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,’