Apropos of whether the Episcopal Church will be separating itself from the Church Catholic if it doesn’t comply with the Windsor Report suggestions: Catholicity, in the sense of a doctrinally-uniform church, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Variation is life. The history of the creation shows that progress comes from continually generating lots and lots of variations; testing them in the rock polisher of reality (cf. Deut. 18.21-22); and reproducing the ones that seem to work.
In organisms, a “catholic” gene pool can be exceedingly vulnerable to environmental changes, such as the introduction of a disease pathogen. [1] And if there’s one thing we’re confident of in this life, it’s that environmental change is a constant. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether organizations might have the same vulnerability — even the Body of Christ. Maybe catholicity of doctrine isn’t such a good thing after all.
NOTES
[1] The Irish Potato Famine is a testament to the dangers of “catholicity”: In the mid-19th century, Ireland depended heavily on a single food crop, the potato. Because the potato reproduces asexually through vegetative reproduction, the potato population in Ireland had had little or no genetic variation — and turned out to be vulnerable to the fungus Phytophthora infestans. When the fungus struck the isle in the 1840s, the potato crops were ravaged for several years; deaths and emigrations resulted by the hundreds of thousands, and the ripple effects of the Great Famine are felt to this day.
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