More on Episcopal Ecclesiology

I have been giving more thought to my suggestion that the Episcopal Church is now espousing, perhaps quite unintentionally, a modernistic ecclesiology where the two concrete forms of ecclesial existence are the national church and the individual. The parish and diocese are within this framework mediating legal fictions functioning as aggregates of individual spiritualities on the one hand, and trustees of the property belonging to the national church. This new ecclesiology I have called “Neo-Erastianism.”

Some of the ideas behind this I have expressed in an earlier post, where I suggest the ecclesiological nationalism is a product of modernism. Among my comments were these:

What strikes me today is that Protestantism emerged along with the development
of the nation/state, and was indeed underwritten by this modern political
project. We often forget just how important the emerging western nations
were to the success of the Reformation…. Historic Protestantism exists as the
spiritual arm of a political trend that is in fact now under the immense stress
of both globalism on the one hand and tribalism on the other. Nationalism posits
a mediating unit, the Nation/State, as the ultimate political unit. Such a
unit has been unstable as it is too large for the tribe and requires bureaucracy
and a police or military force to maintain. With Protestantism no longer
underwritten by the culture, either formally as in a state church, or tacitly,
as in the case of the United States, and with ecclesial bureaucracy not able to
adapt to rapid social and technological change, churches such as the Episcopal
Church are destined to become moribund.

The Neo-Erastian airs from the Presiding Bishop and other bishops were inevitable.

Anglican ecclesiology (at least in its North American manifestations) is actually a matter of preferences and the exercise of power. The individual is free to choose from a variety of ecclesiological options, and then is able to embody these choices to the extent that I have the power to do so. “Preference” refers most specifically to the ecclesial existence of the individual as a religious subject. Higher levels of ecclesial life, such as the parish or the diocese, are simply aggregates of individual preferences. This dynamic has been intensified by the loss of the geographically defined parish church and the rise of sodalities of type or party, such as the Anglo-catholic or charismatic, for example. The parish thus serves the preferences of the individual by gathering individuals of like preference together as a more efficient means of providing resources.

The interaction of these preferences, especially to the extent they come into conflict with one another, is governed by the operation of power. This power resides most concretely in the national church, with subsidiary application of this power through dioceses and congregations.

But note that none of the above is strictly theological in structure. One can hold to the episcopate as the esse of the church, or that the church is an event created by the faithful preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments. These merely constitute the aforementioned preferences. Ecclesiology as it pertains to the national church is a matter of polity enforced through canon and, as is increasingly the case, civil law.