How we can Understand the Church as Spirituality Perfect

“Newman and other High Church argued that subjective religous experiences, particularly those powerfully emotional evangelical conversions, lead only to egotism and resultant schisms. In contrast, Evangelicals, like gnostics, believe that such experiences, which proved the connection of God to every individual believer, protected true religion from the high and dry devotees of church hierarchy and from beneficiaries of ecclestiacal bureaucracy.”

Taken from : http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/gnostic.html

As a high church Anglican, I do not believe that there is a true schism of any significance in God’s Church. .  I   understand that are legitimate differences in expression and practice .Yes God’s Church is held together by the acceptance of Apostolic Succession and the essential tenets of faith set forth in the creeds. Anglican emphasis on scripture, tradition, and experience I believe provide further clarity on many theological issues but do not define the core of the true Church. Our brothers and sisters in Christ may differ greatly on modern political issues but at the end of the day a Bishop is a Bishop thru the laying on of hand and any Bishop that can legitimately claim an adherence to Apostolic succession is part of the true Church.

Yes , within the true Church there is the ongoing  insignificant schism of matters of politics, style of worship, and legitimacy of personal religious experience. This is as it should be for God’s church on some level is Eternal but on a practical level ever evolving and broad. I harbor no great distain for my more conservative brothers and sisters as the Creed is our common faith and the Church was founded on spiritual perfection that someday all these matters will be made clear.

The matter of personal faith within the Church is of concern to me. The liturgy of the Church speaks to me on a personal level as nothing else. The fact that I recite the same words as the very first Christians is of immense import. The sacraments and the worship of the earliest Christians in many ways are preserved in God’s true Church. The church had theological perfection before the birth significant theology or even the wide spread acceptance of what we believe to be canonical Scripture. Men of women of faith understood and found Christ for centuries when there only experience and teaching of the faith was present in liturgical worship. This is not to say that there were no personal experiences for of course because encounter with God always leads to personal experience. A devotion to Mary or inspiration by the lives of the Saints is ways in which personal faith can be enriched and practiced with the broader truth of the Church. Even the Charismatic movement within the Church has legitimacy in fostering personal faith as long as it does not conflict with the truth that we all come into Church at the point of our baptism and for many this occurs in infancy. The church has the perfect and correct process by which we as intellectually and spiritually grow personally accept Christ. By means of Confirmation or even first Communion, we grow naturally into our faith. There is not anywhere on the journey in the true Church that there not opportunities for us to question and to accept the personal truth of God. , but our salvation is not dependent on us.

The unshakeable beauty is that no intellectual or personal spiritual error can separate from the love of Christ or the benefit of his sacrifice. Christ said it was finished on the Cross and for reasons it matters our salvation is secure by our baptism. Not even the foolish can separate themselves form the love of Christ by intellectual rejection of their Baptismal vow. It is finished and we in the end will only respond with unfettered Joy.

Christ gave us all that is necessary and that is the only grace that matters.