Evangelical and Anglican?

If Sydney Anglicans identify somewhat with the Puritans, especially of the Elizabethan era, it is also the case that they identify very strongly with the ‘Evangelical’ movement of the eighteenth century. The first chaplains of the colony were evangelicals and sponsored by the circle of Charles Simeon, one of the leading evangelicals of the Church of England. Like the Puritan movement, this was a movement that began within but subsequently exceeded the bounds of the Church of England. The established church proved too limiting for many and also sought to persecute and expel the proponents of evangelicalism. And yet, there is no doubt that evangelicalism has played and continues to play a major part in the history and ethos of Anglicanism. As Turnbull says, ‘…Anglican Evangelicalism is a manifestation of the Christian faith which gives fullness of expression to the core foundational beliefs of both Anglican and Evangelical Christian traditions’.

Most commonly, the Evangelical movement is thought to have begun in the eighteenth century with the conversion of John Wesley (1703-1791) in 1738. Labelled ‘enthusiasts’ by their opponents in the Church of England, the evangelicals were treated with a great deal of hostility and found difficulty in obtaining livings. This ‘enthusiasm’, though it seemed crass to some of their co-religionists, was representative of an extraordinary reawakening of ardent faith. It was also a judgement that the assumption that mere membership in the Church of England was sufficient for Christian identity was deeply flawed. It was after all a direct reaction against the dryness, formalism and rationalism that characterised much of early eighteenth century established Christianity. A Christianity without a heart for God was clearly deficient. The evangelical movement lead to missionary zeal and social reform on a grand scale; evangelicals formed societies and co-operated trans-denominationally. They wrote hymns that are still sung today. John Wesley and George Whitfield (1714-1770) become famous as open-air preachers. Like the Puritans, it is has to be said that the evangelicals oftentimes inhabited the fringes of the institutional church. They seemed less interested in ecclesiastical preferment and more concerned with missionary work. They were often directly persecuted by the authorities.
The term ‘evangelical’ itself is contested territory, both as a historical description and as a identifier for contemporary Christians. My purpose here is not to become entangled in this debate, but simply to show with broad brush strokes that evangelicalism and Anglicanism overlap considerably. Anglicanism is a great denominational home for evangelicalism, but it is not the only one. Likewise, evangelicalism has made and continues to make a considerable contribution to Anglicanism. The British historian David Bebbington’s description of evangelicalism is the best known and most widely used and will be sufficient to frame our discussion here. Bebbington speaks of ‘a quadrilateral of priorities’ – namely, conversionism, activism, Biblicism and crucicentricism.

Evangelicals are conversionist in that they proclaim the necessity of personal transformation in response to the gospel of grace. They preach to the heart, appealing for repentance of sin and turning to God in dependence. Their gospel is highly individualist in this sense – it is not sufficient for true Christian faith merely to be in possession of membership in a church grouping. Evangelicals are also, as Bebbington speaks of them, activist. They expected the evangelical conversion to result in a transformation of life. This meant that the believer was expected to be busy in the process of moral renewal and in seeking the conversion and moral renewal of others. The activism characteristic of evangelicals resulted in evangelistic mission but also in programmes for social welfare on a large scale. Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury become bywords for the activist streak within evangelicalism.
Evangelicals have always been people of the Bible. Like their Reformation forebears, they have taken Scripture as the supreme authority for Christian life and for doctrine. The centrality of preaching for evangelicals is evidence of what this means in practice. As well as being Biblicist, the evangelical is also crucicentric – which means that central place is given to the atoning work of Christ on the cross. Christ is an exemplary figure and a moral teacher, but he is first and foremost the saviour who died for sin.

In bringing Anglicanism and evangelicalism together, Anglican Evangelicals have mostly but not exclusively subscribed to a form of moderate Calvinism. This description would apply to the faith of two of the greatest of evangelical Anglicans, Charles Simeon (1759-1836) and Bishop J.C. Ryle (1816-1900). They appealed for their identity within Anglicanism to the Protestant and Reformed nature of the Anglican settlements of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. However, they did not insist on the rigorous application of Reformed doctrine, especially over the extent of the atonement. Just as Article 17 is quite a restrained account of predestination, so Anglican Evangelicals have certainly asserted but not overemphasised this teaching. Most often co-operation in evangelism and fellowship with non-Calvinist evangelicals overrode concerns about absolute purity of doctrine. Even if the effects of the atonement were to be applied only to the elect, the preaching of the gospel was to be to all.

This ethos is perhaps where tension with the institutional framework of Anglicanism most often surfaces. More often than not, evangelicals have felt themselves excluded from the positions of power within the Anglican churches of the West. Their priority has always been the preaching of the gospel and not the maintenance of the institutional church. Their ecclesiology – and they most certainly do have an ecclesiology – does not tend to recognise the bureaucratic side of the denomination as ‘church’. If the institution inhibits the preaching of the gospel, then there is no question where compromise has to be made. For other Anglicans with a more hierarchical view this seems like schismatic behaviour.

As the Oxford movement grew in influence in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the evangelicals insisted on the Protestantism of the Church of England, often to the point of legal controversy. The most celebrated – or notorious, depending on your point of view - of these incidents was the ‘Gorham case’ of 1846-7. Evangelical clergyman Charles Gorham clashed with his Tractarian bishop Henry Phillpotts over the critical issue of infant baptism. Gorham, taking the evangelical position, asserted that baptism did not necessarily effect regeneration. After all, evangelicals believed in repentance and conversion. Phillpotts pointed to the wording of the Book of Common Prayer which seems to refer to the child as regenerate; and wanted to refuse him a post in his diocese as a man of unsound doctrine. The precedent set by the case could have made the position of every evangelical clergyman in England uncertain to say the least. The case made its way as far as the non-ecclesiastical Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which finally found for Gorham. What this meant was that the place of evangelicals within the Church of England was secured. Their interpretation of the formularies was certainly permitted, if not entirely endorsed.

In Sydney there is an entire diocese in a major city which is run by evangelicals. This breaks with the usual experience of evangelicals as having almost no institutional leverage and in having to live within diocesan structures which are liberal-Catholic in flavour. The evangelical behaviours which have irritated non-evangelical Anglicans historically are magnified in the case of Sydney. The unusual dominance of evangelicals in the diocesan structure of Sydney diocese means that Sydney does look strange to Anglicans who are accustomed to liberal-Catholic hegemony – and ecclesiology - elsewhere. Liberal-Catholics expect to be in charge of things. But they would be mistaken in calling evangelicalism ‘unAnglican’, for the moderate Calvinist evangelical outlook of Sydney with its missionary activism and its Biblicism and with its emphasis on the atoning blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sins is utterly consistent with the evangelical Anglican tradition that has had an unbroken presence in the Church of England for nearly three centuries. The English evangelical Anglican Alister McGrath has written:

My concern is simply to insist that evangelicalism is, historically and theologically, a legitimate and respectable option within Anglicanism. At no point is evangelicalism inconsistent with any of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the only document apart from Scripture, the creeds and the Prayer Book, regarded as authoritative for Anglicans.

It has not only been my intention to show here that Sydney’s evangelical Anglicans have a legitimate place within Anglicanism. History shows that the evangelicalism held so dear by Sydney’s Anglicans arose from and was to a great extent nurtured by Anglicanism. The Anglican operating system was not always strictly compatible with the evangelical software, but at many points it actually helped -and helps - it to run better.

Weaknesses of Anglicanism?

I think one of the great things about the list that Justin generated of the strengths of Anglicanism is that it shows that Anglicanism has the possibility of becoming aware of its own weaknesses. Inbuilt in Anglicanism is the possibility of its own ongoing reformation. It is not beholden in an unrepentant way to its own traditions. This is more difficult for Roman Catholics and for non-conformists, I think, whose identity is more to do with a specific ecclesiology. Yes, that's one of the funny things about Anglicanism: it is (or ought to be) quite pragmatic about ecclesiological matters, in fact (read Richard Hooker to see this) - and what a relief it is too! You know, that is partly why Anglican Evangelicals are even 'lower' church than many Baptists and Presbyterians. Because, if you are a Scriptural Christian, then you can't possibly hold to Anglican church order as the only possibility!

There are some weaknesses worth exploring, however. I think Anglicanism's attachment to an Impirical political vision has yet to be repented of. There is a kind of superiority complex that Anglicans have which is inherited from the English superiority complex. We barely notice it until non-conformists point it out! We are just used to be the church of establishment. Even in Australia, where we are NOT the church of establishment, we act as if we are.

Let's be fair: the British Empire was one of the more benign empires of world history. And Anglican Christianity often ameliorated the rapine capitalism that drove the unprecedented conquest of territory. If you believe in Providence, as I do, then God used even British greed to spreed the gospel to the nations. And the Anglican Communion is perhaps the last vestige of that Empire, apart from the Commonwealth Games. Perhaps you could add to that the dominance of the English language globally, I guess.

Anglicanism, as the church of respectabilty and establishment, has a tendency to elitism and intellectual snobbery. It also licences aestheticism and nominalism. The political liberalism of the contemporary Church of England is not different in style to its former conservatism: it is still very much an establishment politics, a politics of respectability.

Because of the its links to government, too, it has aped the bureacratic structure of liberal government, and has imported its managerialism.

A New Evangelical Anglican Vision?

Just this past term I have had the great pleasure of co-teaching – with Professor Ashley Null, the renowned Cranmer scholar - a MA unit offered here at Moore College entitled ‘Anglican Identity’. In it we made careful study of the development of the English reformation and the works of leading figures like Fisher, Cranmer and Hooker.

A highlight was reading the moving testimony of Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII, to her conversion to the gospel of justification by faith.

I was curious, however, as to why so few Sydney clergy thought this was a subject that might interest them, or that the study of the founding documents of our denomination might be well worth their while.

This was confirmed by casual conversations with Moore students. I asked them ‘how do you understand your identity as an Anglican?’ – and was met with baffled looks and shrugs. The denomination is a ‘good boat to fish from’, mostly, but there is (it seems to me) no great passion for Anglicanism itself and no great commitment to study its formularies and its history.

Perhaps it is because the international controversies have become wearisome and even a source of embarrassment. Perhaps it is because the denomination changes at glacial speed – and we in our time are addicted to change, even for its own sake. Perhaps we are also in the grip of the ‘lone ranger’ vision of the brave church planter, unencumbered by denominational vagaries.

But I was surprised that even the GAFCON movement, with its bold and remarkable vision for an global Anglican movement, has not caught the local imagination. It has been perceived as a political rather than a spiritual movement - which is certainly not the way it was perceived by those who were present in Jerusalem.

More than ever, we need to renew our vision of what it means to be an evangelical Anglican. My conviction is that not only is being evangelical the most authentic way of being Anglican – we’ve been saying that for years - but also that being Anglican is a great way of being evangelical.

How come?
Firstly, because the Anglican formularies (the 39 Articles, the Prayer-Book and the Homilies) subject themselves at every turn to the authority of scripture. They offer themselves to be tested against a scriptural norm.

Second, because Anglicanism has a great sense of what is of primary and what is of secondary importance. Other Protestant denominations have a tendency to make secondary issues – like the manner of baptism or church discipline or church government – primary. And they endlessly divide because of it. The Anglican formularies commit us to important things – and allow us freedom under Scripture on the secondaries. The great evangelical bishop JC Ryle called this a 'studied moderation about things non-essential to salvation'. What a blessing!

Third, Anglicanism is a great mission strategy. From the beginning, Cranmer and the others knew that they were in a battle for hearts – hearts, like Catherine Parr’s, that needed conversion. Today, the opportunities opening up for mission because of our Anglican networks are extraordinary - nationally and globally. Anyone interested in Christian mission ought to be interested in what is happening through Anglican church today - yes, despite all our well discussed flaws.

I am sure I could add more to this list. But I am not sure that the message is being heard.
The text of Ed Loane's wonderful speech to the Anglican Church League is here. In it, Ed recounts the League's century-long determination to defend the evangelical character of the diocese of Sydney from liberalism and tractarianism. It struck me however that for most of that century evangelical Anglicans knew what the Anglicanism they were defending was. There was a strong positive as a corollory to the negative. If today we have lost a sense of what that Anglicanism really is, then a determination to defend it becomes merely negativity for its own sake, or sectarianism. We need urgently to relocate the evangelically beating heart of our Anglicanism - that ought to be the go-forward mission of the ACL. No amount of fighting off charismatics or New Perspectivists will seem meaningful if there is not this real sense that being Anglican is worth it for a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical.

And that leads me to a final point. We urgently need a liturgical renewal or even revival - and our Anglican heritage gives us the resources to make it possible. Now: I don't want to be misunderstood here. I am NOT calling for nostalgia, for dressing up, for antiquarian services in 16th century English or anything of the kind. Far from it. BUT it seems to me that Cranmer's great insight was that the habitual and regular gathering of God's people - corporate worship - was a crucial moment in which the distinctive emphases of Christian doctrine were to be embedded in the hearts of believers (and preached to non-believers). The thirty-nine articles envisage that in diverse times and places new expressions of corporate life will needed to embody and embed these same truths - showing us that the content and not the form was the thing that mattered.

Too often, Sydney Anglican meetings are characterised by what they are NOT. They are not charismatic and they are not Catholic. Fine. But I can't believe we are satisfied with these negatives. What is more, we have a real envy problem when it comes to the charos - why are their people having so much fun? Why do they enjoy such theologically lite services so much?
The BCP is a standard which we ought to emulate in our own way - it is one of the best things we have! It dramatises the Christian gospel and the Christian life in response - teaching us justification by grace through faith and the authority of scripture and nurturing us in those. It makes a feature of preaching, but it puts even the preacher under the authority of the scriptures that are read aloud. In rejecting the theology of Roman Catholicism, the Protestant reformers at the same time had a compelling alternative to offer. And done rightly, it hits the Christian experientially deep down. Could we one day be able to say again that what we do in church meetings is the one of the best things about being a Sydney Anglican?

Puritan and Anglican?

Sydney Anglicans more often than not trace their heritage to the great Church of England figures of the sixteenth century – to Cranmer, to Latimer and Ridley and to the others who were leaders under Edward VI and martyred under his sister Mary. Marcus Loane (1911-2009), Archbishop of Sydney from 1966-81 and formerly Principal of Moore College, authored a number of popular histories of this period after the manner of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. The defiant stance of these figures on the basis of the Protestant and Reformed character of the Church of England was an marker of identity in 1950s and 60s Australia – a period in which sectarianism was much more prominent as a social issue and a period in which the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Anglican Church of Australia was making a great deal of headway. As the national church came together, would Sydney Anglicans remain true to the faith for which the great Marian martyrs died? Certainly they would.

The somewhat romantic appeal to the martyrdoms of the Marian reign is a hint that a particular reading of the course of the English Reformation is in place: that the short reign of Edward VI was a Protestant high water-mark for the Church of England, but that the programme begun in that brief period (1547-53) had remained unfinished. On this reading of the English Reformation, there is some sympathy for those who later chafed at the slow rate of change under Elizabeth’s rule and who became known as ‘the Puritans’. It is one of those words – like ‘fundamentalist’- that has become (indeed always was) a religious term of abuse, with its image of humourless and stern moral nitpickers. This label has been frequently applied to Sydney Anglicans by their detractors not only to indicate their determination to further reform Anglicanism along Protestant lines but also to their alleged moral seriousness.

Historically speaking, the label ‘Puritan’ is a broad brush. There were Puritans over the long period of their prominence (from 1560s through to 1680s) who strongly disagreed with each other over what needed to change in the church and which doctrines to emphasise. Ultimately it was the Puritans of Parliament who rose up against the forces of Charles I and had him executed in 1649, inaugurating the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-58). Puritans were at various times persecuted and even expelled by the church authorities. Yet at the same time, the presence within the Church of England of those who might identify with the Puritan disposition has been ongoing. As Richard Turnbull has written ‘[T]hroughout the history of the Church of England there has also been a persecution of Puritan divines and yet also a continuing presence within the Church of those of Puritan disposition.’ This was so even after the ‘Great Ejection’, when nearly 2,000 Puritan clergy chose to leave their livings in protest against the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Interestingly, it was the issue of the royal supremacy which was most controversial. The restoration of the Book of Common Prayer, somewhat modified in line with Puritan sensibilities, was not nearly as problematic.

To identify with the Puritans, then, is not to repudiate Anglicanism. It is certainly to insist on the importance of right doctrine and on the propriety of ongoing reform of church practices in line with Scripture – and this is not to the taste of some other Anglicans. Some streams of Puritanism certainly found themselves outside the Church of England. Those Puritans who would advocate Presbyterianism, for example, found themselves outside of the bounds of the Church of England following the Restoration. It would be hard to make the case for a non-episcopal version of Anglicanism today. On matters of church governance, discipline and order, the normative rather than the regulative principle holds sway with Anglicanism. However, it was frequently matters to do with Church-State relations that led to the rebellion and then departure of Puritan clergy from the established church. It is fascinating to note that this was the very goad against which the Oxford movement kicked. John Keble’s famous 1833 sermon ‘National Apostasy’ was an attack on the collaboration of the Church of England with its government. For Anglicans not now living in England under royal supremacy, this issue is entirely irrelevant.

What this means is that Puritans have had a long-standing place within the Church of England and within Anglicanism, and that one of the major issues on which they took their stand they were not the only ones to do so and there is now in any case no longer any controversy. If Sydney Anglicans are Puritans, it does not follow that they are not also Anglicans.

Still Anglican

While the puritan and evangelical heritage of Sydney Anglicans gives them ample grounds to stake out within the Anglican tradition and to resist being marginalised, the reality to be admitted is that both of these groups have had at times testy relationships with the structural and institutional side of Anglicanism. Puritans were frustrated with the lack of further progress in doctrinal and liturgical reform and so many of them left the Church of England or were forced out. Evangelical Anglicans have always freely co-operated with evangelicals in other denominations, and have prioritised gospel work at the expense of institutional conformity. As Turnbull writes, ‘[H]istorically, Anglican Evangelicals have proved flexible over church order in the interests of the gospel’. But if Anglicanism has been flexible enough to accommodate evangelicals, it has also been flexible with progressive liberalism. Evangelicals have felt stymied in their mission by an institution which in turn seems only too ready to endorse the liberal agenda in faith and conduct. For evangelical Anglicans in every generation the question arises ‘what is the tipping point as far as remaining an Anglican goes?

It was certainly an issue for evangelicals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Could they continue to preach the gospel unhindered in the Church of England when all about ritualism and liberalism were advancing? At a gathering of evangelical clergy from the Eastern Counties on the 11th June 1879, Bishop J.C. Ryle of Liverpool delivered this stirring call to remain:

No doubt you live in days when our time-honoured church is in very perilous, distressing and critical position. Her rowers have brought her into troubled water. Her very existence is endangered by papists, infidels, and liberationists 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? 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.


The Evangelical Anglican concedes that he or she is not a member of a pure church, or a purely reformed church. But it is, as Ryle says, a theological mistake to expect purity and unity in any visible church.

A similar crisis point came in October 1966 when the free church preacher Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), speaking at the National Assembly of Evangelicals, called upon evangelical clergy in denominations that were not exclusively evangelical to leave and to join with him in forming an evangelical denomination in which doctrinal purity could be assured. It seemed at the time like a reasonable appeal to evangelicals in the Church of England, who were increasingly marginalised and on the defensive, and who had watched openly radical scholars such as J.A.T. Robinson (1919 – 1983) rewarded for their unorthodoxy by elevation to the episcopate. At this point the acknowledged leader of the Anglican evangelicals, John Stott, intervened. This lead to the wholesale recommitment of evangelicals to working within the Church of England in 1967 at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele. A similar conference was held in Australia, but with no lasting impact.

Encouraged by the lead of John Stott, evangelicals in the Anglican Communion have largely held their ground. In the last forty years, the Anglican denominational structures have been in many cases quite congenial to the missional aspirations of evangelicals. Where other types of Anglican churches have waned, evangelical churches have certainly not. In that time the increase of evangelical numbers in the churches of the west has opened up new divisions, it must be granted. Tensions over the emphasis on charismatic gifts and the ministry of women continue to simmer. The consecration of woman as bishops may prove to be a step too far for some evangelicals in the Church of England.

For Sydney Anglican evangelicals then there is every good reason to remain committed to the Anglican church. Sydney Anglicans have felt concern at developments in the national and global Anglican Communion and have frequently wondered aloud whether they could continue in fellowship with these bodies – or what form that fellowship might take. They ought to remember that, as well as being an age of terrible division and confusion, the last forty years have been an era of remarkable innovation and experimentation in the name of mission and there is much to give thanks about.

Yet if Sydney Anglicans want to stay within the fellowship of Anglican churches they need to do so in good faith. They cannot point the finger at those who transgress in the areas of faith and conduct if they themselves are in the process of eroding the Anglican edifice. For example, the supreme authority of Scripture in Anglicanism is given a particular mode of reception – by dint of the two great creeds, the sacraments and the role of the episcopate. Anglicanism is not a tradition in which every interpretation of Scripture is held to be equally valid – even if there is considerable room for disagreement. This is in contrast to churches that subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, which is far more detailed. It may be that, in all good conscience, some evangelical Christians need to admit that the Anglican expression of Christianity is not for them. They would not be the first.

Anglicanism doesn’t require much, but it does require some things. Just as I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican and to deny the resurrection or the Trinity, I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican with any authenticity and honesty and to have a greatly reduced role for the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. These examples are not equally serious, of course. However, a church which substituted the practice of the Lord’s Supper for a fellowship tea would not be an Anglican church and should have the honesty to say so. It may still be a Christian church – but it could not continue as an Anglican church.

Paul Avis - The Identity of Anglicanism

T&T Clark have just released Paul Avis' The Identity of Anglicanism, and give you a peek at the first chapter if you look here.

Interesting: I was delighted that he picked up the definite confessionalism in Anglicanism, and also that Anglicanism has never asserted itself as the whole church catholic - it has always accepted the possibility of other churches. This is a quite crucial aspect of Anglican ecclesiology.

Anglicanism as 'unabashed Protestantism'?

What is an ‘Anglican’? In one sense the term itself is anachronistic. The Church of England is primarily an institution, the national church of a particular country. It was only with the growth of the British Empire that the question of ‘Anglicanism’ arose – especially when there was now a political separation between England and the US. The Episcopal Church was not governed by the King of England from 1776 – so in what sense could it, and other former Church of England churches, understand their continuity with the church that had given them birth? It was an identity question that was felt with a particular pressure in the nineteenth century and which has decisive significance for the way we consider the question of ‘Anglicanism’ today.

Those of more Catholic disposition have emphasised the continuity of the English church today with the church of the pre-Reformation period. Even when it was in communion with the Church of Rome, the English church (the ecclesia Anglicana) had its own remarkable and somewhat independent identity. The tension between the papacy and the English monarchy – which came to a head in the Reformation – had many precedents, including the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, in 1170 by King Henry II’s henchmen. However, any assertion of a continuity of heritage between the pre-Reformation Church and what came later has to reckon with the complexity and diversity of that history. For example, in the seventh century AD both Celtic and Roman styles of Christianity competed for supremacy in the English Church. Which is to be held as more authentically ‘Anglican’? Or is it a synthesis between them? Where in the story does the radicalism of the Oxford scholar John Wyclif (1330-78) and the movement of his followers, the Lollards, fit in? That is to say: describing a continuous line from the pre-Reformation period to the present has more challenges than the standard Anglo-Catholic description allows. The demand for reform and the appeal to the authority of Scripture is part of the picture that ought not to be obscured.

Since the 1980s, revisionist historians such as Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy have tried to describe the English Reformation as a top-down and chiefly political movement which had little traction amongst the English people themselves. There is no doubt that the English Reformation was achieved through the workings of statecraft as much as through the conversion of souls. Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’ - the problem of his barren marriage to Catherine of Aragon – was the catalyst not only for an institutional break with the Church of Rome and with the papacy, but for a change in the theological outlook of the English church. While Haigh and Duffy try to paint this as entirely engineered by a coterie of theologians like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, there is no question but that the faith of Reformation Europe had made some inroads among the English people, however clandestine.

Thomas Cranmer is not a figure for Anglicans equivalent to the way Martin Luther is for Lutherans. Nonetheless, Cranmer’s Reformation bequeathed to the English Church as particular theological outlook which cannot be eclipsed in any description of Anglican identity. Though some have tried, Richard Turnbull notes ‘[I]t is difficult to deny the formative role of the Reformation on the polity, theology and ministry of the Church of England.’

Cranmer set down three large foundation stones upon which henceforth the English church was subsequently built: the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. These have not come down to us unaltered from his pen. They were subject to a degree of refinement and alteration. Even so, the attempt to minimise the importance of these formularies in some parts of the Anglican church in recent years only reveals an embarrassment with the unabashed Protestantism of these documents. While it would be historically naïve to think of the career of Cranmer as the reset point for Anglican identity – as if nothing has happened since then, or as if he is an Anglican Muhammad – it is certainly the case that no description of Anglican identity can bypass or minimise his contribution to the theological distinctiveness of Anglicanism.

‘Unabashed Protestantism’ – is that an overstatement? That the liturgy was now to be in the vernacular was in itself a recognition of a different – Protestant (or better, ‘evangelical’) - understanding of the very nature of Christian faith itself. The words of the Prayer Book were not meant to be experienced by the people as a mystery evading their understanding. The service of Holy Communion was, in successive editions of the Prayer Book, moving in a more Protestant direction. Recent work by renowned Oxford historian Dairmaid MacCulloch shows that Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology was becoming even less like Luther’s understanding of the ‘real presence’ and shifting towards a Reformed understanding. The document that became The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion is unmistakeably Reformed in character. It is true that the articles do allow for a deal of flexibility, and do not pronounce on some controversial matters. Yet that should not be mistaken for some policy of reticence or the endorsement of infinite variety. The embarrassment of liberal and Catholic Anglicans at the Articles is a fairly strong indication that the plain reading of them sees them as an expression of a Reformed theological outlook.
The Articles assert the primacy of the authority of Scripture for Anglican faith and practice. That is not to say that Scripture is the only authority, but it is held to be the supreme authority, even over the great creeds of the church (Article VIII). Article VI reads: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’. According to the articles, Scripture is to act as the measure of what Anglicans believe.

For two great Elizabethan Anglicans, Scripture was likewise of paramount importance. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is often held up as the doyen of Anglican divines – ‘judicious’, rational, careful and moderate in tone. He was an opponent of the Puritan extremists in the Church of England who were moving against the episcopate and against all customs not explicitly sanctioned in Scripture. For a long time it was thought that he had endorsed ‘the three-legged stool’ of Scripture, Reason and Tradition as equal, mutually-informing authorities in Anglican thinking. Careful reading of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity tells another story. He writes:
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason over-rule all other inferior judgments whatsoever ( Laws, Book V, 8:2; Folger Edition 2:39,8-14).

Scripture, reason and tradition do not have equal weight for Hooker. Quite clearly, Scripture has precedence, then reason and third, church tradition. Though the Puritans were mistaken when they opposed tradition where Scripture was silent, they were correct in placing Scripture ahead of all other authorities. Hooker can be described as endorsing the ‘normative’ view of Scripture with regard to church order and ceremonies, as opposed to the ‘regulative’ view championed by his Puritan opponents such as William Perkins and Thomas Cartwright. He conceded that the threefold order of ministry – bishop, priest and deacon – cannot be directly established from Scripture, but that the historic episcopate is nevertheless a good way to frame the polity of the English church.

In his 1562 work Apology of the Church in England, Bishop John Jewel (1522-71) of Salisbury made an ardent defence of the Reformation settlement in England, setting it over against the abuses of the Church of Rome. He depicted the Church of England as episcopal, but thoroughly Reformed in doctrine. The Church of England in its stance against Rome needed to be convincingly apostolic. It could do so by appeal to Scripture; but also by appeal to the Church Fathers and to the Councils. This was not to invest them with an authority independent of Scripture, but to show that, even on their preferred ground, the Roman Church was not the true heir of the apostolic teaching.

To the work of these two Elizabethan divines we might well add the declaration of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in 1888 as an instance in Anglican history when the primacy of Scripture was clearly asserted. The 1888 Lambeth conference of bishops received in slightly amended form a document which had been passed by the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America in 1886. The four points of the quadrilateral are, in order: Holy Scripture as ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’; the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed; the two sacraments; and the historic episcopate. The basis of the unity of the Anglican Communion is thus a common confession of faith derived from Scripture.

What these examples prove is quite modest, but it is sufficient. They demonstrate that those who hold that it is thoroughly and authentically Anglican to view Scripture as the supreme authority have a more than reasonable case grounded in the major documents of Anglican history and in the thought of its major theologians. Furthermore, on soteriology and the sacraments it is quite clearly possible to discern a succession of authoritative figures and documents that assert the Reformed view, however distasteful this might be to some contemporary Anglicans. There are other readings of Anglican history – most notably the reading perpetuated by the Oxford movement in the 19th century, which emphasised the Caroline divines and their appeal to the Church Fathers. Yet even this sketch of Anglicanism shows that this reading of Anglican history could only ever be a selective and polemical one. A Christian faith which places it emphasis on the supreme authority of Scripture for doctrine and practice and which upholds the Reformed view or salvation and the sacraments can with confidence assert its continuous place within the Anglican story. A view of Anglicanism which places Scripture as supreme authority and which has a Reformed soteriology and which has a flexible attitude to liturgical practice certainly has a good case to be considered as authentically Anglican. However, this plurality and flexibility is not infinite.

Nicholas Taylor on Lay Presidency

Opposition to Sydney’s proposal for lay presidency has been extremely strong from other parts of the Anglican world – even from churches who are allied with Sydney in the GAFCON movement. This proposal seems to be a step too far for many Anglicans.

An Anglican priest working in South Africa, Nicholas H. Taylor has written a substantial and sophisticated response to the proposal for lay presidency titled Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. It has to be said that the depth and seriousness of Taylor’s book rather outweigh the short polemical pieces and committee papers that have been offered by those advocating lay administration. He offers an extensive and nuanced discussion of the nature of authority in Anglicanism and on the whole gives a careful exposition of the case for lay administration before countering it with his own.

Two features of his argument mar it, however. The first is that he attempts to say what ‘Anglican’ is, but can only do so by making his own, more Catholic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper paradigmatic for all Anglican practice. The problem comes when you romanticise the Anglican compromise as a wonderful synthesis, instead of acknowledging that the ambiguity in the formularies made possible, within the same ecclesiastical structure, the presence of two mutually exclusive views of the Eucharist; and that the fragility of this compromise meant that it resolved nothing, and was always going to fall apart at some point. Taylor is unable to acknowledge the legitimate and continuous presence of the alternative reading of the sacraments in the Anglican tradition, and fails to argue against it on its own terms. What he discovers is only that the Anglican evangelical view of the sacraments is not the same as the Anglo-Catholic one. We knew this already.

Second, though Taylor is for the most part a model of scholarly dispassion, when he comes to engaging with the diocese of Sydney he is unable to contain himself and slips in to a polemic which verges on nastiness. He calls Sydney ‘an ultra-Protestant fringe of Anglicanism’ whose ‘interpretations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer may alike be tendentious, and account of the historically somewhat liminal place this diocese has taken in the Anglican Communion, and even in the Anglican Church of Australia.’ The word ‘liminal’ – a word Taylor repeats - is the strange one here. Does he mean by it ‘barely perceptible’, or ‘a transitory state’? In any case, it is clear that Taylor wants to portray these, the most serious advocates for the position he wants to counter, as extremists and eccentrics barely worth taking seriously. He adds to this impression by pointing out to his readers the connection that Sydney Diocese has maintained over a number of decades with ‘the schismatic ecclesial group known as the Church of England in South Africa, which maintained close ties with the apartheid regime’. This is a largely irrelevant statement designed only to taint Sydney Anglicans with racism in the mind of his readers and so utterly prejudice the outcome of his discussion. The complex history of the ‘other’ Anglicans in South Africa is by no means without its regretful aspects (for which its bishop, Frank Retief, made a public declaration of apology and repentance in the 1990s); yet the phrase ‘close ties’ would be more than an exaggeration. The argument for Sydney’s ‘liminality’ means that he overlooks the long and vigorous history of evangelicals within the Church of England in almost every place that the Church of England has gone. It is a historically myopic view.

Taylor points out that while in many instances the argument for lay administration is driven by the practical problem of the lack of ordained clergy – most often in rural districts – in Sydney there is no such shortage compared to other dioceses. This observation is correct, although there are a greater number of people in congregations in Sydney Anglican churches, too. It is certainly difficult for a complete outsider to the diocese in question to offer his view on the practical needs of the ministry. He does not take into account the way in which the development of new congregations has put pressure on the current system of ordination. Nevertheless, he is correct to understand Sydney’s push for lay administration as theologically driven and not just pragmatic.

It is just that he cannot accept the theological views of Sydney as having a valid place within Anglicanism. Taylor characterises the diocese of Sydney in this way:
The agenda of the diocese of Sydney, under its current Archbishop, is to resume and bring to its completion the process of reformation disrupted by the deaths of Edward VI and Cranmer. Reform is to be continued along a theological trajectory in continuity with Cranmer.
On what evidence Taylor bases this suspicion I would like to know. He offers none. This kind of comment merely reveals the prejudice against with which his project unfortunately began. He takes Archbishop Peter Jensen to task for depending heavily on Cranmer’s views as normative for Anglicanism in his argument for lay administration. This would be to vastly overstate the claims that Jensen makes for Cranmer in his short piece on the subject. And yet, it would seem to strange to argue that, as the primary author of the Anglican formularies, Cranmer’s views are of very limited importance to the discussion. Taylor is right to point to the fact that Cranmer argues strongly for administration of the sacrament only by those duly authorised by lawful authority – but then, this is not really in dispute.

Taylor then tries to mount the perverse argument that the argument for lay presidency is actually designed to uphold hierarchical and patriarchal patterns within the diocese of Sydney:
It is not envisaged that delegation to lay people of functions such as preaching and administering holy communion in Sunday worship would involve any participation in the pastoral oversight exercised by the Archbishop and clergy of the diocese of Sydney. Power would remain vested in an exclusive male cadre, formed principally and definitively at Moore Theological College in the very particular and narrow theological tradition which Sydney represents.
The issue of lay presidency, he argues, must be linked to Sydney’s resistance to women’s ordination. If lay people – females among them – can be admitted to the business administering communion as well as communion, then what is it that not ordaining them excludes them from? Taylor deduces that it must be all about conserving the power of the clique, or the ‘cadre’, as he calls it. What ordination represents, in Taylor’s reading of the Sydney mentality, is not preaching or presiding but power. This is a kind of postmodern power-critique of the predictable kind, but it relies on speculation about the motives of others to which Taylor is certainly not privy. How is Taylor able to see what it is really about from his study on the other side of the Indian Ocean? Is he such a successful psychologist?

In fact, push for lay administration in Sydney began quite separately to and at around about the same time as the call of women’s ordination began in the wider Anglican Communion. Certainly, the proponents of lay administration have wanted to show that their understanding of ordination was not a specifically sacramental one, and that their objection to women’s ordination was not on the basis of the Anglo-Catholic reasoning about sacerdotal ministry. If anything, however, lay administration would open up leadership opportunities for lay men and women and for female deacons in Sydney, which is a diocese with a long history of active lay leadership by both genders and which employs more women in ministry than any other. Taylor’s comments about the ‘particular and narrow theological tradition’ represented by Sydney reveal only his (deliberate?) ignorance of the ongoing presence of evangelicals within Anglicanism around the globe. If it is only in Sydney that they have been able to influence an entire diocese in the way they have, it is because of the political hegemony of the liberal catholic party elsewhere. Most dioceses in the world would represent a ‘very particular and narrow theological tradition’ – namely, the liberal catholic one – under whose powerful rule it is oftentimes very difficult for evangelicals to live. It is a bit rich, quite frankly, to be lectured on power politics from the point of view of the most successful political grouping in the Anglican Communion.

Taylor makes a great deal of an almost throw away comment by Archbishop Peter Jensen. In advocating for liturgical change, Jensen described the current forms of liturgy as ‘almost irrelevant’ in the context of contemporary mission. By this he did not mean, as Taylor takes him to mean, that the gathering together of the people of God around the word and sacrament was irrelevant – only that the forms in which we have continued to practice our meeting have become inaccessible and impenetrable to the secularised world. Yet Taylor riffs on this phrase, claiming that

As a theology of the laity, it denigrates the people of God to whom the ‘almost irrelevant’ ministry of word and sacrament is entrusted, while clergy are engaged in the ministry which really matters.

This is just plain misreading – and it is certainly not the intention of those who argue for lay administration. What Taylor completely ignores is the vigorous support for lay administration from lay people themselves within the diocese of Sydney. Far from being a plot by the men at head office to shore up their own power, the envisaged change is meant to complete the ‘lay revolution’ begun in the late 1960s by admitting lay people to the ministry of the table as well as the ministry of the pulpit.

The pity is that Taylor’s book is an otherwise very accomplished and judicious work carried out with appropriate scholarly dispassion. At the end of his extended review of the subject, he argues that the issue of who presides at the Lord’s Supper is a second order issue, and that it is permissible in certain emergency situations. From Taylor’s point of view, the most suitable solution to the shortage of clergy is the ordination of local Christian leadership as ‘the most satisfactory alternative to authorized lay presidency at the eucharist’. I fail to see what the difference between lay administration and local ordination is, especially if you do not share a more catholic view of ordination. It is nowhere envisaged that lay administration would mean unauthorised administration – there would have to be a system of due authorisation of lay ministers, just as there is for lay preachers. And the authorisation would hold for the services in the local parish and not elsewhere. Is the difference between lay administration and local ordination only then a matter of what you call it? It would seem so – unless you have a quasi-mystical view of the effects of ordination. Local ordination is no less a novelty than lay administration. So why is this alternative preferable and the Sydney suggestion anathema?

A holy huddle?

To proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in brutal old Sydney town has never been easy. The second chaplain to the colony, Samuel Marsden, became known as ‘the flogging parson’ because of his over-zealous administration of his weekday duties as magistrate. Despite his evident enthusiasm to preach the good news in New South Wales and also in New Zealand, he became perhaps not unreasonably diverted by the task of building and maintaining social order in a hostile and fragile environment.

His successors likewise felt the combination of inertia and hostility to the gospel wearisome. In his study of Sydney Anglicanism from 1885 to 1914, former lecturer at Moore College Bill Lawton argued that the Sydney Anglicans of that period felt under pressure from the advance of secularism. In this period, churchmen noted and bemoaned the loss of respect for Sabbath observation, the prevalence of drunkenness and threats to traditional patterns of marriage as symptomatic of the decline in the church’s influence on social order. In response to this felt crisis, Lawton argued that local Anglican leaders such as the then Principal of Moore College the Welshman Nathanael Jones came to focus their attention not on society but on the ‘little flock’ – the small gathering of believers who were waiting deliverance from the trials and tribulations of the world. They were influenced in this by the Brethrenism and revivalism characteristic of the evangelicalism of the period. As Lawton writes:

The religion of these evangelicals was essentially introspective and futurist, fearful of the social and ideological changes taking place around them. Intuitionism combined with millennialism to inhibit their developing a coherent social theory. By concentrating exclusively on ends and goals, Moore College fashioned a clergy whose sole task was to interpret the mind of God to the people of God, but who failed to interpret that mind to a secularised society.

If the choice was between accommodation and retreat, then retreat was certainly preferable.
For Lawton, the teaching about the last things – eschatology – explains the increasing defensiveness of local church pronouncements on social issues. Eschatology inevitably leads to questions about the nature of present social order and the role of the Christian church in it. Jones and others taught a form of premillennialism shaped by the thought of the well know Irish preacher John Nelson Darby (1800-82). For Darby, Scripture was an essentially prophetic book which describes humanity as being progressively dealt with by God in a series of ‘dispensations’. Each dispensation begins with a divinely appointed task that comes with a promise of blessing, and ends with an act of divine judgement. In the present dispensation, that of the church, we are to live following the judgement of God on Israel for its hardness of heart and in the light of the expectation that God will restore the kingdom to Israel. The task of the Christian evangelist is to call people out of the fallen and disgraced world and into the church – to become one of the truly converted, spiritual gathering of believers. Failing to keep society Christian by legal means or by persuasion in the press, the evangelicals prayed for the coming of revival instead.

A case study from this period was the church’s response to the Divorce Extension Bills which were proposals for liberalising the divorce laws. While in 1886 there was intense debate about the issue of divorce, but the late 1880s, the local churchmen seemed to have retreated. Society’s unwillingness to respond to the Bible’s authority on this issue seemed to take the wind out of their sails. The intervention of the clergy on this matter had not endeared them to the public:
The daily press, and particularly the Sydney Morning Herald, responded at first cautiously and deferentially but soon editorials began a hostile attack on the churchmen’s lack of compassion and their legalistic concern for semantics.

The advancing tide of secularism was met by an attempt to use the law as instrument to bring about conformity to the will of God. However when it became apparent that a gap was opening up between Christian standards and the standards of the society at large, Anglicans turned their attention back to the ‘little flock’ as a community where divine law could certainly be maintained.

Lawton the historian writes:

Sydney evangelical Anglicanism drew upon the Brethren doctrines of the church as ‘gathered community’ and Bible as a record of unfulfilled prophecy. The denomination developed a futurist eschatology in which the local ‘gathered’ community of Christians was seen as the proleptic expression of the heavenly Church.

But this is also evidence of Lawton the contemporary (1987) churchman and commentator. Throughout his book Lawton shows himself convinced that this pattern of retreat and defence against the rising tide of secularism driven by a certain eschatology and ecclesiology is characteristic of present day Sydney Anglicanism. His clear purpose is not merely antiquarian interest but critique of the present by uncovering a genealogy of theological ideas and tribal instincts. Unfortunately, he makes this case only by inference and not so much by evidence. In order to be convincing, he would have to show that even though pre-millennial theology and holiness movement piety from Sydney Anglicanism since at least the 1950s has completely faded, their impress on the Sydney Anglican mindset is still in evidence. A former longtime lecturer at Moore College, Lawton doesn’t carry out this tracing of connections explicitly – probably because of the deep personal regard he felt for Broughton Knox and others. The lines of connection between the two phases of Sydney Anglican history are not simple and are drawn here over six decades or more. Yet the relationship of eschatology to a theological understanding of the world is a connection still very much in evidence.

Uncommon Worship?

On the 20^th February, 1547, the nine-year old Edward VI was crowned in Westminster Abbey. His Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, charged him with these words:

Your majesty is God's vicegerent, and Christ's vicar within your own dominions, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed; the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed.[1]

Cranmer could not have uttered such strong words before King Henry VIII. But now he was free to speak, he revealed his hand. What he wanted to see in a reformed Church of England – and what Cranmer would proceed to institute over the next half-decade, with the King’s help - was nothing less than a revolution in worship. The evangelical gospel was a severe condemnation of the practices of medieval Catholicism and the theology of worship which it implied. The need for new forms of worship was urgent because the stakes were so high, in Cranmer’s mind: if the people are going to worship God rightly, then the unbiblical, distracting and frankly idolatrous practices of the previous era needed to be repudiated and replaced. Nothing less than salvation was at stake. 

What ensued was a complete renovation in the idea of worship along the lines of the Reformation gospel. First in 1549 and then again in 1552, Cranmer gave to the English people in words that they could understand a pattern of worship which enshrined the priority of God’s grace and gave words to the people’s response of gratitude. In these two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer ensured that the Word of God would not be silent amongst the people of God. He presented to people the true character of God, the Almighty and everlasting God ‘whose property is always to have mercy’, that they might worship him as he truly is. And he ensured that the death of Christ for sin was at the centre of an Anglican spirituality. 

The forms of worship created by Cranmer have become for many Anglicans the distinctive mark of their church. For some people, to say ‘Anglican’ or ‘not Anglican’ means something about the form of worship that is being used in a particular congregation. And yet, some four and a half centuries after Cranmer, the reality is that the churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion are not as united in their habits of corporate worship as one might think. Happily, many provinces have authorized significant revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, updating and translating the language as necessary. There has been some liberty to experiment for the sake of reaching the lost, such that traditional forms of worship exist side by side with highly informal gatherings. As a matter of fact, Cranmer had already imagined a time when a diversity of forms of worship would be needed for cultural reasons. It is worth examining Article 34 at this point:

XXXIV. Of the Traditions of the Church.
It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners, so that nothing be ordained against God's Word. Whosoever, through his private judgment, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.

Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, so that all things be done to edifying.

The principles for instituting ceremonies and rites for each new era and place take into account ‘the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners’, so long as what is ordained by each church is ‘done to edifying’ and is not simply a matter of the exercise of whim. The test is whether a particular form agrees with God’s Word or not, and that the principle of order not be upset by what is done as churches gather. In other words, there was to the reformer’s way of thinking about it a need for flexibility and even pragmatism about forms of worship – so long as the theological principles were not cast aside. 

And this is a matter of much greater concern in the churches of the Anglican Communion. The diversity of forms of worship represents not simply the practical needs of the gospel in each place, but frequently a different theology of worship altogether. Without knowledge of the theological principles of Anglican worship, we are simply not able to discriminate between forms of worship that in fact dishonor God, and forms of worship that please him. Instead, we simply do what is right in our own eyes. In their various ways, the Anglo-Catholic movement, the charismatic movement and reformed evangelicals have pursued their own theological convictions about Christian worship above and beyond the words on the pages of the Prayer Book and into territory highly disputed by the other groups within Anglicanism. What are we to make of this diversity, and how can we evaluate it?

If the stakes are as high as Cranmer set them in his charge to the young king, this cannot be a matter of simple indifference. That does not mean that intolerance and inflexibility ought to aim. But it does mean that we need to recollect what Cranmer and the other Reformers were trying to do when they wrote the BCP and commanded its use in the churches. Furthermore, it does mean that we need to seek out once more a proper Scriptural and theological account of worship so that nothing be ordained against God's Word.

 

That is the principle task of what follows in this book, Reformation Anglican Worship: The Gratitude that follows Grace. My objective is to uncover the roots of the Reformation theology and practice of worship. But I am doing this not because I think it is simply a matter of historical interest. Nor am I interested in playing that old Anglican game – namely, the search for the allegedly most authentic reset point for Anglicanism. While it is obviously my conviction that the theological convictions of Cranmer at the other English reformers had and still have a seminal significance for Anglicans ever since, and that the theology of this period has often been disregard in a more than cavalier fashion (historical pun intended!), I am more interested in whether these theological convictions are sound ones or not. That, it seems to me, is truest to the spirit of the reformers – that nothing be ‘repugnant to the word of God’.  

That was crucial for Cranmer as a liturgist. He was a genuinely theological liturgist, seeking to enshrine a particular gospel by means of his revision of English worship. He sought to If vagueness or ambiguity is a feature of the Book of Common Prayer, such that different parties have simultaneously claimed to find their own theological convictions expressed therein, then that is not Cranmer’s fault. Cranmer was clear about what he was repudiating, as his charge to King Edward demonstrates. He also clearly was intending the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion (in his time, 42), and the homilies to be a complementary set, mutually informing one another. The origins of the distinctive Anglican worship – for which it is best known – lie in a clear step away from the worship of the medieval Catholic Church and the theological convictions that it represented.

In relatively recent times, the Latin slogan lex orandi lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief) has been used as a way of suggesting that doctrine is subordinate to liturgy. Hence, the Canadian Book of Alternative Services (1985) says:

It is precisely the intimate relationship of gospel, liturgy, and service that stands behind the theological principle lex orandi: lex credendi, i.e., the law of prayer is the law of belief. This principle, particularly treasured by Anglicans, means that theology as the statement of the church's belief is drawn from the liturgy, i.e. from the point at which the gospel and the challenge of Christian life meet in prayer. The development of theology is not a legislative process which is imposed on liturgy; liturgy is a reflective process in which theology may be discovered.[2]

A number of things ought to be said about this principle, not the least that its alleged origins in the ancient church are certainly questionable. It was introduced into Anglicanism in the twentieth century, having been coined the late nineteenth century by a French Roman Catholic monk by the name of Prosper Gueranger (1805-75). But even so: the principle is usually taken to mean (as it is in the Canadian Prayer Book) that doctrine is derived from worship, and not the other way around; and that, as a result, theology is a groping to describe the inexpressible experience of worship: it is a ‘reflective process in which theology may be discovered.’ That is both a mistranslation of the Latin, and not at all a good description of what is the case in the Reformation Anglicanism of Thomas Cranmer. The Latin phrase is of course reversible, such that ‘the law of belief is the law of prayer’. Cranmer was clearly in possession of a set of theological convictions that he hoped to express through his liturgy. He knew what he was – and wasn’t – inviting English church-goers to believe as they worshipped. 

Perhaps this might be thought as somewhat distastefully combative. Don’t we live a world away from those old controversies? Do we twenty-first century Anglicans not recoil from the violent outcomes of the disagreements of the sixteenth century? Certainly we do. But this does not excuse the theological fuzziness that besets contemporary Anglicanism. I would regard the liturgical confusion of our present time as a distinct echo of the controversies of the sixteenth century. Different styles of worship amount to nothing at all, as Cranmer knew. In which case: let as many liturgical flowers bloom as can be planted. But a different theology of worship is indicative of a different view of how people come to know God – how they get saved, in other words. That is something worth caring about, if we are to be authentically Christian.

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[1]

[2] I got this from Peter Toon.

Are Sydney Anglicans Fundamentalists? Muriel Porter thinks so

The critics of Sydney of course continue to use the term 'fundamentalist' as a pejorative against them. One such very recent example is Muriel Porter’s book The New Puritans – The Rise of Fundamentalism in the Anglican Church. Make no mistake: Porter loathes Sydney Anglicanism and is not afraid to say so. Though it is published by a University Press (Melbourne), this book is a piece of unmitigated polemic rather than having any pretence to some kind of scholarly objectivity (as the author herself admits). The title of her project is an indication of the purpose of her tract. If she can prove that Sydney Anglicans are rightly labelled ‘fundamentalists’ then that is, in a sense, enough. In the minds of the audience to which Porter imagines she is writing, fundamentalism is per definition a very bad thing. Her thesis is that ‘Sydney Diocese is now in several key respects fundamentalist although it detests this badge’; therefore, she denies the right of Sydney Anglicans to self-describe. In fact, protesting against being called ‘fundamentalists’ (as Robinson has done) is exactly what fundamentalists do.

So, she is right about that Sydney Anglicans do not wish to be called fundamentalists. Archbishop Peter Jensen sought to distinguish fundamentalism from his kind of evangelicalism in his first major address following his election in 2001. In that speech he outline fundamentalism as implying ‘an anti-intellectual, backward-looking and ugly zeal in the cause of religion’. He agrees that both the fundamentalist and the evangelical hold to the supreme authority of Scripture. The difference is that, while the evangelical interprets the Bible ‘literally’, the fundamentalist interprets it ‘literalistically’. A literal, or plain reading of Scripture might still make use of traditional interpretation, the genuine advances of modern biblical scholarship and was open to learning from contemporary thought.

Porter is less than impressed by this speech, mostly because she can’t grasp the really not very subtle difference between ‘literal’ and ‘literalistic’. There is more to fundamentalism than that, she says, and points to Barr’s notion of the particular ‘fundamentalist mentality’. Never mind that Peter Jensen has actually acknowledged a similar kind of definition in his speech. What is that mentality? Porter wheels on the definitions provided by Oxford academic Harriet Harris: a rationalist mindset, a ‘Calvinistic zeal to root out error and preserve doctrinal purity’, charismatic and authoritarian leadership, behavioural requirements, and a tendency to separatism. To this Porter adds ‘a commitment to male headship’. This list is of course not arbitrary. Porter’s determination is to define ‘fundamentalism’ in such a way that her description of Sydney Anglicanism fits the definition. But the definition is already decided by her perceptions of Sydney Anglicans. While she acknowledges that there is a vast literature in the study of religion about fundamentalism (she doesn’t mention the ground-breaking work of George Marsden and Mark Noll, for example), she overlooks that and chooses the one that suits her polemical purposes best. Sydney Anglicanism is fundamentalist because fundamentalism is whatever Sydney Anglicans are. And Porter doesn’t like it. It is, in short, a cheap shot.
But even with the dice loaded, it still fails miserably. Firstly, she claims that Sydney is ‘rationalistic’. It is interesting, by the way, that ‘rationalism’ is felt by Porter to be an obviously bad thing, without explanation as to why this is so. Porter claims that the Sydney commitment to ‘propositional revelation’ is evidence of this self-evidently egregious rationalism – which is of course evidence of fundamentalism, on the terms she has decided beforehand:
The theory [i.e. propositional revelation] refers to revelation imparted through rational thought processes alone, without any subsidiary, complementary or external revelatory processes, such as through sensuous experiences mediated through liturgy, music, nature or Eucharistic participation.
Certainly, the emphasis on the Word of God as the revelation is the Sydney emphasis, and she is right to say that Sydney church services emphasis the reading, hearing and preaching of the Word of God over against other aspects. It is not accurate to describe this in terms of ‘rational thought processes’. It is the hearing of the Word, which has personal and existential and emotional and experiential impact – as Luther said, ‘the ears are the organ of the Christian’. Faith comes from hearing, after all. It seems uncontroversial to uphold, in a Protestant denomination, the verbal nature of the Word of God (for that is all that is meant by ‘propositional’ revelation).

Again, Porter rightly observes that what is at stake is a different view of how Scripture is meant to work. This is a crucial and revealing moment, for Porter at this point puts forward her version of the Christian doctrine of revelation. What Porter wants is for the Holy Spirit to speak outside of Scripture so that her particular causes, especially the ordination of women to the priesthood and to the episcopacy, may be endorsed. She appeals to some vague sense of an extra-scriptural guidance which is not at the same time subject to the authority of Scripture. And she makes an attack on the classic Protestant doctrine of the clarity of Scripture – which now becomes another feature of fundamentalism (not before listed): ‘This support for a ‘plain’ meaning is a hallmark of the fundamentalist approach to Scripture’. (p. 26) This is because Porter doesn’t like the insistence in Sydney that Scripture might mean what it actually says. As a matter of fact, fundamentalist approaches to Scripture more often result in literalistic and not plain readings of Scripture.

Then follows a bizarre paragraph:
Many commentators have demonstrated that no ‘plain’ reading is possible, given the nature of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, which are thousands of years old. They reflect entirely different thought-worlds from that of the twenty-first century, and are inevitably imbued with the ancient cultural patterns, norms and expectations from which they were written. More than a hundred years of scholarly criticism has revealed the complexity of interpreting the meaning of the Bible for contemporary Christians. Similarly, many scholars have pointed out clear examples of the Christian Church changing its mind as over the centuries it has read the Scriptures with fresh insight.
Porter of course names no such commentators or scholars or critics, despite citing them as indisputable authorities. Despite Peter Jensen’s protestation that Sydney Anglicans were in fact open to the genuine findings of contemporary biblical scholarship, Porter is insistent that this is not the case. Never mind the academic qualifications and publications – from secular universities and in leading research journals - of the biblical scholars from Moore.

What’s more, she misunderstands the notion of the ‘plain’ reading entirely. Protestant interpreters have always acknowledged that the interpretation of Scripture is complex, and that new light may be shed on the meaning of the text (as in fact 2 Peter 3 tells us!). The notion of the plain reading of Scripture is in the first instance a commitment to read Scripture as a properly literary document and not to bring fanciful spiritual allegories to bear upon it. Porter herself is confused - on the one hand she wants to be able to say that the Holy Spirit can overrule the teachings of Scripture; but on the other she wants to say that reading the Scriptures with fresh insight matters. Why would fresh insight into Scripture matter if you weren’t actually committed to the authority of Scripture? The example of slavery is brought out, as it always is, of a case in which people changed their minds about Scripture. This is of course not news. It was people who held to a doctrine of revelation like that of Sydney, such as the great reformer William Wilberforce, who decided that obedience to Scripture necessitated an end to slavery. He won not because his reading of Scripture was in the end more convincing than those who argue for slavery from Scripture. The danger with Porter’s model of divine revelation, which seems to invite consideration of which social trends are the work of the Holy Spirit and which aren’t, is that this logic could be used to support almost any cause you could name. How could Porter speak against an aberrant but widely-held development in society? This is where Porter’s own extremism slips into view: she represents the extreme liberal wing of the Anglican Communion as represented by the Episcopal Church in the USA, in which the only authority to which anyone is subject is gut feeling. Is ‘emotionalism’ preferable to ‘rationalism’? Whatever the case, even if ‘rationalism’ is a hallmark of fundamentalism, and even if the kind of rationalism that is meant by that term is found in Sydney, Porter has wandered far from this point and strayed into a discussion of the role and practise of the authority of Scripture – in which she proves less than widely read and not particularly acute. It is hard to see how it supports the point she is making.
As for the ‘zeal to root out error and doctrinal impurity’, again Porter resorts to the unscholarly sweeping gesture - ‘too many to discuss in detail here’. The frankly trivial example that she does cite is the ban on the Anglo-Catholic use of the chasuble, which has been in force since 1910. Remembering that Porter is trying to show that Sydney is only since 2001 ‘fundamentalist’, this example is particularly insipid. Other Anglican dioceses make requirements of their clergy vis a vis liturgical garments. Her second example is a piece of unsubstantiated hearsay: ‘refusal by many Sydney clergy to allow lay women to play any significant part in the main Sunday services – even reading lessons from the Bible – as a means of keeping faith with their claim that women must not exercise any leadership in mixed … congregations’ (p. 29). Not one concrete instance is cited. I personally travel to many different parishes in Sydney and I can say categorically that Porter is plainly wrong at this point. Lay and clergy women lead services, read lessons, lead in prayers, lead singing and in some parishes preach. In my own parish, there are a number of women who serve in this way. Once again: the experience of evangelical clergy and candidates who hold a complementarian view in other dioceses is that the authorities will insist on their view with zeal and enforce it if necessary. Is this not ‘zeal to root out error and doctrinal impurity’? It just aligns with Porter’s prejudices.

The third point on her checklist is ‘charismatic and authoritarian leadership’. In her sketch of the role of Sydney’s Archbishop, she provides a less than convincing case, noting that Sydney is historically committed to the priority of the parish. Parish clergy enjoy remarkable independence in Sydney, in fact, compared with other dioceses. While noting Peter Jensen’s high profile, she admits ‘whether this equates with authoritarianism I do not know, but I suspect that this archbishop does not need to be authoritarian’. Noting that there has been in Sydney a high degree of unity in the Synod and so on is not exactly tantamount to establishing an authoritarian pattern. Again, it is worth observing that there are charismatic and authoritarian leaders in non-evangelical dioceses – indeed far more authoritarian than in Sydney. Archbishop Peter Carnley of Perth, well known for his liberal Catholic or ‘progressive Orthodox’ views, was by all accounts just such a figure.

Thus far, Porter has failed to tick off any of the points on her checklist. We might concede something of her first point. However, despite the fact that she acknowledges the sophistication with which the Sydney view is argued, her own alternative model of guidance and revelation is theologically thin and certainly questionable.

What of the last two points? As to behavioural requirements, Porter argues that Sydney has a ‘harsher set of rules concerning personal morality’. As evidence, she cites Sydney’s policy on divorce and remarriage. Sydney’s policy is certainly less flexible than the free-for-all in place in some places in Australia. It remains however a good deal more liberal and accommodating than the practice of the Roman Catholic Church. Remarriage after divorce is not banned – it is, rather, than clergy are very reasonably required to be cautious. Since scripture has some specific things to say on this issue, it seems unremarkable to find this policy. Sydney Anglicans talk about sex far less than outsiders sometimes think. However, it is true that an orthodox position on marriage – held by the majority of Anglican Christians today, contrary to Porter’s claim – is held by the great majority in Sydney diocese. Porter then repeats a piece of ‘anecdotal evidence’ which is actually false: ‘it is now highly unlikely that a single man will be appointed rector of any Sydney parish, presumably for fear that his single state might mask an unacceptable sexual identity or that he might fall prey to sexual temptation’. There is no such policy. I cite as counter-evidence Rev Paul Dale, who is now married, but who was appointed rector of St John’s Kirribilli some years ago as a single man.

‘Separatism’ is Porter’s last check-box. She can only establish this by looking sideways at the evidence. She notes rightly that Sydney Anglicans are proudly counter-cultural which she says ‘indicates a predisposition towards separatism’. We thank her for her amateur psycho-analysis. However, it is scarcely a telling point. Christians have always seen themselves as counter-cultural in some way, since the earliest times. In any case, the label ‘separatism’ invites the question ‘what separatism and on what grounds?’ There have been many forms of separatism in Christian history justified for any number of reasons. The monastic movement is one such example. Porter quite overlooks the ongoing commitment of the Sydney diocese in any case to involvement in society – its commitment to justice and social welfare in which it continues to invest enormous resources. Sydney seeks the Christianisation of society by inviting people to become Christians, not by spreading Christian values (so-called) abroad. That much is a given. But it is not tantamount to ‘separatism’.

Porter’s attempt to classify Sydney Anglicans as fundamentalists was a put-up job in the first place. Even then, it fails spectacularly at every point – partly because she is simply hasn’t done her homework and relies on gossip and hearsay. She has an open goal, and still she misses the target. As she herself acknowledges she avoids scholarly complexity repeatedly and chooses instead the kind of journalistic shorthand that has corrupted public debate of politics in Australia.