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My last few posts have been straightforward about my growing conviction that to be Anglican is to be Reformed; that is, in the magisterial Protestant sort of way, drawing its inspiration from the figurehead Reformed leaders of a Calvin, Bucer, Zwingli, and the like. To read the 39 Articles should leave you thinking the same thing.[1] But to be Reformed in the Anglican way is slightly different than to be so in the way other Reformed churches have been and are. How so?
Let’s open up the Articles[2] and see how they present themselves.
Though most of the Articles have a sort of (negative) Anti-Roman flair, of particular interest for drawing out their (positive) Protestant character are Articles VI, XI, XII, XXV, IXXX, XXXI.
Drawn up as a list of analytic propositions, these Articles (constitutive of Anglican belief, mind you) could be put thus:
VI: All that is necessary for salvation and true spirituality is only and exclusively found within the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
XI: Justification, or right standing before God, is to be found only by faith in the objective and finished work of Jesus Christ.
XII: Good works are not meritorious to our salvation, but are only to be conceived as springing forth from a pre-existent faith.
XXV: The only sacraments that act as instruments of grace (i.e., those that are rightly called sacraments) are those of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism.
IXXX: The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is of such a nature that those who do not have faith in Christ do not truly receive the realities contained in the signs of bread and wine.
XXXI: The exclusive instrument for the satisfaction of God and the reconciliation of God and Man, effectual exclusively for the salvation of mankind, is that made by Jesus Christ. There neither is nor can be any propitiatory activity outside of his life and work alone.
Other propositions with Article-support:
- Ecumenical councils can err and sometimes have erred.
- The various historic churches (Antioch, Jerusalem, Rome) can err and have erred.
- Purgatory, or any sort of purgative intermediate dimension after death, is a fiction, unsupported by the Scriptures.
- Prayer to anyone or anything other than to the Triune God is unsupported by the Scriptures and a danger to a healthy spirituality.
- The Lord’s Supper does not contain the presence of Christ in a corporeal sense (see IXXX).
- The nature of man, after the fall, is adequately called totally depraved.
- Because of said depraved nature, the salvation of man, both in general and in particular, is always exclusively due to God’s initiatory activity in both predestination and election.
As one considers these propositions, it is clear that the picture that emerges tightens the field of what can be defined as Anglican identity. If the Thirty-Nine Articles are to be upheld (understood, remember, according to their literal and grammatical sense) as essential theological statements of Anglican belief, then these Reformed commitments must be in play.
Yet, there are also ways in which the Articles (as well as the Books of Homilies, the other authoritative Anglican theological document besides the Scriptures and the Prayer Book) might nuance this strong push I am making here for the “Reformed” character of Anglican identity. For one, many of those who hold to traditional Reformed theology list out the “five points” as summative of the broad commitments contained in the Reformed tradition. This isn’t always the case, of course, and there are important nuances to be highlighted. Yet, when reading the authoritative Anglican documents, one sees that it is not a requirement, for example, to hold to “particular redemption,” nor to “perseverance of the saints” (the latter of which is almost explicitly rejected in the Homily “A Sermon How Dangerous a Thing it is to Fall from God,” in book one of the Book of Homilies). When considered in comparison to a fold like the Lutherans, who also take issue with those two points, these facts give one the impression that to be Anglican is to be somewhere, roughly, between the two; Lutheran and Reformed, that is.
Anglicans don’t believe in the corporeal presence like Lutherans do, nor the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature, yet they would find room in the Anglican documents for rejecting both the “once saved always saved” formula as well as the limited atonement doctrine of the Reformed, and in that way would be like the Lutheran fold. Anglicans reject purgatory, adoration and invocation of the saints, meritorious charity unto salvation, and hold to original sin, total depravity, predestination and election, the mystical or spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper (alongside a general “receptionist” understanding), justification by faith alone, sola scriptura, and a general efficacy/applicability of the atonement.
Now, these are all points theological, and not necessarily indicative of any one necessary liturgical style. The liturgical rituals are not unimportant or disconnected from the doctrine (lex orandi lex credendi), but are not essentially connected to one version of churchmanship over another. That is something for the church to hash out and about which to converse.
Such it seems to me.
Soli Deo Gloria
[1] Many Anglican statements of belief today will claim to hold to the “literal and grammatical sense” of the Articles, thereby attempting to make this clearer, one would hope. See To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 133.
[2] The authorized version of the Book of Common Prayer (for most Anglican churches) is the 1662 version, which includes in it the Articles of Religion.
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