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Essentials of Anglican Identity

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Essentials of Anglican Identity A WONDERFUL ORDER: ESSENTIALS OF ANGLICAN IDENTITY Vocations Day, Gordon Square, Saturday 30 November 2013 by Colin Podmore I’m delighted to be with you. The fact that God is calling so many from within the catholic tradition to serve him and us as deacons and priests in the Church of England, and that so many are responding to that vocation, is a great sign of hope for the future. Fr Brownsell has asked me to talk from an historical point of view about the Church of England’s identity as ‘part of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church’. He also asked me to comment on how we can function within the Church of England as she is, so I’ll preface my talk with some brief comments about that. One thing that depresses me about some of our clergy and ordinands (and it is not their fault but the fault of those who teach and guide them) is that they have a remarkable degree of familiarity with the liturgy, rubrics, canons and conciliar documents of another church (fine in itself), but combined with a remarkable ignorance of the liturgy, rubrics, canons and other fundamental documents of our own church. What is worse, such people have a tendency to identify what is Roman as ‘catholic’ and what is Anglican as ‘protestant’. If we regard our own church and tradition as protestant, we have no business as catholics to be in it; if we portray the Church of England as such, we can hardly complain if she behaves accordingly. Our vocation is to recall the Church of England to her true identity as part of the one, holy catholic and apostolic Church, and to promote her catholic identity. We can do that by working with the grain of the Anglican tradition, by being visibly and audibly Anglican. That gives us permission to reproach others when they pursue innovations which conflict with the catholic identity of our church and its tradition. What’s in a name? Names are often central to the identity of people and groups, so it is perhaps with our names that the search for Anglican identity should begin.1 Many churches have a name that contains within it a theological programme – a denomination. ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Wesleyan’ refer to the teachings of individuals, while ‘Baptist’ highlights a belief and practice. Even the name we use for the Roman Catholic Church highlights the role within it of the Bishop of Rome. But though Thomas Cranmer played an important part in the Reformation of the English Church and Richard Hooker was one of its first defenders against those who wanted to overthrow its structure and tradition, we are not Cranmerians or Hookerites. Our church is not named after an individual, a belief or a practice. ‘Church of England’ and ‘Anglican’ tell us nothing about doctrine: neither of them is a denominational name at all. So where does our name come from? The Church of England’s separate identity as an autonomous church began in the 1530s, when Henry VIII took the Church of England out of Europe. (In modern terms, it was like withdrawing from the European Union.) To change the metaphor, Henry VIII was Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher rolled into one. He first nationalized the English branch of a multinational corporation, the Western Catholic Church, and then proceeded to privatize significant parts of it – in particular the monasteries and their lands, which he passed on to his supporters. Our separate identity begins from that point, but that wasn’t when the Church of England began, and its name didn’t begin then either. In the 1 References for many of the facts and quotations that are not specifically attributed in these addresses may be found in my book: C. J. Podmore, Aspects of Anglican Identity (Church House Publishing: London, 2005). 1 middle ages the English Church had its own identity as a national church within the wider western Church, in communion with the see of Rome. In Latin, it was called Ecclesia Anglicana, which simply means ‘the English Church’. Long before the Reformation (from the fourteenth century onwards) Ecclesia Anglicana was commonly translated ‘Church of England’. That name was not invented by Henry VIII. Indeed, his whole point was that he was not founding a new church but rather detaching the existing English Church from Rome. ‘Anglican’ is just a churchy way of translating the Latin word ‘Anglicana’. It simply means ‘English’. Unlike the names of other churches it doesn’t tell you anything about theology at all. So much for the name ‘Anglican’, but what about ‘Anglicanism’? That term was first used in 1837, by John Henry Newman. Just ten years later, in 1847 the name ‘Anglican Communion’ was first used to identify the family of churches that had come to be associated by then with the Church of England. I don’t think it’s an accident that the terms ‘Anglican Communion’ and ‘Anglicanism’ came into use at around the same time. The Church of England’s name is its programme – simply to be the church of and for the English nation. It’s the church to which every baptized person in England has the right to belong and from which everyone in England has a right to seek pastoral care. But that definition wasn’t sufficient when the Church of England was extended throughout the world. A different name was needed – one that referred to the overseas churches’ English origins without actually describing them as ‘English’. The name ‘Anglican’ tells us something about those churches (where their tradition came from), but it tells us nothing about the Church of England – beyond the tautology or truism that the English Church embodies and reflects the English religious tradition. The ‘Historic Formularies of the Church of England’ If our names don’t help us very much, what of our formularies? When Lutheran and Reformed Christians encounter the Church of England they tend to look for a ‘confession’ (comparable with the Augsburg Confession for example) – a statement of beliefs offering a doctrinal or confessional basis for the Church of England. They open the Prayer Book and find the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, which are printed there with our other two ‘historic formularies’, the Book of Common Prayer itself and the Ordinal (ordination services). ‘Aha,’ they say, ‘there is your confession.’ But the Thirty-nine Articles don’t play the same part in the Church of England’s life as the confessions still do in many Lutheran and Reformed churches, and arguably they never had quite the same role. The Canons of 1604 required the clergy not only to declare their assent to the Thirty-nine Articles but also to acknowledge that the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal contained nothing contrary to the word of God, and to promise to use the Prayer Book exclusively in public worship. That is very significant. The Prayer Book and the Ordinal thereby became associated with the Articles as part of what Continental Protestants would call the ‘confessional basis’ of the Church of England. Lex orandi, lex credendi (the idea that the way we worship expresses what we believe) was to become and remain the classical Anglican approach. So it’s important always to look at the three ‘historic formularies’ together; on their own, the Articles can give only a partial impression of what Anglicans believe. The Articles are moderately Calvinist in their theology, but when the phrasing is examined it becomes apparent time and time again that they were designed not to tie things down with tight definitions but rather to include as broad a range of people as possible. That has remained a typically Anglican approach. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church puts it thus: 2 ‘Though not ostensibly vague, they avoid unduly narrow definition. Much variety of interpretation has been put upon many of them without improperly straining the text, and probably this licence was deliberately intended by their framers.’ But the Articles do exclude Roman Catholics on the one side and Puritans on the other, and the policy of ‘comprehension’ (we would call it ‘inclusion’ in modern English) that they reflect was ‘ “comprehension” of a (limited) variety of views’.2 It would be quite wrong and unhistorical to project back onto the sixteenth-century Church of England a sort of ‘anything goes’ diversity that some believe the Church of England should now embody.3 Unlike some Reformed confessions of faith, the Thirty-nine Articles begin with five articles on God and Christ taken straight from the Early Church. Oliver O’Donovan has commented, ‘We must not miss the significance of the fact that they are the first five articles. Even if the English Reformers had nothing new to say about God and Christ, they were not to be discouraged from saying something old.’4 The Church of England exists not in order to say something new or different, but to say what the Church has always said. Today, the Church of England’s attitude to all three ‘historic formularies’ is somewhat more nuanced than it once was. The doctrine of the Church of England is identified in Canon A 5: ‘The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.’ The primary reference points are not a sixteenth-century document but in the first place the Holy Scriptures and then secondly ‘such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures’.
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