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Anglican-Methodist Reconciliation
A Dissenting View*
By Franz Hildebrandt

After seven years of dialogue, a report has now been published, summarizing the Anglican-Methodist negotiations in Great Britain looking toward the union of these two communions. (The report is: Conversations between the Church of England and the Methodist Church, February, 1963, 63 pp., Church Information Office, Westminster, SW 1, England, and the Epworth Press, 25 City Road, London EC 1, England, three shillings, ten pence.) The conversations were undertaken on the basis of Archbishop Fisher's suggestion in his Cambridge sermon of 1946 that the Free Churches might "take episcopacy into their system." Twelve Anglican and eight Methodist delegates now propose that this be done in a "Service

*The publication of the report referred to in this comment has already occasioned a heated exchange of views in Great Britain. Writing in The British Weekly, Professor T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh regards the proposals as a "test case" and hopes for reconciliation between the two churches both for its own sake but also for its positive effect upon "the whole ecumenical movement." In a rejoinder, Norman Snaith, one of the four dissenters signing a minority report for the Methodists, interprets the proposed ritual to mark the reconciliation as issuing from a Church of England perspective in which "it is essential that Anglican hands must be laid on Methodist heads," and this he rejects flatly. The present critique is written by a former Lutheran who left Germany under Hitler migrated first to England and to Methodism, and then to America and Drew Theological Seminary. Professor Hildebrandt takes his Methodism seriously, having written extensively on the subject. He would not want to be regarded as a foe of "institutional unity of any kind" (as Torrance charges against the minority report). Still less is he opposed to ecumenical dialogue as such or in particular. Yet as his comment indicates, he is deeply disappointed in the proposals now before the two bodies in Britain and even feels they foreshadow similar difficulties for merger programs elsewhere. The issue, as always, hinges on episcopacy and ordination. Because of the importance of this debate, other views may be presented in this section in subsequent issues and correspondence is invited.-Ed.

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of Reconciliation" in which, with mutual laying-on of hands, Methodist ministers would be received into the ministry of the Church of England ("Take authority to exercise the office of priest") and vice versa. Methodist Bishops, elected by their Conference, would be consecrated to take their place in the "historic" episcopate and would exercise their office within their own districts, alongside the Anglican Diocesans. After this first stage of full communion between the two churches, organic union would follow some years later, not yet spelled out in detail, but implied as a firm obligation on the part of the majority signatories.

In "A Dissentient View" four of the Methodist representatives have rejected the proposal because of fundamental disagreement with the underlying doctrine of scripture and tradition, episcopacy and priesthood, ordination and sacraments. All have agreed, however, to refer the report to the two churches for discussion on the parish and circuit level and to request that no final vote be taken until 1965. The Anglican Convocations of Canterbury and York are due to meet in May and the Methodist Conference at Preston in July, 1963, and both will presumably act on this referral and suggestion.

The Anglicans insist in England as elsewhere upon their particular succession as an indispensable precondition for intercommunion and organic union. The Methodists (this is the crucial point of departure) ask: "can we, therefore, contemplate any method other than Episcopal ordination" to achieve this goal? No attempt to challenge the assumption; no inquiry into the truth of the matter! The possession of the "historic" episcopate by a majority of Christian bodies and centuries appears to be sufficient a purely secular argument. The "Dissentients" point out very plainly that "historic episcopacy is completely without support in the New Testament"; that historically it is, as Wesley said, "a fable which no man ever did or could prove"; that ecumenically "it has notoriously failed to act as the safe guard it is claimed to be." Look at the absence of most Eastern Orthodox observers from the Second Vatican Council and at the apparent split over this scheme right through British (and possibly world) Methodism-so much for the "symbol and focus of unity and continuity."

A good deal, of course, is made of the "freedom of interpretation" which Methodists, like Anglicans, will have in accepting the episcopacy; but again the "Dissentients" note that "actions speak louder

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than words," that Anglican hands play the decisive part in the pro posed ritual, and that only the avoidance of any "hands" could have effectively banished the obvious implication of ordination. The same fallacy obtains with regard to the priesthood. Again the Church of England has insisted from the very outset in 1955 on the safeguard of the "office and function of a priest in the Church of God"; the Methodists duly oblige by the stipulation that Holy Communion "is generally held to be in some sense a sacrifice" and by a three-page, first-time, semi-official statement on Methodist sacramental doctrine, especially the eucharistic sacrifice, which makes one wonder why Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were burnt at the stake.

"The New Testament does not provide a blue-print of Order for all time," says the report. Precisely; therefore, the imposition of unscriptural laws is to be resisted. What is in store for Methodism, neatly disguised as a "gift" for our enrichment (and incidentally only obtainable through the mode described by Benjamin Gregory in 1873 as "digital contact"-in no other way does it seem possible to " share each other's spiritual heritage") is, in fact, the yoke "which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear" (Acts 15: 1 1). We are told that "non-episcopacy has never been a Methodist doctrine"; we are not told that American Methodism from the beginning has had "episcopacy in its system" and it made no difference whatever for intercommunion with Canterbury. Seabury must supply what was lacking in Asbury's orders. This kind of inoculation was at tempted by Thomas Coke in 1808 and providentially turned down both by Methodists and Protestant Episcopalians; it was attempted in the Plan for Church Union in North India and Pakistan (with explicit reference to the origins of "a separate episcopate in the Methodist Church in America") and has just been rejected by both churches; it is attempted again in the Blake-Pike merger scheme and will, we hope, meet with the same deserved fate.

"Evangelical catholicity" is the slogan of the day and replaces what the fathers of British Methodism a generation ago affirmed, in Wesley's phrase, as "the principles of the Reformation." It is rumored that "closing the ranks" against the perceptible growth of the Roman Church in Britain had something to do with the sense of urgency in the present report; yet what could be more Roman than this whole concept of unification of ministries and at the same time more certain of Roman rejection, together with Anglican orders, as "null and

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void"! Were the eight Methodist signatories unaware of the present Archbishop of Canterbury's pointed dissociation, on behalf of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland, from the Knox four-centenary in Edinburgh, 1960, and again the St. Columba commemoration in Iona in 1963? Dr. Stewart will preach and Bishop Newbigin celebrate.. the Episcopalians will hold their separate service!

The non-theological factors are not hard to detect. The "dying" Methodist Church in Britain, to judge from membership statistics, seems ready to quit but speaks in terms of the Pauline "dying with Christ." The prodigal daughter, after two hundred years of non conformity, returns home and repents "the scandal of our unhappy divisions"; but it is conveniently overlooked that the "mother church" for the majority of Methodists today was never in any sense the mother, and that twentieth century Anglicanism has little or nothing in common with the church which was the Wesley's' home. Why does the great craving for the "historic" episcopacy not lead to an open, outright, honest joining of the Church of England? What are the remaining attractions of Methodism after 1965: itinerancy and teetotalism? Or could it be that after Methodist doctrine has been abandoned, Methodist power must be defended and therefore Methodist Bishops must be established beside the Anglican diocesans?

What some sections of the ecclesiastical and secular press have hailed as "a momentous step forward" is, on the contrary, the step into oblivion. Wesley, when he ordained Coke, changed order for the sake of the Gospel; we, in mending his "irregularities," change the Gospel for the sake of order. Wesley wanted the Prayer Book and no Bishops; we want Bishops and no Prayer Book. Instead of learning from and sharing with our Anglican brethren the real common treasure, our liturgical chaos will continue "within the strictest invariability of episcopal ordination." Wesley in his Ordinal took care to change "priests" into "ministers"; we make the opposite substitution. Wesley ever aimed at uniting the Methodist preachers and societies; we aim at dividing them. Unlike the Anglican commitment to consultation with the other churches of the Anglican Communion, no such consultation has so far been reported from within world Methodism; and if the report is adopted for Britain, it will drive from our midst all Methodists of "dissenting" origin,

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destroy the Union of 1932 and rob us of the substance of our churchmanship.

Bernard Manning's warnings of thirty years ago have proved prophetically true. Is this new circumcision of which he spoke, this making and accepting of "historic" bishops for the sake of unity the clear will of Christ? Is it the manifest fulfillment of Christ's prayer that they all may be one? It is the only question that matters; and we can answer it only by a solemn and emphatic No. The issue has been clear ever since Dr. Fisher's 1946 sermon; nothing has changed since the Lambeth Quadrilateral. It is a foundation on which true union cannot possibly be built. If it was wrong then, it is wrong now, and the only prayer to be offered about any invincible error is that we may be delivered from it once and for all. Ten years ago the Methodist Synod in Scotland unanimously passed the following resolution which still seems to some of us of the essence:

"That this Synod,
faithful to the catholic spirit of the Wesley's,
mindful that the altar is the Lord's Table,
and therefore practicing intercommunion with all who love Him in sincerity,
feels bound to resent and resist the suggestion that the right of full communion which He Himself has granted to every believer, should be made dependent upon a condition of church polity which is
absent from the Gospel and alien to the principles of the Reformation;
unworthy of our Methodist heritage and disruptive of our present unity;
insular in its validity and irrelevant to the urgency of our evangelistic mission."