A HISTORY LESSON: PROPER LIMITS TO DOCTRINAL INNOVATION

By Ephraim Radner

As we await the Taskforce recommendations with their proposals for common life on the basis of some set of "principles," and anticipate our own diocesan convention, with its resolutions and legal articulations, the following may be of interest.

I recently came across the declaration cited below. It is from the 1814 General Convention, Journal of the House of Bishops. Perhaps it is well known, and has been cited by others in the present debate, but it is the first time I have read it. Its substance seems to have some pertinence to our current discussions regarding the character of ecclesial authority within ECUSA, and the proper limits on our doctrinal and disciplinary self-understanding. It is interesting that this declaration precedes, by a long shot, the consciousness of an "Anglican Communion."

It says nothing different than what is contained in our Prayer Book's 18th-century Preface; and what is recorded in the founding Conventions of our Church — that is, that the "independence" of (P)ECUSA as a church is focused solely within the realm of "civil concerns" and limits solely the imposition within the American church of the "civil" and "ecclesiastical will" of a "foreign country"; and the "independence" of the American church does not in any way touch upon the unity of "doctrine, worship, or discipline" between (P)ECUSA and the Church of England.

No new argument, then; just a piece of justifying documentation for the question: are the actions of General Convention and of bishops and dioceses of this church at one with the doctrine, worship, and discipline of the Church of England? If they are not, we stand in violation of our legal identity.

From the Journal of the House of Bishops, May 20th, 1814:

"The following declaration was proposed and agreed to: It having been credibly stated to the House of Bishops, that on questions in reference to property devised before the Revolution, to congregations belonging to the Church of England, and to uses connected with that name, some doubts have been entertained in regard to the identity of the body to which the two names have been applied, the House think it expedient to make the declaration... that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America is the same body heretofore known in these States by the name of the 'Church of England'; the change of name, although not in religious principle, in doctrine, or in worship, or in discipline, being induced by a characteristic of the Church of England, supposing the independence of Christian Churches, under the different sovereignties to which, respectively, their allegiance in civil concerns belongs."