Source: Leander Harding
June 8th, 2006
Bishop Stacy Sauls of Kentucky has written his diocese on the run up to General Convention 2006 and has described the conflict in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as a contest between real Anglicanism as it emerged in the Elizabethan Settlement and as has been practiced in the Episcopal Church until very recently and an upstart sort of pretend Anglicanism championed by Bishop Duncan of Pittsburgh and the bishops of the Global South. The real Anglicanism in Stacy Sauls view has never sought doctrinal uniformity but has always sought to maintain unity in a church where there were fundamental doctrinal disagreements by the use of a form of common prayer that could be used by all parties without violating conscience. The upstart Anglicanism according Saul’s definition seeks to impose doctrinal uniformity. The bishop proposes that room should be made at the table for the upstarts because such tolerance of difference is quintessentially Anglican but if the upstart Anglicanism replaces the real non-doctrinal Anglicanism than Anglicanism properly understood will disappear and the ancient tradition will have bee replaced by the cuckoo in the nest. This is Bishop’s Sauls’ argument as I understand it.
It so happens that the bishop’s letter has been issued as I am preparing to teach a course on “Worship in the Prayer Book Tradition” and have the English Reformation and the history of the Book of Common Prayer in close view. I completely disagree with the bishop’s reconstruction of the intention and content of the original prayer books and with his estimation of the role of doctrine in the English Reformation, the Elizabethan Settlement and Cranmer’s books of 1549, 1552 and the 1662 book which is still the standard in various forms in most of the Anglican Communion. About that more in a moment. First and foremost in answer to the charge, “It is not really Anglican,” let me say, that should never be the first question. I cherish the Anglican Tradition. I think, in fact that we in ECUSA have departed from it and are in danger of losing the treasures of “Mere Anglicanism”. But surely the first question must be, “is it the Apostolic Christian Faith?” The office of a bishop in the Anglican way precisely as defined in the first and classic prayer books and ordinals is to protect and guard and defend the faith of the Apostles. Anglican comprehensiveness can be invoked to allow for a spectrum of belief within a reformed and catholic faith. It can not with integrity be invoked to support overturning great swaths of the biblical witness and to support things which have never been taught in any catholic or reformed church.
The questions under dispute at the upcoming General Convention are indeed not about sex only. The questions about the 16th century Reformation were not about indulgences only but then as now, secondary issues often bring to the fore the most fundamental issues of belief and practice. The questions before us are about the fundamental character of the Apostolic Faith. Many people have written very ably about this including Kendall Harmon. To state just one issue there is the doctrine of creation. Are things as we find them they way they are supposed to be. Are people as we find them the way they are supposed to be or do we need to be changed and is it possible and necessary that God in Christ can and should work the most profound and basic and far reaching changes in people through the death and resurrection of the Lord and through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Some have put up this up as a choice between a religion of inclusion and a religion of transformation. Within the paradigm of transformation there is room for inclusion, “just as I am without one plea.” When God is said to be the author of our human situation just as we find it and that no transformation is possible, traditional Christians whether Anglican or any other flavor, are bound to suspect that fundamentals of the Gospel are being denied. The dispute is not about the nature of Anglicanism but about the nature of the Gospel and that is why there is such fire in it.
The version of Anglican origins that Bishop Sauls gives is a familiar one and is a staple put forward by those who are deeply invested in revising traditional theology and ethics. The say that Anglicanism has always been about tolerating different and even mutually contradictory theologies. We agree to disagree and we commit to pray together according to a common form. That is the Anglican way, it is said. We are not a confessing church. We are not a doctrinal church. That is the story that is put forward with it seems to me a complete innocence of the historical record.
I have just been deep into the study of Cranmer and the classic prayer books. They are from top to bottom doctrinal documents. The liturgy of the first prayer books is the catholic liturgy of Latin Christianity scoured by a thoroughgoing subjection to scripture. Wherever possible Cranmer used the actual words of scripture so that the original prayer books are overwhelming bible books. Cranmer had a thoroughgoing doctrinal standard and that was the doctrine of unearned grace which is apprehended through faith. Anything that countered that doctrine was ruthlessly excluded from the first books. It is true that the use of the book was accepted as adequate subscription to the doctrine and that there was an English unwillingness to engage in inquisitorial investigations. It is true that rubrics were constructed in such a way as to allow for a range of churchmanship. Though the range is not comprehensive by modern standards and much of the range of churchmanship that has existed in the history of Anglicanism has existed not because of the original settlement but because of an imposition on the charity of the English people, of bishops and other authorities.
To say that the classic prayer books of Anglicanism define an Anglican way that is agnostic with regard to doctrine beggars the imagination. How can it be that Reformation people in the end established a system that was indifferent to the doctrines over which the Reformation was fought and for which our worthiest divines gave their lives? It is interesting that the history we are given by Bishop Sauls never mentions the 39 Articles. It was not possible to exercise any office in the Church of England without signing these articles. If you want to appeal to the Elizabethan settlement you must surely appeal to the Articles as well, for it is the Articles that give the context in which the Prayer Book is to be used.
Bishop Sauls is exporting anachronistically to the time of Cranmer and Elizabeth notions of pluralism and the inherent inaccessibility of truth that are the products of our post-modern time. Argue for these things if you will but do not say that they have always been what Anglicanism has been about. Anglicanism has always been about Apostolic and Patristic Christianity which seeks in every way to give the scriptures the governing role in the church.
A religion which requires no definite doctrinal confession and which is agnostic about the existence of ultimate truth and which makes of bishops theological innovators rather than protectors of what has been once handed on to the saints is a completely contemporary invention. It is an example of an attempt to make the Christian religion work in terms of axioms that are fundamentally hostile to it. This religion is an attempt to synthesize the faith of the catholic church and the faith of the reformers with the dogma of uncertainty that is a foundation to post-modernism. It is bound in the end to fail. Trying to find the bona fides of such a religion in the history of the English Reformation or the Elizabethan Settlement is an extreme example of historical revisionism. The historical facts and documents simply will not bear the thesis out.