Building an increasily orthodox Via-Media and a more Traditionalist Lex orandi-lex credendi-lex vivendi:

At the time of the Affirmation of St. Louis in 1978, secular culture had long been navigating religious custom for both the Anglican Communion and the American Episcopal Church. It had a lot of practice doing just that on two continents.

In England, the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Liberal Anglican theologian (a Unitarian preacher by trade), encouraged contemplativeness based on his poetics about opium usage, on “celestial delectation,” and on “self-annihilation.”

In America, further repurposing of the “Via-Media” was afoot, it being the case that the Deist mindset of Thomas Jefferson, of James Madison, and of George Washington, had effectively founded the United States, instead of Biblical primacy.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the famous son of a New England Unitarian Minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke to such very purposes at the Masonic Temple in Boston:

“The boldness of the hope men entertain transcends all former experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety.” (“LECTURE II. THE CONSERVATIVE; Lectures on the Times: Read at the Masonic Temple in Boston, 9 Dec. 1842,” Emerson, R.W.; The Dial, Cook, G.W., ed. Is. 10, 1901) 

“Hope” for what, and “piety” in the name of whom or what? Freemasons, indeed!

Violence, tyranny, and paranoia rule today, while science is the diety for most people. A given Reformed Episcopalian or Anglican Continuist will reject another conservative Anglican in humiliating ways in their own churches, to assert ideological dominance, in keeping with the times. By the same measure, he is given to adulating a worldly peer for his music, pornea, or beer choices. Filth, pettiness, and persecution are too often not the escaped as Christians flee their institutional religious cesspools only to suffer further isolation from the occupants of a science-loving proud Vestry, busily programming antique-sounding hymnals on the MP3 system to be heard by the cowed weekly faithful in the pews.

As Episcopalian J.P. Morgan hired anti-churchman agnostic Thomas Edison to wire America with generators, lightbulbs, and electricity, the “Innovation” bespoken by Emerson was now becoming the source of such hope, and science became that hope’s liturgy.

By the Eleventh Lambeth Conference, Anglican and Episcopalian bishops, promulgated Resolution 19 of Lambeth 1968, “The Study of Social and Political Change (b) That the normal pattern for the missionary structure of the Church be that of ecumenical action and that every use be made of consultants from the social sciences and related fields.” Feminism led to the elevation of Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was elected in 2006 as the first female Presiding Bishop in the history of the U.S. Episcopal Church and also the first female primate in the Anglican Communion. In 2002, the Episcopal General Convention ratified the election of Gene Robinson, a non-celibate openly gay man as Bishop of New Hampshire.

To recharge the Via-Media, with Traditionalism, tempered with Richard Hooker’s sober conception of it, the Law, be  it legislation that is either Ecclesiastical, Temporal, or Civil, must firstly identify “traditionalism,” and should derive equally from Divine Origin and from conservative orthodox Custom. It ought to begin with gentility, while ridding the self of the fructified syrupy novus-ordo Liberal catch-words of “mercy” and “dignity” and “welcoming.” Just start by being decent as your version of charity. It is a good way to begin the inevitable advent of a return to Common Law, now that Civil Law is literally dying flaccidly in the streets.

The American custom of conflating common or natural law with the “pursuit of happiness,” actually derived not from Thomas Jefferson, but from Englishman William Blackstone. In his Comentaries on the Laws of England, this Tory (Conservative) Anglican, named the source of this custom as completely finding its validation solely in Scripture:

“This law of nature, being coeval [existing at the same time] with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other… The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature, as they tend in all their consequences to man’s felicity… Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these.” (Comentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone; Prest W., ed.; Oxford, 2016; Book I; Sec. 42, p. 35)

The Scripture in question, would be the Gospel of St. John and Genesis 1 and 2. For the ordination of solely men and the prohibition against homosexuality, there are, respectively, Hebrews 5:1, and Romans 1:26-2.

Usage of the “pursuit of happiness,” now strictly requiring scriptural definition and refinement, it should follow that Liberalism, Modernity, Transcendentalism, Woke Ideology, and Critical Theory, Marxism, and all such social sciences, can only be said to be at variance with the Bible, when employing this term.

Hooker, in Book V Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity uses strong language forbidding priestly error to enforce belief in the necessity of orthodoxy to bring the Holy Spirit to parishioners, via priests, “To whom Christ hath imparted power both over that mystical body which is the society of souls, and over that natural which is himself for the knitting of both in one; (a work which antiquity doth call the making of Christ’s body;) the same power is in such not amiss both termed a kind of mark or character and acknowledged to be indelible…. [Biblical] Examples I grant there are which make for restraint of those men from admittance again into rooms of spiritual function, whose fall by heresy or want of constancy in professing the Christian faith hath been once a disgrace to their calling.” (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker, Richard; Morris, C. Ed.; Wipf & Stock, pub.; Book V. p. 417)

Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi (Latin: “the Law of what is Prayed [is] what is Believed [is] the Law of what is Lived”). This is the importance of Holy Scripture reverenced as the primary source of authority for Anglican theology, the deriving of Law and the canonizing of the Polity from Divine Origin. It must depend on an austere interpretation of the divine origin of Holy Scripture, according to an increasingly orthodox customizing of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi. Get leaner. Get meaner. Do it for God and Family. The heathen are ready to hunt us down and drag us in the streets, hoping you will watch yourselves getting beaten on Facebook Live Feed.

Let us then say that the very best definition of Christian Tradition is the most morally correct and orthodox interpretation possible of Holy Scripture that reverences its divine origin of Bible truths, to inform all of the activities and religious and social doings and thinking of all refined abiders of the aptly revived true and good Ecclesiastical, Temporal, and Common Law—built on the very articles of ancient Faith, Scripture, which protect the Traditional and worthy Custom of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi. 

This ancient Latin maxim saw its first expression in “Episcoporum Auctoritates: De Gratia dei et Libero Voluntatis Arbitrio,” a tract written by St. Prosper of Aquitaine. Known as the great lay apologist for his teacher, St. Augustine of Hippo, to Pope Celestine, to refute the Pelagian heresy, he wrote with disgust that the Pelagian Bishops were teaching that Christians only require their intellect and will, instead of God’s Grace, to attain Salvation.

The Latin translation is also supplied here of his famous “Lex credendi” statement, so that the reader can see the direct literal translation (rather than the typical Googled one[s]) for himself, to see that “elation” (meaning “pride”) of “pernicious novelty” and “growth of probable studies” do not appear in typical translations of this great statement of Faith for Bishops to follow:

“In addition to the inviolable sanctions of the most blessed and Apostolic See, by which most Fathers, cast down by the elation of pernicious novelty, and the beginnings of good will, and the growth of probable studies, and in them even to the end have taught us to relate perseverance to the grace of Christ, Traditionally, it is being celebrated uniformly throughout the world and in every Catholic church, so that the law of belief establishes the law of supplication.”

“Praeter beatissimae et apostolicae sedis inviolabiles sanctiones, quibus nos plissimi patres, pestiferae novitatis elatione dejecta, et bonae voluntatis exordia, et incrementa probabilium studiorum, et in eis usque in finem perseveratiam ad Christi gratiam referre docuerunt, obsecrationum quoque sacerdotalium sacramenta respiciamus, quae ab apostolis tradita, in toto mundo atque in omni Catholica Eccelesia uniformiter celebraniur, ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi.” (St. Prosper of Aquitaine; “Episcoporum Auctoritates: De Gratia dei et Libero Voluntatis Arbitrio”; Patrologia Latina; Capitulum VIII; ed./pub., Jacques-Paul Migne, 1844: Patrologiae Cursus Completus; p. 209)

Sacred Tradition therefore comprises the full definition of “Traditional Anglicanism.” The Religious Custom of interpreting our blessed divine origin of Holy Scripture is to celebrate the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Our Sacred Tradition is also to follow the Rule or “Ordo” supplied for us in the Book of Common Prayer, with its calendar, its Lectionary, its tables for predicting the falling of Holy Days, and of Abstinence and Fasts, and of its Moveable and Non-Moveable Feasts. Included in our Tradition is all that is also in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the Holy Office, the Orders of Holy Communion, Holy Baptism, and the other, religious Sacraments, such as Confirmation, Marriage, Penance, Last Rites and Unction, and Ordination. Our Sacred Tradition also includes our reverence of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Affirmation of Saint Louis. The Low Church concentration in the houses of the diocese predominates with the expectation that simple black full-length Cassock, a white Surplice, and a full-length Stole bearing the appropriate Liturgical color will do, as will musical adherence to the 1940 U.S. Episcopal Hymnal. The Office of Deacones is an appointed one, not an ordination. The Bishops are expected to institute Customs carefully, always mindfully conserving these ways.

Thus, in obedient witness, Traditional Anglican Church of America abides the consecrations, ordinations, and appointments of its religious men and women, and of its laity, with profound seriousness. Hooker sums up this call to obedience to abide Sacred Scripture, Tradition and careful Custom, as follows:

“The ministry of things divine is a function which as God did himself institute, so neither may men undertake the same but by authority and power given them in lawful manner. That God which is no way deficient or wanting unto man in necessaries, and hath therefore given us the light of his heavenly truth, because without that inestimable benefit we must needs have wandered in darkness to our endless perdition and woe, hath in the like abundance of mercies ordained certain to attend upon the due execution of requisite parts and offices therein prescribed for the good of the whole world, which men thereunto assigned do hold their authority from him, whether they be such as himself immediately or as the Church in his name investeth, it being neither possible for all nor for every man without distinction convenient to take upon him a charge of so great importance.” (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker, Richard; Morris, C. Ed.; Wipf & Stock, pub.; Book V. p. 416)

A Priest or a Bishop thus cannot resist the intrigues and violence of heresy or violence, unless he is able to establish exactly how and why all of his customs, traditions, and lifestyle, are truly orthodox traditionalist interpretations of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, helped along into our minds through our English language, as this anciently-consecrated tongue enjoys its greatest spiritual advocate through our best revived Anglican-Continuum witness.

Let us get back to work on this!

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