Some thoughts on truth and the Church and ARCIC

Fr. Sean Finnegan writes at The Anglo-Catholic:

A colleague, Fr Tony Churchill (no stranger to this debate), remarked to me in the early 1990s that Catholics and Anglicans in the ARCIC debates were trying to answer two different questions. Catholic theologians ask whether a doctrine is true (and therefore should be held by all); Anglicans ask the question whether one could hold this doctrine and still be an Anglican; can this doctrine be held within the breadth of Anglicanism? [Which is why we Traditional Anglicans left 30 years ago and the establishment of Personal Ordinariates inside the Catholic Church can't happen fast enough!]

I think also that the wrong issues were addressed by ARCIC, or at least addressed in the wrong order. Clearly, matters like the Eucharist, the Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary are crucially important, and have divided Protestantism and Catholicism for five hundred years. However, without examining the underlying principles, any agreement reached on these important subjects will prove to have been built on shifting foundations which could result (and, some would say, have resulted) in major cracks, even collapses, within the structure so carefully built by ARCIC.

The most important issue that should have been examined first is the nature of truth, and how we are to arrive at it. For a Protestant, a Christian himself (or herself) reads the Bible, and, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and helped by the witness of tradition (for some) and reason, discerns God’s truth for himself. Within this system, there has to be a fair degree of toleration of difference, because Protestants had discovered within a couple of years that two earnest Protestants are going to have two different interpretations of pretty fundamental doctrines, and if they aren’t going to end up killing each other (which some did), they are going to have to accept that there can be room for honest doubt. This, I would contend, has eventually given birth to doctrinal liberalism, though it would be a mistake to conclude from this that all Protestants are liberals, though Protestantism is particularly prone to liberalism on the one hand (for the nice people) and bigotry on the other (‘my privately held opinion is better than your privately held opinion’).

To a Catholic mind, our Lord did not come to write a book, but to found a Church through the wisdom of which, guided by the same Holy Spirit, he would continue to guide his Church into all truth. That Church would, inspired by the Holy Spirit, write a book, (the New Testament) but the Church precedes the book and therefore authoritatively interprets it (as the Bible interprets the tradition). It is the Apostles who are to be listened to as one would listen to Christ (Luke 10:16), and the Church holds that they continue to teach through tradition with scripture and through their successors.

But then the Apostles also need to be listening to Christ and under his authority and the authority of the deposit of faith they have been entrusted to pass on.

Thankfully, I see evidence of that.