This Protestant argument of the Federal Vision  as well as a recent conversation with fellow seminary students and teachers, reminded me of how blessed I am to be an Anglican. One of the great things about being Anglican is the freedom to be intellectually honest. It is a liberating freedom that is well worth sacrificing for.

One of the hardest things to cope with, especially as a minister, is to live with a bound conscience. If one is in a Presbyterian, Baptist (etc.), or Roman church, and attempts to be inclusive to historical theology in its fullest,  one may find themselves either tied to anxiety or tied to the stake. But in the Anglican church (continuing) one can be fully inclusive to all the robust and intelligent saints in the Church’s history without being harmed. I’m sure there are exceptions (diocese, presbytery, etc.) that are orthodox in their ecumenicism, but the exceptions in Christianity have yet to find their dominion.

Anglicanism attempts to wrap its arms around the wholeness of God’s redemptive historical plan of salvation. Priests such as Luther and Huss,”lay-teachers” such as Calvin, and even the offbeat such as Zwingli, are recognized as gifts from God. Yet, in the other movements of the Church, one is bound to a fragment of men here and a fragment of men there, or they are missing the entire blessings of prophetic movement such as the Reformation. In Anglicanism, one can embrace Christianity in its entirety, and one can do it with orthodoxy!

The Anglican church does not claim to be the all-in-all or even the future Church of John 17:21, but many of us believe that it is the closest to the all-in-all that we have in our day!