On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity

Preface to the Second Edition

In offering the public a new edition of this book 25 years after its first appearance I have done no more than remove an occasional word or adjust the punctuation, to make the reader’s journey a little smoother. Otherwise the confident and voluble voice that raised itself 25 years ago is heard as it spoke then, with all its now-unidiomatic he’s and his’s. Without being too indulgent to our own faults, we owe our younger selves a modicum of respect, and it does nothing for a writer’s integrity if the thoughts of youth are constantly checked and corrected by age. I must report, however, that I now feel some discomfort at the unsympathetic reading that I gave the Lambeth Quadrilateral (p. 96).

The past quarter-century has been kind to the study of Anglican history, and were the book to be written afresh, there would be much to expand upon. Diarmaid McCullough’s biography of Cranmer and Eamon Duffy’s controversial probings of English piety on the verge of Reformation have changed the whole tone of historians’ treatment of the Tudor period. New views have been opened up on what may still be thought of as the classic period of Anglican life and letters through a new appreciation of the long undervalued achievement of the Scottish Anglican King James VI/I. The era of Establishment Anglicanism, too, 1662-1832, has appeared in a new and exciting light as the result of the work of J. C. D. Clark. But to go into these matters, however enticing, would be to lose the thrust of the book, which marginalized historical and textual context to make space for the Anglican Reformers to intervene conversationally in our contemporary theological questioning. This is a work of high catechetics rather than scholarship.

In 1985 I gave little thought to the other partner in this conversation, the ‘we’ who turn to Tudor Christianity as a source of understanding. Various facets of Anglican experience are simply missing from this book. Nothing is said of the polar tension between high-church and low-church (an echo of that between Tory and Whig in secular politics), the fruit of the English Civil War and the Ejection which followed the failure of reconciliation in 1662. (Have we ever sufficiently appreciated what it meant that in Britain alone the seventeenth-century civil-religious wars pitted Protestants directly against Protestants?) Also passed over is the international missionary expansion which transformed the Anglican churches into a worldwide communion by the end of the nineteenth century. These omissions were defensible, even necessary, given the aim of the book, but would be difficult to sustain if the book were written today, now that the future of the Anglican family of churches has become a matter of doubt. Being an Anglican Christian over the past quarter-century has indeed been a heart-in-mouth ride. Mutual excommunications by Anglican bishops, counter-dioceses set up in opposition to one another, primates refusing to receive communion together at the hand of the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘flying bishops’ criss-crossing the country to visit parishes which will have no truck with their diocesans, all these bewildering experiences have transformed the nature of the Anglican identity. And, finally, there is ‘the Covenant’, an instrument which seems to some to sound with a perturbingly un-Anglican note.

I mention one other factor, less observed but probably of greater significance than all the others: the general disuse of the Book of Common Prayer, even in England where its position is protected by law. A church that conceived its relation to doctrine liturgically — for that was Thomas Cranmer’s chief legacy — was bound to be deeply tied to the language of its prayer. If the first cause of the Anglican Reformation was the English Bible, its decisive form was the English Prayer Book. For many generations it could plausibly be said that Anglicans needed no ongoing conversation with the Articles or other Reformation documents, since their shared liturgical texts and translation of the Bible gave sufficient content to the claim that the rule of prayer was the rule of faith. Anglican forms of prayer and Christian belief were transported across the globe on the sea-going vessels of the English language. And if, as some now prognosticate, the Anglican communion will shortly disappear from the family of Christian churches, that will be due not least to the dissolution of the language formerly called ‘modern English’ into a structureless lingua franca of the worldwide web. New liturgies, already replacing the common book when this essay first appeared, were an attempt — unavoidable, and by no means badly conceived — to respond to the instability of the linguistic culture. Today we are offered a variety of national liturgies only loosely associated by family-resemblances. If they sound a little mealy-mouthed and already old-fashioned, that is a measure of the speed with which the catastrophe of the English language has occurred, and of the strategy adopted to meet it, which made a virtue of avoiding elaboration. There is no point in bewailing the linguistic loss or in being ungrateful to the liturgists, who have, perhaps, given us the best that an inarticulate age is capable of using. But the traditional Anglican way of moderating its self-understanding has, on any account, ceased to operate. The prayer-book which still holds a normative place in Anglican constitutions is one which few use for prayer and fewer still recognize quotations from, and that is why unfamiliar instruments like ‘the Covenant’ have become indispensible. If we are to hand on to future generations something of what we have received, what is needed is a new and very deliberate return — at a catechetical and not only a scholarly level York bridal shop to the study of our Anglican sources.

The Articles are only one small piece of this task. There is much that they cannot teach as well as much that they can. One thing, however, they might teach us at this juncture: how the church should proceed in a crisis of inner conflict. The matter is highlighted in Article 26 (27 in Cranmer’s sequence), one of two Articles which in 1985 I passed over in silence. (The other omission, more pardonable, was the catalogue of Homilies in Article 35.) Article 26 upholds the view common to the Western church since Augustine’s polemical campaign against the Donatists that sacraments may be valid and effective for salvation even when performed by unfit ministers. The implications of this doctrine are worked out with remarkable coolness of nerve by Thomas Aquinas, for whom even rank unbelief on the part of the priest cannot stop God honouring the sign that Christ has instituted. The reality of what takes place there can be annulled only by a determined and clear intention on the minister’s part not to celebrate the sacrament but to subvert it: ‘when one does not intend to confer the sacrament, but to perform a parody of it — especially when that is made obvious to everyone else’.

The substance of the Article was lifted whole by Cranmer from an earlier composition of his own, the Thirteen Articles of agreement with Lutheran theologians in 1538, where it marked a convergence between Lutheran horror of Anabaptist sectarianism and the Anglican hope of accomplishing a reformation from within — by episcopal inquisition, as he added in 1553, and by the power of ecclesiastical appointments. To it he then attached a title, ‘The wickedness of the ministers doth not take away the effectual operation of God’s ordinances’, which, as Stephen Mark Holmes has realized, was drawn from an unlikely source, the arguments of the late thirteenth-century scholastic William Durandus in support of the effectiveness ex opere operato of the consecration of the eucharistic elements — a typical example of the Archbishop’s unbridled eclecticism.

Parker made a change to the title in 1571, replacing Cranmer’s ‘wickedness’ with ‘unworthiness’, and it is reasonable to suppose that this was to emphasize that the clerical inadequacy which could not invalidate a sacrament did not stop with moral delinquency but included theological error. That is to say, he sharpened the focus of the Article to discourage popular initiative in passing judgment on the theological stance of particular priests, a practice which could quickly destroy the parochial and diocesan system, as it has begun to in our own day. In 1560 Parker had been presented with the Scots Confession of Faith, approved by the Scottish Parliament in the midst of dramatic political events and made possible by English military support. He must have been dismayed by its Article 22, ‘On the right administration of the sacraments’, which explains why ‘we flee the society of the Papistical kirk in participation of their sacraments’. The two grounds offered for this policy were, indeed, astonishing. Catholic priests, the Confession declared, were not properly ordained, for the double reason that they were not required to preach — what this might mean for Church of England clergy instructed to read the Homilies was alarming enough — and, ‘more horrible’ in the eyes of the Scots Reformers, that Catholic discipline permitted women to administer baptism in urgent need. The second ground for not participating in the Catholic Mass was that it was contaminated by unwarranted practices, like venerating the host, and by false understandings, like that of eucharistic sacrifice. These features of Catholic theory and practice had, of course, been condemned in the English Articles of Edward’s reign (29/28, 30/31), but without ever drawing the conclusion that Catholic priests were not ordained ministers, let alone that Catholic Eucharists were not valid sacraments of the Gospel. The Scots added pointedly that the sacrament demanded a correct understanding not merely on the part of the recipient but on the part of the minister, too: ‘the right use ceases ... if the teacher plainly teach false doctrine’. Those who spoke for the Scottish Reformation believed there was a ‘synagogue of Satan ... the church malignant’ set in opposition to the ‘immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ’ (Scots Confession Art. 18), and that is why the Reforming Parliament took the dramatic step of abolishing the mass. That no such action was undertaken by an English Parliament indicates how reluctant the leaders of the English Reformation were to invest ‘the Mass’ with any distinct ontological identity. There was no anti-sacrament, as there was no anti-church. The term ‘mass’ carried negative overtones, but if we take Cranmer’s own practice as a measure, it meant simply the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as overlaid by corruptions of practice and doctrine. The only question was how those corruptions were to be corrected. Thus the whole approach to Reformation was, as Secretary Cecil had warned the Scots leaders at the beginning, a different one. (That views of Reforming sympathizers in either country were not as homogeneous as the official texts should not, of course, be forgotten.)

Today we are in a position to appreciate the implications of Article 27/6 as rarely before. Of my assumption in 1985 that all was all such plain sailing with this Article that nothing needed to be said, I can only remark that what was coming on the Anglican churches was hidden from me. In the autumn of 1988 I observed at first hand the damage inflicted on Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenical discussions by the Lambeth Conference’s inability to establish a coherent approach to the ordination of women to the episcopate. That was the moment at which the anxious shape of the new era of Anglicanism first made an appearance; the more high-profile crises which followed simply gave sharper definition to what had emerged then. The presenting issue was a variant of that very one on which John Knox and his associates had thought the Catholics so lax. The Church of England itself, to the surprise of its sister-churches, has suffered far more anxiety over the consecration of women as bishops than over the liturgical recognition of same-sex partnerships. Also surprisingto observers both Protestant and Catholic is how much worse the anxiety has been than that which surrounded the ordination of women as priests. It seems to many that once the principle of women’s ordained ministry is conceded, it must extend to all orders. Anglican experience has not followed that logic for two reasons. One is a good reason, appreciated especially by Eastern Orthodox partners: a reflective doctrine of three orders of ministry, bishop, priest and deacon, understands them as different, offering distinct services to the life of the body. A bishop is not simply a ‘senior cleric’ but one entrusted with a special ministry with its own requirements. The other is a bad reason: doubt over the consecration of women as bishops affects not only their own episcopal orders but the orders of priests and deacons whom they have ordained, or who are ordained in turn by men whom a woman has ordained. The Article might have warded off this vertiginous nightmare, which is induced by a failure to apply its principle to formal defects in orders — a curious inversion of the order of importance! This limitation effectively subverts the doctrine, making the validity of a sacrament depend upon its most accidental features.

How, we are currently asking ourselves, can a House of Bishops containing both men and women function as a collegial body, and how can it even worship together when some male bishops do not believe that their female colleagues are bishops at all, or even priests? Perhaps, instructed by this Article, those bishops might reason like this: ‘I could never take part in the consecration of a woman, and I should not hide, in public or in private, my belief that a false step has been made. I cannot cease to pray that the Church will recognize its error and withdraw from it. Yet I can see that it was made in good faith, the Church believing (wrongly) that it exercised a power that the Spirit had granted it. The Church which consecrates women intends, in the scholastic phrase, to do what the church does, meaning them to be bishops in the sense that the church has always had bishops. So I can, and must, relate to this church as to the church of Jesus Christ - though fallen into error, which is no new thing. I may not forget the promise made to a church that can sometimes err, that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it and that Christ is in its midst. I can relate to its consenting bishops and pseudo-bishops as to partners in the Gospel who have overreached themselves in their zeal, not as to those who have fallen away from Christ. I shall refuse to receive communion when a woman celebrates — for though these are not the only defective eucharists to be found, these are the ones that demand a public witness from me. But I need not withdraw from receiving communion with the consenting bishops and pseudo-bishops, for they are Christians heeding the Lord’s invitation. I need not refuse the ministry of a male priest who has received ordination in good faith from a woman bishop, though, if he asks it, I should confer conditional ordination on him for his conscience’s sake. I bitterly regret the breaches in church-order which demand these compromises, but a broken church-order must be helped to grow whole again, not broken further. Unity remains the overarching imperative in church order, even in a débacle such as this. My colleagues do not see how their acts damage the unity of the church. Would that excuse me, who do see it, if I damaged it further?’

How, on the other hand, might a woman member of the House of Bishops view her position beside those who disbelieve the reality of her consecration? ‘The Holy Spirit led the Church to take this step, and in accepting consecration I have declared it a true discernment of God’s will. I cannot allow that conviction constantly to be brought into question. But that is what I would allow if I were constantly put out of countenance by those who doubt it. I was asked for a courageous discernment to match the courageous discernment of the church. What would my response be worth if it could not cope with the ambiguities? I acted in full knowledge that there were bishops who conscientiously opposed the step, and I said that I respected their position. Now I must prove as much by showing cheerful patience. If I fail at this point, I show that I acted without due consideration. Continual wrong-footing of opponents and demands to exercise my rightful powers would simply confirm that I did not believe that my calling was from God. Those in my diocese who cannot bring themselves to receive the sacraments from me have a harder part than I do, since the Church has judged them mistaken. They will need all the sympathy that I and my male assistants can give them in coming to terms with their position. I can prove my episcopal authority only as Jesus proved his, by care and oversight courageously and sacrificially expressed, wherever and in whatever ways are opened to me. If I look for opportunities to be the bishop that I am, I shall not find myself without work. I will know frustrations, as have those male bishops who participated in the ordination of women as priests. In accepting these graciously, they have not lost authority, and neither shall I. We all need time and experience, for the process of reception will only be complete when we turn round and look at one another and wonder what the fuss was about. The best way to help it forward is not to be fretful.’

With this modest proposal I must leave the Anglican churches to the future God holds for them and this book to the readers it may find on its new excursion. I hope I may be forgiven one personal remark. My satisfaction that this book continues to be asked for is enhanced by the memory of Fr. George Schner SJ of Toronto, whose role in its genesis I noted in my 1985 Introduction. When in 2000 he died suddenly at the age of 50, Canada lost its finest theological teacher and Anglicans a sincere friend. Those who were never in a classroom with him will scarcely understand the impact he made on his generation, which derived from an extraordinary capacity to read and to teach others to read. (I like to boast that I learned to read Karl Barth from a Jesuit.) He had other rarely combined talents, those of a fine organist, a gourmet cook and a skilled psychotherapist, all mediated through a personality of endearing eccentricity. When he died, I wrote: ‘Feeling around the interstices of one’s life in search of the missing friend, like a tongue feeling around the mouth for a missing tooth, we have known just how much we received from the friendship. Even as we cry, The Lord is taking from Jerusalem both stay and staff! (Isa. 3.1), we realize that a stay and a staff is precisely what we have had .... Good people contribute to our becoming good. What we take from them becomes ourselves. Not to have known and loved them would be like not having been.’

New College, Edinburgh

Epiphany 2011

Introduction

What excuses can I make to the reader of theological books for asking him to entertain, in this ‘conversation’ with Tudor Christianity, a rather self-indulgent undertaking? It is evident to myself, and will be more so to others, that I have no qualifications to write a historical work about the sixteenth century church; while such credit as I might have as a theologian will quickly be dispelled, it must seem, by my grave lack of seriousness — I having it in mind neither to raise disturbing questions about faith for someone else to answer, nor to reflect inconclusively on a multitude of theological methodologies, nor even to ‘reconstruct’ theology by way of a new synthesis with the social sciences! I am driven back upon the lame defence that this is the kind of enterprise which theologians ought from time to time to set their hands to.

It is intended as a conversation with a Christian text from the past, the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England. It is not a study of that text, for that would imply that the text itself had become the sole objection of attention. In conducting a study the scholar puts his intellectual powers completely at the service of the text, and makes it his only business to enable the text to speak clearly. It is a weakness in his work if his own concerns and the fashions of his time intrude. What