By now I am sure that most people reading this are aware of the controversy surrounding Fr. Calvin Robinson’s dismissal from the Mere Anglicanism conference after criticizing women’s ordination in his talk. Of course, I agree entirely with what Fr. Robinson said about that practice, and was pleased to find him make many of the same arguments I made in my own article against it.
But he also attacks the Reformation as well:
However, while I agree with Robinson’s opposition to women’s ordination and critical theory, they were not the only things he criticized in his talk. Robinson also spent some time arguing that liberalism and aspects of Marxism stem from the Protestant Reformation, a movement he has previously claimed was “a mistake.”
What many fail to realise is that, if we reject WO, rejecting the Reformation isn’t as easy as it looks. While Robinson understand this, he needs to take further measures to be consistent.
Let’s start with the whole business of authority. I did a piece entitled Authority and Evangelical Churches and I will pull some quotes therefrom:
So where do Evangelical churches fit into this? The honest truth is that every Evangelical church–without exception–is the result of an act of rebellion from constituted ecclesiastical authority. That trend started with Protestant churches in general, although most of these complicated the issue by their alliance with the state. But look where it went from there. The Methodists seceded from the Anglicans, the holiness and Pentecostal churches in their turn seceded from the Methodists, and the Baptists simply seceded from everybody including themselves. The multitude of denominations is a testament of one secession from another, of one rebellion against existing authority after another. As noted in Taming the Rowdies, in the US the rebel churches not only succeeded in rebelling against constituted secular authority (the British) but then turned around and, with the connivance of the Freemasons, managed to get the established churches booted out of their places in all of the colonies!…
The day I come to the conclusion that submission to a human authority structure is the ne plus ultra of the Christian life is the day I return to Roman Catholicism, because the Roman Catholic Church is the only Christian church with a consistent theory (if not always practice) of authority.
So, if continuity of authority is what you’re looking for (and it’s obviously a big deal with Fr. Robinson,) then the Reformation was a mistake. We need to look elsewhere for reasons to justify it.
Now let’s turn to my piece Women in Ministry and Authority in Churches: A Response to the Ugley Vicar, which was my response to John Richardson (of blessed memory) on this topic. Richardson, who opposed WO, nevertheless brought up John Goldingay’s “Authority A and Authority B” paradigm. I’ll reproduce Richardson’s summary of Goldingay:
In it, he identified two kinds of authority. Authority A is the institutional kind possessed by the centurion, who said to one man “‘Go’ and he goes, to another ‘Come’ and he comes.” Authority B, he said, is the kind possessed by Jesus who, “spoke with authority because he was in touch with God and with truth” (8).
Goldingay then went on to consider the implications for the church’s ministry, with the following observation:
… in the church it is the position of elder-presbyter-priest/bishop that has become, as it developed clearly into two offices, the most important locus of Authority A in the church. (22)
Goldingay’s distinction may be criticized in the details of presentation (did Jesus not possess an ‘Authority A’, precisely as recognize by the centurion?), but it is helpful in considering the nature of authority itself, particularly as it applies to the ordained ministry. For what many members of the Church of England do not realize is just how much the authority of their ‘hierarchy’ is an Authority A, not B.
I would invite my readers who are interested in this topic to peruse the whole post, but a summary of what I got out of the dialogue and subsequent reflection is as follows:
- Authority “A” is a part of any organisation, and doesn’t necessarily imply spiritual supremacy of those who hold it, which is a key point to what follows.
- Authority “B” can come in one of two forms. One is Roman Catholicism’s magisterium, where the church can both pronounce on matters of life and eternity and make them stick to the faithful (even when they have dicey Scriptural backing.) This authority extends to its priests, who are both dispensers of the sacraments (grace) and take the place of Christ at a sacrificing altar. The other is what you see in modern Pentecost where the church is under the straight direction of the Holy Spirit, who raises up charismatic leaders (I’m thinking about the pattern shown in Judges, not the self-validating stuff we see now) to guide the Body of Christ.
- Authority “B” was necessary when the canon of the New Testament was non-existent, being written or being finalised. The need for it subsequent to that is doubtful. This is the springboard for the whole Reformation, although Protestant churches routinely claim things that smack of Authority “B”.
- Anglicanism’s place in all of this is complicated, and depends upon how you view the English Reformation. I tend to the more “Protestant” view, which accentuates the separation between Rome and Canterbury.
- In any case dispensing with Authority “B” in churches pulls the rug out of the key argument against WO: that it puts women in authority, and specifically spiritual authority, over men. Once you deny that the church still has Authority “B” your main case against WO goes with it. (The flip side to that is that women cannot claim it either, something that feminists don’t want to admit. One of the things, however, that modern Pentecost has demonstrated is that you can have WO without feminism.)
- I think that the RCC’s claim of Authority “B”, while having promoted some very nice theological constructs, has overall had a deleterious effect by promoting things that are contrary to the character of our Founder.
Calvin Robinson needs to swim the Tiber if he wants to be consistent. Unfortunately this is the worst moment (in my lifetime at least) to do Tiber swimming, something I tried to set forth in Gavin Ashenden Swims the Tiber. But if he wants to be consistent about both of these issues, he (and others) don’t have very many nice choices these days.
Positive Infinity 
Respectfully, I find this confused. I’m not aware of anybody arguing that men have “spiritual supremacy” over women. The authority in question is spiritual authority, which is precisely just Authority-A in the context of the church. That is what Protestant churches have always denied to women, and I see no inconsistency in their doing so.
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Actually, Authority B is the spiritual authority. It is the authority to make definitive pronouncements on the truth of God and to make them stick. This is at the heart of the whole concept of the magisterium. (I’m assuming that you’re not enamoured with the concept of Authority B set forth in principle by modern Pentecost.) If you support this idea, then your position on WO makes sense. But my observations on Evangelical churches being the product of rebellion really undermines any concept of they having Authority B (and maybe even A to the extent they claim it,) and I think these apply to most Protestant churches (Anglicanism is, as always, a muddle about this.)
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I am disagreeing with the claim that authority B is the only type of spiritual authority. I believe that authority A, as well, can become a spiritual authority when it resides in the church. So, for example, Paul’s being upset when he realized he had called the high priest a “whitewashed wall.” Ananias was hardly a man dripping with Authority-B, but he nevertheless had spiritual authority because of his position (authority-A) within God’s people.
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It is problematic to say that churches that have rebelled against constituted and continuous Christian churches have spiritual authority of any kind. (The “constituted and continuous” church has problems of a different kind, but that’s a different subject…)
The Church of God (where I’m at) recognised at its first General Assembly that it was of a judicial nature only, and that was before the “living document” theory of American law became fashionable. (As it has, sad to say, in many liberal churches…)
The whole business of Ananias is equally problematic because any authority he had from God ended when, to use a hillbilly expression, the veil in the Temple was ripped “half in two.” It just took a while for that reality to sink in to Jew and Christian alike.
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Well, I wouldn’t say that the Church of England “rebelled” in the relevant sense. Deciding not to recognize a usurped authority does not make one a rebel, anyway not in a way that undermines one’s own claim to authority. Ditto later Anglicans.
And that’s the question on which most of these will turn, really. Presbyterians, for example, will likewise *claim* (rightly or not) that they did not resist any properly constitute authority that actually applied to them. One has to get into the weeds and actually refute them, or not — you can’t just make a blanket statement that if there’s someone, somewhere who’s claiming authority over a church, and they don’t recognize it, then they’re in rebellion and can’t have proper authority.
So I’d say that the majority of Protestant churches do, in fact, have coherent (albeit, in many cases, wrong) views of authority that include real spiritual authority. (Yours apparently does not claim that, and thus does not.)
Incidentally, I’ve enjoyed your blog in silence for quite awhile. Human nature, I suppose, that the first time I post is when I disagree with you.
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My own view is this: it was God’s idea to have an institutionally unified, orthodox church from the start. That was his “Plan A” (to bring those letters back into the discussion.) The problem was that same church, whose one job was to keep the paradosis, basically botched that job in the name of cultural accommodation and political power. So it was necessary to have a “Plan B” in like manner to the Israelites wanting a king. That Plan B really got going in the Reformation and persists to this day. It is unsatisfactory in a number of ways but when those originally entrusted with a task cannot get it done right such things are necessary.
Central to any church or institution having spiritual authority is the ability for same institution to make authoritative pronouncements on matters of faith and morals and for those to stick. This is the magisterium. When Protestant churches in various ways adopted sola scriptura, they abandoned the magisterium, because sola scriptura centralises the authority with God alone. This simple fact has not quite sunk in with many churches.
The nature of Anglicanism relative to the RCC it seceded from has always been a matter of debate. The transference of the supreme authority from the Pope to the King of England, and the fact that the CoE existed because of the king’s “broad seal” puts the matter in a different light than other churches. The idea of a church under the authority of the state (one which the Russians would replicate under Peter the Great and maintain now) was one to which Bossuet reacted in horror in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches.
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