Authority in the Episcopal Church: One Priest's Perspective

From a sermon by the Rev. Rob Field, rector of St. Philip's Church in Brevard, North Carolina, February 2003 (paragraphing edited for readability):

[T]o be quite frank, I am convinced that some of the loudest voices in these debates have never arrived at a proper Anglican understanding of authority. Or, on one of my more cynical days, I might even go so far as to say that some of these louder voices actually do have a grasp of the classical Anglican approach, but they don’t like it. And, therefore, they are trying to undermine or change it — perhaps because they have come into our fold from another Christian tradition which does not understand authority in the same way.

So, I believe that we need to begin saying what we have often been too polite to say in the past: that Anglicanism does not need to be fixed by people who either don’t understand it, or don’t like what they do understand!

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And from the next sermon in Fr. Field's series (paragraphing edited for readability):

Some Christians who come into the Episcopal Church from other denominations expect us to read and understand the Bible the same way they did in their former church. But they may become confused or disappointed or even angry when they discover that we do not have a doctrine of biblical inerrancy or 100 percent literalism.

Liberal Christians sometimes get confused on this subject as well. I have heard liberals say things such as, “I don’t have to take the Bible literally in order to take it seriously.” In my opinion, they’re only half right. In some cases, it’s true that we do not have to understand the truth of the Bible in a literal way. But many times, we are expected to take the Bible literally. When it says, for example, that Jesus was born, lived as a human being, and died on the cross, we had better take that literally — or something very important will be missing from our faith experience!