Mattingly double-majored in journalism and history at Baylor University and then earned an M.A. at Baylor in Church-State Studies and an M.S. in Communications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He is a prodigal Texan who has never met a mountain he didn't love. He is a music fanatic whose interests range from Celtic acoustic guitar to Russian chant. His wife, Debra Bridges Mattingly, is a librarian in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. They have two children, 20-year-old Sarah Jeanne and 15-year-old Frye Lewis. The Mattinglys are members of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Linthicum, Maryland.

AGAIN: Welcome Terry! You've developed a thorough understanding of the state of the Anglican communion in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular, through your work over 25 years as a journalist. But you also have an intimate connection as a former Episcopalian. Please share with us something of your own encounter with the Episcopal Church.

Terry Mattingly: I need to stress that I am not a theologian, but a journalist. . . . I was raised Southern Baptist; my wife was raised Southern Baptist. My father was a Southern Baptist pastor, and for a period of time a Southern Baptist executive in Texas. But in the early '80s we became Episcopalians. One of my very first exposures to Orthodoxy, outside of a history textbook, was actually in the Episcopal Church, in which it was explained to me that there are many people within Anglicanism who think of the Church of England as the Orthodox Church of England, from before the Schism. Part of the tension between Anglicanism and Rome was that the Celtic church was such a consciously separate unit to itself. It had so many things in common with Orthodoxy as opposed to the Roman way of doing things. Primarily with regard to monasticism-they had the emphasis on monasticism as opposed to the more political Roman system of dioceses.

So it was in that context that I first heard a quote attributed to Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. He was a very Anglo-Catholic, very conservative, traditional Anglican. He said that the mission of Anglicanism was to become Orthodoxy in the West and seek union with the Church of the East. Now I had always heard ecumenism in an Anglican context discussed in terms of ecumenical work with Rome. That was the first time I ever knew that there was a stage when ecumenical ties with Orthodoxy were actually much greater.

In the West the forms of church life that were most compatible with Orthodoxy were killed off. I believe it's Fr. Michael Keiser who has the wonderful quote, "People need to remember that Orthodoxy in the West didn't die, it was murdered." I love that phrase. What he's referring to is the Celtic church being destroyed not once, not twice, but three times. The Celtic church was radically altered by the Norman invasion. Many of its traditions died in a kind of political seizure by Rome. You also have all the Viking invasions. And then finally you have the Reformation and the Calvinist destruction of a lot of the Island of the Mighty as well.

There's so much about the Celtic church that we don't know. But its ties to Orthodoxy are genuinely intriguing. There's so much pre-Schism history and material and worship and art and iconography. The Book of Kells and all of the great Celtic saints are just as much ours as they are the Western church's. That includes Patrick, and Brigid, and Hilda, and Brendan. These great saints. . . . That's our church too.

AGAIN: It's interesting that you mention that common heritage. In this issue, we have a wonderful article from Donna Farley on St. Cuthbert. We also have an article on the conference held at St. Andrew House in Detroit in January, a colloquium on Orthodoxy for Anglicans. It was titled "Faith of our Fathers." That title was chosen to summon up that image of a shared heritage-the ancient Christian Fathers of the East and of the West belong to both the Orthodox and the Anglicans.

TM: Again I believe it was Fr. Michael Keiser who once told me, "There is a reason that bagpipes have an eison." The trade routes out of the Mediterranean and the East definitely went up the coast of Europe, and that's how Christianity got up there-by sea. And the monastic traditions are strikingly similar. That's where the real history is. . . .

Orthodox Christians need to know that the ancient, pre-Schism heritage of the Church of England is our heritage too. At Holy Cross in Linthicum, we have icons of the Western saints on our walls as well as the Eastern saints. My own personal patron saint is St. Brendan of Ireland, and if you look at our wall behind the chanter's stand at the saints of America, you will find an icon of Brendan as well as the others because of the historical stories of his sea travels. There is archaeological evidence that if he didn't make it to the shores of America, his disciples certainly did. There are things written in the ancient Celtic writing called Ogham on rocks at sites in New England. . . . There are rocks along Brendan's Trail in Ireland that have been carved with this same writing.

So as radical as it may sound to some people, that would mean that the first Divine Liturgy on American shores would have been Western Rite. Brendan and other seafaring monastics of that era were literally putting themselves in boats and saying, "Lord, blow us where you want us to go." In the surviving texts regarding Brendan, though, you find also an incredibly detailed plan about how to get to the land of the West. There's an interesting book by a man named Tim Severin, who recreated Brendan's boat and set out to see if you really could get from England to America in a boat that size, made from leather and wood.

AGAIN: Turning from the ancient to the modern, can you give us an overview of the state of Anglicanism today? Orthodox Christians in America need to know about the Anglican communion in order to have a fruitful dialogue with individual Anglicans and Episcopalians and with their parishes as they live out their own witness of the Orthodox faith.

TM: It is important for me to explain just a little bit how the Anglican compromise has resulted in such interesting things in terms of structure, which has so much to do with the current problems. The more conservative elements of Anglicanism tend to be its most Protestant elements, and its most liberal elements are usually people who think of themselves as highly catholic. . . .

The heart of the Anglican compromise boils down to putting St. John Chrysostom and John Calvin in the same pew. But neither one of those men want to be there. There are things on which they do not agree with each other, and they would not compromise. And yet the Anglican compromise tried to have both sides of a Protestant and ancient equation be equal. You simply can't pull that off.

People need to understand that there are very strong parts of Anglicanism that are rigorously Protestant. Some of the liveliest Anglicanism you will meet in the world is thoroughly Reformed, very Calvinistic. This is the John Stott and J. I. Packer wing of low-church Anglicanism. In that context, you will find a heavy emphasis on congregationalism. They will be very Protestant, and this is probably the most conservative and biblical part of modern Anglicanism. That's where, for the most part, you had the missionary societies that went to the Third World. Then you have the traditional branch that would be called Anglo-Catholic, which would deny or water down a lot of the Protestant side of the compromise and put a much heavier, more Roman emphasis on ecclesiology, on the role of the bishop, on church tradition as a part of interpreting Scripture as opposed to sola scriptura-a very consciously Catholic element. . . .

Anglicans are highly skilled and genuinely talented in compromise. When you say that Anglicanism is the church of the via media-the middle way-that implies a kind of compromise position between two camps that often don't want to compromise. And on moral and social issues, what you have ended up with is a never-ending march to the left-because you're constantly compromising on the church traditions of the ages. This steadily, slowly but surely, pulls you to the theological left on critical issues. . . .

Episcopal bishop William Frey used to say that Anglicans have been doing this via media theological method for so long they can't stop. As he put it, if one side says Jesus is Lord, and the other side says Jesus is not Lord, the Anglican compromise is Jesus is occasionally Lord. He meant that as a joke, but you can see that in the history of the Frey Amendment. [Editor's note: This was a failed attempt by traditionalists to make a doctrinally conservative addition to Episcopal Church law.] Frey said Episcopal clergy must not be sexually active outside of marriage. That leads to a theological statement: Sex outside of marriage is sin. But the other side says sex outside of marriage is not always a sin. Which means the Anglican compromise is sex outside of marriage is occasionally sin. The left isn't happy, and the right isn't happy, but you have moved in the leftward direction. You've compromised the absolute truth of an ancient doctrine. That's how the mechanism works.

Right now, what we have is two groups of true believers who don't want to compromise. It's so interesting that sexuality ended up being the line in the sand, when it could have been-and I argued it should have been-the Resurrection. Why when Anglican bishops began to deny historic doctrines related to the Incarnation and Resurrection and salvation through Christ alone, and other critical doctrines, why didn't the war break out then? Whereas now it has broken out over sexuality.

AGAIN: Why do you think that is so?

TM: My own hunch is that first of all sexuality gets covered in the media, whereas a doctrine about theological language is harder for the press to cover. The other thing frankly is that the theological left has learned how to state its beliefs about Resurrection and Incarnation in a way that sounds OK. And, they're very hard to pin down. In other words, you could talk about the hope of the Resurrection, but you've redefined what all the words mean. You need to understand that Anglicanism defines itself as being united by certain liturgical texts-but you don't have to all agree on what the words mean. A lot of Anglicans will say it's important that when they say the Creed, instead of saying "I believe," most Anglican churches say, "We believe." Meaning the body affirms this, but it is not necessary for the individual to do the same.

AGAIN: Since issues of sexuality have been what has sparked the current conflicts, though, do you have thoughts in general on how that is playing out? Where are the lines being drawn? And, to what extent are the issues of sexuality bound up with the related issues of gender in general, like say the female priesthood?

TM: For the Anglicans, sexual issues do not automatically connect with gender issues, even though Orthodox would see that they do. For a lot of Protestant Anglicans, remember that they are placing more of an emphasis on congregationalism and less on classic catholic orders. So, there are a lot of charismatic Episcopalians and evangelical Episcopalians who have no problem with the ordination of women, because their concept of priesthood is subtly different from those who see it in the full catholic sense. Even though they are conservative, the ordination of women was not a make-or-break issue for them. They don't connect it with the transcendent, sacramental understanding of what the priesthood is, because their theology is more Protestant and more Reformed. There's this very low church Protestant element there that can be conservative on some issues but not on others that the Orthodox would see.

AGAIN: It seems that something the Orthodox need to keep in mind in their encounters with Anglicans is that they need to be prepared to speak to two different audiences. On the one hand, you have the more Protestant wing, where you may have more agreement on questions of, say, scriptural truth and their application to social issues. And on the other hand, there is the more Catholic side of the Anglican communion, where you may have some common ground about, for example, sacramentalism and mystery in the faith.

TM: There are still conservative Anglo-Catholics, but not as many. The most vital and alive conservative elements in modern Anglicanism are charismatic or evangelical low-church Anglicans. There are still some very high-church, fully Catholic Anglicans. But I find it very interesting that modern liberal Anglicanism tends to identify much more with a high-church, liturgical smells-and-bells approach to Anglicanism.

This makes many Orthodox confused, because they see these people and they say, gosh, they even have icons in their church. We have a lot in common with them. When theologically, you may have almost nothing in common with them. And then you walk into another Anglican church, and it will be like a megachurch. There will be a rock band, and it will be very low church. The liturgy may be much more informal, but their view of morality and basic doctrines and biblical authority and ancient traditions of the Church would be much closer to the Orthodox-even though it doesn't look like it in terms of style.

That's why we're having many people convert to the Orthodox Church right now from this other body, this separate body, that is called the Charismatic Episcopal Church-the CEC. That's a group of people that's coming out of Pentecostal or even Assemblies of God backgrounds. They're seeking beauty. They're seeking mystery. They're seeking transcendence. Many people out of that interesting new church-which is not a part of the Anglican Communion-are coming into Orthodoxy right now. . . .

When you're talking to the high church, one of the critical issues for them is their love of liturgy and the music of liturgy. They love the language of the classic Book of Common Prayer; they may be the people that actually have the hardest time giving up their rites. So they are your audience for the Western Rite, like the Liturgy of St. Gregory. It's very hard for them to give up their entire musical heritage. And whatever you want to say about Anglicanism, it has a glorious musical heritage. As someone who came from that background, that was a major hurdle for me coming into Orthodoxy. As a musician, I was going to give up almost every note of classical music I had ever sung in my life.

I think where these more conservative high church Episcopalians struggle is in the cultural realm much more than the theological. The theology is not going to be a major issue for them. The problem is giving up their glorious Christmas music, or never being able to sing "Lift High the Cross" again. That's a tremendous struggle for some of the most conservative of Anglicans, who would have the most theological reason to come to Orthodoxy. Those are the people who might struggle the most with the cultural aspects of Orthodox Christian parish life.

AGAIN: We've used both the name "Episcopal Church" and the name "Anglican Church." For those who aren't familiar with these terms, the simplified explanation is that the Anglican communion is a worldwide entity, and the Episcopal Church is the affiliated body in the United States.

In one recent news story, the Anglican archbishop of Nigeria is being turned to by Episcopalians as an authoritative voice for traditional Christianity. This seems representative of the increasingly popular notion that it is in the Third World that we will find the future growth and energy of doctrinally traditional Christianity. Can you speak about the situation in general of the Anglican communion in the Third World?

TM: The Anglican experience in the Third World, first of all, is infinitely more evangelistic and growing. The church there is just exploding in terms of size. They are experiencing unbelievable growth, especially in Africa and in Asia. Whatever you're dealing with, you're dealing with a faith that is urgently alive. Unlike the American context, where people are not even able to replace their own children in the church, they're growing at a rapid rate. So it's a very evangelistic church.

We have much we can learn from Anglicans in the Third World about what a liturgical evangelism might look like. Even though much of what they're doing is charismatic, in a very real sense of that word, I still think we can pay attention to what they're doing and learn from it. It might be Calvinistic, but it is still going to have more of a liturgical form than, say, the Southern Baptist Convention would have over there. There are going to be some very alive, highly Catholic elements. For example, the African church-African culture itself-has a heavy emphasis on authority and patriarchy. This means African bishops are going to be much more a kind of spiritual father model than you would experience in America, where bishops are thought of as super-theology professors who are appointed because of a combination of management skills and lecture skills. Instead of being primarily an intellectual or administrative leader, an African bishop is much more of a spiritual father or shepherd-even if that person has two degrees from Oxford.

African Christians are also dealing with a situation in which some of their own children could be kidnapped by Moslems. Or if you're the Anglican bishop in Singapore, you're literally dealing with the occult in many, many cases. These are not people who doubt the reality of a pre-modern spiritual world. The lives of the saints speak to these people in ways that we just don't have any understanding of.

AGAIN: Let's return to the current crises that are rocking the Anglican communion today. Frederica Mathewes-Green has spoken of the way in which the "stay and fight" mentality of many traditional Episcopalians has ended up becoming a kind of trap, to such an extent that fighting itself became their faith.

TM: There's a wonderful joke. The year is 2017. Two Anglo-Catholic Episcopal priests are standing in the foyer of the National Cathedral as the Presiding Bishop and her lesbian lover begin to process down the center aisle of the cathedral in a cloud of incense, carrying a statue of the Buddha. And one Anglo-Catholic priest turns to the other and says, "You know, one more thing and I'm outta here."

That joke is not funny to a lot of people, because it is a symptom of exactly that phenomenon of traditional Christians continuing to fight after they've already lost. But let me point out that for many, in addition to having trouble giving up pension funds and jobs and all those practical, fleshy, daily concerns of life, for Protestants-and remember that many of the most conservative elements in Anglicanism are Protestants-they can slide quite easily in to a kind of congregationalism that says, my church is fine. They have a more congregational concept of theology and polity anyway. Then, on the other side, for the conservative Anglo-Catholics, you're asking them to give up their entire musical heritage - all of their liturgy, all of their beautiful prayers, their architecture. These people that actually appreciate the theological content of all that, they have trouble giving it up and they want to stay and fight. So, they're more likely to either form a splinter church of Anglicanism, or to settle for some sort of arrangement where they get to keep one good bishop, while everybody else goes to heck in a handbasket.

AGAIN: Would you say that at least, given that these splinter churches exist that are genuinely trying to continue to practice doctrinally traditional Christianity, that it might be useful for local Orthodox congregations that learn of these parishes to think of them as potential allies? Could there be bonds of friendship between them that leaves to the side for the time being questions of being in communion with one another and of conversion, and just aims to open up a dialogue and between the two parishes at a local level?

TM: There certainly would be a natural bond there on social issues. That would be a great place to get together and create something like, say, a "St. Nicholas Crisis Pregnancy Center," with the patron saint of the orphan and the abused child becoming a common figure to both. And then you go together in this ministry to the poor and the abandoned. They would certainly be the kind of doctrinally and culturally conservative-which is not always the same thing as politically conservative-people with whom the Orthodox could do business.

AGAIN: Returning to something we touched on briefly earlier, for the Orthodox one of the most radical innovations of the Anglican communion is the ordination of women. As you've said, there are many Anglicans, even conservative Anglicans who hold to a more Protestant theology, for whom the ordination of women is not particularly troublesome. How would you say the Orthodox should respond to this?

TM: Most importantly, we need to remember that there is nothing Orthodoxy can do in the American context that will please people who actively desire the ordination of women, other than the ordination of women. It is critical though that when Orthodox say that we believe that it is possible for a woman to literally be a Church Father, in the sense that there were women who were among the Church Fathers, or when we say that it is possible for a woman to be a theologian, or that it is possible for a woman to be a missionary or an evangelist, we need to make sure that we know what those roles look like in the modern Church. Or, if we say every congregation needs a father and every congregation needs a mother - in a non-liturgical sense - we need to have our act together in terms of explaining uniquely what Orthodoxy means when it uses that kind of language.

AGAIN: What would you tell Orthodox Christians if they were to ask you, "What do I need to know about what's really happening in Anglicanism in America today?"

TM: They need to understand that, like Orthodoxy, Anglicanism does not have a pope. There is no one person who can settle this issue. Yet they also need to understand that it is the Church of England. This whole crisis is ultimately going to come down to the fact that England-and by that I mean the archbishop of Canterbury and the whole structure of the English church-is going to have to decide whether it will accept the liberal American establishment or the Third World traditionalists.

I don't think the Third World traditionalists are going to compromise. And I don't think the American left is going to compromise now on issues of the sexual revolution. They are not going to be willing to offend the New York Times editorial board and other sources of doctrinal power and authority.

So at some point, England is going to have to figure out which way it wants to go. And the Church of England is just as divided as the American church on these issues. It's just that the emphasis has been on America and Canada, where certain steps have occurred more quickly, because there aren't other structures, such as the queen, to help limit it in some way. . . .

The Anglican communion is a very important body. To the Orthodox, it should matter that there are strong, living Anglican churches in parts of the world where Orthodoxy is not as visible, like Asia, Africa, and India. To some degree these churches are an important dialogue partner. I think it is important that Orthodoxy not get suckered into relating to the Church of England only through ecumenical partners such as the World Council of Churches or the American Council of Churches. I think there is a need for traditional Orthodox leaders to dialogue directly with the traditional Anglican leaders on their own terms. Even if that is seen as a political backing of that side of the Anglican war, the pope has already decided which side of it he is going to talk to the most. I think Orthodoxy needs to send some similar signals if we want to defend traditional forms of faith in the modern age.

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