Our Past is Latin

In an article on the Anglo-Catholic blog, Fr Michael Gray writes:

The question is not whether the Copts, or so-called Antiochenes, or whoever, are legitimate jurisdictions of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church (though some might wish to dispute that) but whether they are in any useful sense our past. Like it or not, we are Western, not Eastern or Oriental. We follow in our formularies Augustine on the Trinity and original sin. Our Old Testament is not the Septuagint (Rome too now translates from the Hebrew). Our past is Latin, not Greek. We (like Rome) are post-reformation, post-enlightenment. We have not been formed by centuries of subjection to an Islamic state. Or perhaps it is the very differences that lend enchantment – that unity with such a body would never have any practical content, would never challenge us, would never require us to learn from it because we have so little in common? I do not of course deny the shared faith. And of course unity with the Orthodox and Oriental jurisdictions is a duty – but it is more likely to be achieved by Rome than by us. So unity with Rome is the best way to unity with Moscow and the smaller Eastern and Oriental bodies.

This entry was posted in Anglican, Church. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s