LATIMER STUDIES 10
A
Kind of Noah’s
The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness
by J. I. Packer
The Latimer Trust
© J I Packer 2006
ISBN 0-946307-09-1
EAN 9780946307098
Published by the
Latimer Trust
1. Anglican Comprehensiveness – Virtue or Vice?
1.2 Comprehensiveness – Unlimited?
2. Anglican Comprehensiveness – A Likely Story?
3. Anglican Comprehensiveness – The Hard-Made Decision
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
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.
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
‘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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
John Charles Ryle
(1816-1900) was also an
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.)
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
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
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,’[11] died before the attempts of Tractarians and
Liberals in Oxford to recover ‘catholic’ teaching and map out an up-to-date
undogmatic intellectualism respectively had made any significant impact. Apart from the Calvinistic issue, Simeon
never had to engage directly with any theology different from his own save the
natural man’s heresy that we can be moral enough to be saved without faith in
Christ; it is hard to envisage how he would have handled denials of the Trinity
and Incarnation. Ryle had controverted
the Romanizing distinctives of Ritualist theology and also the vague openness,
optimistic, unspecific and clear only in being anti traditional, which came to
mark Broad Church theorizing; he had argued against the idea that the Church of
England had best become ‘a kind of Noah’s ark, within which every kind of
opinion and creed shall dwell safe and undisturbed, and the only terms of
communion shall be willingness to come inside and let your neighbour alone’,[12] and had expounded his conviction that the
wise bounds of Anglican comprehensiveness are those which are actually set by
the Articles, Creeds and Prayer Book as understood in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. ‘Let us be as broad as the Articles and Creeds, but not
one inch broader,’ he had written. ‘If
any one tries to persuade me that I ought to smile and look on complacently,
with folded arms, while beneficed or licensed clergymen teach Deism, Socinianism
or Romanism, I must tell him quite plainly that I cannot and will not do it ...
I love my own Church too well to tolerate either scepticism on the one hand or
Romanism on the other, and I think I am only doing my duty to my ordination
vows in trying to “drive both away”.’[13] Were
he here today, to see Wiles’ neo-Deism, Lampe’s neo-Socinianism and the variety
of faiths disclosed in the 1976 Doctrine Commission report Christian Believing,
he would certainly judge the enlarged comprehensiveness which finds room for
all this to be, in Sellar-and-Yeatmanese, a Bad Thing.
But what would they tell
us to do about it? Ryle had seen heresy
trials backfire (the acquittal in 1864 of Williams and Wilson, two contributors
to Essays and Reviews, secured to English clergymen a legal right to treat
parts of Scripture as unhistorical); he had learned from the Bell Cox
prosecution in his own diocese (1886-7) how little you gain, and what goodwill
you lose, by making martyrs of men who, however misled, are able, honest,
hardworking and respected; he would be no more likely to recommend judicial
proceedings than secession. What both he
and Simeon could be expected to say, from what we know of them, is rather this:
(1) We should remember that the defined
faith, the historical heritage and the calling, evangelistic pastoral and
prophetic, of the English national church remain what they were, despite the
incursion of tolerated errors;
(2) We should realise that the ‘guilt by association’
argument touches no one who explicitly dissociates himself from the errors
concerned;
(3) We should remind ourselves that by
leaving the Church of England in disgust at its doctrinal disorders we should
stand to lose more than we gained;
(4) We should regard these errors, which
are all well-meant efforts to restate the faith for today, in terms of
deficiency - failure, that is, for whatever reason, to affirm the full gospel -
and devote energy to filling in what they omit or refuse to say;
(5) We should recognize that the best way
to serve a church infected by error is to refute the error cogently in public
discussion and debate, as Paul refuted the Galatian and Colossian errors, and
Athanasius the Arian error, and Augustine the Pelagian error, and Luther
Erasmus’ semi-Pelagianisni, and J. B. Lightfoot the errors of Supernatural Religion, and Eric Mascall
the errors of Robinson’s Honest to God
and van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of
the Gospel.
(6) We should resolve to pray for
champions in scholarly debate who will be able to do this job effectively on
the appropriate scale, and meantime say our own piece in public against the
errors in question as clearly as we can; otherwise we shall find in ourselves
an unquiet conscience, and an ungodly desire to flee the Church of England, not
because of the errors it tolerates, but only because of our own evading of the
call to speak for God against them (as Jonah found himself wanting to flee from
the presence of the Lord whose word he had refused to speak).
Whether or not I am
right to put these words into the mouths of Simeon and Ryle, they are certainly
the first things I want to say as we come now to grips with the over-tolerant
comprehensiveness which appears as one of the leading vices of the present-day
Church of England.
2. Anglican Comprehensiveness – A Likely Story?
ONE ingredient in today’s Anglicanism - by
which I mean the thought and practice of the Church of England with its
worldwide daughters - is, as we saw, its claim to be comprehensive in a way
that other traditions are not, and its confidence that this comprehensiveness
is a fine thing. So far I have written
as if it were just a matter of unlimited tolerance, sometimes of the
intolerable, which would suggest that it is really less a glory than a
shame. It certainly looks so from
outside, and sometimes from inside too.
Many Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and non-Anglican evangelicals
have thought it irresponsible and scandalous, and made no bones of saying so,
and some of my own anger and misery at my church’s complacent doctrinal
disarray will have come through to my readers already. But there is, of course, at least in theory,
more to comprehensiveness than this; though folk find it notoriously hard to
get hold of just what.
Why is that?
Because since the middle of the last century comprehensiveness has been
paraded as an Anglican excellence from at least four distinct points of view,
each observing it as a phenomenon and justifying it as a policy in a different
way. When this fourfoldness is not
discerned and consensus accounts of comprehensiveness are attempted, the
results are so cloudy, unfocused and ambivalent that one can no more make sense
of them than one can weave mist or sculpt custard. While it was to be expected that Anglican
comprehensiveness would comprehend different ideas of itself, the effect, here
as in other areas of plural Anglican thinking, is to induce a degree of
theological glossolalia which Eeyore would have labelled a Confused Noise, and
which is as maddening and bewildering to observers as it is embarrassing and
frustrating to those whose own utterances are part of it. To make sense of this situation we have to
separate out the four positions, locate them in the flow of Anglican history,
show what distinct benefit each supposes itself to bring, and evaluate them on
their separate merits. That is this chapter’s task.
First, both historically and logically, comes
the traditional understanding of comprehensiveness in terms of calculated inclusion. Here, comprehensiveness means a deliberate
policy of so ordering the Church that it can be a spiritual home for all ‘mere
Christians’ who do not insist on adding to the creed mediaeval and
post-mediaeval novelties (papal claims, the Mass-sacrifice, etc.) or taking
from it any of the biblical fundamentals which it contains.
Comprehensiveness in this sense was the aim
of the Elizabethan settlement, which sought a church structure that might
embrace the whole nation. The settlement
took the form of a broad-based Protestant traditionalism circumscribed by the
Articles and Prayer Book (two witnesses to a biblical fulness of faith and
worship), the royal supremacy (the sign that the Church was national and
established), and the historic episcopate (marking continuity in space and time
with the church of earlier days). Being
Reformational as against Papal and Anabaptist and on the eucharistic presence
Reformed as against Roman Catholic and Lutheran (Article 28), the settlement
could claim to embody the essence of New Testament and mainstream patristic
Christianity; thus it displayed true catholicity of substance. The doctrine of the Articles was put forward
as a sufficient minimum, leaving a great deal undefined, and no terms of lay
communion were imposed other than de
facto acceptance of the established order; thus a truly catholic
inclusiveness was achieved as well.
Archbishop Parker, the first Elizabethan
bishop, spoke of the settlement in terms of ‘golden mediocrity’ (aurea mediocritas ‘a golden mean’ is
what we should say). With this may be
bracketed the familiar idea of Anglicanism as a ‘middle way’ (via media). What these phrases point to is Anglican unwillingness
to shape the Church in a way that either needlessly cuts loose from the past or
needlessly cuts out Christians who would be part of it in the present. The via
media was never, as is sometimes suggested, a tight-rope walk between
The
benefits sought through this policy of circumscribed inclusiveness were two:
catholicity for the Church and unity, religious political and social, for the
nation. Until the nineteenth century the
policy seemed on the whole to be succeeding, despite the lapses of leadership
which squeezed out the Puritans and Wesley’s people in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries respectively. But
when Tractarians started to accuse the Church of defective catholicity because
of what it jettisoned at the Reformation, and Newman to argue that for doctrine
to remain the same it must constantly develop and change often, and liberals to
deny that the Bible should be read as if God were its primary author, then not
only Anglican unity but also the theological basis of the comprehensiveness
policy itself were irrevocably undermined. For the policy rested on agreed
acceptance of what the Bible, Creeds and Articles contain as normative
revelation, or at least as catholic theologoumena that must not be spoken against. It expressed doctrinal modesty but not
doctrinal indifferentism. Its demands
and restrictions in matters of belief and behaviour were no less categorical
for being minimal. But once substantial bodies of Anglican theological opinion
began to question these demands on grounds of catholicity and truth, some
wanting to augment and others to reduce what was common ground before,
agreement that the Anglican set-up secured genuine catholicity became a thing
of the past, and the Church changed overnight from a community unitedly
proclaiming an achieved catholicty as the basis of its fellowship into one
unitedly seeking such a basis but divided as to what, if anything, needed to be
done to secure it. So for more than a
century the Church has been a cockpit of debate between representatives of
differently conceived catholicities trying to knock each other down and if
possible out, or to elbow each other aside, or to find ways of taking into
themselves the apparently opposed principles of the other views; and the debate
continues.
In
1957 Alec Vidler wrote:
In these latter days the
conception of Anglican comprehensiveness has been taken to mean that it is the
glory of the Church of England to hold together in juxtaposition as many
varieties of Christian faith and practice as are willing to agree to differ, so
that the Church is regarded as a sort of league of religions. I have nothing to say for such an
unprincipled syncretism … the principle of comprehension is that a church ought
to hold the fundamentals of the faith and at the same time allow for
differences of opinion and of interpretation in secondary matters, especially
rites and ceremonies. It is this
principle that excluded .., those who believed too little, for instance any who
did not accept the Creeds, as well as those who believed too much, for instance
those who held that submission to the Bishop of Rome is necessary to salvation,
or that Holy Scripture requires a Presbyterian form of church government and
permits no other. Within these limits, which
were secured by a uniform liturgy and by Articles of Religion which purported
to be positive where Scripture was positive and reticent where it was not, it
allowed for the maximum of flexibility and variety.[14]
Good
words, and historically correct; but too many Anglicans have moved beyond this
position for it to stand as an account of what Anglican comprehensiveness means
today.
Second comes F. D. Maurice’s very influential
reinterpretation of comprehensiveness as integrative
practice - that is, the synthesizing in action of apparent theological
opposites. Maurice (1805-72), an
ex-Unitarian for whom the living Trinity was the key to everything, was both a
speckled bird and a stormy petrel, a distinguished, original and isolated
figure in the Church of England whose influence, gone as it seemed long before
his death, has remarkably revived during the past half-century.[15] He lived when Anglican party strife was at
its height, and his highly individual plea for a non-party understanding of the
Church of England fell on deaf ears.
Today it chimes in with what many wish to hear, so we should not perhaps
be surprised when Maurice is hailed as a prophet for our time.
Maurice held that the God who bestows
national characteristics appoints distinct destinies for various national
churches, and that part of the Church of England’s special calling is to
synthesize in its ordered life of worship and ministry all the principles
separately maintained as theoretical opposites by its three warring parties,
evangelical, Tractarian and Broad Church.
As he saw it, each party contends for a positive principle, to which it
adds antithetical, negative, restrictive and sectarian notions in order to form
an exclusive system of thought (Maurice detested systems). Thus, evangelicals contend for salvation in
Christ and muddy it with Calvinism, Tractarians contend for the God-givenness
of the church and muddy their point with sacramentalist theory, and Broad
Churchmen contend for freedom from bondage to intellectual systems of yesterday
and link this with pleas to abolish the Articles and Prayer Book. But as Maurice saw it, all three positive
principles were embodied already in the Church of England, with its creeds,
sacraments, liturgy and ordained ministry, and the rest of each position could
be safely dismissed as mistaken.
Maurice’s contention at this point was that
the union of the Triune God with mankind and the dominion of Christ over his
church, together with the institutional means by which this union and dominion
are furthered, are more basic to Christianity than any theological
formulations. In one sense, of course
they are, for things talked about are always basic to talk about them; but
Maurice was meaning that the church is primarily institutional and only
secondarily confessional, and that is much more disputable. His approving comment on the English
Reformation, which Stephen Sykes quotes, shows his attitude: ‘Here the idea of
the Church as a Spiritual Polity ruled over by Christ, and consisting of all
baptized persons, did, owing to various providential circumstances, supersede
the notion of the Church, as a sect, maintaining certain options; or to speak
more correctly, the dogmatical side of Christianity was here felt to be its
accessory and subordinate side, and the ordinances, which were the
manifestation of it as the law of our social and practical life, were
considered its principal side. ‘[16]
Sykes
judges that Maurice’s view of Anglicanism has been ‘theologically disastrous.’
‘It must be said bluntly,’ he explains, ‘that it has served as an open
invitation to intellectual laziness and self-deception ... the failure to be
frank about the issues between the parties in the Church of England has led to
an ultimately illusory self-projection as a church without any specific
doctrinal or confessional position.’[17] If ever we wondered whence came the facile
idea, often met, that the Church of England is a liturgical rather than a
confessional church, now we know.
It is hard to dissent from Sykes’ verdict,
and no less hard to accept Maurice’s view of the Church of England. For (1) in order to show how in Anglican
practice the three party positions are complementary Maurice is forced
high-handedly to redefine them in ways which neither evangelicals nor
anglo-catholics can own. (2) Maurice’s view implies that the crusading
Anglicanism of a Simeon-or Ryle-type evangelical, who wants to see the whole
Church of England leavened with the gospel, is less authentically Anglican than
that of a professedly anti-party institutionalist like himself. (3) Since
Maurice too was a theological crusader, advocating an account of universal
redemption which neither evangelicals nor anglo-catholics could accept, and
basing his institutionalism largely on it, he should really be seen as a
one-man party, unlike others in having private theological reasons for not
wanting to change the Church’s constitution, but possessing no better claim to
be a mainstream Anglican than anyone else. (4) To suggest that in the English
Reformation as a whole (as distinct from the reign of Henry VIII, which only
saw its beginning) the issue of theological truth (‘the dogmatical side of
Christianity’) was not primary is to part company with all exponents of what
happened for the first hundred years after the event, not to mention most
since. Granted, the Reformers sought a
reformed catholicism, not a new start; granted too, no fully interlocked
Anglican system like that of the Tridentine decrees or the seventeenth-century
Westminster Confession was ever spelt out; nonetheless, what the Articles
defined was set forth categorically and confessionally, to be the doctrinal
standard for interpreting Anglican liturgy, and it is idle to say it was not.
‘We have all been taught’ wrote Dr. Amand de Mendieta, ‘that the English Prayer
Book (1662) and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion were deliberately so
phrased that Catholics and Protestants alike could interpret them in their own
way.’[18] Maybe we have, and maybe Maurice inspired
much of the wishful thinking behind the statement; but of the Articles at any
rate it is simply not true, and on this stubborn fact views of Anglicanism like
Maurice’s founder.
In sum: Maurice construed Anglican
comprehensiveness as a genuine uniting of seeming opposites. He understood it as essentially a holding
together, in a common frame of ministry and worship, of three types of folk who
at the level of practical principle, that is, of faith and life as distinct
from theology, were not basically disagreed, though they thought they
were. Maurice believed he could see that
their deepest contentions were complementary rather than contradictory. But this belief had in it less of prophetic
insight than of theological oversight, for faith and theology cannot be thus
separated. The Christ to whom each man’s
faith is a response is the Christ of the kerygma he believes, and to the extent
that their understandings of the gospel vary different Christians serve different
Christs, or at least differently conceived Christs. Had Maurice reflected on how the kerygmas of
the three parties differed from each other, not to mention his own, he would
surely have seen that his supposition of basic complementarity and harmony was
superficial - though it has to be said that the decisiveness of differences of
belief when held by users of the same liturgy is something which
institutionalists both before and since Maurice have always found hard to
appreciate. The final verdict on Maurice’s
vision of the Church of England must be that it was one of history’s pleasanter
pipe dreams. Would that it were so! But it was not so in Maurice’s day, and it is
not so now.
Third in order comes the semi-official
twentieth-century understanding of comprehensiveness as a state of inner tension, indeed frank disunity on
some matters, which the Anglican Communion is providentially called to sustain
because, first, out of it will some day emerge a richer wholeness (catholicity)
than the Christian world yet knows and because, second, it qualifies the
Anglican communion to act as a ‘bridge church’ bringing into unity with itself
bodies which cannot at present find unity with each other. Inner incoherence is the price Anglicanism
pays for the privilege of fulfilling its unique vocation in reintegrating
Christ’s divided church.
Sometimes
this view is presented as an extension of Maurice’s, and historically it may
have developed in that way, but theologically it is a different thing
altogether. Maurice looked back to
Christ’s founding of the church as his kingdom, and sought a way of harmony
between warring Anglican groups by appeal to historically given institutions of
the kingdom - sacraments, creeds, worship, ministry. This third view looks forward, anticipates
new developments and states of things, and finds the meaning of present
conflict in future prospects. Let me illustrate. Here, first, is Amand de Mendieta unveiling
his vision for the church which he left the Roman communion to join.
I am convinced that the
historic mission or destiny of the Church of England, and, on a wider scale,
the destiny of the world-wide Anglican Communion, is to make a theological and
also a practical synthesis of
Catholicism and Protestantism. Up to the
present, we may say, the Church of England has too often been content with a
more or less tolerant co-existence, a mere junta-position (sic) of different ideas, points of view, theologies, and practices,
having no higher ambition than to keep a kind of precarious peace or rather
truce, by letting sleeping dogs lie.
But, to that extent, this so-called ‘comprehensive’ Church of England
has failed to rise to the height of its historic and providential
vocation. Our Church must bestir itself
and become a genuine dialectical
Church ... a dialectical Church is committed to the view that all these views
or particular theologies (Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, Liberal) must all be transcended in a higher synthesis.[19]
And here is the Church Unity Committee of the
1948 Lambeth Conference reflecting on the tensions set up in reunion
discussions with non-episcopal churches by the coexistence of different
Anglican views of episcopacy.
We recognise the
inconveniences caused by these tensions, but we acknowledge them to be part of
the will of God for us, since we believe it is only through a comprehensiveness
which makes it possible to hold together in the Anglican Communion
understandings of truth which are held in separation in other Churches, that
the Anglican Communion is able to reach out in different directions and so
fulfil its special vocation as one of God’s instruments for the restoration of
the visible unity of His whole Church.
If at the present time one view were to prevail to the exclusion of all
others, we should be delivered from our tensions, but only at the price of
missing our opportunity and our vocation.[20]
It would be hazardous to speak either for or
against this noble and hopeful vision, and I shall limit my comments to a
review of some relevant facts.
First,
it is a fact, and a happy one, that within the past thirty years the previously
felt convictional and kerygmatic gap between the more conservative evangelicals
and the more conservative anglo-catholics has shrunk.[21] On such matters as biblical authority,
justification, the efficacy of baptism towards salvation, and the balance of
preaching and eucharist in worship, there appears a convergence, which the
charismatic, liturgical and evangelistic thrusts of our time continually help
along. Today’s evangelicals see that
tradition has value as an aid to understanding Scripture and a safeguard
against bondage to present-day cultural prejudice. Today’s anglo-catholics see that tradition,
which purports to embody and express biblical faith, must be judged by those
very Scriptures which it interprets and applies. Most anglo-catholics allow that those who
took evangelicals’ sola fide to mean
that justification is by feeling justified and sanctification is unreal or unimportant,
misheard. Most evangelicals perceive
that the faith which catholics inculcate looks to the Christ whose salvation
the sacraments display, and not to the sacraments without the Saviour. Evangelicals nowadays carry conviction when
they profess concern for the universal visible church even though most of them
still use the invisible-visible distinction to express their mind on the
church’s nature. Catholics nowadays have
largely ceased to speak as if the church’s existence depends on the prior and
independent reality of the ordained ministry, even though they still go beyond
evangelicals in their valuation of the historic episcopal succession. (The thought of the historic episcopate as a
sign of the space-time continuity of Christ’s ministry from heaven to his
people has been found illuminating and unifying in some quarters.) Catholics
have help evangelicals to see Christianity as the baptismal life; evangelicals
have helped catholics to see it as a life of joyful assurance and expectant
prayer. These are some of the more
obvious points of convergence. How far
the two bodies of opinion have really changed, and how far they are just
hearing each other better, is a question on which views may vary, but that need
not concern us. Somehow or other, convergence
has come about, and for this we should he thankful.
But it is also a fact that in recent years an
enormous gap has opened up between evangelicals and catholics on one side and,
on the other, those liberals, heirs of the old Broad Churchmen, who since 1963,
the year of Honest to God, have been
called radicals - ‘rads’ against ‘trads’, or ‘questers against ‘resters’. The Bultmannite hermeneutic, which treats New
Testament narrative and theology as so much culture-determined mythology,
celebrating and evoking the ineffable impact of God upon us while telling us
nothing of a divine-human redeemer at all, has bred a worldwide crop of
Christian reconstructionists, all starting from a non-incarnational view of
Jesus, all working with a unitarian idea of God seasoned with more or less of
process-theology, all claiming that modern secular knowledge makes their type
of view the only one possible, and all vigorously offsetting themselves from
the categories and content of traditional belief. Many Anglicans, leading scholars among them,
are in this camp. But the versions of
Christian belief which the reconstructionists produce strike evangelicals and
catholics as forms of unbelief, or at least of intellectual besetting sin,[22]
and in relation to the fashion of thought that has produced them - which,
please God, will pass, as fashions do - de Mendieta’ s ‘higher synthesis’ is
out of sight.
Finally, it must be said that events since
1948 have not given any obvious colour to the notion of Anglicanism’s providentially
appointed ‘bridge’ role. At home the
Anglican-Methodist unity scheme has failed, partly because of its problematical
Service of Reconciliation which maintained the rule, allegedly necessary to
Anglican comprehensiveness, that non-episcopal clergy must receive the form of
episcopal orders, and the subsequent multi-church discussions that produced the
Ten Propositions do not seem to have been notably enlivened by Anglican
magic. Overseas union schemes involving Anglicans
have also collapsed or been put into store (
The fourth and most recent way of
understanding Anglican comprehensiveness is in terms of the belief,
characteristic of the liberal tradition, that theological relativism is inescapable, and to make explicit
provision for it is wise and healthy. No
formulations of faith (it is urged) have finality; treat them as sacrosanct,
and the church stagnates; but let reason, informed by contemporary culture, revise
and reshape them, and the church will both appear relevant and be found
enriched. Anglicanism, honouring reason
in theology, has always instinctively made room for those who in the cause of
truth and relevance have felt bound to challenge accepted formulations, and
this comprehensiveness, whereby the Church in effect holds the ring for debate
between advocates of the old and the new, is one main secret of Anglican
resilience and vitality. So at least it
is said.
To see what this viewpoint implies, we must
be clear on some facts on which clarity is too often lacking.
First, the basis of all forms of this
position is the hypothesis that no universally right way of thinking about God
is given in Christianity. Evangelicals
and anglo-catholics characteristically hold that there is a universally right
way, given to us in the teaching and trains of thought found in the Bible. Catholics ordinarily make a point of adding
that patristic tradition and conciliar definitions have authority as a guide to
interpretation, setting limits within which all subsequent attempts to develop
biblical thinking should stay. But for a
century and a half those known as liberals, modernists and radicals have found
this incredible. Unable to accept what
might be called a Chalcedonian view of Scripture (i.e. that it is fully human
as well as fully divine, and fully divine as well as fully human), they have
doubted both the reality of the Chalcedonian Christ to whom the New Testament
witnesses and the propriety of reading Scripture as more than a rag-bag of
traditions, intuitions, fancies and mythology whereby good men celebrated and
shared their sense of being in touch with God - a contact occasioned for New
Testament writers by a uniquely godly man named Jesus. (This, of course, is how the sceptical
conventions of biblical criticism, as practiced in the schools for over a
century, would lead one to read Scripture were there not cogent reasons for
taking higher ground.) That prophets and
apostles no less than creeds and churches can all be wrong on questions of
reality and truth, is plank one in the liberal platform. Scripture and the Christian literary heritage
are certainly stimulating, inspiring and effective in communicating God, but that
does not make them true. So the constant
endeavour of the liberal fraternity from the start has been to go behind and
beyond biblical witness to reformulate the faith in terms which to them, as
modern men, seem truer, clearer and less inadequate (whether evolutionist,
idealist, panentheist, deist, existentialist, Marxist; sociological,
psychological, syncretistic; or whatever).
In this they break both with the
Latitudinarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who saw human
orthodoxies as mere logic-chopping but the Bible as infallible truth, and with
all who have upheld the idea of an agreed core of fundamentals. Sykes notes how Gore, the pioneer liberal
catholic, met Anglican modernism with the demand that all articles of the creed
be treated as fundamentals, including Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection,
both of which (said Gore) historical enquiry confirms. ‘But’ comments Sykes ‘the question he did not
tackle satisfactorily was whether a Church could demand that all its clergy
adopt the same conclusions on historical matters. In view of the very large quantity and weight
of dissentient voices in Gore’s own day and since, it would be a little absurd
to claim that Gore’s position on this matter was in any sense
characteristically Anglican.’[23] Certainly, for today’s liberals there are no
fixed fundamentals; everything, not excluding the doctrine of God - indeed,
some say, that first - is regarded as in principle open to review and change.
Second, the liberal presence guarantees
genuine contradiction of views. Sykes
rightly says that it is a presence rather than a party; liberals have no united
platform or policy, for they hold in common only the negations noted in the
last two paragraphs, plus the sifting, reshaping methodology which these
negations entail. They agree only in what
they are against; beyond this it is every man for himself. ‘It is a very
obvious fact that modern radicals in the Church of England neither form a
cohesive group nor identify themselves with the earlier modernist movement.’[24] Sykes blames Maurice for leading Anglicans to
think of liberals as a party in the Church parallel to the other two. He notes that ‘a “liberal” theological
proposal is always in the form of a challenge to an established authority, and
thus necessarily implies a dispute about the appropriate norms or criteria for
any theology whatsoever.’ He notes too
that ‘it is impossible to be merely a “liberal” in theology one’s theology …
will be liberal in as much as it is a modification of an already existing type’
- liberal catholic, liberal evangelical, or even liberal latitudinarian.[25]
And he rightly stresses that any church in which liberals do their thing,
querying the traditional and jettisoning the conventional, will have to endure
real divergences of belief as some negate what others affirm and affirm what
others cannot but negate. As he
observes, ‘Maurice’s theory of comprehensiveness is utterly inadequate to
account for this situation, and to persist in using it is a dangerous form of
ecclesiastical self-deception.’[26]
Third, the liberal method has gained
acceptance in Anglicanism, as in most other large Protestant churches. When in 1862 two of the authors of Essays and Reviews were tried for
heresy, most of the novelties they affirmed were held not to be contrary to the
doctrine of the Church of England. When
in 1921 Gore urged that modernists be disciplined for sitting loose to the
creed, the response of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, was to
set up a commission to report on the state of doctrine in the Church of England,
and its report, by acknowledging the liberals’ contribution to the thought-life
of the Church, was, says Sykes, an ‘unambiguous victory’ for them.[27] The 1976 Doctrine Commission report, Christian Believing, distinguishes four
attitudes of Anglicans to the creeds which they recite in worship. Some embrace them as norms, ‘classical
crystallizations of biblical faith’.
Some recite them, despite reservations about their content, as a way of
professing solidarity with the historic church.
Some ‘can neither affirm nor deny the creeds, because they look to the
present rather than to the past to express their faith, and attach most
importance to fresh understandings of that continuing Christian enterprise
which has its origin in Jesus.’ Some
feel the fallibility of creeds and cannot in principle regard them as
expressing their loyalty to Jesus and the Creator, so feel uninvolved with
them. The first attitude is
characteristic of evangelicals and catholics, the other three of liberals. Coexistence is painful, but ‘the tension must
be endured,’ says the report; the church gains more from responsible debate
between those who hold these points of view than it could gain by ruling any of
them out.[28] Clearly liberalism has come to stay.
Fourth, all forms of liberalism are unstable.
Being developed in each case by taking some secular fashion of thought as the
fixed point (evolutionary optimism, historical scepticism, Marxist sociology,
or whatever), and remodelling the Christian tradition to fit it, they are all doomed
to die as soon as the fashion changes, according to Dean Inge’ s true saying
that he who marries the spirit of the age today will be a widower
tomorrow. It is not always realised that
the history of the past century and a half is littered with the wreckage of
dead liberallsms. Though liberalism as
an attitude of mind (going back at least to the Renaissance, if not indeed to
the temptation of Eve) has persisted, and persists still, particular
liberalisms have so far been relatively short-lived, and can be expected to
continue so. Some liberals cheerfully
acknowledge this and never treat their current opinions as more than
provisional, anticipating that they may think differently next week. Others clearly cannot bear this prospect, and
respond to factors which undermine their present opinions in the manner of King
Canute forbidding the tide to come in; but the former group are more
clear-headed. They measure the health of
theology by its fertility in producing new options alternative to old ones, and
value Anglican doctrinal tolerance (which they equate with comprehensiveness)
because it removes all restraints on innovation.
Anglicans with a juster idea of what is given
in Christianity see the matter rather differently. They judge of the health of theology by such
criteria as fidelity to Scripture and in particular to the truths of
incarnation and mediation, and they find the endless shifts of the liberal
kaleidoscope reminding them Irresistibly of the folk whom the New Testament
describes as always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth
(2 Tim. 3:7). Only by an agnostic
judgment of charity can they treat exponents of non-incarnational Christianity
as Christians, and they see all such doctrine as weakening the church and
threatening men’s spiritual welfare.
Though thankful that no particular liberalism can hope to last, their
hearts still cry, ‘Lord, how long?’
From the foregoing survey we can now see precisely
what Anglican comprehensiveness amounts to in the year of grace 1981. We perceive that, though all agree that
catholicity requires as wide a comprehensiveness as the Christian revelation
will allow, there is no common mind on how the current breadth of doctrinal
toleration should be regarded.
Some
still define Anglicanism in terms of the fundamentals set forth in the creeds
and Articles, and challenge the propriety of clergy who sit loose to these
ministering in the Church of England.
Thus, for example, in 1977 the
If, then, a time comes when
a clergyman can no longer conscientiously teach something central to his
church’s doctrine (such as the personal deity of Jesus) which he has solemnly
undertaken to teach, we urge that the only honourable course open to him is to
resign any post he occupies as an accredited teacher of his church ... in the
last resort (i) if a central Christian doctrine is at stake, (ii) if the
clergyman concerned is not just questioning it but denying it, (iii) if he is
not just passing through a temporary period of uncertainty but has reached a
settled conviction, and (iv) if he refuses to resign, then we believe the
bishop (or other leader) should seriously consider withdrawing his licence or
permission to teach in the church.[29]
Others
continue to believe (though, it seems, myopically) that all Anglicans are
‘really’ united, whatever their views, by virtue of their common loyalty to the
Anglican communion as a going concern, and that a transcendent synthesis of
what now appear as contradictory theologies either exists already or will exist
some day. So they decline to be troubled
by any outbursts of apparent heterodoxy, or to be moved by others’ distress at
them, judging that the heretics’ continuing loyalty to the institution suffices
to excuse any unfortunate things they say.
There is no official attitude to public heterodoxy among Anglicans, but
this is the common attitude of officials in the Church’s administrative
hierarchy.
Finally,
a strident minority, whose noise-to-numbers ratio in the Church of England
reminds one of the 3, 000-strong British Humanist Association in Britain’s
domestic affairs, insists that any ascription to Jesus and his church of any
kind of ultimate significance should be accepted as a legitimate Christian
option, since the focusing of this significance is what Christian theology with
its inescapable conceptual relativism is really all about.
Advocates
of the three positions understand Scripture and practise theology in such
different ways that genuine communication between them is next to
impossible. They are to each other very
different animals, and from this standpoint comparing the Church of England
which contains them to Noah’s ark is not facetious but apt.
I
do not suppose I am the only one for whom Anglicanism still means identifying
with official doctrinal standards (creeds and Articles, historically
understood), and appreciating the Anglican heritage – the 1662 Prayer Book,
beside which modern alternatives seem so feeble and wet; the ethos of a
biblically reformed and informed traditionalism; the concern for catholicity
which makes Anglicans eager to embrace everything of value in other churches’
traditions, and the hatred of sectarianism which makes them hostile to narrow
one-sidedness; the practical, pastoral orientation of theological enquiry; the
long-suffering tolerance which waits for things to be thoroughly discussed,
lest consciences be wounded or truth squandered; and so forth. Nor do I suppose I am the only one whose
active Anglicanism expresses, not complacency at what the Church is today, but
hope of what it may be tomorrow, when (please God) it reapprehends its heritage
and is renewed in so doing. How should
Anglicans of my sort, for whom so often it is only the Anglican ideal that
makes actual Anglicanism bearable, view the present state of doctrine in the
Church of England? The next chapter will
try to answer that question.
3. Anglican Comprehensiveness – The Hard-Made Decision
‘THE hard-made decision’ is Beethoven’s
phrase; he wrote it in capitals (DER SCHWER GEFASSTE ENTSCHLUSS) above the last
movement of his last quartet (Op. 135, in F).
With it he wrote a question-and-answer motto over the two three-note
phrases which start its main theme: ‘Must it be? It must be!’ (Muss es sein? Es muss sein!)
It was his last word on the topic about which for a quarter of a century
he had been sending the world musical messages, the Eroica symphony being the
first. That topic was the creative and
even joyous acceptance of circumstances so far from ideal that you feel them
threatening to crush you. Beethoven, the first great composer to see music as
personal communication, spent his best years focusing in some thirty
transcendent masterpieces aspects of that spirit which, when ‘fate knocks at
the door’, refuses to be crushed, but regains strength and fights back to
triumph - not over the pressure, but under it.
It was fitting that eight months after finishing the quartet, and
following two days of unconsciousness, Beethoven should be momentarily roused
by an enormous thunderclap and die open-eyed, his clenched fist raised ‘with a
very serious, threatening expression’.
The quartet, however, is peaceful.
The motto, says Sullivan, ‘is a summary of the great Beethoven problem
of destiny and submission. But Beethoven … treats the old question here with
the lightness, even the humour, of one to whom the issue is settled and
familiar … the portentous question meets with a jovial, almost exultant answer,
and the ending is one of perfect confidence.’[30] Living daily with acute frustrations -
deafness, his ears ‘whistling and buzzing constantly’; loneliness; unsteady
health; poverty; the dirty, depressing muddle of his bachelor home; and a
failed relationship with his nephew, the one person on whom he lavished love
and from whom he sought love in return - Beethoven was voicing contentment, not
indeed with pain and grief as such, but with the creativity which his pain and
grief had enhanced. ‘Must it be? It must be!’
As if to say: I would not have shaped my task as circumstances have now
shaped it, but I accept it, and find life to be satisfying and worth-while as I
rise to it. On which the proper comment
is the dictum of Ecclesiastes: ‘There is nothing better for a man than that he
should eat and drink, and find enjoyment In his toil’ (2:24, cf. 3:22). How true that is.
In this chapter I shall suggest that fruitfulness
for oneself and others may come from a comparable ‘hard-made decision’ to
commit oneself to Anglicanism despite its doctrinal disorders. I shall not, however, suggest that this is in
any way a heroic gesture. The Beethoven
of Op. 135 would have laughed at the idea that his acceptance of the inevitable
was heroic; maybe he thought so in his Eroica days,[31]
but at the age of 56 he took himself less seriously. This was how it had to be, and that was
that. Mature Christians who toil and
endure for God do not think themselves heroes either; for them too it is all in
the day’s work, as God helps them to do what has to be done next. It was so with Paul. Once, for pastoral reasons, he felt obliged,
against his preference, to catalogue the hair-shirt conditions of his life as
if he was boasting about them. ‘ … Far more imprisonments, with countless
beatings … once I was stoned. Three
times I have been shipwrecked … in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger
from my own people, danger from the Gentiles … danger from false brethren ...
And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety
for all the churches ... Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?’ (2 Cor.
11:23-29). But he felt awkward saying
all this, lest he seem to be parading himself as a hero; as he soon found
opportunity to repeat (for he had said it at length already in the earlier part
of the letter), he was no more than a man who in conscious weakness knew the
strengthening power of his Lord (12:5-10; cf. 11:30, chaps. 1-5~). And all who, with Paul, labour up to the
limit for Christian conversion and nurture, and against unbelief, misbelief and
sin in the church, know themselves to be in the same boat. They do what they have to do, in the strength
of the Lord who moved them to attempt it, and give him the glory for whatever
goes right.
First let it be stressed, now as I start my
argument, that Anglicans today are so by choice. This is because the visible church is now
split into overlapping denominations; you opt for the one you prefer. There was no such choice in apostolic or
patristic days, for then each local congregation was seen as an outcrop and
microcosm of the one world church, and being one with your own local group was
part of the definition of being a Christian.
Nor was there any such choice in the Middle Ages, when one communion
(based on either
In
I
maintain that a man with his eyes open to the full range of Anglican doctrinal
pluralism may yet responsibly choose to be an Anglican, even an Anglican
minister, though it may be a hard-made decision bringing misery as well as
fulfilment. I do not maintain (I had
better say this outright) that choosing to be an Anglican is a virtue, or that
choosing not to be one or not to stay one is a vice. Choice, we saw, is necessary, and anyone may
conclude that, rather than be Anglican, Methodist, Baptist Union or United
Reformed (all which bodies are doctrinally mixed), he should join one of the
smaller groups (Brethren, Pentecostals, Fellowship of Independent Evangelical
Churches, Reformed Baptists, Free Church of Scotland, etc.) which debar from
the ranks of their teachers anyone holding ‘critical’ views of Scripture or
rejecting major evangelical tenets. To
be sure, some think these smaller bodies purchase doctrinal purity at the price
of theological stagnation, and are cultural backwaters out of touch with
society around, just as some think Anglican allegiance is an unholy
identification with cultural privilege, ecclesiastical worldliness and
theological indifferentism. But these matters
are arguable both ways, and neither estimate need be accepted. More important is respect for the other man’s
deliberate decision, whether or not it coincides with your own.
3.2. Ongoing Doctrinal Conflict
He who chooses Anglicanism finds himself, as
we have seen, in a large, loose, complex church structure with a conservative
tone but a seemingly endless willingness to tolerate cultured heretics. It has an official doctrinal commitment to
the sufficiency of ‘God’s Word written’ (Articles VI, XX), and a liturgical
custom of reading Scripture in large quantities, larger perhaps than any other
mainline church can match. But it is
currently split on what the Bible means, so that the range of beliefs found among
its teachers is startlingly, not to say scandalously, wide, and recognizable
evangelical faith, whether protestant, anglo-catholic or charismatic in
colouring, is a minority phenomenon. Yet
God’s church, of which the Church of England is professedly part, is charged to
guard the deposit of apostolic teaching, to adhere unwaveringly to the New
Testament gospel (cf. Gal. 1:6-9; 2 Tim. 1:12 f., 2:2), and so to prove itself
‘the pillar and bulwark of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15). How then do evangelicals who, whether for
reasons already given or for others, choose Anglicanism view the doctrinal
free-for-all which Anglican comprehensiveness has become? Often they bemoan it, as I have been doing
myself; what, then, makes it possible for them to accept it? Have they ceased to regard faithful stewardship
of God’s revealed truth as the church’s calling, and their own too? Or are they compromising their principles by
ducking the issue? Or what? How can they have a good conscience, living
cheek-by-jowl with so much heterodox teaching?
These are proper and pressing questions; no Anglican evangelical can be
excused from facing them, nor commended if he tries or manages to get along
without an answer to them.
Here
in a nutshell is my answer, for what it is worth. I submit that evangelicals were right to approve
the older type of comprehensiveness, based on common acceptance of the
fundamentals of the creed, but that they cannot and, for a fact, do not commend
or condone what that historic comprehensiveness has now turned into. They accept it reluctantly and with sorrow,
as in a fallen world and an imperfectly sanctified church they accept much else
reluctantly and with sorrow. They accept
it not as one of Anglicanism’s special goodies but as the unavoidable result of
one of Anglicanism’s other qualities, namely its desire to rule out no
questions and clamp down on no discussions, but to give every viewpoint which
claims, however freakishly, to be in line with Scripture and reason,
opportunity to make its claim good, if it can.
Approving this quality as a mark of both human and Christian maturity,
they are prepared to show conscientious goodwill to a good deal of experimental
theology which would, perhaps, be looked at askance in doctrinally unmixed
churches. But in accepting Anglicanism’s
present doctrinal plurality in this way their conscience is good and their
commitment to doctrinal purity as an ideal remains uncompromised, for:
(1) They see that in the providence of God
much insight, stimulus and help in understanding spins off from work done by
good scholars whose claim to be interpreting Christianity is marred by some
seemingly heterodox opinions. From this
they conclude that the church gains more from continuing to accept these men on
the basis of their own good intentions, while looking to its orthodox scholars
to correct any oddities, than it could do by officially outlawing them and
declining to pay serious attention to their work. The formalist idea of orthodoxy as a matter
merely of keeping yesterday’s dogmatic formulae intact seems inadequate to
evangelicals, vigorously as they often defend these formulae; the orthodoxy
that evangelicals seek is one which, while wholly faithful to the substance of
the biblical message, will be fully contemporary in orientation and expression,
and they know that to this end experiments in re-statement must be
allowed. They know too that in matters
exegetical and theological the profoundest perception does not always belong to
those who aim to be ‘sound’ and ‘safe’, and they are sensitive to the narrowing
effect which restricting oneself to what is ‘sound’ and ‘safe’ can have on the
mind. So, because of the great potential
benefit of what the theological explorers do, Anglican evangelicals think it
right to be patient with them, despite what appear to be dropped bricks; you do
not shoot explorers, any more than pianists, when they are doing their
best. Evangelicals perceive that much of
the exploring is done on the basis of the academic freedom which all scholars
outside Communist countries claim - that is, freedom to follow the argument
wherever it seems to lead and to publish novel notions, hypothetically held, to
see how the scholarly world reacts to them.
Also, evangelicals perceive that if in the course of these explorations
real fundamental heresy is put out, wittingly or unwittingly, more benefit
comes to the church from public analysis and refutation (as when Paul trounced
the Galatian and Colossian heresies, and Augustine the Pelagian heresy, and
John Owen the Socinian heresy) than from any use of the big stick on the
offending author. The words quoted above
from the C. E. E. C. document showed that they do not rule out discreet use of
the big stick as a last resort on heretical clergy guilty of what used to be
called contumacy (and for this there is biblical precedent: see 1 Tim. 1:20; 2
Jn. 9-11). But evangelicals think that, as the same document goes on to say:
‘The most effective way to restrain and correct error Is not by a resort to
repressive measures but by a convincing commendation of the truth, with a
corollary exposure of error in all its arbitrariness and incoherence.’[32]
In
a mature Christian community such as the Church of England seeks to be, one
which declines any Idea of infallible Popes, bishops or preachers but gives the
Bible to the laity so that the whole community together may judge on matters of
faith, demonstration through debate naturally and necessarily becomes the basic
form of discipline in Christian doctrine.
The risks of the procedure (unending pluralism, constant muddle, public
vacillation and embarrassment) are high; however, its benefits (ripe
convictions emerging from a long hard look at alternatives) make the risks
worth taking.
(2) Evangelicals
see it as part of their own task in the Church of England to serve present and future
Anglicans (not to say members of the doctrinally-unmixed bodies mentioned
earlier) by themselves tackling off-key views in debate and showing them
inadequate. While welcoming what
insights they find in the work of the heterodox, they approach the excrescences
of current Anglican over-comprehensiveness from the standpoint of the original
comprehensiveness to which they adhere as their ideal, and what seems to cut at
fundamentals they attack. They do not
passively accept all the disorder they find.
Nor do they accept that they are guilty by association of the errors
they oppose (a nonsense notion, which has been given an unhappy airing during
the past two decades); nor do they accept that they are settling for a
situation in which no doctrinal discipline operates. They urge, rather, that discipline (which
means training - Latin, disciplina)
is in Scripture a primarily pastoral concept, and that the kind of
pastorally-oriented controversy in which they engage is the basic form of
discipline in the doctrinal realm.
Ecumenical
idealists on the one hand and evangelical separatists on the other think it
scandalous that the visible church should be racked with conflicts about
belief, and labour for a state of affairs in which their neck of the woods, at
any rate, shall be free from it.
Conflict over doctrine, however, and fundamental doctrine at that (the
person, work, place and sufficiency of Jesus Christ our Saviour), kept
occurring in the apostolic church, as witness the New Testament letters, and we
find Paul writing to the Corinthians: ‘No doubt there have to be differences
among you to show which of you have God’s approval’ (1 Cor. 11:19, MV). Implicit in his words seems to be the
far-reaching principle that God will regularly allow divisions of one sort or
another to enter the churches, as they had entered the Corinthian community, so
that the different consequences for spiritual enrichment or leanness of
different beliefs and ways of behaving may become plain. Certainly, evangelicals in the Church of
England do not suppose that their conflict with well-meant misbelief will be
over until the Lord comes. But they are
not discouraged. They see this task as
part of the package deal which they accepted when they chose Anglicanism, and
they know that for them this choice was the ‘best buy’. A hard-made decision? Maybe; but not one to regret, for all the
burdens it brings.
It
is important not to miss the force of this reasoning by falling victim to the
sectarian idea, sometimes met, that evnngelicalism, being Christianity at its
purest, ought to practice self-sufficiency in theology, taking nothing from the
mixed bag of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic and liberal Protestant
thought on the grounds that nothing in that bag can help evangelicals in the
least. Were this idea sound, the case
for patience with the intermittently heterodox would be less strong; but the
idea is not sound. I for one regard the
evangelicalism outlined in the opening paragraphs of this essay as the purest
Christianity that the world has seen since apostolic times, and in that sense I
affirm Christianity to be evangelicalism and vice versa. But it does not follow that adherents of
other mutations of Christianity, mutations which seem less close overall to the
spirit, belief and thrust of the New Testament, have nothing to teach me on
this or that particular point - nothing, that is, which I could not have
learned from some evangelical source.
Nor does it follow that I serve God best by assuming there are no new
truths, or new applications of truth, that wait to break forth from his holy
Word, so that as a teacher in the church I need only repeat traditional
evangelical positions and I shall have done my job. The truth is rather this: Theology is an ongoing corporate enterprise
which in principle involves the whole church.
It is an enterprise through which everyone’s under- standing of what God
has revealed is again and again enlarged.
It proceeds by dialogue with past and present attempts to spell out that
revelation, dialogue through which Scripture actually evaluates the various
attempts made to expound it. We all need
to examine and re-examine by Scripture whether our own traditions, as well as
those of others, are true and adequate (two questions, not just one); and the
late B. B. Warfield, as doughty a Reformed traditionalist as the world has
seen, was right when he said in conversation that the theologian must be like
the busy bee, always moving around gathering raw material for honey from all
sorts of flowers. So it is best, in
these days when identifying the main stream of Christian belief is not a
problem (it was different in New Testament times), not to treat those who seem
heretical on one key point in a way that keeps the church from benefiting by
their insight on other points. Hence the
preferable course is exposition and debate.
I have tried in this essay to formulate an
overall approach to the over-comprehensiveness which for many is the saddest
aspect of the present day Church of England.
Not all the many, incidentally, are evangelicals; there can be few
Anglican catholics who do not feel equal misery at the freedom to sit loose to
fundamentals which some theologians claim in the name of contemporary
reinterpretation of the faith. But we
must not get this out of proportion. The
handful of distinguished radicals who are at present catching the public eye
are as nothing compared to the solid body of Anglicans, lay and clerical, for
whom Scripture remains God’s message to us, who identify the Christ of faith
with the Jesus of history and the Jesus of history with the Jesus of the
gospels, and who still value the creeds as declaring the key facts on which
faith rests. Far more exposition of the
evangelical faith by Anglicans goes into print than of radical alternatives,
and far more renewal of spiritual life is experienced where Christ is
proclaimed from the Bible in the old way than where radical notions have come. (Radicals talk much of renewal, but the
pastoral barrenness of their doctrine is a byword). By God’s mercy the Church of England, though
disorderly, is far from dead, and there is no solid reason to suppose that
those Anglicans who contend for the historic gospel are fighting a losing
battle.
We
looked earlier at J. C. Ryle, the evangelical champion whose episcopate began
in 1880, just over a century ago. Folk
sometimes guess what he might say could be inspect the Church of England now,
and I shall add my guess to theirs. He
would note how the Church has shrunk and lost influence; he would tell us that
it looks more like a doctrinal Noah’s ark than ever. But he would also thankfully record that his
often expressed fear that the Church would split and sink had proved unfounded;
that there was in fact more unity on essentials than in his day, and more
concern for evangelism, and more respect for each other among the parties, that
there was less Romanizing and less quarrelsomeness than he knew, and more
esprit de corps. Our radicalism might
well make him blink, but he would see it, despite the self-confidence of its
exponents, as what it is - an aggregate of unstable minority positions, for
none of which can long life be expected.
Despite its presence he would, I think, take heart, and tell all
evangelicals to do the same.
But
the argument I have been using to justify the hard-made decision of Anglican
allegiance is one of principle - namely, that the way in which Anglican
tolerance obliges you to cope with Anglican doctrinal disorder is, though
taxing, the best way both for you and for the Church as a whole; and this
argument does not draw any of its force from rosy hopes for the future. On the doctrinal front I do not in fact
entertain rosy hopes. Reduced
Christianities, like the poor, will no doubt always be with us, and it is not
my thought that a good heave now would rid us of them for all time. I simply urge that the way of dealing with
them which has been described will continue to be the right and proper way,
however angry or upset their existence makes you feel, and whether the Church
seems for the moment to be gaining doctrinal purity or losing it. The motto of
|
01 |
The
Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem Jim
Packer |
|
02 |
The
ASB Rite A Communion: A Way Forward Roger
Beckwith |
|
03 |
The
Doctrine of Justification in the Church of England -
Robin Leaver |
|
04 |
Justification
Today: The Roman Catholic and Anglican Debate - R. G. England |
|
05/06 |
Homosexuals
in the Christian Fellowship David Atkinson |
|
07 |
Nationhood:
A Christian Perspective O. R. Johnston |
|
08 |
Evangelical
Anglican Identity: Problems and Prospects - Tom Wright |
|
09 |
Confessing
the Faith in the Church of England Today - Roger Beckwith |
|
10 |
A
Kind of Noah’s |
|
11 |
Sickness
and Healing in the Church Donald Allister |
|
12 |
|
|
13 |
Music
as Preaching: Bach, Passions and Music in Worship - Robin Leaver |
|
14 |
Jesus
Through Other Eyes: Christology in a Multi-Faith Context - Christopher Lamb |
|
15 |
Church
and State Under God -
James Atkinson |
|
16 |
Language
and Liturgy Gerald
Bray, Steve Wilcockson, Robin Leaver |
|
17 |
Christianity
and Judaism: New Understanding, New Relationship - James Atkinson |
|
18 |
Sacraments
and Ministry in Ecumenical Perspective - Gerald Bray |
|
19 |
The
Functions of a |
|
20/21 |
The
Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today - Jim Packer, Roger Beckwith |
|
22 |
How
We Got Our Prayer Book -
T. W. Drury, Roger Beckwith |
|
23/24 |
Creation
or Evolution: a False Antithesis? Mike Poole,
Gordon Wenham |
|
25 |
Christianity
and the Craft - Gerard
Moate |
|
26 |
ARCIC
II and Justification - Alister
McGrath |
|
27 |
The
Challenge of the Housechurches Tony Higton,
Gilbert Kirby |
|
28 |
Communion
for Children? The Current Debate A. A. Langdon |
|
29/30 |
Theological
Politics Nigel Biggar |
|
31 |
Eucharistic
Consecration in the First Four Centuries and its Implications for Liturgical
Reform - Nigel Scotland |
|
32 |
A
Christian Theological Language - Gerald Bray |
|
33 |
|
|
34 |
Stewards
of Creation: Environmentalism in the Light of Biblical Teaching - |
|
35/36 |
|
|
37 |
Future
Patterns of Episcopacy: Reflections in Retirement - Stuart Blanch |
|
38 |
Christian
Character: Jeremy Taylor and Christian Ethics Today - David Scott |
|
39 |
Islam:
Towards a Christian Assessment Hugh Goddard |
|
40 |
Liberal
Catholicism: Charles Gore and the Question of Authority - G. F. Grimes |
|
41/42 |
The
Christian Message in a Multi-Faith Society Colin Chapman |
|
43 |
The
Way of Holiness 1: Principles - D. A. Ousley |
|
44/45 |
The
Lambeth Articles - V. C. Miller |
|
46 |
The
Way of Holiness 2: Issues
- D. A. Ousley |
|
47 |
Building
Multi-Racial Churches - John Root |
|
48 |
Episcopal
Oversight: A Case for Reform David Holloway |
|
49 |
Euthanasia:
A Christian Evaluation Henk Jochemsen |
|
50/51 |
The
Rough Places Plain: AEA 1995 |
|
52 |
A
Critique of Spirituality
- John Pearce |
|
53/54 |
The
|
|
55 |
The
Theology of Rowan Williams |
|
56/57 |
Reforming
Forwards? The Process of Reception and the Consecration of Woman as Bishops
Peter Toon |
|
58 |
The
Oath of Canonical Obedience
- Gerald Bray |
|
59 |
The
Parish System: The Same Yesterday, Today And For Ever?
- Mark Burkill |
|
60 |
‘I
Absolve You’: Private Confession and the Church of England - Andrew Atherstone |
|
61 |
The
Water and the Wine: A Contribution to the Debate on Children and Holy
Communion Roger Beckwith, Andrew Daunton-Fear |
|
62 |
Must
God Punish Sin? - |
|
63 |
Too
Big For Words?: The Transcendence of God and Finite Human Speech –Mark D. Thompson |
|
64 |
A
Step Too Far: An Evangelical Critique of Christian Mysticism – Marian Raikes |
|
65 |
The
New Testament & Slavery: Approaches & Implicaitons – Mark Meynall |
|
66 |
The
Tragedy of 1662: The Ejection & Persecution of Puritans from the
Restoration to the Revolution – Lee Gatiss |
[1] The
Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem: An Analysis,
[2] op. cit., pp. 20 ff. In the
first chapter of Knots Untied (1877) J.
C. Ryle defined evangelical religion in terms of the supremacy of Scripture,
the sinfulness of man, the substitutionary atonement of Christ and the
sanctifying work of the Spirit.
[3] See Hooker’s Learned Discourse of Justification, Works,
[4] See, for
justification of these statements, J. A. T. Robinson, Honest to God, London: SCM, 1963; The Human Face of God London: SCM, 1973; Don Cupitt in The Myth of God Incarnate, London: SCM,
1977, pp. 133 ff.; M. F. Wiles, The
Remaking of Christian Doctrjne, London: SCM, 1974; G. W. H. Lampe, God as Spirit, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977, and essay in A. Vidler, (ed.) Soundings
Cambridge: CUP, 1962, pp. 173 ff.; Dennis Nineham
in The Myth of God Incarnate, pp. 186
ff.
[5] On Simeon, see Memoirs, ed. W. Carus, 3rd ed.,
[6]
[7] Toon and Smout, op. cit., p. 71.
[8] For example, Expository Thoughts on the four gospels; Christian Leaders of the 18th Century; The Upper Room; Holiness;
Practical Religion; Old Paths; etc.
[9] Holiness, 1952 repr.,
[10] Cf. R. T. Beckwith, G. E.
Duffield, J. I. Packer, Across the Divide,
[11] Carus, op. cit. p. 506. Sinleon called himself a
‘moderate Calvinist’, p. 294.
[12] Principles for Churchmen,
[13] op. cit., p. 41.
[14] Vidler, Essays in Liberality,
[15] On Maurice, see A. M. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern
Theology,
[16] Maurice, The
[17] Stephen W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism,
[18] E. Amand de
Mendieta, ‘From Anglican Symbiosis to Anglican Synthesis’ in The Anglican Synthesis, ed. W. R. F.
Browning, Derby: Peter Smith, 1964, p.
144.
[19] op. cit., pp. 147, 153. The source of
the ‘dialectical church’ idea is acknowledged to be H. A. Hodges in Anglicanism and Orthodoxy: a study in
Dialectical Churchmanship,
[20] The Lambeth Conference 1948,
[21] For evidence of
this, compare C. O. Buchanan, E. L. Mascall, J. I. Packer, Bishop of Willesden
(G. D. Leonard), Growing into Union,
[22] This point is
gently but firmly made by E. L. Mascall in Theology
and the Gospel of Christ,
[23] Sykes, op. cit., p. 23.
[24] op. cit., p. 31.
[25] op. cit., pp. 32f.
[26] op. cit., p. 33.
[27] op. cit., p. 30. The report was entitled Doctrine in the Church of England, The Report of the Commission on Christian
Doctrine appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922,
London: SPCK, 1938.
[28] Christian Believing,
[29] Truth, Error and Discipline in the Church;
issued by the
[30] J. W. N. Sullivan, Beethoven, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949,
p. 155.
[31] Cf. Sullivan, op. cit., pp. 60-77, where the
Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 is printed in full.
[32] Truth, Error and Discipline in the Church,
p. 14. The earlier quotation is in Section 2.5 above.