Article (Virtue online): Is it Anglican well-being or willful amnesia?

Henry VIII may, for his own sinful ends, have separated the Church of England from the Papacy, but late-medieval Roman Catholicism required longer, indeed required the blood of the Protestant martyrs, to be reformed.

When biblical doctrine is forgotten as being essential to true unity, the alleged diversity celebrated by today's revisionists quickly exposes itself as tyranny against biblical Christians. Richard John Neuhaus has identified this sleight of hand in his dictum: "When orthodoxy becomes optional, it soon becomes proscribed."

Dozens of Episcopal Church dioceses today, in which biblically faithful Christians are marginalized, manifest this tragic irony. Dozens of Episcopal bishops in such dioceses have willfully forgotten that the original Episcopal consecration vows administered until the late 20th century included explicit assent to the following questions:

Will you then faithfully exercise yourself in the Holy Scriptures, and call upon God by prayer for the true understanding of the same: so that you may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome Doctrine, and to withstand and convince the gainsayers?

Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to the same?

The forgetfulness, indeed total disappearance, of such commitment since the new Episcopal Prayer Book was adopted in 1979 has caused many Episcopalians to seek the cover of overseas Anglican bishops in order to remain faithfully rooted in the Catholic order and Protestant freedom of the Anglican Reformation. Read more