(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
Sometimes I wish I’d never started this series on the Anglican articles. I certainly feel like that when faced with what I find to be the viscerally repellent phrasing of the thirteenth. (I hope that my sense of repulsion has not totally affected my judgement!)
XIII Of Works before Justification
Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity: yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.
I have already argued in previous posts in this series that this whole discussion on faith and works is carried out on entirely the wrong basis, and neither the overarching concepts nor the specific formulations have any real basis in Paul’s writings, from whence they are fundamentally claimed to flow.
Behind this article lies the fundamental assertion that one cannot earn God’s grace and love, nor bootstrap one’s way to salvation. That assertion, although expressed with different foci by Jews and Christians, Catholics and Protestants, seems to me to be central to the biblical vision, which stresses God’s prior initiative and our lives as needing to be responsive.
Grace first is also a vision of a fundamentally good creation. But somewhere along the way, entangled in late mediaeval constructs, the article (and many other expressions of Reformation thought) obscures that central theme by turning God into some kind of morally deficient judge of a defective past creation, instead of the gracious sustainer of present creation, whose loving determination is active to bring all created being to its consummation.
The mercy of a God who judges all human deeds sinful unless they are performed by those that same mercy has brought to believe in Christ is scarcely mercy at all. In fact, whatever the article actually says, that can’t precisely be the Anglican reformers’ view, since they accept the salvation of the the faithful people of the Jewish covenants before Christ.
Going further, it seems to me that they have no real active concept of non-Christians, and neither make provision for, nor develop a theology of, God’s mission in the world. The assumption is that, living in a Christian commonwealth, every citizen is to be classified as believer, heretic or apostate. It may be possible to conceive of aliens as having another religion, but as the ghettoisation of Jews shows, their existence was deeply troubling. The assumption is that everyone is baptised, and so this article probably needs to be read in that light as talking about what activates that baptismal seed within them, doing good deeds because we wish to be loved, or doing good deeds because we have discovered that we are loved.
In today’s world, however, that Christendom assumption is plainly nonsense, and so the wording of the article seems even more nonsensical, if not simply appalling. If we truly have a vision of God’s creative and redemptive work (two different angles of looking at the same gracious purposeful loving action) focused and known in and through the sacrificial love of the Son of God who shares our humanity, then no person lives, speaks and acts without the grace of God sustaining their being, or themselves ever being less than the object of God’s determined and determining love.
How one comes to recognise that grace, and the ways in which people respond to that grace, are different questions for which the Church continues to need to work on its theology of mission — understood as embracing creation and redemption as its methods, and unity and consummation as its goal.
It seems to me that some atheists have been very palpable gifts of God’s grace to me, some by their friendship, and the goodness I have found in them, others by their protest against distorted pictures of God the church has wittingly or unwittingly perpetrated, others again by their pursuit of truth in the light of their reason and courage, in the face of a church that has not liked the challenge of uncomfortable truths. I am not prepared to say that these are not good deeds pleasing to God. And I am certainly not prepared to say that these are anything other than the working of God’s grace (however much my atheist friends may dislike that classification).
I hope and pray that they might (somehow, somewhere, somewhen) come to know how to name the God of that grace with gratitude, but ultimately that is God’s business and theirs. In the meantime, I shall continue to name him and thank him for them. In the light of my experience, the more generous reflections of our tradition (like the apologists’ logos spermatikos and the traditions of seeing our reasoning and relating nature as God-imaging) and above all a more hopeful reading of scripture, I have rather more sense of God as the one in whom we all live and move and have our being, who will not be so easily frustrated in his creative purposes, and who above all delights far more in his creation than the wording of this article suggests.
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I am very glad you started and that you continue this series. It takes a deal of somersaulting to turn these statements on their heads – where they need to be sometimes.
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