On a mid-winter Monday in 1645 the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, ascended to his martyrdom on a Puritan scaffold. As he went, he lamented the fate of his church which he had described earlier as like corn being ground to powder between the two great millstones of Romanism and Puritanism.

"[The Church of England] is like an oak cleft to shivers with wedges made out of its own body; and at every cleft, profaneness and irreligion is entering in, while ... men that introduce profaneness are cloaked over with the name, religion is imaginarie -- of imaginary religion! For we have lost the substance, and dwell too much in opinion."

In Rome, an English baronet, learning of the execution, told a certain abbot there that he presumed the Romans would be saddened by his death, to which the abbot replied that they had more cause to rejoice, "that the greatest enemy of the Church of Rome in England was cut off, and the greatest champion of the Church of England silenced."

Laud believed that "the Catholic Church of Christ is neither Rome nor a conventicle [a Non-Conformist assembly]. Out of that there is no salvation, I easily confess it. But out of Rome there is, and out of a conventicle too; salvation is not shut up into such a narrow conclave."

Laud was what a later generation would call a "liberal catholic." His was a free catholicism, dogmatically rooted in scripture and ancient tradition and for that very reason not constricted by limitations imposed by embattled ecclesiastical parties. Laud believed that he belonged to a liberal catholic church, a province of the visible historic church founded by Jesus Christ, free of Puritan restrictions and Roman accretions. He would have agreed with Charles Gore when he wrote some centuries latter: "Broadly, there is no question of what the Church of England has stood for since the Reformation. It has stood for what can best be described as a liberal or scriptural catholicism." (The Basis of Anglican Fellowship in Faith and Organization, Oxford 1914, p. 4)

"That salvation is not shut up into such a narrow conclave" has been the belief of liberal catholics ever since Laud's day. And like the archbishop himself and the church of his day, contemporary liberal catholics are again in danger of being ground to powder by two great millstones, once Roman and Non-Conformist, now revisionist and fundamentalist.

The millstones are not really that much different now than they were in the time of Laud. In the 17th century the Puritan accused the Romanist of being a revisionist, diluting the scriptural message by compromising the historic faith to satisfy the pagan instincts of fallen humanity. And the Romanist, standing on the other side of the growing divide, accused the Puritan of being a fundamentalist, using scripture to overthrow the very tradition needed for its authentic interpretation. Across the ever-widening chasm running through the midst of Western Christendom, revisionist and fundamentalist have been throwing ecclesiastical brickbats at one another for the last 400 years, until what was once a battle fought between opposing ecclesiastical camps has become a militant conflict between contradictory beliefs as to the very nature of Christianity itself. And now, having grown weary of it all, the world has turned secularist and the liberal catholicism of Anglican tradition has been left out in the cold seeming to have no place to stand and no message to proclaim

Ever since the Reformation, Ecclesia Anglicana has tried to bridge the yawning chasm between revisionist and fundamentalist by adopting a via media which at its best has been a comprehensiveness seeking to embrace both the scriptural revelation and the riches of secular culture, and at its worst a mere compromise between irreconcilable ecclesiastical camps. But now, living in a world gone secular, historic Anglicanism, like the nation from which it sprung, seems to have lost its nerve. We are thrown back into the days of Archbishop Laud in which the quest for comprehensiveness is again almost entirely abandoned and with it the church's liberal catholic identity. Nor is compromise possible in a post-'60s world which believes that compromise, like hypocrisy, is a mortal sin. Like the rest of the Christian West, Anglicanism has itself been reduced to two armed camps in a power struggle of political confrontation between irreconcilable opposites.

Comprehensiveness is simply an Anglican word for catholicity, and with its demise among Anglicans, the traditional liberal catholic loses his identity as well. As the war between fundamentalist and revisionist increases in intensity, either he retreats from the field into insignificance and obscurity or feels compelled to take sides in a battle not of his own making, joining the revisionist camp as an Affirming Catholic, or marching Forward in Faith with evangelicals whose only trustworthy weapon is sola scriptura.

If historic Anglicanism is to survive, a way will have to be found to recover an authentic catholicity which is liberal without turning us into libertines, magnanimous without encouraging us to desert our principles.

The concept of pluriformity will not do the trick; that is only a neologism for an unacceptable compromise. Our only hope of success is to rediscover the authentic meaning of catholicity and then learn how to deal with its opposite. We too often forget that the opposite of catholicity is heresy, not protestantism or evangelicalism, and that the problem with the heretic is that he uses his partial understanding of truth to deny the rest of the truth. He is never completely wrong; he is just not sufficiently right. The truly liberal catholic, on the other hand, submits himself to the whole truth including those aspects of the truth he does not yet comprehend. The only thing he negates are negations; he only denies denials. Our task is not to live out some compromise between incompatible heresies, but to embrace whatever partial truth we find, no matter where we find it, and to place that truth within the wholeness of faith taught by the church throughout the centuries under the guidance of that Holy Spirit who continually leads us into all truth.

Those who would still call themselves "Anglo-Catholics" need to remember that a catholic party within the church is a contradiction in terms. We are not Anglicans who happen to be catholic, but catholics who can still find within the Anglican Communion of churches, no matter what some of their official bodies may proclaim, that fullness of the faith given us in the revelation of Jesus Christ, fully contained in scripture, adequately interpreted through the ancient tradition of the church and capable of being proclaimed by the faithful in their particular vocations and ministries.

As B.I. Bell, that somewhat gloomy prophet of the 1930s and '40s, once wrote in THE LIVING CHURCH: "Having bought up the church as a sort of plaything, [they] are now tired of their toy; and the public at large, having learned by experience how rarely is any spiritual challenge to be met within [our] church, leaves our pews unoccupied and our preachers unheard. We have our reward.

"And Anglo-Catholics have not mattered very much either -- chiefly, I think, because ... they have gotten so used to looking after their private practice as to have lost interest in the public health of the communion. If so, both they and the communion must share the blame.

"And there are many more priests, and even bishops, ready in an emergency to stand with the catholics, than all men understand. Of course, most of these are only semi-catholic; but they are on their way, and they do respond to vital and clear challenge if those who make the challenge are humorous, kindly, and really catholic."

The Rev. John H. Heidt is the rector of Christ Church, Dallas, Texas.