Whither Anglicanism?

The Anglican communion's plural viewpoints and differing worship styles with, at the same time, unity of church administration, is appealing as an example of how a single church for all believers might work. But in recent times a problem has arisen with its model. Some have used the Anglican tendency toward genial tolerance of varying views to bring into the church ideas that are heterodox at best, importing passing fashions from the culture as new standards for Christianity. It will be interesting to see how (or whether) the Anglican communion recovers from that.

That said, Anglicanism is uniquely positioned to serve as a vehicle for dialog, since it is a Protestant church with Catholic roots and Orthodox affinities. As an entity that can point to its continuous existence and operation from long before the Great Schism of 1054, it can claim kinship to the undivided Church of old, something no other Protestant body can do. At the same time, it is accepted as a Protestant church by the other Protestants. On that basis, Anglicanism would seem in the ideal position to broker dialog. But, bedeviled by its problems maintaining historical orthodoxy, today it speaks with a divided voice.

"Thus far and no farther" in accepting peculiar ideas is a limit Anglicanism has hesitated to set, and while it dithered, heterodoxy set in. Not all ideas bear consideration; some can and must be rejected outright. Compromise is a good thing but there is such a thing as too much compromise, compromise over the wrong things. There is no profit in dialectic where there are points that are not negotiable--the modern way is to suppose that all points are always negotiable, but that is simply a heresy of our benighted present era.