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Introduction
explicit and implicit. It is of course unfortunate that a view of sacramental validity that confers so wide-embracing a benefit beyond the visible limits of the Body of Christ on earth should also be open to the abuse of treating valid orders and sacraments as the sole mark of the true Church, whatever the aberrations and eccentricities of those who possess them may be. But the ways of God are not always as neatly logical as the human mind would like to make them.
It may well be asked whether the disentangling of the story of these intricate 'goings on' that Mr Anson has accomplished with such skill and labour is worth the trouble taken over it. For some perhaps his book would prove a boring recital of unfamiliar and puzzling complications. But for those who are deeply concerned for Christian unity, and as deeply interested in the complex psychological factors, our own and other people's, which lie behind the theological divergences of divided Christians; for those too who realize the necessity of tackling eirenically the problems of authority, which are responsible for these divergences in belief, there can be much food for thought. Mr Anson's story shows us a reductio ad absurdum of the divinely ordained hierarchial structure of the Church instituted by apostolic succession, when divorced from almost every consideration but a mechanical conception of validity.
The obsession of the 'bishops at large' and their followers with the validity of orders has brought them to the belief that such validity is the sole hall-mark of the nature of the Church and its authority. Ubi ordines validi, ibi ecclesia is the principle upon which they all of them consistently act with a determined conviction. The result of this action is that they are in effect reduced to saying 'Get valid orders and you can choose what you believe'. They are unaware that they are saying this, and consequently lay great stress on the supreme importance of an orthodoxy, which turns out to be no more than their own particular and sometimes variable 'doxy'.
What they have forgotten in their often wild and eccentric way is that even a valid apostolic succession is of small value unless it is possessed by a Believing Community that is a visible organic society, divinely preserved from the loss of its structural unity. This unity preserves and is preserved by its sensus fidelium and by the teaching authority of the Church as taught by the Eastern Orthodox Church
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