The new ACNA encompasses many different Anglican strands and groups, and among these groups, while there appears to be basic agreement on certain moral issues (such as human sexuality), there is widespread disagreement on important doctrinal issues such as the ordination of women, the nature of baptism, and the celebration of the Holy Eucharist (specifically lay presidency). These doctrinal issues cannot simply be pushed aside, as they are at the root of the more practical moral issues, and also for the sake of truth and fidelity to Christ and His Church.
Well with all of this disagreement on such important matters it is critical that all parties return to the sources of theology and evaluate their beliefs and positions in light of the them. The sources of theology are the Scriptures and Tradition, the latter referring generally to the Church Fathers (up to St. John of Damascus), and the dogmas and definitions of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, but also to the ancient liturgies and devotions of the Church. Secondary sources would include the Book of Common Prayer, the Formularies of the English Church, and English reformers and their successors. New developments and ideas in theology have to be compared against this standard, not against an "ism" that is alien to the English tradition. (e.g. Calvinism, Romanism, etc.) So before one would even try to reconcile Calvin's doctrine of election with the Book of Common Prayer's rite of Holy Baptism one must compare Calvin to the English reformers, and men such as Archbishop Laud, and then also compare him to the fathers and doctors of the Church. As the Rev'd. Canon Arthur Middleton has shown in his great book "Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy" this return to the ancient sources was the central and primary concern of the English Reformers and their successors. He writes,
"Therefore the principle upon which the English Reformation proceeded was by appealing against Rome to Holy Scripture as interpreted by the primitive church, so that in its intentions and first issues it was neither Lutheran not Calvinist, but a return to primitive ancient Catholic Christianity. The Book of Common Prayer was an embodiment of the desire of the English church to restore ancient and primitive doctrine and worship. If the note of controversy seems to creep in too often, it is because the immediate cause of most of the writings of this era of Anglicanism's history was the need to clarify its beliefs in the face of opposition. For example, Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Laud in his Conference with Fisher the Jesuit, had the same fundamental aim, to make plain the position of the Church of England as contrasted with Papists on the one hand and the Continental Reformers on the other. Their theory on the position of the English church was a restatement of the doctrine of the original Reformers that there has been no break in continuity of the Church, so that she was still the same ancient catholic but reformed church of these islands." (p.307-308)
The "problem" with Anglicanism is not that it is a non-sensical "middle way" where two or more mutually exclusive integrities can somehow be held together (as some folk erroneously claim). The problem is when Anglicans reject the sources of their belief, and the intention of the English Reformers, and then alter or reject the theology of the Prayer Book to adopt a newfangled practice or belief.
As Geoffrey Fisher wrote, "The Anglican Church has no peculiar thought, practice, creed, or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ's Church from the beginning."
