What of Anglo-Catholicism? - A Personal Assessment
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
January 25, 2103
If the authentic Anglican Way is meant to be Cranmerian and Confessional according to our standards compiled in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 (Liturgy, Ordinal, Articles) what is to be the Evangelical assessment of the continuing Roman Way advocated by the Tractarians and their heirs? There has been much bitterness in the past and mutual scolding.
The Evangelical baulks at Catholic ecclesiology, sacramentalism, and a consequent soteriology that offends in terms of the way in which Christ is grasped and salvation gained. The more the rescue effected by our Lord is examined in its details the more the rift widens. Former Evangelicals were horrified at the features of Puseyism and strongly castigated its convictions. The battle was not only internal and within the Church of England. In the 19th century Scots, Americans, and Continentals also took up their cudgels in great alarm. William Cunningham, Merle D'Aubigne, Abraham Kuyper, and C.P. McIlvaine took a line similar to J.C. Ryle and Hugh McNeile in their response to the High Churchmen who were adversely influencing the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion.
Theologically the differences still prevail and the differences are beyond reconciliation. Evangelicals must contend for the Reformational character of the Anglican constitution. Anglo-Catholics will be vigorous in defending their point of view which is deeply valued by them. From the Reformed position there should be no compromise. The truths we hold dear tower above any other consideration. Christ in the revelation of his free grace towards us is exceedingly dear - and yet so is he to so many Roman and Anglo Catholics. There is a tension of faith and yet often the experience of fellowship.
Doctrine matters as an urgent priority, and yet there can be a meeting in a common piety in which Jesus enables us to transcend the boundaries ruled by the intellect. None of us is fully orthodox intellectually - sin and prejudice cramp our style. None of us are fully defined by our theological stance. Nor is our soul life completely in accord with our cerebral perceptions. We are a mess, unfathomable to ourselves, and only our Saviour has access to the chambers of the heart. We do not truly know ourselves, which is why we register shock when some convulsion or other in our lives brings some horrific reaction or trait to the surface (which we struggle to deny). Somewhere at our very core God creates a reliance solely upon his mercy and our tongues are not in touch, nor our minds keeping pace, with the mysterious operations of grace. Calvinists can be mean, selfish, and ruthlessly ambitious. Catholics can be mild, generous, and channels of divine love and peace. There is a sense in which our doctrinal militancy has also to be controlled by a charitable modesty. Adherence to the Confessions of the past should not necessarily mean the repetition of the vehement and violent conflicts of the past. Such a delicate balance in the human mind was maintained by some of the greatest advocates of Anglican Reformed Catholicism who were even counter cultural in eras of markedly hostile controversy e.g. Cranmer himself and those giants among Christian men such as Archbishop Ussher (of whom one keen opponent kept a portrait in his personal study), and Bishops Joseph Hall and John Davenant. In theological debate our brains must be acute, our hearts aflame, but may God prevent our blood from boiling.
Again, the personal inner collision is between Confessional conviction and Christian confraternity. The coupling of truth with love is not easily maintained and history shows how both sides have failed signally. To succeed is humanly impossible. We must be prayerful and penitent. This is not to minimize our outright detestation of vicious and aggressive heresy, and in that case, even in a climate where capital punishment was universally (Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed) recommended for or meted out to perpetrators of dangerous doctrinal error we have a precedent established by Jean Calvin to approach the heretic and strive for their conversion (as did Calvin in the case of Servetus - even the Catholic authorities and mild Melancthon believed that the Spaniard should die for his audacious mischief).
Somehow the Lord Jesus guides his chosen to faith through the maze of theological opinion whenever the heart sincerely thirsts for God and his righteousness. We are more confused than we are prepared to admit, and such are our limitations that the things we see with clarity can often blinker us to other facts evident on a broader panorama. Our doctrine is one examination of our position before God, but who can monitor the transactions between God and the soul at our profoundest level? This is why the prayers of a believer are sometimes a safer gauge to the health of the heart.
Our plea should be to see Christ in his majesty and mercy, his grace and glory, to the fullest extent possible. Our doctrine is the description of what we see. That is why it must be carefully framed. Our devotion derives its quality from the reality of Christ within. Sometimes we do not match the two too well.
With reluctance, in a first person fashion, which is best avoided, there follow some autobiographical points on the matter pertaining to persons of Catholic conviction.
My closest colleague in English parish ministry was an adorable Anglo-Catholic to whom I related in warmest friendship and upon whom I relied for spiritual counsel. We each respected the other and prayed and pastored together with never a rough word or any discourteousness. In a previous Ecumenical Project, in which Catholics did not formally participate, my closest companion was a Catholic priest who met to pray with us, and his letter was the kindest received when I was taking up a new appointment in another city. When I took compulsory annual retreats I did so in a Catholic convent and received much kind guidance from the Sister Superior, a German, who insisted we should meet together and recommended the Scripture passages for my meditation. When a person from my first parish as an incumbent married a member of the Catholic Church I was invited, to my amazement, to officiate over the central portion of the service. When I was in theological difficulty from time to time, dealing with the destructiveness of modernism/liberalism, I was greatly helped through reading Catholic and Anglo-Catholic authors such as Michael Ramsey, Michael Marshall, Eric Mascall, Dame Maria Boulding, Carlo Carretto, and Sister Ruth Burrows. I greatly love William Harmless on Augustine, Robert Faricy on prayer, and the works of Gerald O'Collins. Objections to Catholicism do not arise from personal animosity. I frequently use the Jerusalem Bible with much appreciation, having read the extensive notes of editor Alexander Jones whilst on retreat, and have also based private devotions on the text of Daily Prayer from The Divine Office (RCC). There have been many other pleasing and beneficial contacts with both varieties of Catholicism.
It is possible to cultivate warm relations with folk who are manifestly "in Christ" when there is disagreement as to how we "enter Christ". There can be Credal harmony where Confessional details vary, just as John Elliot the Puritan missionary, in his isolation from like-minded fellowship, found Christian solace and friendship in a Roman Catholic priest ministering in the same region. William Whitaker, the principal hand behind the composition of the decidedly Calvinistic Lambeth Articles, greatly admired Thomas Aquinas, and James Ussher who modeled the now replaced Irish Articles on the Lambeth Articles was hugely admired by his Continental Catholic opponents. Professor David Brown, the Free Church of Scotland scholar and biblical commentator, opened and maintained correspondence with Cardinal Newman (who had lost no respect for his Evangelical mentors John Newton and Thomas Scott) and frequently visited him at The Oratory, taking to heart Newman's observation that Evangelicals paid less attention to the Gospels than to the Epistles and rectified the matter by writing his own commentary encompassing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Brown sent a copy of the Life of Dr. Duncan to Newman, and John "Rabbi" Duncan himself, a theologian and Hebraist of great expertise hailed Pusey as an Augustinian. Charles Spurgeon regarded Pusey on The Minor Prophets as "invaluable". The eminent Baptist felt it possible to turn to writers with whom he disagreed and "wash out the gold".
As Reformed Anglicans we must maintain a trenchant testimony toward what Alexander MacLaren called triumphant certainties, but recognize also with David Brown that, "Logic does not rule everything; that error is often self-inconsistent; and that some men are better than their creed, while other men are often worse than theirs. . . . He could make ample allowance for 'wood, hay, stubble,' on the true foundation, and believe that even good men may have helped to lay them there, whose work would certainly be burnt up in the end, though they themselves might be saved, yet so as by fire" (William Garden Blaikie).
Lively faith resides in every heart that humbly, earnestly, and with self-renunciation looks to and leans upon Jesus alone. Labels are indicative of the rational understanding and interpretation of the facts that furnish our faith in a conceptual sense. Trust and truth may not be equivalent in believing minds. The term "Anglican" is properly applicable to those standards formulated at the Reformation. Subscription is required of those in any ministerial or pastoral office. Membership is open to all sincere believers. The call of Evangelicals is to doctrinal clarity in adherence to Holy Scripture. It is a spiritual obligation incumbent upon clergy to pursue and uphold this clarity and to commend it to the people. Given that our Communion is now comprehensive of a variety of views the task is to urge all in pastoral office to return to Scriptural and Confessional roots and seek that unity, that one Gospel voice, that can, under God, achieve effective impact on a skeptical world. Let us honestly examine the propositions that we hold and band together in humble dependence upon the marvelous God of the Church and the Gospel.
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
January 25, 2103
If the authentic Anglican Way is meant to be Cranmerian and Confessional according to our standards compiled in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 (Liturgy, Ordinal, Articles) what is to be the Evangelical assessment of the continuing Roman Way advocated by the Tractarians and their heirs? There has been much bitterness in the past and mutual scolding. The Evangelical baulks at Catholic ecclesiology, sacramentalism, and a consequent soteriology that offends in terms of the way in which Christ is grasped and salvation gained. The more the rescue effected by our Lord is examined in its details the more the rift widens. Former Evangelicals were horrified at the features of Puseyism and strongly castigated its convictions. The battle was not only internal and within the Church of England. In the 19th century Scots, Americans, and Continentals also took up their cudgels in great alarm. William Cunningham, Merle D'Aubigne, Abraham Kuyper, and C.P. McIlvaine took a line similar to J.C. Ryle and Hugh McNeile in their response to the High Churchmen who were adversely influencing the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion.
Theologically the differences still prevail and the differences are beyond reconciliation. Evangelicals must contend for the Reformational character of the Anglican constitution. Anglo-Catholics will be vigorous in defending their point of view which is deeply valued by them. From the Reformed position there should be no compromise. The truths we hold dear tower above any other consideration. Christ in the revelation of his free grace towards us is exceedingly dear - and yet so is he to so many Roman and Anglo Catholics. There is a tension of faith and yet often the experience of fellowship.
Doctrine matters as an urgent priority, and yet there can be a meeting in a common piety in which Jesus enables us to transcend the boundaries ruled by the intellect. None of us is fully orthodox intellectually - sin and prejudice cramp our style. None of us are fully defined by our theological stance. Nor is our soul life completely in accord with our cerebral perceptions. We are a mess, unfathomable to ourselves, and only our Saviour has access to the chambers of the heart. We do not truly know ourselves, which is why we register shock when some convulsion or other in our lives brings some horrific reaction or trait to the surface (which we struggle to deny). Somewhere at our very core God creates a reliance solely upon his mercy and our tongues are not in touch, nor our minds keeping pace, with the mysterious operations of grace. Calvinists can be mean, selfish, and ruthlessly ambitious. Catholics can be mild, generous, and channels of divine love and peace. There is a sense in which our doctrinal militancy has also to be controlled by a charitable modesty. Adherence to the Confessions of the past should not necessarily mean the repetition of the vehement and violent conflicts of the past. Such a delicate balance in the human mind was maintained by some of the greatest advocates of Anglican Reformed Catholicism who were even counter cultural in eras of markedly hostile controversy e.g. Cranmer himself and those giants among Christian men such as Archbishop Ussher (of whom one keen opponent kept a portrait in his personal study), and Bishops Joseph Hall and John Davenant. In theological debate our brains must be acute, our hearts aflame, but may God prevent our blood from boiling.
Again, the personal inner collision is between Confessional conviction and Christian confraternity. The coupling of truth with love is not easily maintained and history shows how both sides have failed signally. To succeed is humanly impossible. We must be prayerful and penitent. This is not to minimize our outright detestation of vicious and aggressive heresy, and in that case, even in a climate where capital punishment was universally (Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed) recommended for or meted out to perpetrators of dangerous doctrinal error we have a precedent established by Jean Calvin to approach the heretic and strive for their conversion (as did Calvin in the case of Servetus - even the Catholic authorities and mild Melancthon believed that the Spaniard should die for his audacious mischief).
Somehow the Lord Jesus guides his chosen to faith through the maze of theological opinion whenever the heart sincerely thirsts for God and his righteousness. We are more confused than we are prepared to admit, and such are our limitations that the things we see with clarity can often blinker us to other facts evident on a broader panorama. Our doctrine is one examination of our position before God, but who can monitor the transactions between God and the soul at our profoundest level? This is why the prayers of a believer are sometimes a safer gauge to the health of the heart.
Our plea should be to see Christ in his majesty and mercy, his grace and glory, to the fullest extent possible. Our doctrine is the description of what we see. That is why it must be carefully framed. Our devotion derives its quality from the reality of Christ within. Sometimes we do not match the two too well.
With reluctance, in a first person fashion, which is best avoided, there follow some autobiographical points on the matter pertaining to persons of Catholic conviction.
My closest colleague in English parish ministry was an adorable Anglo-Catholic to whom I related in warmest friendship and upon whom I relied for spiritual counsel. We each respected the other and prayed and pastored together with never a rough word or any discourteousness. In a previous Ecumenical Project, in which Catholics did not formally participate, my closest companion was a Catholic priest who met to pray with us, and his letter was the kindest received when I was taking up a new appointment in another city. When I took compulsory annual retreats I did so in a Catholic convent and received much kind guidance from the Sister Superior, a German, who insisted we should meet together and recommended the Scripture passages for my meditation. When a person from my first parish as an incumbent married a member of the Catholic Church I was invited, to my amazement, to officiate over the central portion of the service. When I was in theological difficulty from time to time, dealing with the destructiveness of modernism/liberalism, I was greatly helped through reading Catholic and Anglo-Catholic authors such as Michael Ramsey, Michael Marshall, Eric Mascall, Dame Maria Boulding, Carlo Carretto, and Sister Ruth Burrows. I greatly love William Harmless on Augustine, Robert Faricy on prayer, and the works of Gerald O'Collins. Objections to Catholicism do not arise from personal animosity. I frequently use the Jerusalem Bible with much appreciation, having read the extensive notes of editor Alexander Jones whilst on retreat, and have also based private devotions on the text of Daily Prayer from The Divine Office (RCC). There have been many other pleasing and beneficial contacts with both varieties of Catholicism.
It is possible to cultivate warm relations with folk who are manifestly "in Christ" when there is disagreement as to how we "enter Christ". There can be Credal harmony where Confessional details vary, just as John Elliot the Puritan missionary, in his isolation from like-minded fellowship, found Christian solace and friendship in a Roman Catholic priest ministering in the same region. William Whitaker, the principal hand behind the composition of the decidedly Calvinistic Lambeth Articles, greatly admired Thomas Aquinas, and James Ussher who modeled the now replaced Irish Articles on the Lambeth Articles was hugely admired by his Continental Catholic opponents. Professor David Brown, the Free Church of Scotland scholar and biblical commentator, opened and maintained correspondence with Cardinal Newman (who had lost no respect for his Evangelical mentors John Newton and Thomas Scott) and frequently visited him at The Oratory, taking to heart Newman's observation that Evangelicals paid less attention to the Gospels than to the Epistles and rectified the matter by writing his own commentary encompassing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Brown sent a copy of the Life of Dr. Duncan to Newman, and John "Rabbi" Duncan himself, a theologian and Hebraist of great expertise hailed Pusey as an Augustinian. Charles Spurgeon regarded Pusey on The Minor Prophets as "invaluable". The eminent Baptist felt it possible to turn to writers with whom he disagreed and "wash out the gold".
As Reformed Anglicans we must maintain a trenchant testimony toward what Alexander MacLaren called triumphant certainties, but recognize also with David Brown that, "Logic does not rule everything; that error is often self-inconsistent; and that some men are better than their creed, while other men are often worse than theirs. . . . He could make ample allowance for 'wood, hay, stubble,' on the true foundation, and believe that even good men may have helped to lay them there, whose work would certainly be burnt up in the end, though they themselves might be saved, yet so as by fire" (William Garden Blaikie).
Lively faith resides in every heart that humbly, earnestly, and with self-renunciation looks to and leans upon Jesus alone. Labels are indicative of the rational understanding and interpretation of the facts that furnish our faith in a conceptual sense. Trust and truth may not be equivalent in believing minds. The term "Anglican" is properly applicable to those standards formulated at the Reformation. Subscription is required of those in any ministerial or pastoral office. Membership is open to all sincere believers. The call of Evangelicals is to doctrinal clarity in adherence to Holy Scripture. It is a spiritual obligation incumbent upon clergy to pursue and uphold this clarity and to commend it to the people. Given that our Communion is now comprehensive of a variety of views the task is to urge all in pastoral office to return to Scriptural and Confessional roots and seek that unity, that one Gospel voice, that can, under God, achieve effective impact on a skeptical world. Let us honestly examine the propositions that we hold and band together in humble dependence upon the marvelous God of the Church and the Gospel.
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church
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