Faith seeking redefinition: beginning with God

(The second post in a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)

At the risk of a gross generalisation, there are two broad approaches to thinking about life, the universe and everything. One is to start with where we are, and the other is to look for a secure place to begin our exploration. The former will tend towards the muddled, and often leads to the view expressed by the proverbial Irish countryman “If I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here.” The latter is rather prone to tie things up too tightly, and fails in the process to recognise the situational bias of the starting place. (Look at the dualist ghost Descartes created to haunt Western thought!)

At the Reformation, Calvinism went for the tidy option by beginning the Westminster Confession with statements about the foundational nature of the Scriptures. The Anglican Reformers went for the messy option by jumping straight in with what the Church believed about God.

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The following four articles continue in this vein, spelling out aspects of the Christian understanding of God as the late mediaeval and early modern church had received it. There is no blank slate to start with. I intend to come back to the content of the article in a subsequent post – not least because one of the taken-for-granted aspects of the article is the now strongly contested idea of divine impassibility. For the remainder of this post, I want to make some observations about the method.

There are those who wish to claim that the Church of England began with Henry’s need for divorce. That is not, and never has been, Anglican self-understanding. The Church of England, from its own historical viewpoint, is the Church founded by Christ on the apostles, and proclaiming the faith once delivered to the saints, now stripped of the impure encrustations of mediaeval Romanists. This rooting of Anglican faith in the classic tradition of the Church is one that continues in its major early writers, and should not be overlooked. It is also of a part with an attachment to the Vincentian canon, that the Anglican Church holds to “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus).

That is obviously a tendentious self-understanding at every point, not least in the attachment (shared with other magisterial Reformers) to a myth of a patristic golden age. An important side effect of it, however, is a sense of the Church’s doctrine as more than simply an Anglican affair. So, for example, Hooker could appreciate that while wrong, Roman Catholics could nonetheless be Christians. While they might have a faulty doctrine of justification by faith, the faith they had was faith in the blessed Trinity, and they like we are justified by faith, not by having a right doctrine of justification. This upset some Puritans – and continues to give problems to some of their successors.

By putting this doctrine of God first, the articles stake a claim to the mainstream Christian tradition before they attend to controversial matters. What all Christians believe about God is more important than what they believe about anything else. That people belong to a community believing in God comes before the working out of the hows and whys of that believing. We should probably not overlook the political aspects of this: Elizabeth and her advisers intended the Church of England to be the English nation at prayer and before God. Exclusions therefore needs to be minimal, and inclusion maximal. The unity of God should unify the nation.

That ambition was never to be completely fulfilled, and as time went on came to be seen first as unfeasible and then as no longer desirable. Nonetheless in it lie the more positive roots of what is sometimes now simply dismissed as “Anglican fudge”. When set against either the Thirty Years War ravaging continental Europe, or the upheaval of the English Civil War, a desire to pay more attention to what unites us than divides us looks rather more attractive.

Beginning where we are, for the Church of England, at its best puts a greater emphasis on God and the Church’s worship of the Blessed Trinity. It puts an emphasis on the common doctrine of the Catholic Church and the received inheritance of the patristic era. It takes what has received, and then works out how to live that out in a time of upheaval and controversy. It acknowledges the practical and political implications of doctrinal statements. It is resistant to grand schemes.

The Church of England simply doesn’t do systematic theology – the nearest any of its early writers ever came was the deeply pragmatic Laws of Ecclesiatical Polity, whose title alone is a giveaway of where the emphasis lies. There have always been those for whom that is seen as weakness more than strength. Lack of grand systems can lead to mess and muddle, to competing visions and no mechanism for resolving them. Is that the glory or the shame of the Anglican Church? I guess the jury’s still out on that one.

Tagged as: 39 articles, anglican, methodology