicals, including Evangelical Anglicans, do not believe this to be true, and that is precisely my point: these two approaches to the number and origin of the sacraments are logically, ontologically, and theologically irreconcilable, but that fact is simply being ignored at the moment because traditional Anglicans of both persuasions have temporarily set aside their church dividing disagreement about this issue in the face of open war with the Episcopal Church. Once that war is concluded, however, then the old differences will once again be unavoidable. Please understand, my point in every comment on this thread is not to make an argument for the Catholic understanding of the sacraments; it is simply to point out that the Catholic and Evangelical ways of understanding of the sacraments cannot, finally, be sustained together in one church. The Anglican attempt to do so has failed, and the results of the failure are depriving congregations of their property and clerics of their livelihood. Ideas, after all, do have consequences.

The primary category mistake of most Anglicans seems to be a refusal to accept the Principle of Non-Contradiction. For example, either sodomy is a grave sin or the foundation of a sacrament, but it can’t be both. Or, either it is possible that women have the capacity to receive presbyteral and episcopal ordination or they do not, but it can’t be both. Let’s forgot for a moment the authority of Apostolic Tradition which every Catholic must believe is an intrinsic part of the Gospel (no sola Scriptura for us), when a foundational principle of right reason like Non-Contradiction is routinely denied in practice if not in theory, then the only thing left is raw will to power. Hence the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Kyrie eleison.

 Related reading: Ten Objections to Women Priests; Principle of Non-Contradiction; BIBLICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A Christian Anthropologist Considers Gender in the Bible