American Catholic Episcopacy
The genius of the American Church
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” –John 17:21
The history of the Episcopacy is one that I will continue to find fascinating. As a self-avowed Protestant, I am especially interested in the views of the earliest Reformers regarding its retention, as well as the historic tensions between those Church Bodies which preserved the Historic Episcopate and those who did not. It is no secret that –unfortunately– the different Reformed Churches came to several different forms of Church Government in the wake of the Reformation. As someone in a tradition which has retained the Historic Episcopate and the Apostolic Succession, I cannot help but ask, “what now?” Delving into this vast inquiry has led me to read Norman Sykes’ excellent Book Old Priest and New Presbyter. Not only is it an insightful work on the tensions between Episcopal England and Presbyterian Scotland, but several of his observations have reminded me of a few of my favorite American Divines. I think that he provides a good jumping off point for how many of them viewed the American Church and the function of our own Church Government.
Commenting on the various Protestant Polities, Sykes writes:
From the amalgam of these varieties of Protestantism there might have emerged the ecclesiastical equivalent of that mixed polity so beloved by Aristotle, which could have embraced episcopal, presbyterial, and lay elements in a balanced whole.
–Norman Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbytery, 42
(Emphasis my own)
Now, this got me thinking: this same sentiment was expressed by several priests of the American Church who submitted a Memorial to the House of Bishops in 1853 regarding the Protestant divisions at the time as they were felt within the United States. This very interesting letter was instigated by none other than [Saint] William Augustus Muhlenberg –the Father of American Church Schools and a general hero of the faith to American Anglicans everywhere. The ‘Evangelical Catholic’ Muhlenberg and his companions state:
This leads your petitioners to declare the ultimate design of their memorial—which is to submit the practicability, under your auspices, of some ecclesiastical system, broader and more comprehensive than that which you now administer, surrounding and including the Protestant Episcopal Church as it now is, leaving that Church untouched, identical with that Church in all its great principles, yet providing for as much freedom in opinion, discipline, and worship, as is compatible with the essential faith and order of the Gospel. To define and act upon such a system, it is believed, must sooner or later be the work of an American Catholic Episcopate.
According to the Rev. Edwin Harwood commenting on the Memorial fifty years later, the suggestion was for the Protestant Episcopal Church to serve as “the nucleus of a larger ecclesiastical system, embracing baptized Christians of various names, not bound by our rubrics and canons (and of necessity neither controlled by nor represented in our General Convention) but bound to us and to each other by the common acceptance of ‘an American Catholic Episcopate.’”
Here I will not comment on the particular system proposed by these irenic priests. Their aim was ultimately a noble one and need not be scrutinized further. The point of significance is that these priests saw the American Episcopal system as the solution to Protestant division within North America. What is astounding is that this seems to be the general feeling of American Churchmen as it is not limited to a particular party! Rather surprisingly, Bishop [and Saint] Charles C. Grafton writes:
“As we study the history of our Church in England, we can but regret the numbers which formed themselves into sects, and went out from her. The evils of which they complained, have in the American Church been done away with. In our American Church government the Bishop is no lordly Prelate appointed by a Prime Minister, but is elected by the Clergy and the people. Her Bishops govern not autocratically but with the advice of counselors chosen by Clergy and Laity. Here the Priests, by virtue of their office, sit in Council along with the Bishop, and the Laity have their own recognized place in Conventions and Vestries. The American Catholic Church thus combines the advantages of the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational systems.”
–Address to the Annual Convention in the Diocese of Fond du Lac, 1901
(Emphasis my own)
According to Grafton, there was a real belief that the causes of European ecclesiastical divisions were remedied within the return of a more primitive and apostolical form of Episcopacy as found within the American Church. Surprisingly to me, of what I’ve learned during the last two years of studying with the Eastern Orthodox –especially as described in the two volume series Primacy in the Church published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press– the systems hypothesized by Sykes above and incarnated in Grafton’s understanding of the American Episcopate, corresponds with the idyllic form of Episcopal Government. It seems that the American Episcopal self-understanding –even among its ‘Anglo-Catholic’ constituents such as Grafton– was the belief that our Church was the ultimate fruition of Reformational controversies; it was what Primitive Protestantism (if you will pardon the expression) had always envisioned.
Not a bad legacy.