Title: "The Moravian Episcopate and the Episcopal Church": A Personal Response/A Reply to Dr. Colin Podmore's Personal Response
Abstract: As one of the two scholars mentioned in the text of Thomas C. Ferguson's article Moravian Episcopate and the Episcopal Church,1 and the author or editor of works cited in twenty-four of its seventy-one footnotes, I read the article with interest but with great concern. It is so misleading, both in its overall effect and in many of its individual assertions, that I feel obliged to request publication of this response in order to set the record straight.2 As this is a personal response, it is appropriate to explain that I approach the questions discussed in the article from three distinct perspectives. First, having received my doctorate for a thesis on Moravian history, I have an academic interest in the subject.3 Second, my former professional involvement-as Anglican co-secretary both of the recent English Anglican-Moravian Conversations and of the Conversations which resulted in the Porvoo Agreement between the British and Irish Anglican churches and the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches -results in a continuing interest. Third, having once lived and worked in a German Moravian settlement for a year, and having made many research and social visits to Herrnhut and other Moravian settlements in the ensuing twenty years, I am a friend and admirer of the Moravian Church and of many individual Moravians. My work for the English Anglican-Moravian Conversations was naturally influenced by my academic interest, but I nevertheless tried to keep the roles of historian and ecumenist distinct. Thus the Conversations' Report4 contained, alongside the Common Statement, four signed essays by myself-a distinction largely obscured in the footnotes to Dr. Ferguson's article.5 In his article, Ferguson addresses both historical and ecumenical issues. He does not aspire to academic neutrality; but rather sets out an argument for the Episcopal Church to recognize the episcopate of the Moravian Church and the orders of its clergy (503). In what follows, I shall discuss first the historical issues and second the ecumenical issues. True ecumenism must involve friendship and personal commitment, so what I say about the ecumenical issues might be influenced (but should not be over-influenced) by my affection for the Moravian Church. My discussion of the historical issues will, by contrast, aim to be scholarly and dispassionate. I hope that this approach will help to clarify the issues, which Ferguson's article addresses in a somewhat less differentiated fashion. HISTORICAL ISSUES No one doubts that the Moravian Church has inherited the orders of the Unitas Fratrum (Church of the Bohemian Brethren or Unity of the Brethren-often referred to as 'the Unity') and that its bishops stand in a succession of episcopal consecrations stretching back to 1553. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was contention-which Dr. Ferguson's article renews-over two historical issues: (a) whether the succession originated in the consecration of two bishops by presbyters in 1553, or with bishops consecrated in 1500, or goes back in an unbroken chain of consecrations to the consecration of the first bishop of the Unitas Fratrum in 1467, and (b) whether the person who consecrated that first bishop himself possessed the 'historic episcopate' (i.e. episcopal orders conferred in an unbroken succession of the laying on of hands by bishops stretching back to the early church) and was thus in a position to confer it on the Unitas Fratrum. During the last 125 years a number of scholarly works have addressed these issues directly or indirectly, and it will be useful at the outset to list some of the most significant of them. The first was The Moravian Episcopate, a pamphlet by Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz, an American Moravian bishop.6 This was followed by his History of the Church known as the Unitas Fratrum.7 That work is cited at crucial points in Ferguson's article, but the omission of the date of publication from the initial footnote reference has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the fact that it is actually a nineteenth-century work, originally published in 1885. …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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