David Wilson, one of several Evangelicals in the Diocese of Pittsburgh who followed Anglo-Catholic Bob Duncan into the Anglican Church in North America, has written a description of a group of mostly evangelical clergy in the Pittsburgh diocese who met together for fellowship and encouragement from the mid-1980s to the division of the diocese in 2008. The group was given the nickname ‘Thunder on the Theological Right’ by Pittsburgh bishop Alden Hathaway, and became known as TOTTR.
It seems to me, though, that Hathaway got it wrong. Not about the ‘thunder’—if you know any of the people involved, you won’t quibble about that. But surely when Evangelicals thunder, they thunder on the left. It’s Anglo-Catholics who share characteristics with the political right: conservative, traditionalist, opposed to change, authoritarian. Evangelicals, on the other hand, are the party that has sought change in the church since before the Reformation, and who have never been satisfied that the degree of reformation so far achieved is enough; ‘but halflie reformed’ was our view of the Elizabethan church, and what Evangelical would say it’s any better today? Evangelicals have only one tradition, the truth in God’s Word Written, agreeing with Augustine that ‘custom without truth is error grown old’. Evangelicals are those who treasure the ‘blessed change’ wrought in them by the Holy Spirit, and pray for similar change in others and further change in the same direction for themselves. And Evangelicals have always asserted the Scriptural standard of shared ministry rather than clerical dominance, and preferred the designation ‘minister’ to ‘priest’ because of the hierarchical and authoritarian implications of the latter term.
If Hathaway had got it right, they would have been TOTTL, not TOTTR; ‘Total’, rather than ‘Totter’, might they have said? In my foolish dream, this simple change of nomenclature would have kept us standing together, rather than tottering, and there might still be a reform movement in the Episcopal Church.
June 2, 2011 at 8:55 am
Philip,
I think you make an excellent point, but don’t you think the right/left dichotomy is less predicated on Anglo-Catholic/
Evangelical identity than on the status of one’s church party at a particular moment in time.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Michael Saward’s tongue-in-cheek A FAINT STREAK OF HUMILITY, but he’s withering in his description of the older generation of Evangelical clergy in the Church of England whom he encountered in the 1950s and 1960s, of whom he would happily have employed such monikers as “conservative, traditionalist, opposed to change, and authoritarian.”
By the same token, at the height of the Ritualist controversy, it would be hard to have referred to an Anglo Papalist as “conservative” or “opposed to change,” (though I suspect “authoritarian” would have been a constant).
June 2, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Yes, the whole left-right thing really only applies to politics and can be problematic even there. I would say that on a spectrum that only ran from Evangelical to Catholic the analogy works best if Evangelicals are on the left and Catholics on the right, but there are plenty of times when one or both aren’t being true to themselves, and spoil the analogy. Although I believe that the argument used by the ritualists came down to ‘we’re just doing away with these Protestant innovations’. But after all those centuries it certainly looked like they were the innovators.
And current circumstances seem to make innovators of us all, unfortunately…
June 3, 2011 at 11:16 am
All interesting comments. In defense of Bishop Hathaway, I don’t think he was consciously working toward the split which occurred in the church when he formed his group. He was heartbroken when it occurred. What he wanted to do was strengthen the evangelical voice, which was in the minority in TEC and still is; I don’t think he was preparing departure as the path to follow because the voice was not being heard . – About dichotomous terms: sometimes they’re helpful, but I don’t think the left/right thing, for instance, applies consistently even to politics. People and movements change as situations change. And it’s easy to get so caught up in the terms, the labelling, to the extent that people don’t really think.
June 3, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Celinda,
Just to clarify, I don’t think +Alden was ever a member of TOTTR and, as David points out in his piece, realignment split the group right down the middle.
June 3, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Thanks, Jeremy, for correcting my gross reading error. I just looked at the passage we’re discussing again, and see that +Alden used the phrase about the group the others mentioned had formed! Not about a group he had formed or was part of.