Thursday, January 24, 2008

"...The content and significance of the Christian experience preserved in this Apostolic Faith and Order transcends all individual perceptions and defies all final rational analysis. For it contains within itself a truth more adequate than the world's own and therein lies its authority and influence. It comes in all its saving power to identify with the world, but as soon as the world attempts to accommodate and trim that Apostolic Faith and Order to its own limited insights, it is lost, and the Church with the world ends up like a ship aground on rocks. The Fathers in every age have been aware of this and that the only way of salvation for a shipwrecked Church and world is to be conformed to the Eucharistic self-giving of God. Let this be our ministry of reconciliation, the way for people of the tradition today, living and working for the reintegration of the whole Church 'Eastern, Western, our own'. In this Third Millennium we will need to hear less of individual denominations and more of the Una Sancta, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, in whose catholicity all our fragmentation can be made whole."

from Father Arthur Middleton's Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy