Saturday, February 3, 2024

E. Sylvester Berry on the Anglican Branch Theory

  

THE BRANCH THEORY. As already noted, the Branch Theory maintains that the Church of Christ consists of three parts or branches,--The Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican, and that consequently the Anglican Church is truly Catholic, since it is a part of the Church universal and a corporate continuation of the Church of England before the Reformation. The following quotation from Father Finlay will show the utter absurdity of this theory: “Though it has been prominently before the world for three-quarters of a century, it finds no one to accept and advocate it outside of the Anglican Communion. A section,--a small minority of the Church of England,--maintains the theory. The large majority of Protestant Episcopalians know nothing of it; while Greeks and Roman Catholic repudiated it utterly. Is it likely that the Church of Christ is constituted on a pattern which not one in a hundred of her members will acknowledge? Are we to believe that the true constitution of the Church was hidden from mankind,--from the Church herself,--through nineteen centuries, and was only then to be made known to a little group of Anglican theologians who have failed to persuade any but a handful of their own Communion that their conception of the Church is that of Christ?” (“church of Christ,” p. 168) (E. Sylvester Berry, The Church of Christ: An Apologetic and Dogmatic Treatise [Frederick County, Md.: Mount Saint Mary's Seminary, 1955; repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2009], 100-1)