Let's Rethink the Continuum -- III

As I've mentioned here before, while Anglicanism has leaned toward Roman Catholic liturgical form at various times in its history, it is a Protestant denomination. It does not acknowledge the authority of the Pope, and in addition, Article XXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which are included in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, says in part:

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. . . . The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.

Protestant denominations had ordained woman priests for decades prior to The Episcopal Church's decision, some from their founding. The St Louis Affirmation can be looked upon as an attempt by a particularly conservative Anglo-Catholic faction in The Episcopal Church to impose its highly selective quasi-Catholic views on a main line Protestant denomination. Those who broke away were perfectly comfortable, it would appear, with married priests and bishops, divorce-and-remarriage, artificial birth control, and no-Popery, but apparently they wanted to pick a fight over the ordination of women, not normally a Protestant preoccupation.

I think Douglas Bess is spot on when he begins Divided We Stand remarking on the difference between the wildly overestimated numbers that the Continuum either predicted or now claims, versus the tiny actual memberships in its denominations. The vast majority of Episcopalians have been satisfied to be main line Protestants. When they fall away, it is not in the direction of liturgical conservatism.

In addition, one of the key figures in the Continuum, Louis Wahl Falk III, really didn't have a dog in this fight. He'd been deposed by the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac in 1966. A member of a prominent Wisconsin family, he'd left that state in the wake of the scandal to run what was apparently one of the family businesses in Iowa. I made a number of career wrong turns when I was young; in fairly short order I realized I wasn't cut out to be either an Army officer or a college professor, and I moved on. Somehow, Louis Falk doesn't seem to have gotten the same sort of message: a dozen years after he was removed as an Episcopal priest, he seems to have determined he still had a vocation, and he got right back into a fight that, frankly, shouldn't have concerned him.