tmatt on ecclesiastical homicide

tmatt on ecclesiastical homicide July 16, 2007

Here’s some quotes of note from a recent interview with Terry Mattingly. There’s more where these came from; click the link below.

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.”

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.

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. . . .

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.

Read the whole interview H E R E.


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