Unity and Truth: Part III
by Martin Davie:
Where we have go to so far.
Where we have got to in Parts I and II of this series of posts can be summarised by the following bullet points.
- The bishops have insisted that ‘Unity matters – it really matters’
- There are two forms of the Church, the Church invisible and the Church visible.
- In the Church visible there can be true and false forms of unity
- The true unity which the visible Church is called to exhibit is unity in the truth, and the truth concerned is the truth about who God is, what God has done and how God calls his human creatures to behave in consequence that God has revealed in Christ and through the Spirit.
- The Church of England holds that we know about this truth (‘the faith’) primarily thought the inspired word of God in the Scriptures and secondly and thirdly through the teaching of the orthodox Fathers, Creeds and Councils of the Early Church and thirdly through the Church of England’s ‘historic formularies’ (the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer and the 1662 Ordinal).
- The Church of England grounds its doctrine on these three sources and holds that its doctrine is to be accepted because of its fidelity to the truth taught by them. It is because this is the case that any forms of liturgical practice that are contrary to the Church of England’s doctrine are ruled out.
- There can be both theological development and diversity of practice within the visible Church, but such development and diversity is limited by the need to be faithful to inheritance of orthodox faith which has been passed om across the centuries since the time of the apostles.
What all this means is that taking seriously the bishops’ declaration that ‘unity matters’ involves testing what they propose regarding the next steps in the LLF propose against the criterion of unity in truth that has just been outlined. We shall now go on to consider how what they propose measures up against this criterion.
Assessing what the bishops are proposing in GS 2358
Does what the bishops are proposing meet the criterion of unity in truth?
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