History Reminder
The Presiding Bishop’s letter generator has launched another complaint about border crossing, which concept now seems to include “setting foot inside the borders of the United States without my express invitation and permission.” We may have to change “Episcopal Organization” to “Episcopal Franchise.” So time for a history reminder.
The Church has tended to put integrity of witness and teaching ahead of organizational concerns. One good example of this behavior comes from one of the most obscure, frustrating, ill-documented, enigma-wrapped-in-mystery periods of (relatively) recent history, post-Roman, pre-Saxon Britain, the time after about 410 and before, oh, 550 or 600 or so. The Roman government had more-or-less withdrawn from Britain: Roman life continued, for a while. Most of what we know of the time is encapsulated in legends.
One thing we do know about is that in the 420s, the Christian Church in what was still Gaul, not yet France, became concerned about a recurrence of Pelagianism in the British Church. We don’t know much about the British church of that time, except that there was one. We have little idea of how far Christianity had penetrated, what were the episcopal centers, or who the bishops were. But because one of the leaders of the Gaulish Church was the eminent Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, we know about his involvement with the British Church.*
Germanus was a not unusual type of the time, the Roman secular governor and lawyer who moved into Church Administration. He had been a lawyer, politician, and soldier, was fond of hunting, and was governor of the area before he became bishop. The Church in Gaul, distressed by a revival of Pelagianism across the Channel, sent Germanus to look into things. They did not write polite letters to the British Bishops asking their permission - the British bishops may have been part of the problem, since the Pelagian revival was promoted by one Agricola, either a bishop or a son of a bishop, and the ruling class seems to have been persuaded by him. Hmm. This starts to sound familiar.
So Germanus went over - some stories hint that he may have been accompanied by St. Patrick, who may have spent some time in Germanus’s school in Auxerre - held a public debate with the Pelagians, and seems also to have led an army against some Saxon invaders. It’s a little confusing. He returned a decade later, because Pelagianism, as always, was restless in its grave.
The point being that, whatever other issues were certainly involved, the Church had no problems with sending a delegation to confront and refute a regional church establishment that had gone bad. Germanus’s biography, written about 80 years after his death, makes a point of saying that the Bishop of Rome gave his permission to the Gaulish mission to Britain, but whether or not that is the case, it’s sure that the initiative began in the local Gaulish synod, and there was no hand wringing about going into some other bishop’s territory. Christian truth is always more important that Christian polity, if a choice must be made. At the time of Germanus's visit, the Church was unified. Germanus and Agricola or Agricola's father and all the Pelagian-tinged Brits were part of that unified Church. No one said that Germanus and his companions were somehow schismatic, breakers of unity, for confronting the British Church in its vagrancy. Their business was to restore the witness of the errant branch of the Church, and its hard to see how that mission could be conceived as divisive - except by miscreants.
*the Wikipedia article is an ok if sketchy summary of Germanus's involvment.
