‘I never said it.’ Humpty was red-faced and plainly aggrieved.
‘Said what?’ I asked.
‘That man Lewis Carroll quoted me as saying: “When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” I said nothing of the sort.’
That’s between Humpty and Lewis Carroll, I thought. But not entirely. We’re all tempted to handle words in this way. After all, we’re fond of the word ‘Anglican’ but it’s just a variant of ‘English’, with that similar word ‘Anglian’ lurking in the background. If we say we belong to the Anglican Church, we think it’s more or less the same as saying we belong to the English Church. (That’s how they describe it in Scotland.) And we all know lots of people who are Anglican without being English. They may not even speak English.
Some Anglicans like to say they belong to the Episcopal Church, but there are other Churches than the C of E that have bishops. What you might call default Anglicans (those who were baptized in the Church of England and have not been near it since) would not think of using that word to describe their allegiance. Episcopalians live in America, don’t they?
We can of course say we belong to the Reformed Catholic or Catholic Reformed Church. The trouble is that all our friends would say they have never heard of such a Church. It’s not surprising that when C.S. Lewis wrote one of his best-sellers, he called it ‘Mere Christianity’. That’s enticing but it merely side-steps the problem.
The trouble with all these terms is that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty was right. We use words to mean what we like to think they mean. It’s one of the things that friendly observers and not so friendly sceptics find amusing or misleading about Christians. We cherish our own interpretation of ‘apostolic’ ‘orthodox’ and ‘biblical’ Remember Butler’s Hudibras and those who ‘prove their doctrine orthodox by apostolic blows and knocks.’ …
Humpty had nodded off. I found myself about to do the same thing. That was shortly after I discovered a church using the adverb ‘Anglicanly’.
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