A Kind of Noah's Ark?

Foreword

Dear Joe,

Your question calls for more than I can put in a letter, so I have written this small book on it. Don’t be embarrassed; Luther wrote a book on prayer specially for Peter his barber (a gem, incidentally), so why shouldn’t I write a book on being an Anglican specially for you? If there’ s sense in it others beside you will get the benefit, and if it turns out like Eccles (‘I don’t say much, but what I say - don’t make sense’) you won’t be held responsible.

I know you’re not yet sure whether to offer for ordination, and you mustn’t think that by this grand gesture I’m trying to put pressure on you. If God wants you in the ordained ministry he’ll put on all the pressure that’s needed, and you’ll find yourself having to say, in the words of the great Spike Milligan walking backwards for Christmas (remember?), ‘it’s the only thing for me.’ But thinking chaps like you are needed in the Anglican ministry, and I don’t want needless stumbling-blocks to lie in their way.

You asked me how an evangelical who takes seriously his stewardship of revealed truth can ever with a good conscience take office in the Church of England when it is such a doctrinal Noah’s ark, parading a comprehensiveness under which, as it seems, literally anything goes. That’s an important question, and a fair one, since I am in fact a clergyman, and you are by no means the only person to put it to me, and I’d like the world to have my answer.

Whether I take my stewardship of revealed truth seriously enough others must decide, but I can say this: For a generation now I have had close links with Free Church evangelicals who spared no effort to show me that as an Anglican I am in a false position. I think I know their arguments pretty well by now. Yet though Anglican doctrinal pluralism brings as much distress today as ever it did, I was never so sure that as an Anglican I’m where I should be, and where many others should be too. I want to share the lines of thought that brought me here. So please read on.

Sincerely

JIM PACKER

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1. Anglican Comprehensiveness – Virtue or Vice?

This essay is a companion piece to the first of the Latimer Studies which I wrote in 1978, entitled The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem.[1] There I discussed what evangelicals in the Church of England stand for; here I ask what the Church of England itself stands for. I do so as an evangelical, and since this word means different things to different people I shall first spell out what I mean by it, so that no one will misunderstand where I am coming from in what follows.

1.1. Evangelical Perspectives

Anglicans who call themselves evangelicals, like those who claim to be Anglican (Anglo-) Catholics, see themselves as holding in trust for the rest of the church a heritage of truth and insight, perceptions of reality and duty, and traditions of stockpiled wisdom and spiritual experience, which form part of the wealth laid up in Christ for all, but which, partly through unawareness of true notions and partly through prepossession by false ones, not all up to now have been able to grasp. In my earlier study I noted as chief among the truths of which evangelicals are trustees:

(1) the supremacy of Scripture as God-given instruction, a sufficient, self-interpreting guide in all matters of faith and action;

(2) the majesty of Jesus Christ our sin-bearing divine Saviour and glorified King, by faith in whom we are justified;

(3) the lordship of the Holy Spirit, giver of spiritual life by animating, assuring, empowering and transforming the saints;

(4) the necessity of conversion, not as a stereotyped experience but as a regenerate condition, a state of faith in Christ evidenced by repentance and practical godliness;

(5) the priority of evangelism in the church’s agenda;

(6) the fellowship of believers (the faith-full) as the essence of the church’s life.[2]

Evangelicals stress that faith, like charity, must begin at home, in the sense that convertedness is first to seek because unconverted folk can neither know God’s forgiveness and favour nor serve him or others as they should. Immature evangellcals have sometimes settled for a euphoric, man-centred pietism, concerned only with possessing and spreading the peace and joy of ‘knowing Christ as my personal Saviour’ (sadly, these precious words are nowadays a cant phrase), and never appreciating God’s revealed concern for truth and righteousness in church and community. Maturer evangelicals, however, have always recognized that though personal conversion is the starting-point Christians must learn a biblical God-centredness and seek after ‘holiness to the Lord’ in all departments of the church’s worship, witness and work and in every activity and relationship of human life. Over the past four centuries in England this maturity has been most apparent when evangelicalism has been closest to its historical roots in Reformed (that is, Reformational, or, to use a word which would have distressed John Calvin, Calvinistic) theology.

‘Evangelical’ and ‘Reformed’ are not synonyms. Not all evangelicals, Anglican or other, would call themselves Reformed (some profess to be Lutheran, Wesleyan, Pentecostal or just nondescriptly biblicist); nor can all conservative Calvinists properly be called evangelicals (some are formalists in doctrine and devotion, some are institutionalists in pastoral care and strategy, and some are quietists wholly absorbed in monitoring the drama of God’s life in their souls). But whenever evangelicalism is fuelled by teaching that reproduces the biblical theocentrism of Calvin’s Institutes or the Anglican formularies or the later Westminster standards (drafted, be it said, mainly by Anglicans), all of which documents show the same balanced concern for personal faith, a pure church and a godly society, it manifests the mature breadth of which I am speaking.

At the turn of this century both Abraham Kuyper, architect of Reformed renewal in Holland, and G. K. Chesterton, the most potent Christian apologist in England (despite his sad misconception of Protestaatism), were both saying from opposite sides of the fence that in construing Christianity the ultimate choice lies between Calvinism and Catholicism. Leaving aside the questions, which a well-informed person might want to press, as to whether the Reformed humanism of Kuyper was not more truly catholic, in the sense of comprehensively Christian, than Chesterton’s romantic mediaevalism, and whether the backward-looking Catholicism of Chesterton was not really more sectarian, in the sense of unbiblically exclusive, than Kuyper’s forward-looking Protestantism, we may agree with them at once. The Roman (Catholic) and Reformed (Calvinistic) really are the only traditions of Christian thought that have range and resources sufficient to become full-scale world-and-life-views-philosophies of life, in the old rich sense of that phrase, seeing all reality, activity and community steadily and whole, because it is all being looked at in relation to God’s cosmic goals and plans and to the eternity (the world to come) to which it is all working up. And only when evangelicalism comes under Reformed tutelage (for substance, even if not by that name) does it successfully transcend the limitations of pietistic individualism and show itself as a viewpoint of biblical breadth.

Now the evangelical tradition of faith and life in the Church of England has been mostly fed by Reformed theology, and has characteristically been marked by deep concern, variously expressed, for godliness in both church and community, as well as in individuals and ‘keen’ groups. Think, for illustration, of the Reformers, and the Church Puritans who followed them; of the Church-oriented evangelicalism fostered by Simeon, Wilberforce, the Clapham fraternity and later by J. C. Ryle; and of the unacknowledged yet decided return of many Anglican evangelicals in our time to their Reformed roots, a return which has led to the strong wish expressed at the Keele and Nottingham congresses, that evangelicalism might be effective in reshaping and renewing church and nation today. The sort of pietism which withdraws from all constructive links with the church and the world save those with other evangelicals should not, therefore, be seen as an evangelical Anglican norm, any more than mediaeval relic-worship should be thought of as a Roman Catholic norm. The fact that some within evangelical circles and many outside them treat such pietism as the evangelical norm is sad and stultifying. To think of what is eccentric as ordinary, or decadent as standard, is grievously to misunderstand.

Certainly, this has not been a good century for Anglican evangelicals. Influence has shrunk and pietistic individualism has prevailed, leading many to suppose that nothing about the Church of England matters save that it is still the best boat to fish from. Despite the recent Reformed resurgence noticed above, it is clear that very many earnest Anglicans still think about their church in this way, and other things about it never bother them. But this shrugging off of concern as to what appearance the Church presents to the watching world, and how it nurtures its adherents, and how far its ways glorify God, is not the authentic evangelical attitude, nor is it the standpoint from which I write the present essay.

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1.2. Comprehensiveness – Unlimited?

Anglican apologists often claim that one excellence of the Church of England is its comprehensiveness: that is, the way it finds room on its broad bosom for all sorts of Christians to lie comfortably side by side, amicably debating non-essentials on the basis of their happy agreement about basics. This (so it is urged) is one sign of the Church’s catholic spirit, in other words its purpose of embracing the whole of Christian truth and its unwillingness to be a sect outlawing from its fellowship folk whom Christ accepts, just because they verbalise the faith eccentrically or differ from others on minor issues of faith and order.

The formula sounds good. It is obviously right in principle that a body like the Church of England, a nationwide federation of many thousand congregations in full communion with each other and seeking to embrace as many English Christians as possible while commending mainstream Christianity to all, should be as wide and tolerant in its embraces as the Christian revelation allows. It is obviously right that its creed should be restricted to the minimum necessary, and that on other matters its members be left free, in John Wesley’s happy phrase, to ‘think, and let think’. Historically, Anglicans have for the most part followed the judicious Richard Hooker in grounding the unity of the catholic visible church in its profession of the Christian fundamentals, namely the articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as interpreted by the Bible whose faith they intend to express. Evangelicals as a body go with this, though they insist that the forgiveness of sins in the creeds must be expounded in terms of justification by faith, as Hooker himself did.[3] And if all Anglicans were at one on the fundamentals, the comprehensiveness which allows for (e.g.) different notions of Christ’s eucharistic presence, or different estimates of the importance of the historic Episcopal succession, or different opinions on the circumstances of Christ’s return, or opposing views on the ethics of abortion and the propriety of making women presbyters, while not, perhaps, perfectly comfortable to live with, would present no problem of principle, to evangelicals or anyone else.

Sadly, however, the present-day reality of Anglican comprehensiveness is not like that. It is both more complex and more painful. There are two reasons for this. One is that since biblical criticism, in the sense of systematic study of the origins, composition, literary character and purpose of the biblical books as human documents, established itself in the Protestant world a century ago, many Anglicans have ceased to view Bible doctrine as God’s revealed truth, and no longer let biblical thoughts determine their thinking. Allowing Scripture great human authority as a primary witness to archetypal Christian experience, they deny it divine authority as instruction from heaven. So at every turn we find them distinguishing divine realities from New Testament ideas about them, and refusing to concede that they lose touch with the former by questioning the latter. But to those who believe that the Holy Spirit spoke by the prophets and their apostolic counterparts, making biblical testimony as truly God’s utterance as were the words of the incarnate Son, and who take the fundamentals to be just what Scripture says they are, the claim to uphold those fundamentals while relativizing or recasting Scripture statements about them seems incoherent nonsense. Thus discussion of fundamentals falls into deep confusion, and the question whether there is essential agreement on what is essential to the essentials becomes-problematical to the last degree.

Then, second, Broad Church liberals and radicals, spiritual heirs of the Latitudinarians of earlier times, proceeding on the basis of the view of Scripture outlined above, claim unlimited freedom to reconceive the Christian fundamentals. So today, for instance, brilliant University teachers like Don Cupitt, and Professors Maurice Wiles, Dennis Nineham and the late Geoffrey Lampe (to look no further), are Unitarian rather than trinitarian in their thoughts about God; they, and others like J. A. T. Robinson, by their affirmations of deity in Christ effectively deny the deity of Christ; their claims about his continuing influence effectively deny his bodily resurrection; and they state the forgiveness of sins in terms which deny his vicarious sin-bearing.[4] Nor, if these ideas were scotched, would the liberal snake be killed, for liberal theology is a parasite which lives by challenging received views in the name of reason, and its death in one form regularly heralds its rebirth in another.

There is thus little prospect of any church which allows liberal theological method ever being free of what to evangelicals appears major heresy; and it is clear that the Church of England today, in common with world-wide Anglicanism, understands its commitment to reason as the third strand of its principle of authority, along with Scripture and tradition, as legitimizing liberal method. Hooker, who gave Anglicans this formula, would certainly protest that this way of understanding it destroys his meaning completely, but nothing can be done about that now; we have gone too far. So the comfortable old concept of churchmen who are one on basics agreeing to disagree on secondary matters appears today to be a pipe-dream no longer bearing any relation to what is-actually the case. The reality of Anglican comprehensiveness is quite different. It has become a matter of accepting theological bedfellows who may well have no more in common with you or with each other than the topics they discuss and the vocabulary they use for discussing them.

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1.3. Withdrawal?

Seeing this, some have urged evangelicals in ‘doctrinally mixed’ churches to withdraw into a tighter fellowship where the pre-critical, pre-liberal view of Scripture is rigorously upheld and sceptical revisionism in theology is debarred. It has been said that failure to do this is as unprincipled as it is foolish. It is unprincipled, so the argument runs, because by staying in churches which tolerate heretics you become constructively guilty of their heresies, by your association with them; and it is foolish because you have not the least hope of cleaning up the theological Augean stables while liberals remain there. Withdrawal is the conscientious man’s only option.

That the liberal theological method has come to stay in the Church of England is, as we saw, not open to doubt. That, for the present at least, it is the majority method among Anglican theologians is also clear. Though there is no reason to think that most Anglicans are liberals, the exposure given by the media to the provocatively unorthodox could easily give the impression that these men are on the intellectual growing edge of tomorrow’s Anglican faith. Nor can this state of affairs be expected to change much in the foreseeable future; liberalism, which lives and can only live as a reaction against orthodoxy, will remain a cuckoo in the Anglican nest, and in each generation much theological energy will have to be invested in criticizing liberal criticisms of historic Christian belief. Accepting this is part of what is involved in being an Anglican evangelical today. All these, so far as man can foresee, are fixed points.

So, even if the separatist arguments are not thought cogent, the question presses: is the game worth the candle? Evangelical identity is trans-denominational, and Anglican evangelicals could find spiritual homes elsewhere if they had to: might they not be wise to do so, and wash their bands of the constant battle with the liberals, and invest their God-given mental energy elsewhere?

Half-way up the four flights of stairs leading to one of London’s evangelical institutions there used to hang a card which said: ‘Pause and Pray.’ That is good advice too for folk faced with this specious summons to down tools and run. The genuine distress and frustration which evangelicals feel about the interminable theological incoherence of the Church of England gives the summons immediate appeal. But proverbial common sense tells us that though the grass the other side of the wall is always greener, we should look before we leap, lest we cut off our nose to spite our face and jump out of the frying-pan into the fire. Just as one cannot steer straight forward while looking back at what one is leaving, so one cannot trust reaction to induce right-mindedness. Even if not blind (as it often is), reaction is rarely far-sighted, and may lead to something worse than that from which it flees. ‘Anywhere, provided it be forward’ has been described as a philosophy for Gadarene swine, and ‘anyhow, provided it be different’ would be an axiom of anarchy. To see what to do about what one is against (in this case, a vicious doctrinal pluralism), one needs first to be clear what one is for. So our initial question must be: what sort of Church of England do evangelicals look for? Where do they think it should go, starting from where it is? What hopes and purposes have they for it? What policies do these purposes dictate? Here are the themes on which reflection should centre while separatist sirens sing their seductive song of flight from present troubles.

It will help us to think through these questions if for a moment we glance back at the Anglicanism of two evangelical pritriarchs of yesterday, whom many in the Church of England have taken as role-models, and still do: Charles Simeon and J. C. Ryle. Granted, the methodological comprehensiveness of the Church of England today is, as we have begun to see, a relatively new thing, which the official apologia for comprehensiveness neither envisages nor covers, and neither of these men had to face it. Yet both belonged to a Church of England in which their evangelicalism was very far from being dominant or popular, and in that, at least, they were in the same boat as we are. What did they hope and work for in the disorderly Church of England of their day, and what was their attitude towards those doctrinal shortcomings which they detected? Let us see.

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1.4. Simeon and Ryle[5]

First, their profiles. Simeon (1759-1836), son of a wealthy lawyer, brother of a baronet who sat in Parliament and of one of the Bank of England’s directors, was an Eton boy who came to faith in Christ as undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge. Having graduated without examination and become a Fellow automatically, as Kingsmen did in those days, Simeon was ordained deacon at the age of 22. Three months later he asked his father to put his name forward to the Bishop of Ely for the vacant living of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, and amazingly he got it. There he stayed till his death 54 years later, developing a ministry as preacher, student chaplain, nurturer of ordinands, pastor and educator of clergy, missionary organiser (Church Missionary Society, British and Foreign Bible Society, Society from Promoting Christianity among the Jews), resource person in clerical appointments, and finally purchaser of patronage, which led Macaulay to write: ‘his real sway in the church was far greater than that of any primate.’[6] It was his happiness to see, in the last 25 years of his life, many signs that his kind of evangelicalism was establishing itself in the English middle and upper classes, largely through men whom he trained and advised.

John Charles Ryle (1816-1900) was also an Eton boy. Converted at Oxford, where he also gained a First Class degree, he was ordained when his father, a Cheshire banker, went bankrupt. For 39 years he served as a country parson, becoming an acknowledged evangelical leader through his tracts, books and power of speech; then at 64, ‘set in his ways and his thoughts, past his best,’[7] he was made first bishop of Liverpool, where for two decades he worked manfully setting up a diocese that lacked money, buildings and human resources all along. Whereas Simeon’ s main ministry had been personal (for his 21-volume Home Homileticae, 2536 sermon outlines from Genesis to Revelation, was not equally influential), Ryle’s chief influence was exerted through his pungent tracts and books, some of which are still in print today.[8]

The two Etonians make a fascinating contrast. Both were instinctive aristocrats, dignified and reserved to a degree, yet shrewd, energetic, articulate natural leaders, men of great personal force and pastoral wisdom, with views of Christianity and ministry that were virtually identical. Here, however, the resemblance ends. Simeon, the Old Apostle as they called him, a warm-hearted though somewhat fussy and choleric bachelor, was always the eighteenth-century gentleman, with the elegant geniality that wealth and an assured position in society easily confer. Ryle, the Protestant Bishop, a man of granite with the heart of a child as his successor described him, was a raw-boned, big-voiced, blunt-spoken Victorian, brisk and brusque, tough-minded to the point of truculence, whose natural combativeness shone out in all he said and did - in short, a natural outsider. Not very sociable by nature, and scarred by the trauma of the family bankruptcy and 20 years of near-poverty that followed, plus the pain of losing two wives (the second of whom was an invalid for ten years) before he was 45, most folk found him abrubt and aloof, easier to admire from a distance than to relax with at close quarters. Ryle had better brains, more learning, and power on paper which Simeon quite lacked; Simeon had poise, charm and a genius for friendship which Ryle quite lacked, though there are places where Ryle’s devotional writing communicates a depth of compassion which, from the evidence available, Simeon could not match. Simeon was evidently a sunny person, Ryle rather more severe. But both were great men, and when Anglican vangelicals divide, as they do, over which they prefer they tell us more about themselves than about either of them.

Second, their principles. Here they were together all the way. Both were English churchmen who understood Christianity in terms of the official Anglican formularies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both saw real Christianity as based on the justification of sinners through grace by faith in the living Christ and his atoning death. Both applauded the Articles and Prayer Book for the model of doctrine and devotion which they provide. Both were moderate Calvinists, affirming election without speaking of reprobation and declaring universal as distinct from particular redemption. Both thought it good and right that the English national church should be established (Ryle wrote against disestablishment), and both regretted Dissent, though Ryle insisted that the Church was to blame for causing it. But as both understood preaching in terms of letting Scripture speak, and took its main message to be truths about the present relation of the living Triune God to sinners, and rang endless changes on these truths in their own preaching, so both were glad of Dissenters who preached the same message. The main concern of both was that Christ should be preached, never mind by whom.

Both saw the inherited Anglican system of endowed livings and paternalist patronage as providentially apt for furthering the gospel in England, especially in poor and ignorant communities, and as being fully justifiable on that basis; and both saw the main hindrance to the spread of the gospel in England as lying in failure to work the parochial system well enough. Simeon was up against non-residence and plurality, and clergy who were not ‘serious’ (an evangelical code-word in those days) about Prayer Book religion, who ridiculed those who were as ‘enthusiasts’ (i.e., fanatics), and who set forth ethics as the way to heaven. Ryle believed that Ritualistic crypto-Romanism, boiling down to trust in sacraments for salvation, and woolly Broad Church guesswork, boiling down to trust in sincerity for salvation, were establishing themselves as the preferred options of an increasing timber of clergy, and ousting the gospel of the formularies. Both men, however, interpreted their situation in terms, not of apostasy, but of lack. They had confidence in the power of the gospel, once let loose, to make its way against these basically jejune alternatives and drive them back, and they saw it as their task to let the gospel loose every way they could.

Both were hopeful as they faced the future. This is less plain in Ryle, who unlike Simeon did not see his cause clearly triumph, and unlike Simeon again had in his mind a streak of premillennial pessimism, leading him to warn on occasion of wholesale apostasy before Christ’s coming. Ryle voiced many forebodings of how the Church of England would collapse if doctrinal drift and disintegration went further, and urged constantly that evangelical faith could not be preserved without a fight. Yet he expressed hope too. The following extract gives the basic attitude which he maintained throughout.

You live in days when our time-honoured Church is in a very perilous, distressing, and critical position. Her rowers have brought her into troubled waters. Her very existence is endangered by Papists, Infidels, and Liberationists [disestablishmentarians] without. Her life-blood is drained away by the behaviour of traitors, false friends, and timid officers within. Nevertheless, so long as the Church of England sticks firmly to the Bible, the Articles and the principles of the Protestant Reformation, so long I advise you strongly to stick to the Church. When the Articles are thrown overboard and the old flag is hauled down, then, and not till then, it will be time for you and me to launch the boats and quit the wreck. At present, let us stick to the old ship.

Why should we leave her now, like cowards, because she is in difficulties and the truth cannot be maintained within her pale without trouble? How can we better ourselves? To whom can we go? Where shall we find better prayers? In what communion shall we find so much good being done, in spite of the existence of much evil? No doubt there is much to sadden us; but there is not a single visible Church on earth at this day doing better. There is not a single communion where there are no clouds, and all is serene ... But for all that, there is much to gladden us, more Evangelical preaching than there ever was before in the land, more work done both at home and abroad. If old William Romaine, of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, who stood alone with some half-dozen others in London last century, had lived to see what our eyes see, he would have sharply rebuked our faint-heartedness and unthankfuiness. No! The battle of the Reformed Church of England is not yet lost, in spite of semi-popery and scepticism, whatever jealous onlookers without and melancholy grumblers within may please to say. As Napoleon said at four o’clock on the battlefield of Marengo, “there is yet time to win a victory.” If the really loyal members of the Church will only stand by her boldly, and not look coolly at one another, and refuse to work the same fire engine, or man the same lifeboat - if they will not squabble and quarrel and “fall out by the way,” the Church of England will live and not die, and be a blessing to our children’s children. Then let us set our feet down firmly and stand fast .., man the pumps, and try to keep the good ship afloat. Let us work on, and fight on, and pray on, and stick to the Church of England.’[9]

In other words, the Church of England was worth preserving; the misbelief of the day need not be fatal; if evangelicals would fight together for the gospel in the Church, they would succeed in keeping it there.

So to, third, the programme to which Simeon and Ryle committed themselves. Both constantly sought to do three things to reduce the doctrinal, devotional and practical defects of the Church of England as they found it:

(1) To spread and defend the gospel by preaching, teaching and writing. (This was the hidden agenda of Horae llomileticae, as it was the explicit agenda of most of Ryle’s written work.)

(2) To establish clergy and ordinands in evangelical truth. (Simeon did this more obviously through student ministry and clergy conferences; Ryle did it indirectly, by backing evangelical theological colleges.)

(3) To exert all possible influence to evangelical ends in the Church’s wider life. (Simeon, living in an era when influence was chiefly a matter of whom one knew, cultivated dignitaries; Ryle urged against some of his peers that evangelicals should get stuck into the newly-born Church Congresses and Diocesan Conferences and the revived Convocations, and himself proposed reforming church courts, patronage and canon law, and transforming the Convocations into synodical government - all of which, incidentally, has been done in the past generation, rather more than hail a century after Ryle called for it.)

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1.5. Past and Present

How would Simeon and Ryle react could they see the Church of England today?

They would certainly be delighted that the number of clergy and congregations adhering to their kind of evangelicalism now seems greater than at any time in either of their lives. Simeon saw evangelical influence in the Church of England budding, Ryle thought, probably rightly, that overall he was watching it wither; neither saw evangelicalism blossom as it has blossomed in England during the second half of this century.

Both men would also be thankful to observe the strength of evangelical institutions and societies, the quantity and quality of evangelical printed matter, and the fact that evangelical theological colleges now train forty per cent at least of each generation of ordinands. Simeon would rejoice to see how widely his standards of parish ministry had established themselves; Ryle would be glad that the Church, instead of disintegrating as he feared it would through hostility from without coupled with centrifugal disunity and anarchy within, holds resolutely together, and the sense of unity and trust between churchmen of different schools who keep within the bounds set by the Creeds and Articles has notably grown in recent years.

Both men would wonder, perhaps, whether the quality of Anglican evangelicals today matches that of their predecessors one and two centuries ago. They might sense that we are little people with small souls. They might feel doubt as to whether, in their passion to worship God in the low-key twentieth-century way and in today’s ‘cool’ English, evangelicals are holding firmly enough to the Bible-based Augustinianism of the Prayer Book and cultivating, along with their stress on fellowship with the Father, the Son and the saints, that due humility before God which bespeaks a sight of God’s holiness and a true sense of sin. Present-day hymns and choruses in particular might make them scratch their heads at this point. In their own day, both were hot against respectable, easygoing, shallow people who played superficially with Christianity, and they would certainly wish to check up on us here.

Ryle, who constantly urged churchmen to study the Articles as the Church’s confession of faith, would be amazed and, I expect, distressed that modern Anglican evangelicals attend to them so little. He would find it hard to believe that the 78-page Nottingham Statement (the findings of NEAC 1977) was a serious evangelical document, when it pronounced on the gospel, the Bible and Roman Catholicism, among other matters, without referring to the Articles once! But I think he would be glad to find that both the aggressions of Tridentine Roman Catholicism in England and popular patriotic reaction against it (‘no popery!’) - a scaremongering reaction with which Ryle himself largely identified, and at the time with reason - were things of the past. A realist in his own day, Ryle would appreciate that though the doctrinal gulf between Roman Catholicism and Protestant evangelicalism remains, the milieu in which to survey and debate it has changed dramatically since Vatican II, and for the better.[10] It is a poor tribute to Ryle’ s intelligence to suppose, as some seem to do, that he could not have allowed that a new situation has come to exist, nor understood it, nor welcomed and adjusted to it.

But what of Anglican comprehensiveness? Probably at first sight the range of beliefs and opinions tolerated among today’s clergy, and the depth of indifference as to whether those who hold office as the Church’s teachers believe one thing or another, would stagger both men. Simeon, who put on record his hope that Horae Hornileticae would tend ‘to weaken at least, if not eradicate, the disputes about Calvinism and Arminianism; and thus to recommend ... the unhampered liberality of the Church of England,’