The View From The Foothills

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.

In 1997 everything changed. Our first son was born that year, and though we continued faithfully attending St. Luke’s every Sunday our lives were (and are) consumed with parenthood. Coincidentally, it was also at about this time (December of 1996, actually) that I began posting book reviews on line–but I digress. And so we were more or less distracted until 2003, when Gene Robinson was elected and consecrated the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, an event that polarized–and well-nigh created–the Anglican Blogosphere. I don’t see any value in rehashing all of the details here; if you’ve not been following along, I’ll simply note that the events of 2003 revealed that the division in the Anglican Communion on matters of sexuality, biblical interpretation, and Christian orthodoxy was far deeper and wider than most of us had realized up until that time. Kendall Harmon, who blogs at Titus OneNine, dubbed the two camps the “reappraisers” (those who wish to interpret scripture in accord with modern needs) and the “reasserters” (those who wish to interpret scripture as the Church has always interpreted scripture).

Jane and I, along with most of the people at St. Luke’s, were and are firmly in the “reasserters” camp. The phrase our pastor used was “biblical orthodoxy”–at St. Luke’s, as at a handful of other parishes in our diocese, we would strive to be “biblically orthodox”. And that was well and good. “Biblically orthodox” described in a nutshell what we wanted to be, and what the reappraisers did not seem to care about.

Only, what did it mean? What did being “biblically orthodox” entail? Being true to the scriptures, obviously; but what were the specifics? The Nicene Creed was involved, and I knew something about that and what it meant and where it came from; but the “reappraisers” also recited the Nicene Creed. In the end, I decided that Kendall Harmon had it right: to be a “reasserter” was to interpret scripture as the Church has always interpreted scripture. So…how had the Church always interpreted scripture?

I’m a bit of a history buff, and I’d read quite a bit about the Roman world during the time the Christian faith was born, but I’d never boned up on the Early Church in the years following the Acts of the Apostles. I resolved to remedy that. One of the books I read was Rod Bennett’s Four Witnesses, a book about four of the earliest of the Church Fathers: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Bennett’s book includes a biographical sketch of each along with excerpts from their writings. Not coincidentally, he shows how their writings span the first two hundred years of the Church’s history, and how each was in a position to receive the gospel either from the apostles (Clement came to Rome during Peter’s lifetime) or from those who had known them. Bennett, in fact, details the workings of the Apostolic Succession during those early days.

At the end of the volume, Bennett tells some of his story. He came to the Fathers from a Baptist background, looking for answers to some questions he had…and once they’d been answered to his satisfaction he was a Roman Catholic. (As Lewis noted, a young man can’t be too careful about the books he reads.)

Hmmm. I was not entirely surprised; here were bishops, deacons, and priests as an essential part of the Church, and here was Justin Martyr’s description of the mass, which might as well have been a description of the mass I attended right up until I got married. But Anglicanism also has bishops, deacons, and priests and claims the Apostolic Succession. So that was OK.

In addition to reading about the Early Church, I was also reading widely in the Anglican Blogosphere, just to keep up with the news. In addition to Titus OneNine, Chris Johnson’s Midwest Conservative Journal, and Captain Yips, all blogs I still look at daily, there was one by an anonymous Episcopal Priest who called himself the “Pontificator”. He was involved in a detailed investigation of Anglicanism and whether it could truly be considered a branch of the Catholic (i.e., “Universal”) Church, along side the Roman Catholic church and the various Orthodox churches. In time he concluded that it could not, and swam across the Tiber. This was somewhat distressing, as my original entry into the Episcopal Church had been based on the (not particularly well-researched) assumption that it could.

There were two other threads that worked their way into my thinking at this time. In addition to reading Anglican blogs I’d done a fair amount of surfing around and reading other Christian bloggers, and much to my surprise the ones I found myself going back to time and again, outside of those listed above, were the Catholic blogs, especially those of Mark Shea and Amy Welborn. Mark was genuinely funny, and was also, like the Anglican blogs I was reading, fighting the good fight for Orthodoxy. There was a difference, though: Mark generally entered the fray cheerfully and with gusto, rather than without the anger and frustration I was used to hearing from the Anglican bloggers, nor was he distracted by every little shift in the wind among the major Anglican players. It was refreshing. And Amy somehow managed to maintain a thoroughly irenic tone, even while dealing with contentious issues.

The other thread began with G.K. Chesterton.

Part 4 is here.