The Embryo Parson Checks In

Greetings in the Name of the Most Holy Trinity!

As I noted in this post from last November, I have been intending to revamp this blog to reflect where I am developing theologically, which is in a decidedly Anglo-Catholic direction.  For those few of you who follow this blog, you will know that I have pretty much reversed course since being received into Continuing Anglicanism in 2011 as a stalwart Cranmerian.  Much of my writing here in the past few years reflect my struggle, and I have deleted several blog posts containing Reformed Anglican arguments that I simply don't espouse anymore.

I've not posted much since November for several reasons.   I've been known to take long sabbaticals from blogging in the first place, and secondly, I have been studying and practicing the things I need to do to grow as a priest.  The rector of our mission needing to move away in connection with a job, I have stepped in as the new rector and have been celebrating the Mass every Sunday since late October.  Thirdly, the events related to COVID-19 compelled me to become involved in the Reopen movement.  The reopening now well underway here in North Carolina, I feel I can turn my attention back to theological matters and those pertaining to the issue of Anglican identity.

I have two or three blog articles being written in my head at this point.  I hope to post them here soon.  I will also be posting some thoughts on some young "rising stars" of Continuing Anglicanism writing articles at web sites such as The North American Anglican, Earth and Altar, Anglican Catholic Liturgy and Theology (the blog of ACC Archbishop Mark Haverland), O cuniculi! Ubi lexicon Latinum posui?, and The Sacramentalists podcast.

I will also still be devoting much attention to the Anglican Church in North America and women's ordination.  In the past few months I have come to see that the situation in ACNA is worse than I previously imagined. 

Stay tuned.

The Embryo Parson

Women in Holy Orders: A Response

A paper just published by the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word (ACNA), refuting the recent work of ACNA theologians Grant LeMarquand and William Witt on the question of women's ordination.  Having only given the paper a cursory glance, it appears to be yet another instance of the kind of exegetical wars we've witnessed between Protestant innovator and Protestant defender of the status quo.   That is to say, it is a debate centered on biblical interpretation, with scant interest in the Church's tradition.  This is to be expected.  Dr. Witt justifies his innovation on the fact that he is a "Reformation Christian" who is simply discovering new light breaking forth from Scripture, while Bishop Dobbs and his Canon theologian are responding with biblical arguments refuting those set forth by LeMarquand and Witt.

While I am always happy to see Protestant defenders of the status quo go up against the innovators on this question, it always seems to me to be a case of a frantic Dr. Frankenstein trying to outmanuever his own monster.   Witt is right to see his argument for women's ordination as "Reformational", for the Protestant Reformation effectively untethered biblical interpretation from Catholic faith and practice, resulting in wave after wave of innovation on all sorts of matters of faith and practice since the 16th century. 

I will add this article to my right sidebar list of anti-WO works and sources below. 

Fr. Drew Collins on the Anglican Pastor Web Site

"The Anglican Pastor has tried to position itself as a quasi-official voice of the ACNA. The North American Anglican is far more worthy of that role and your readership."

Two More Responses to Emily McGowen on Women's Ordination

Two more responses to Emily McGowin:

Holy Orders and Headship, Branson Munson

God is Not Fair: Some Thoughts on Women's Ordination, Fr. Gerald McDermott

Also posted as a 1/20/2020 update to Responses to Emily McGowin.

Alice Linsley on Women's Ordination

Alice Linsely is a biblical anthropologist and former priest in the Episcopal Church.  She renounced her orders many years ago and is now an articulate defender of the Catholic Faith.  Read her new article at Virtue Online, "Ten Objections to Women Priests."

Updates Posted Below. . .

regarding the debate over women's ordination between Dr. Emily McGowan (ACNA) and several respondents.

How the Church Lost Its Soundscape

"Musically, all evangelicals are charismatics now."

"The church created the soundscape for Western Christendom because she cultivated her own musical life in the liturgy that united human voices with the angelic choirs of heaven. I can hardly imagine a more worrisome sign of worldliness, or clearer evidence of the church’s identity crisis, than our eager renunciation of our own soundscape and our determination instead to reproduce the world’s."

Note

In the coming days I will be revamping this blog somewhat, partly so that it more accurately aligns with where I have arrived theologically in my Anglican sojourn (here's a hint from a 2015 blog post as to the trajectory I was on then), and partly to clean up and weed out some things on the sidebars. 

Responses to Emily McGowin: Updated

A few weeks ago I posted this blog entry regarding an article at the Anglican Pastor blog entitled, "If Women Can Be Saved, Then  Women Can Be Priests", which was penned by Emily McGowin, a priest (according to the Neo-Anglican understanding of holy orders) in a diocese of the Anglican Church in North America named "Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others."  The next day I posted this comment from an REC priest that set forth a little history of said diocese and its bishop, Todd Hunter.  That history provides some necessary context regarding Dr. Gowin's ordination.

Happily, two new articles have appeared refuting the argument she made at the Anglican Pastor blog.  One is by Fr. Lee Nelson entitled,  "The Problem With Making a Patristic Argument for the Ordination of Women", and is hosted by Anglican Pastor but with a promise of a rejoinder from McGowin.  The other is an article at the Theopolis Institute by Fr. Blake Johnson entitled, "Sacramental Representation and the Created Order".

More appears to be coming, so stay tuned.

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UPDATE:  Here is Dr. McGowin's promised rejoinder.  There are some great critical comments there.  One of them mirrors my own, which is that Dr. McGowin's argument is a colossal non-sequitur.  Meanwhile, The North American Anglican has published Fr. Alex Wilgus' response to her first article.
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UPDATE, 1/20/2020:

Two more responses to Emily McGowin.

Holy Orders and Headship, Branson Munson

God is Not Fair: Some Thoughts on Women's Ordination, Fr. Gerald McDermott

Orthodox Anglicanism and the Benedict Option

Excellent North American Anglican article by Fr. R.R. Tarsitano about integrating the Anglican Way into the Benedict Option and vice versa. This is not to say that non-Anglican communions can't produce their own version of a BenOp community, but as an Anglican I have to agree with Rod Dreher and Fr. Tarsitano that frequent obervance of the Eucharist and the Morning and Daily Offices are key in re-creating a truly Christian culture that can face down secular "culture." There is power in both the Church's sacraments and her prayers.

See also Fr. Tarsitano's hard-hitting TNAA article, which should be read in conjunction with the article linked above, "A Continuing Anglican Communion: A Call to Arms".

Ora Pro Nobis? - Part 2

With reference to the post immediately below entitled, "Ora Pro Nobis?",  Fr. Ben Ben Jeffries has published this response, and which again has drawn a reply from Fr. Wesley Walker.

Ora Pro Nobis?

The North American Anglican published an article two days ago entitled, "A Reformed Litany of the Saints: For All Saints' Day".  It was penned by The Rev. Ben Jeffries, a priest serving in The Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), both as a pastor and as one of the  designers of the new ACNA Book of Common Prayer (2019) and Assistant to the Custodian of the new prayer book.

The thrust of Fr. Jeffries' article is that the responses "ora pro nobis" ("pray for us") in the Litany of the Saints is violative of Article XXII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, which states in pertinent part, "The Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God."  Accordingly, the response "Ora Pro Nobis" should be replaced with the response "Glory to God!"  Fr. Jeffries' argument is essentially an Anglo-Calvinist one, hence article's title, "A Reformed Litany. . . ."

Anglo-Catholic responses to the article on Facebook and elsewhere were swift and many, but this article from The Rev. Wesley Walker, "Ora Pro Nobis: A Response to Rev. Ben Jefferies' 'Reformed Litany of the Saints" is a tour de force.  Don't miss it.   Fr. Walker is a priest in the Anglican Province in America, the blogger at Earth and Altar: Catholic Ressourcement for Anglicans, and owner/operator of the new Anglican podcast The Sacramentalists.

New To The Blog Role: The Sacramentalists

The Sacramentalists podcast.  This podcast began only in March of this year, but already it features some great episodes.  The podcast is owned and operated by Fr. Wesley Walker, Curate at St. Paul Anglican Church in Crownsville, Maryland (APA).  Here is its Facebook page.

"Fasten Your Seatbelts": Can a Woman Celebrate Holy Communion as a Priest?

A talk by Fr. William Mouser, Rector of St. Athanasius Anglican Church, Waxahachie, TX, Orthodox Anglican Church.  Fr. Mouser presented this at our OAC Clericus last weekend.  Please visit Fr. and Barbara Mouser's web site, The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

The religious left cares nothing about any of this, obviously, but the so-called conservative Anglican advocates of women's ordination are so totally oblivious to the deep theological basis for ordaining only godly males to clerical office -- with its *cosmic implications* - which Fr. Mouser describes here.  They will have a lot of explaining to do before the Great Throne of Judgment, but the explanation will not suffice, and they will find themselves eternally ashamed.  God be pleased, what we know from I Cor. 3: 12-15 will apply to them. :(

It's and hour and seven minutes, but I encourage you to make some time to view it.

(Fr. Mouser warned us to "fasten your seatbelts", because the "P      word", among other things,  was coming.  It was one of the most powerful presentations I've seen.)

Do Not Miss This Sermon

It was delivered during Morning Prayer at our Orthodox Anglican Church clericus this weekend, which was held at St. Athanasius Anglican Church in Waxahachie, TX, by the Rt. Rev. Robert Todd Giffin, Ordinary of the Diocese of Mid-America, APA. St. Andrew's Theological College and Seminary conferred an Honorary Doctorate upon him during this service. He has important words for the Continuing Anglican Church.

The video was orifinally hosted by the SATCS Facebook page.

In Orbán’s Hungary, Christ is King

"To not only proclaim the Christian foundation of one’s country but actually rebuild the nation according to Christian principles was bound to raise the ire of the jaded secularists who are successfully presiding over Europe’s dying post-Christian culture."

Know hope for a new Christendom.

A Comment From A Priest. . .

on the article by Emily McGowin referenced below:

I read the article by Emily McGowin. The diocese she is in is run by Todd Hunter. Bishop Hunter is a product of the Vineyard/Calvary Chapel movement. He was received into AMiA in 2008 and made a Bishop in 2009. He came into the ACNA in 2012. His understanding of Anglicanism is nil. I watched an interview he gave around the time AMiA made him a Bishop. He freely admitted to not understanding the sacraments. One comment that stands out was how he still did not understand the need of confirmation. (He was a priest at the time). The AMiA parish in which I watched this interview with AMiA clergy and laity was then called Holy Trinity in Pensacola, Florida. It is now called The Mission. I was newly priested and the only one to vocally challenge the thought of letting this man be in charge of anything in the Church. Some of his other theology was also terrifying. So her theological ignorance, maybe willful ignorance, is honestly arrived at due to her theological "father". In the article Ms. McGowin takes partial quotes attributed to St Gregory of Nazianzus (she gives a very vague reference hard to research), Eph. 5:22, and Galatians. She confuses salvation with function and makes great leaps in logic and reason. How she did not hurt herself in the strain is amazing. For full disclosure I am a priest in the ACNA, the REC in particular. The level of theology shown by McGowin is typical of the ACNA. I second Fr. Little, if you have a choice between the ACNA and the Continuing Churches in your location, go with the Continuing.  I fear the ACNA due to the embrace of non Anglican and in some cases non Christian theology is becoming white washed sepulchres. And for that I grieve.

While I cannot confirm all the specifics in this assessment, it is true that Bishop Hunter was received into the AMiA in 2008, made a bishop in 2009 (!), left AMiA for ACNA in 2012 and is representative of all that is wrong in the Anglican Realignment.   The Diocese of the Churches for the Sake of Others (C4sO) is apparently named after a "ministry" he created before he was received into the AMiA ("Church for the Sake of Others").  It all speaks volumes. 

So this deacon/"scholar" from C4sO simply advances all this pathology in her article today at Anglican Pastor.

Like I said, steer clear.

The Anglican Pastor Blog and Women's Ordination

An Anglican Pastor blog article published today, If Women Can Be Saved, Then Women Can Be Priests, is representative of why I removed this blog from my list of reputable Anglican online sources. "If women can be saved, then women can be priests." Talk about a whopping non sequitur of an article title, and when you dig into the content of the article you'll encounter a shameful piece of theological legerdemain as well. Her argument only mimicks that of the small but vocal nest of feminists I encountered when I was in the Orthodox Church. The fact of the matter is that there is zero, zilch, nada support in the Fathers for women's ordination. It's why they never ordained one.

The article is written by one Emily McGowin, a deacon in the oddly-named "Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others", one of the virtual dioceses of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).  Her bio there, as elsewhere around the Web, reports that she "is a teacher and scholar of religious studies and a theologian in the Anglican tradition."

Well, first of all, the "Anglican tradition" knows nothing of the ordination of women to the ranks of clergy, deacon, priest or bishop.  The ordination of women in Anglican churches is a late uncatholic monstrosity, dating back only to the 1970s. 

The blog's founder, Fr. Greg Goebel, is apparently pro-WO, though this disclaimer is given at the head of the article:

Editor’s Note: Anglican Pastor does not take a site-wide position on women’s ordination. We do, however, require both clarity and charity. The piece below meets our standards. We ask that your responses to it do so as well.

The fact, however, that Anglian Pastor has chosen to give her a forum is damning enough. It doesn't matter that he allegedly allows opposing views.  If you put some uncatholic thing out there as something to be seriously considered, your disclaimer is meaningless from a Catholic point of view, and Anglicans claim to be Catholic, something that is evident not only from Anglicanism's theological history but also from the fact that Anglicans pledge this when they recite the Creed every Sunday: "I believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church."  The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church does not ordain women and never will.  The issue simply is not up for discussion, the protestations of Neo-Anglicans notwithstanding.

With respect to their protestations, Mrs. McGowin's Neo-Anglican view is representative of the theologically and ecclesially troubled movement known as Protestantism.  One of the pathologies of the Protestant Reformation is that it eventually came to embrace pluralistic theologies, quite in accordance with its principle that well-meaning scholars could arrive at differing stances in their quest to discover "new light breaking forth from Scripture" and hence could posit new understandings that should be classed as adiaphora. The Protestant theological academy thus supplanted the authority of the Fathers and the Church's bishops.  That this is so is evidenced in the article, where the author cites the pro-WO ACNA theologian Will Witt, who warmly speaks of "PhD Anglicanism".

However, as Newman remarked, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." There is nothing truly traditionally Anglican or Catholic in this article.  Those who are interested in becoming authentically Anglican should steer clear of Realignment Neo-Anglicanism, and should look to Continuing Anglicanism instead, where the Catholic faith is held and where, accordingly, we recite the Creed with integrity.

Is There Really a Patristic Critique of Icons?

A five-part article written by an Orthodox blogger in response to Steven Wedgeworth's argument against the use of icons back in 2013. Wedgeworth's argument is seemingly based at least in part on Bishop John Jewel's "Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry and the Superfluous Decking of Churches", one of the Homlies approved in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.  As the blogger shows, and as I've suspected is the case generally speaking in the early Reformers' apologetic uses of patristic material on all sorts of matters, the employment of the writings from the Church Fathers is often highly selective.  Add to this that the typical Calvinist exegesis of the pertinent texts (what Wedgeworth calls "the earlier Biblical testimony") is shoddy in the extreme (accounting for why it was never accepted by Lutherans or high-church Anglicans) and you have a situation that leads to the conclusion, per E.H. Browne and others, the the Book of Homilies deserve only our general assent. 

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Against Modernity: Liturgy as Quiet Resistance

From The North American Anglican.