Canterbury Cross
This is not exhaustive and none of these is unique to Anglicanism. But, taken together, they begin to give a picture of what the Anglican tradition of Christianity is about. Among
other things, Anglican Christianity is:
Biblically Focused
“The
Holy Ghost rides most triumphantly in his own chariot [i.e., Scripture].”
“The
first [proposition] is this: If we believe in God at all, it is absurd and
impious to imagine that we can find him out by our own reason, without his
being first active in revealing himself to us. Therefore all our discovery of
him is his self-manifestation, and all rational theology is revealed
theology.”
Rooted in Tradition
Recognizing
that the Holy Spirit's inspiration is not limited to scripture, Anglican
Christianity looks to a broader foundation in the tradition of the Church, particularly the first five centuries:
“One
canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four
general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period –
the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the
boundary of our faith.”
Reasonable
However
hobbled by human sin, reason is an essential means of understanding what God
has revealed to us:
“The
Holy Ghost is not a bird of prey sent by God to peck out the eyes of
[humans].”
“And
this is the second proposition: If God does reveal himself to us, we cannot
acknowledge or master what he reveals without the use of reason. Therefore all
his self-manifestation is also our discovery of him, and all revealed theology
is rational theology.”
Centered in Worship and
Prayer
Anglicans
do theology “to the sound of church bells, for that is what Christian
theology really is all about – worshipping God the Savior through Jesus Christ
in the theology of the apostolic age.”
Sacramental
“Christ
said 'this is my body.' He did not say 'this is my body in this way'. We are in
agreement with you as to the end; the whole controversy is as to the method. As
to the 'This', we hold with firm faith that it is. As to the 'this is in this
way', (namely by the Transubstantiation of the bread into the body), as to the
method whereby it happens that it is, by means of In or With or Under or By
transition there is no word expressed [in Scripture]. And because there is no
word, we rightly make it not of faith; we place it perhaps among the theories
of the school, but not among the articles of the faith...We believe no less
than you that the presence is real. Concerning the method of the presence, we define
nothing rashly, and I add, we do not anxiously inquire, any more than how the
blood of Christ washes us in Baptism, any more than how the human and divine
natures are united in one Person in the Incarnation of Christ.”
“The
Eucharist demonstrates that material reality can become charged with Jesus'
life, and so proclaimed hope for the whole world of matter....The matter of the
Eucharist, carrying the presence of the risen Jesus, can only be a sign of
life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation...If the Eucharist
is a sign of the ultimate Lordship of Jesus, his 'freedom' to unite to himself
the whole material order as a symbol of grace, it speaks of creation itself,
and the place of Jesus in creation.”
Called to Communion
“God
hath created nothing simply for itself, but each thing in all things, and every
thing each part in other have such interest, that in the whole world nothing is
found whereunto any thing that is created can say, ‘I need thee not.’”
–
Richard Hooker (1554-1600), The Nature of Pride
“That
[humankind] is a community, that we all stand in a relation to each other, that
there is a public end and interest of society which each particular is obliged
to promote is the sum of morals.”
“The
Church is saying to the world, ‘he form of human community that's ultimately in
accord with God’s purpose and God’s nature is one in which these principles
apply: the principle of mutual enrichment when we receive the gifts of others,
and see and meet the one another's needs, and the converse, the mutual
impoverishment that happens when we forget or ignore the gift or the suffering
of others.’ The Church says to the world, ‘this is the kind of community that
makes God known; one that shows God's own nature and purpose. God’s nature as
one who is beyond all partisanship, all self-interest, whose whole being is
selflessness: that mystery which the doctrine of the Holy Trinity supremely
reveals for us.
What
that leads to is that every action in which that becomes real is, to use the
language of a later generation, a kind of sacrament: an effective supernatural
realization of God's nature and purpose within history. While we speak of the
sacramental acts of the Church gathered for worship, I think that the Bible
encourages us to believe that every action in which God's justice becomes
manifest is also sacramental in the sense that it shows God's future. For us to
be aware of that, to work and pray with it, is where the sacraments in the
narrower sense become important. The community gathered around the Lord's Table
is a sign of God's future.”
– Rowan Williams (1950- ), ‘No One Can Be Forgotten in
God's Kingdom’ a speech at the TEAM Conference in South Africa Friday 9th March
2007
Catholic and
Protestant/Evangelical
“Our
special character and, as we believe, our peculiar contribution to the
Universal Church, arises from the fact that owing to historic circumstances, we
have been enabled to combine in our one fellowship the traditional Faith and
Order of the Catholic Church with that immediacy of approach to God through
Christ to which the Evangelical Churches especially bear witness, and freedom
of intellectual inquiry, whereby the correlation of the Christian revelation
and advancing knowledge is constantly effected.”
Liberally Catholic and
Generously Orthodox
Anglican
Christianity seeks to embody a liberal catholicity/generous orthodoxy. It is
catholic/orthodox in its commitment to the consensus of the first centuries as
expressed in the early councils and the creeds. It is, as Charles Gore wrote, “conspicuously orthodox on the great fundamentals of the Trinity and the
Incarnation. [Anglicanism] accepts the ecumenical councils as criteria of
heresy.” It is liberal/generous in its ability to reexamine how that
consensus is applied in concrete historical contexts: “. . . standing
ready with the whole treasury of Christian truth unimpaired to meet the demands
which a new age makes upon it with its new developments of character and
circumstance.”
Anglican
Christianity avoids the extremes “represented by a dogmatism that crushes
instead of quickening the reason of the individual, making it purely passive
and acquiescent, and on the other hand by an unrestrained development of the
individual judgment which becomes eccentric and lawless just because it is
unrestrained.”
Passionate, but Patient
Anglican
Christianity is characterized by what Rowan Williams calls a “passionate
patience” that is reticent to declare too handily exactly how God is to
defined or to presume too easily to know what God desires in all instances.
Continuing with Williams, “There is in the Anglican identity a strong
element of awareness of the tragic, of the dark night and the frustration of
theory and order by the strangeness of God's work.” [ . . . ] “The
result is a mixture of poetry, reticence, humility before mystery, local
loyalties and painful self-scrutinies.”
Greetings! My main problem with Anglicanism is the limitation of the tradition to the first five centuries. It seems to be arbitrary. There were heresies after and before, as well councils, great theologians and so on. What changed? How the Church from the 7th century is different from the one in the 4th century, that it lost its authority to authoratively shape the Christian creed. Or perhaps I misunderstand the notion of tradition somehow... Could you please recommend some writings on this question?
ReplyDeleteThank you for commenting, MK. You raise some good questions. I don't know that Anglicans necessarily "limit" tradition to the first five centuries. But, it is safe to say they have historically given those early centuries a certain priority. It is also true that representatives like Charles Grafton, Charles Gore, and C. S. Lewis were suspicious of what they considered to be later theological innovations such as papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt is also clear though that Anglicans have embraced and been influenced by later tradition. Richard Hooker and others were influenced by Thomas Aquinas, for example.