Anglicanism is . . . 11. Committed to the Coinherence of all Humanity and All Creation

Like most Anglican commitments, this one goes deep into the early church. It only sound novel to us after some centuries of having our imaginations shaped by a way of reasoning that is reductive, materialistic, and disenchanting that looks at the rest of creation as a collection of things to be "objectively" studied and used rather than fellow creatures to be known and engaged with respect and reverence. Too often Christians have adopted that more recent way of understanding. We have sometimes forgotten if not denied that the world is charged with the grandeur of God and that everything and everyone is is woven together in relationship with God and each other. Denying that coinherence leads eventually to incoherence. Before we encounter anyone or anything, before we decide if they or it is "useful" to us, God is already is there, knowing and delighting. We are invited to share in that knowing and in that delighting. 

“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

“God is not so in any creature, nor any creature so in God, as Christ—whether we consider him as the personal Word of God, or as the natural Son of man. All other things that are of God nonetheless do have God in them, and he has them in himself. Yet because their substance and his wholly differ, their coherence and communion either with him or among themselves is in no way like that union between the Persons [of the Holy Trinity] discussed above.”

– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

 
“God is present by his essence; which, because it is infinite, cannot be contained within the limits of any place; and as the sun, reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores, is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonored when we suppose him in every one of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Holy Living
 
“The [intensity] whereby sometimes a man doteth upon one creature is but a little spark of that love, even towards all, that lurketh in his nature. We are made to love, both to satisfy the necessity of our active nature, and to answer the beauties in every creature. By Love our Souls are married and solder'd to the creatures and it is our Duty like God to be united to them all. We must love them infinitely, but in God, and for God and God in them: namely all His excellencies manifested in them. When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little. Never was anything in this world loved too much, but many things have been loved in a false way: and all in too short a measure..”
– Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), Centuries of Meditations
 
“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.”
– Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Sermon IX. Upon Forgiveness of Injuries

“All mankind is one volume.”

 – John Donne (1572-1631), Meditation XVII

 
“We are always in the condition that we are because of others. . .
 
The Christian idea was expressed in the phrase ‘bear ye one another’s burdens.’ It encouraged, indeed it demanded, a continual attention to the needs of one’s neighbor, to his [or her] distresses and his [or her] delights. And it defined ‘neighbor’ as meaning anyone with whom one was, by holy Luck, brought into contact. It required then, an active ‘sympathy,’ and it spoke of something still higher, of an active and nonselfish love. It went even farther. It declared a union of existences. It proclaimed that our own lives depended on the lives of our neighbors. Saint Anthony of Egypt laid down the doctrine in so many words: ‘Your life and your death are with your neighbor.’”

– Charles Williams (1886-1945), The Way of Exchange

“We are all limbs and parts of one Whole. Hence of each other.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Till We Have Faces

“The word 'human' refers to something more than the bodily form or even the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and women on the Earth.”

– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Perelandra

 
“God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.”
– Madeleine L’ Engle, (1918–2007), The Irrational Season

 
“The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation. . . It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness; it speaks about compassion.”
– Desmond Tutu (1931-2021), God Has a Dream

“The paradox, noted by a good many other commentators, is that our supposed ‘materialism’ is actually a deeply anti-material thing. The plain thereness of the physical world we inhabit tells us from our first emergence into consciousness that our will is not the foundation of everything—and so its proper working is essentially about creative adjustment to an agenda set not by our fantasy but by the qualities and complexities of what we encounter. The material world tells us that to be human is to be in dialogue with what is other: what is physically other, what is humanly other in the solid three-dimensionality of other persons, ultimately what is divinely other. And in a world created by the God Christians believe in, this otherness is always communicating: meaning arises in this encounter, it is not devised by our ingenuity.” 

– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Embracing Our Limits, Commonweal, September 23, 2015

“If you believe in a loving God who created all things and who wants to know and love all creatures in a relationship rooted in their freedom and willingness to participate, then we should expect that all human existence will be full of signposts, clues, and magnets toward the truth of God’s existence and love. Episcopalians believe that creation is embedded with clues and keys to seek and embrace God’s love. We are free to follow these natural and spiritual trails to their Creator, but we are not free to live in a world without them.”

– Patricia Lyons, What Is Evangelism?

“Worship, in all its grades and kinds, is the response of the creature to the Eternal: nor need we limit this definition to the human sphere. There is a sense in which we may think of the whole life of the Universe, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, as an act of worship, glorifying its Origin, Sustainer, and End.”

– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Worship

“First of all I don’t think the world is actually unenchanted. We are the ones who are failing to see what it is. So what I am interested in is not so much re-enchantment of the world as the undisenchantment of ourselves. Inside the word ‘enchantment’ is the word ‘chant’. In a sense, we have to hear the chant again. We have to tune our ears to it. But we have to chant in our turn. We have to make and shape the beautiful response to the beauty that we see. And that is part of reality.”

– Malcolm Guite (1957 - ), Malcolm Guite: We need to awaken the mind's attention, Re-Enchanting Podcast, Seen & Unseen Magazine

“[I]n God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself, that is in the eternal begetting of the Word and breathing forth of the Spirit, God also knows and loves all the ways in which creatures might participate in the God’s life through God’s gift of each creature’s existence.

. . . Christians have understood the whole universe as the expression in time and space of God’s infinite activity of knowing and loving, that is, of God being the Trinity. This means there is a rich depth of intelligibility that rational creatures (humans and angels in particular) are all to apprehend and appreciate.; and it means there is an ultimate truth of all creatures, recoverable beyond all the world’s incoherence and violence―a living truth that is imperishably known and loved in God’s beloved Child from eternity, incarnate in Christ yet rejected by the world, and finally vindicated and brought to newness of life in Christ’s resurrection.”
– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition

“Christ the Word incarnate, who bears within himself God’s eternal knowing and loving of every creature, draws the whole world to himself; in his dying sin’s mendacious and abusive grip on every creature is undone and, in his rising, the deep truth and goodness of every creature is vindicated and brought fully to life.”

– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition

“The Christian community, desiring to share ever more fully in Christ’s dying and rising again, develops a new understanding of humanity’s contemplative calling―so that a continual conversion of contemplative consciousness collaborates in Christ’s re-harmonizing of creation with God’s knowing and loving of each creature.”

– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition

 
Sin might be understood as the denial of coinherence and communion with God, all humanity, and the rest of creation:
 
“We see beneath all evil, beneath the universe itself, that eternal and original union of the Father and the Son . . . that union which was never fully manifested till the Only-begotten by the eternal spirit offered himself to God. The revelation of that primal unity is the revelation of the ground on which all things stand. It is the revelation of an order which sustains all the intercourse and society of men. It is the revelation of which sin has ever been seeking to destroy, and which at last has overcome sin. It is the revelation of that perfect harmony to which we look forward when all things are gathered up in Christ . . . when the law of sacrifice shall be the acknowledged law of all creation.”
– Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), The Doctrine of Sacrifice Deduced from the Scriptures

 
“[Humans] desired to know schism in the universe.”
– Charles Williams (1886-1945), The Forgiveness of Sins
 
“They [Adam & Eve, Humanity] had refused the co-inherence of the original creation and had become (literally) incoherent in their suffering. He [God] proposed to make those sufferings themselves coinherent in him, and therefore to reintroduce them into the principle which was he.”
– Charles Williams (1886-1945), Natural Goodness

“We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. . . I would not have it thought that I condemn a society because of its material ruin, for that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of its excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom.”

– T. S. Elliot (1888-1965), The Idea of a Christian Society

 
“Like all the members of the community, we are all a mess of incoherent elements until the Holy Spirit calls us into roles and invites us into opportunities that resemble all our experiences and gifts in a beautiful way: and we trusting that our reassembling – a glimpse of the final reassembling of heaven – will be a blessing not just to ourselves but to all around us.”
– Sam Wells (1965 - ), Forward to Letters from Nazareth by Richard Carter

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10. Committed to Belonging and to Being the Church as the Body of Christ

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12. Committed to the Pursuit of Holiness

Anglicanism is . . . 10. Committed to Belonging and to Being the Church as the Body of Christ

More so than some more Protestant church bodies, Anglicanism understands the divine-human drama to be centered not on the individual but on the community of the Church. While not strictly a matter of either/or, it does matter where we put the emphasis. By the Holy Spirit, God calls us into community where we learn to love one another as God loves us and empowers us to bear that love in the world. In, with and under that community, the Holy Spirit moves like an electric current empowering the Church to make our “life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair” (Book of Common Prayer). 

The Holy Spirit not limited tot he Church, of course. It blows where it will. But, wherever else it blows, we can count on it blowing through the baptized community that is the Church.

As the body of Christ the Church is, in a mystical sense, an extension of the Incarnation.

“The Spirit of Christ will be wanting in the heart that is shut up in selfishness”
– Henry Martyn (1781-1812), Journal and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn 

“‘Individualism’ has no place in Christianity, and Christianity verily means its extinction.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Gospel and the Catholic Faith

“Of course every person is an individual; but his individuality is what marks him off from others; it is a principle of division; whereas personality is social, and only in his social relationship can a man be a person. Indeed, for the completeness of personality, there is needed the relationship to both God and neighbours. The richer his personal relationships, the more fully personal he will be.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Christianity and Social Order

“We realize the fullness of our own being only when we are conjoined in love to other beings, and gain our best hints of unity and completeness of life in sacred flashes when hearts and minds, retaining their separateness, through their very separation realize the mystery and miracle of fusion. Such flashes are rare and fugitive; it is possible that many people are never visited by them. But they are real, they do happen; and a suggestion is in them of the Divine interweavings wherein the full richness of Infinitude must abide.”

– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), Social Teachings of the Christian Year

“The Holy Catholic Church is both logically and chronologically prior to its individual members with their individual experience. Christian doctrine knows nothing of an atomistic individualism. Though an intensely personal matter, faith is never a purely private matter.”
– J. S. Whale (1896-1997), Christian Doctrine

“Thus it must ever be with the working of the separatist principle in the Church. That principle tends inevitably to disintegration. One sect begets another, until gradually the original idea of a company of believers knit together in one organic body dies away, and nothing is left but the barren individualism, whose motto is ‘Every man for himself’.”
– William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), The Church-idea

“Men speak as if Christians came first and the Church after: as if the origin of the Church was in the wills of the individuals who composed it. But, on the contrary, throughout the teaching of the Apostles, we see it is the Church that comes first and the members of it afterwards ... In the New Testament ... the Kingdom of Heaven is already in existence, and men are invited into it. The Church takes its origin, not in the will of man, but in the will of the Lord Jesus Christ ... Everywhere men are called in: they do not come in and make the Church by coming. They are called into that which already exists: they are recognised as members when they are within; but their membership depends on their admission, and not upon their constituting themselves into a body in the sight of the Lord.”
– Frederick Temple (1821-1902), Catholicity and Individualism, quoted in Catholicity, A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West Being a Report presented to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury by a group of scholars including Dom Gregory Dix, T. S. Eliot, Austin Farrer, and Michael Ramsey
 
“Christ did not order or provide for any book to be circulated. He forbade our following any one person. ‘Call no man master.’ He endowed His Church with the Holy Spirit, making the Church thereby a living organism, through which He acts, gathering souls into His saving light and life. In the Church are to be found the Holy Scriptures and the sacraments. By the Church the Scriptures are preserved and interpreted to our enlightenment, and the sacraments are administered for our reception of life. We hear the voice of Christ speaking to us through the Church as guided by the Holy Spirit, it interprets the written word, and makes the truth known within us by our union with it.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), Christian and Catholic
 
“For this primarily the Church exists: to be the Spirit-bearing body, and that is to be the bearer of Christ, the great ‘Christopher,’ perpetuating, in a new, but not less real way, the presence of the Son of man in the world.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Incarnation of the Son of God

“Christianity has always maintained that God incarnate, Jesus the Christ, inaugurated Christian community. Some maintain that he established it directly. Others hold, more plausibly, that he founded it indirectly. For them, church is the continuation of the mission that Jesus preached and enacted. This corporate activity, empowered by the Holy Spirit, makes Christ present in and as that community.”

– Scott MacDougall, Who Needs Church?, The Other Journal, Issue 37: Church , Spring 2024

“The commission given to the Church is that it carry out the purpose of God. That is what is meant by the description of it as ‘the Body of Christ’. It is to be the instrument or organ of His will, as His fleshly Body was in the days of His earthly ministry. That Body has many functions to fulfil, and one of them is suffering. The members of the Church do not, or should not, belong to it for what they can get in this world or in any other world; they – we – should belong to it in order to take our share in the great work, the fulfilment of God’s purpose in the world and beyond it.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Christianity and Social Order

“The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Attributed

 
“While the New Testament emphasises the Catholic truth that the church is the extension of the Incarnation, it stresses also the vital importance of that Faith which is associated with the word Evangelical; for the Indwelling of Christ, which makes possible the Church, is linked to Faith in Him ‘Who loved me and gave Himself for me.’”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Body of Christ - An Appeal to Anglo-Catholics in The English Catholic: the Quarterly Gazette of the Anglican Society (Summer 1928)
 
“The meaning of the Christian Church becomes most clear when it is studied in terms of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Gospel and the Catholic Church
 
“The Christian community (the church militant) has been put here on earth not for self-nurture or nourishment but to exercise the painful, glorious work of reconciliation across the terrifying barriers erected all across our communal existences in this world.”
– Hans Frei (1922-1988), On the Thirty-Nine Articles in Unpublished Pieces: Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School archive edited by Mike Higton

“The Church is itself the primary sacrament of Christ in human history. It is the sign of the union of all believers with God the Father, and at the same time it is the sign of the promise of the ultimate unity of the whole of humanity.”

– Louis Weil (1935-2022), Sacraments & Liturgy, the Outward Signs

“The church is the community of those who have been immersed in Jesus’ life, overwhelmed by it.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Tokens of Trust
 
“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
 
“The Christian community, desiring to share ever more fully in Christ’s dying and rising again, develops a new understanding of humanity’s contemplative calling―so that a continual conversion of contemplative consciousness collaborates in Christ’s re-harmonizing of creation with God’s knowing and loving of each creature.”
– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition
 
“In the Church, the mystical body of Christ, we have a yet further extension of the idea for which the lover of humanity cries. For the Church, both normally and ideally, includes the entire human race; even now, in a world invaded by sin and failure, it is the representative of all, the earnest of the society to be. It not only claims our service, but commands our reverence; for, made up as it is of faulty and distorted people, it yet reaches up into a higher region, and witnesses to perfection, through its organic and sacramental union with a Head in whom are centered holiness, wisdom, authority.”
– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), The Witness of Denial
 
The Church is essential, But Anglicans have no illusions of it being anything other than a treasure-bearing clay jar (2 Corinthians 4:7).
 
“Before Christians can say things about what the church ought to be, their first need is to say what the Church is, here and now amid its own failures and the questionings of the bewildered. Looking at it now, with its inconsistencies and perversions and its want of perfection, we must ask what is the real meaning of it just as it is. As the eye gazes upon it, it sees the Passion of Jesus Christ; but the eye of faith sees further: it sees the power of Almighty God.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Glory Descending: Michael Ramsey and His Writings, ed. Douglas Dales
 
“Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?

Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), No life, here – no joy, terror or tears, Church Times 17 July 1998
 
“We would like to imagine the Church striding through history like a hero or a saint. But, if we are honest, we must admit that the Church has ever staggered through history like the Whiskey Priest – all too often drunk on (worldly) power and sin, cowardly, less than faithful, self-interested, etc. But, while it has never been more than a Whiskey Priest, it has, by the grace of God, never been less. In spite of all its shortcomings, it has borne Word and Sacrament to the world. And it has also raised up exemplary saints – known and unknown. As with Graham Greene’s priest [in The Power and the Glory], we know that in spite of its shortcomings, the Spirit does not abandon the Church and God’s power and glory are present in and through it. But only and always by God’s grace, not its own heroic or saintly purity.

And there’s the rub. The compulsion and presumption to create a pure Church, whether that be pure in holiness or pure in teaching or pure in justice – however and by whomever any of those is defined – is rooted in either pride or impatience (or both). If we continually expect and demand that the Church stride through history like a hero-saint we will continually be frustrated by its actual plodding through history like a Whiskey Priest. But we will also miss the opportunity to learn what it means to live by God’s power and glory rather than our own. We will miss the fact of God’s sheer grace. I wonder if the refusal to accept and love the Church as a ‘corpus permixtum’ – a mixed body of sinners and saints – is not rooted in our own unwillingness to see ourselves as ‘simul justus et peccator – simultaneously righteous and sinful. We only ever live under the Mercy.”
– Matthew Gunter (1957 - ), Whiskey Priest Church, An Odd Work of Grace blog, July 4, 2015
 
“It is almost too obvious that the church reflects both the very best and the very worst of us, for, – whatever else it is – it is composed of human beings. And human beings are sometimes hopeful, sometimes seek after petty forms of power, and sometimes are mobilized into the most remarkable sacrificial acts. . . as furious as I get, the church – in all its hypocrisy, human cravenous, and prejudice – remains a place of grace. And remains a place of grace because God is bizarrely and wonderfully passionate about the freaks, the half-mad, the second-rate, and yet glorious bunch that we – the church – are. And if God can still value the loons within it (including me), then so can I.”
– Rachel Mann (1970 - ), Dazzling Darkness
 
“In spite of the various faults which at any time disfigure the Church, we also see from time to time what might be called ‘gleams of glory,’ moments when the ideal nature of the Church, its true nature, shines out.”
– John Macquarrie (1919-2007), Starting from Scratch

Anglicanism is international

Anglicans belong to the Anglican Communion, comprised of 42 autonomous provincial churches and over 80 million members across 160+ countries. It is united by shared historic Anglican tradition and worship, mutual recognition and fellowship rather than a central authority. The Archbishop of Canterbury serves as spiritual leader and focus of communion. The Anglican Communion is a reminder that to be a Christian is not an individual affair. It is to be a member of the body of Christ, the Church. It is to be bound to allegiances that transcend national boundaries as well as other loyalties. Members of the Anglican Communion are fundamentally united to other members of the Communion around the globe by a common heritage of faith, by bonds of affection, and by the water of baptism which is thicker than blood. We belong to one another.

“The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church), is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”

– Preamble of the Constitution of the The Episcopal Church

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9. Incarnational

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11. Committed to the Coinherence of all Humanity and All Creation

Anglicanism is . . . 9. Incarnational

Anglicans believe in the necessity of the Passion of Jesus Christ for our redemption. The cross is essential. As is the Resurrection. But Anglicanism has tended to focus on the Incarnation – God taking on human flesh, human reality, and indeed, material reality more generally – as being itself salvific. The emphasis on sacramentalism in the last post is grounded in the Incarnation.

“Not having, as did the Continental Reformers, a preoccupation with the doctrines of justification or predestination they [Anglicans in the century after the Reformation] followed the Fathers of the Nicene age in treating the Incarnation as the central doctrine of the faith. Indeed a feeling of the centrality of the Incarnation became a recurring feature of Anglican divinity, albeit the Incarnation was seen as St. Athanasius saw it in its deeply redemptive aspect.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Ancient Fathers and Modern Anglican Theology, Sobornost, Winter-Spring 1962

“Every thing, which God would ever do, must have been unchangeably present to the Divine Mind. To think of the Incarnation, as only a remedy for Adam’s fall, is to imagine changeableness in God. There can be no afterthought in God. God must have eternally known and provided for it. The All-Holy Soul of Jesus must ever have been the Object of his choice. It must have been the centre of His Creation, the Primal conception of His Mind, when He willed to put in act what He ever had in mind. The central idea of His Mind, that, wherein things in heaven and things in earth were to be united, was a Human Soul.”
– Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Eleven Addresses during a Retreat of the Companions of the Love of Jesus, Adress III. ‘God’s Love for each soul in the Incarnation’
 
“What does the Church think of Christ? The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God ‘by whom all things were made.’ His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be ‘like God’—he was God.
 
Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—[God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”
– Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, from ‘The Whimsical Christian’
 
“God does not give us explanations; we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations; he gives us a Son. Such is the spirit of the angel’s message to the shepherds: ‘Peace upon earth, good will to men . . . and this shall be the sign unto you: ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.’
 
The Word of God brings upon human pain and strife the consolation of eternal love.”
– Austin Farrer (1904-1968), The Essential Sermons

“What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God’s love, a love we don’t even have to earn.”

– Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007), Penguins and Golden Calves

“A teacher of small children told us of a child who said to her, 'Jesus is God's show and tell.'

How simple and how wonderful! Jesus is God's show and tell. That's the best theology of incarnation I've ever heard. Jesus said, if you do not understand me as a little child, you will not be able to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, Glimpses of Grace

 
“In Athanasius’ words, ‘He became man that we might become divine,’ so that we might share in the life of God and consequently that the life of God might be in him. Yet the Redeemer is not a gnostic Christ imparting the secrets of divine wisdom, who could indeed be a heavenly figure in human disguise. The mystery of our redemption is something altogether deeper than that. It proceeds, not from the outside by illumination, but from the inside by participation. We need transformation, not information.”
– John Polkinghorne (1930-2021), The Faith of a Physicist

 
“God’s love has no bounds. It seeks to preserve the integrity and goodness of all creation regardless of how far God must reach down into the constructs of human hate to do so. The freedom of God that is expressed in life is always connected to love. It is God’s very love for life that serves as the motivating force for all that God does. Because of God’s love for creation, God has entered into human history. God’s very movement in human history is defined by the love of God.”
– Kelly Brown Douglas (1957 - ), Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
 
“The stupendous theme [of Christianity is] that God’s ultimate purpose for the human race and for the whole material universe is that they should be taken up into Christ and transformed into a condition of unimaginable glory, and that it is for this that God took our human nature, in which spirit and matter are so mysteriously and intricately interwoven.”
– E. L. Mascall (1905-1993), The Christian Universe
 
“United with Christ our humanity is purified, healed and elevated—saved from sin and its effects (anxiety, fear, conflict and death)—as a consequence of the very incarnation through which the life-giving powers of God’s own nature are brought to bear on human life in the predicament of sin. Humanity is taken to the Word in the incarnation in order to receive from the Word what saves it.”
– Kathryn Tanner (1957 - ), Christ the Key
 
“Humanity is humanity suffering from fear and distress, conflict with others, anxiety before death, betrayal and isolation, separation from God—all the qualities of death-infused, sin-corrupted life that require remedy. The cross then typifies the character of human life that the Word becomes incarnate to reverse by making its own; incarnation does not distract attention from the cross but sees all the struggles of Jesus life as the Word made flesh in light of it.”
– Kathryn Tanner (1957 - ), Christ the Key
 
“How can I matter to him? we say. It makes no sense; he has the world, and even that he does not need. It is folly even to imagine him like myself, to credit him with eyes into which I could ever look, a heart that could ever beat for my sorrows or joys, and a hand he could hold out to me. For even if the childish picture be allowed, that hand must be cupped to hold the universe, and I am a speck of dust on the star-dust of the world.
 
Yet Mary holds her finger out, and a divine hand closes on it. The maker of the world is born a begging child; he begs for milk, and does not know that it is milk for which he begs. We will not lift our hands to pull the love of God down to us, but he lifts his hands to pull human compassion down upon his cradle. So the weakness of God proves stronger than men, and the folly of God proves wiser than men. Love is the strongest instrument of omnipotence, for accomplishing those tasks he cares most dearly to perform; and this is how he brings his love to bear on human pride; by weakness not by strength, by need and not by bounty.”
– Austin Farrer (1904-1968), A Faith of Our Own

“There is a phrase associated with two of the greatest Anglican thinkers of the last generation, Michael Ramsey and John V. Taylor: ‘God is Christlike and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all'. What is seen in Jesus is what God is; what God is is the outpouring and returning of selfless love, which is the very essence of God’s definition, in so far as we can ever speak of a ‘definition’ of the mystery.”

– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Tokens of Trust

 
“Christ has taken humanity to himself, and so every man and woman and child in the world is loveable and infinitely precious. And, in response, men and women can treat each other–whatever their race or color–in the light of Bethlehem; or they can, in rejecting the human dignity of their fellows, reject their own dignity too.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Through the Year with Michael Ramsey, Margaret Duggan, ed.
 
“One of the most convicting aspects of Christianity, if we try to see it in terms of our own day, is the contrast between its homely and inconspicuous beginnings and the holy powers it brought into the world. It keeps us in perpetual dread of despising small things, humble people, little groups. The Incarnation means that the Eternal God enters our common human life with all the energy of His creative love, to transform it, to exhibit to us its riches, its unguessed significance; speaking our language, and showing us His secret beauty on our own scale.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The School of Charity
 
“It was human nature, not a human person, that God the Son united to himself when he became man. Thus, both the state of fallenness and the state of redemption appertain in the first place to the human race as such, and then to individual men and women as members of it; and this does not mean that God is not interested in us as individuals, but that he is interested in us as the kind of individuals we are, namely members of one another.”
– E. L. Mascall (1905-1993), The Christian Universe
 
“The Only-Begotten, having shone upon us from the very Essence of God the Father, and having in His own Nature all which the Father is, became Flesh according to the Scriptures, having, as it were, mingled Himself with our nature, through the ineffable concurrence and union with this body which is from the earth. Thus He, by nature God, was truly called and became a Heavenly Man (not ‘bearing God,’ as some say who do not accurately understand the depth of the mystery, but) being, in one, God and Man, that having, in a manner, co-united in Himself what by nature was far apart and alien from all sameness of nature, He might make man to communicate in and partake of the Divine Nature.”
– Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Eirenicon

“Christ, . . . the Incarnate Word, Son of God, and Son of Man, is Himself in a most true sense the Gospel.

Viewed in this light the Gospel of the Word become flesh brings such an answer as we need, and as we are able to receive, to the riddles of life which widening experience proposes to us, We readily admit that we are not able to grasp completely or to systematise exactly the whole Truth which is presented to us. But we can see, with sufficient clearness to gain confidence in our work, that it throws light on the darkest mysteries of self and the world and God.”

– Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), The Gospel of Life: Thoughts Introductory to the Study of Christian Doctrine

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8. Sacramental

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10. Committed to Belonging and to Being the Church as the Body of Christ

Anglicanism is . . . 8. Sacramental

“Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men's profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.
 
There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.”
– Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, Article XXV. Of the Sacraments (1571)
 
Anglicans recognize that “Other sacramental rites which evolved in the Church include confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction” (An Outline of the Faith commonly called the Catechism, 1979 Book of Common Prayer), but have not generally counted them as sacraments on a par with baptism and Eucharist.
 
Baptism
 
“The crushing suffocation of sin, the rage that sweeps over us like torrents, the weakness that undermines all resolve, the pitiful self-righteousness that cannot ignore how tinny it all sounds, the smallness and meanness, the icy darkness of cruelty: Christ has tasted all this in His baptism for us and for our sake.”
– Katherine Sonderegger (1950 - ), Systematic Theology Vol. 1
 
“Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.”
– Rowan Williams (1960 - ), Being Christian
 
“Christians are baptized ‘into a life summed up in love,’ even though we have to spend the rest of our own lives learning how to do it. Love, therefore, is the budding-point from which all the rest come: that tender, cherishing attitude; that unlimited self-forgetfulness, generosity and kindness which is the attitude of God to all His creatures; and so must be the attitude towards them which His Holy Spirit brings forth in us . . . To be unloving is to be out of touch with God. So the generous, cherishing Divine Love, the indiscriminate delight in others, just or unjust, must be our model too. To come down to brass tacks, God loves the horrid man at the fish shop, the tiresome woman in the next flat, the disappointing vicar . . . and the contractor who has cut down the row of trees we loved, to build a row of revolting bungalows. God *loves*, not tolerates, these wayward, half-grown, self-centered spirits, and seeks without ceasing to draw them into His love. And the first-fruit of His indwelling presence, the first sign that we are on His side and He on ours, must be at least a tiny bud of this Charity breaking the hard and rigid outline of our life.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Fruits of the Spirit
 
"The sacrament of baptism is a lifelong commitment immersed in the reality of the triune God and daring to live the teachings and the ways of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a commitment to renounce, reject, and actively oppose in our lives and in our world anything that rebels against the God who the Bible says is love. It is a commitment to renounce anything that attempts to separate us from the love of God and from each other. It is a commitment to renounce anything that hurts or harms any human child of God or this creation."
– Michael Curry (1953 - ), Opening remarks for Executive Council, June 25, 2021
 
"In Jesus, God shows what it looks like to be vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he would gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, that he and others night flourish as God intends. And before you say, 'Well, he was God; of course he did. What's that got to do with us?’, know *how* Jesus did it. In the very first chapter of Mark, Jesus heads from Nazareth to be baptized by John in the River Jordan. Just as Jesus comes up from the waters, the heavens break open and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove. 'And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased"' (Mark 1:10-11). Everything that follows is powered by the Holy Spirit and by the love of God.
 
The same Spirit that Jesus received now rests on anyone who follows him. God invites us into covenant, whereby the power of the Spirit we can allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces–our lives, our love, our privileges–and share it all like a broken loaf of communion bread."
– Stephanie Spellers (1971 - ), The Church Cracked Open
 
Eucharist
 
“We receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner of our life, and in the eucharist repeatedly to bring our life by degrees to its completion”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
 
“. . . they saw their Lord and Master with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven first bless and consecrate for the endless good of all generations till the world's end the chosen elements of bread and wine, which elements made for ever the instruments of life by virtue of his divine benediction . . . They had at that time a sea of comfort and joy to wade in, and we by that which they did are taught that this heavenly food is given for the satisfying of our empty souls, and not for the exercising of our curious and subtle wits.”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
 
“It was one special end why the Sacrament itself was ordained, our comfort; the Church so tells us, we so hear it read every time to us: He has ordained these mysteries of His love and favour, to our great and endless comfort. The Father will give you the Comforter. Why He gives Him, we see; how He gives Him, we see not. The means for which He gives Him, is Christ—His entreaty by His word in prayer; by His flesh and blood in sacrifice, for His blood speaks, not His voice only. These means for which; and the very same, the means by which He gives the Comforter: by Christ the Word, and by Christ’s body and blood, both. In tongues it came, but the tongue is not the instrument of speech only but of taste, we all know. . . That not only by the letter we read, and the word we hear, but by the flesh we eat, and the blood we drink at His table, we be made partakers of His Spirit, and of the comfort of it.”
– Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Sermons of the Sending of the Holy Ghost preached Upon Whit-Sunday, Sermon III
 
“The doctrine of the church of England, and generally of the Protestants, in this article, is,--that after the minister of the holy mysteries hath rightly prayed, and blessed or consecrated the bread and the wine, the symbols become changed into the body and blood of Christ, after a sacramental, that is, in a spiritual real manner: so that all that worthily communicate, do by faith receive Christ really, effectually, to all the purposes of his passion: the wicked receive not Christ, but the bare symbols only; but yet to their hurt, because the offer of Christ is rejected, and they pollute the blood of the covenant, by using it as an unholy thing. The result of which doctrine is this: It is bread, and it is Christ's body. It is bread in substance, Christ in the sacrament; and Christ is as really given to all that are truly disposed, as the symbols are; each as they can; Christ as Christ can be given; the bread and wine as they can; and to the same real purposes, to which they are designed; and Christ does as really nourish and sanctify the soul, as the elements do the body. It is here, as in the other sacrament; for as there natural water becomes the laver of regeneration; so here, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; but, there and here too, the first substance is changed by grace, but remains the same in nature.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667). The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament

“Week by week the Eucharistic Feast, inexhaustible centre of mystic experience, incandescent with the love of God, welcomes the faithful to the vision of Eternal Truth behind the Sacramental Veil.

What are the social emphases in this crowning Feast, wherein our triumph and our sorrow meet, and the personal life of the soul finds its most sacred expression.”
– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), Social Teachings of the Christian Year

“In the Eucharist, with the Risen Jesus present as our food, we are worshipping with the saints and angels in heaven. But the risen Jesus who is the heart of the heavenly worship is also a Jesus who was crucified, and we share in heaven’s worship only as sharing also in the Jesus who suffers in the world around us, reminding us to meet him there and to serve him in those who suffer. Indeed in the Eucharist we are summoned by two voices, which are really one voice: ‘Come, the heavenly banquet is here. Join with me and my mother and my friends in the heavenly supper.’ ‘Come, I am here in this world in those who suffer. Come to me, come with me, and serve me in them.”

– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, Rowell, Stevenson, Williams, ed.

 
“The creation in all its intricacy and ambiguity is placed on the altar. We place ourselves there, too, even though we can scarcely fathom the mystery of ourselves any more than the wildness of creation. We present the totality of our lives with the bread and wine. We may be eating the ‘bread of adversity and the water of affliction (Isaiah 30:20); we may be content and thankful; we may be confused or exhausted. We may have daily work, cares, and relationships to bring to the altar. To present these things at God’s altar is to present ourselves. We present them so the bread and the wine will be transformed into Christ, and that we ourselves will become Christ anew. Jesus ‘takes’ the bread and the cup from us. We await transformation.”
– Julia Gatta (1948 - ), Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality
 
“This is why Jesus is hymned not as grape juice but as wine: because He is dangerous and excessive. He is more than you need, and He is more than pleasure, and if you attend to Him, you will find so much there that you will be derailed completely. And you will think your heart might break. And then, per Louis de Blois, He will withdraw and you will be miserable and sick until He returns.”
– Lauren Winner (1976 - ), Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God

 
“The chief object, then, of the Holy Eucharist, as conveyed by type or prophecy, by the very elements chosen, or by the words of our Lord, is the support and enlargement of life, and that in Him.”
– Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent
 
Sacramental Perspective

Through the lens of the sacraments, we begin to see that all of creation is indeed sacramental – all material reality is charged with spiritual significance.
 
“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.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

“What else do the sacraments teach us but that we dare not approach heaven by leaving creation behind? Indeed, Catholicism [including Catholic Anglicanism] insists that to be with God we must be willing to subject ourselves to the simplest objects of creation: water, grapes, grain and oil. Strange to think that the same ingredients used for baking a pie can be used for filling the faithful with God’s grace. Alongside the wood of the cross, those four ingredients are the earthly elements of our salvation. Without them we are lost.”
– Mark Clavier (1970 - ), A Pilgrimage of Paradox: A Backpacker’s Encounters with God and Nature
 
“In a general sense you may say that the whole universe is sacramental – that is to say, all material things have some spiritual meaning. They convey to us some vision of beauty and truth and good. The whole universe is a Sacrament of God. So it is that all our great poets of nature are sacramental.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Holy Communion
 
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
– C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory

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Anglicanism is . . . 7. Centered in Worship and Prayer

“[Anglican theology is done] 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.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Anglican Spirit
 
“Thought is not all. Conduct is not all. Life is unspeakably impoverished if it is unhallowed by the sanctities of reverence and worship.”
– Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), Christus Consummator: Some Aspects of the Work and Person of Christ in Relation to Modern Thought
 
“One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created. We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your . . . life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1841), Concerning the Inner Life
 
“I feel the regular, steady, docile practice of corporate worship is of utmost importance for the building-up of your spiritual life…no amount of solitary reading makes up for humble immersion in the life and worship of the Church.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Letters of Evelyn Underhill
 
“The Eucharist divorced from life loses reality; life devoid of worship loses direction and power. It is the worshiping life that can transform the world.”
– William Temple (1881-1944), Citizen and Churchman
 
“Both for perplexity and for dulled conscience the remedy is the same; sincere and spiritual worship. For worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose — and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin. Yes — worship in spirit and truth is the way to the solution of perplexity and to the liberation from sin.”
– William Temple (1881-1944), Readings in St. John’s Gospel
 
“It is mere humbug to say that we will serve God by our conduct but cannot find time for prayer and worship. If that is all we can do, we shall serve him just as much as we have been doing – which has brought the world to the mess it is now in. We must have our times of companionship with God.”
– William Temple (1881-1944), The Hope of a New World
 
“Be not discouraged if but few come to the Solemn Assemblies, but go to the House of Prayer, where God is well known for a sure Refuge: Go, though you go alone, or but with one besides your self; and there as you are God’s Remembrancer, keep not silence, and give Him no rest, till He establish, till He make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.”
– Thomas Ken (1637-1711), A Pastoral Letter from the Bishop of Bath and Wells to his Clergy concerning their Behaviour during Lent
 
“You put yourself with God, empty perhaps, but hungry and thirsty for him; and if in sincerity you cannot say that you want God you can perhaps tell him that you want to want him; and if you cannot say even that perhaps you can say that you want to want to want him!”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Christian Priest Today
 
“God is available to all of us. God says, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ Each one of us wants and needs to give ourselves space for quiet. We can hear God’s voice most clearly when we are quiet, uncluttered, undistracted—when we are still. Be still, be quiet, and then you begin to see with the eyes of the heart.
 
One image that I have of the spiritual life is of sitting in front of a fire on a cold day. We don’t have to do anything. We just have to sit in front of the fire and then gradually the qualities of the fire are transferred to us. We begin to feel the warmth. We become the attributes of the fire. It’s like that with us and God. As we take time to be still and to be in God’s presence, the qualities of God are transferred to us.
 
Far too frequently we see ourselves as doers. As we’ve seen, we feel we must endlessly work and achieve. We have not always learned just to be receptive, to be in the presence of God, quiet, available, and letting God be God, who wants us to be God. We are shocked, actually, when we hear that what God wants is for us to be godlike, for us to become more and more like God.  Not by doing anything, but by letting God be God in and through us.”
– Desmond Tutu (1931-2921), God has a Dream
 
“Prayer is this constant return to the place where one’s projects are frail and fallible and where one can only fall on God’s mercy. That’s the place God works. And God works powerfully there.”
– Sarah Coakley (1951 - ), Prayer as Divine Propulsion: An Interview with Sarah Coakley, Part I, The Other Journal
 
“Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It re-points the person praying, taking him somewhere else.”
– Lauren Winner (1976 - ), Mudhouse Sabbath
 
“We are given the gift of having the Spirit pray to God through us. Simply ask to join in the communion of the Trinity that prays eternally in perfect love. It is truly amazing grace that we can enter this eternal and dynamic prayer.”
 – Patricia Lyons, What Is Evangelism?
 
“When we are not able to do any other thing for men's behalf, when through maliciousness or unkindness they vouchsafe not to accept any other good at our hands, prayer is that which we always have in our power to bestow, and they never in theirs to refuse.”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesial Polity

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6. Catholic and Reformed/Evangelical

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8. Sacramental

Anglicanism is . . . 6. Catholic and Reformed/Evangelical

“These be cases not of wit, but of faith; not of eloquence, but of truth; not invented or devised by us, but from the Apostles and the holy Fathers and founders of the Church by long succession brought unto us. We are not the devisers thereof, but only the keepers; not the masters, but the scholars. Touching the substance of religion, we believe what the ancient Catholike learned Fathers believed: we do what they did: we say what they said. And marvel not, in what side soever ye see them, if ye see us join unto the same. It is our great comfort that we see their faith and our faith to agree in one.”
– John Jewel (1522-1571), An Answer to M. Harding’s Conclusion
 
“We declare aloud that we are Catholic, but not Roman, the last of which words destroys the meaning of the first. We will never confine words of so wide an import within the narrow limits of one city or one man’s breast. The more that a man refuses to do that, the more Catholic is he.”
– Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Response to Cardinal Bellarmine
 
After writing appreciatively of both Luther and Calvin, John Cosin goes on to write, “We are no more followers of Luther or Calvin than of the Pope, where either they or he fall away from Holy Scripture, or cease to walk in the footsteps of the old Fathers who consent in the Catholic Faith. It is clear from all this that we have introduced no new religion into the world or into the Church. On our principles none such could be introduced, but the faith must remain in its completeness and unaltered. It is also clear that we retain in all essentials the Christian and Catholic Faith, which existed formerly, by which we, as well as our ancestors, were brought into the bosom of the Church, and which alone could save us.”
– John Cosin (1594-1672), The Religion, Discipline and Rites of the Church of England
 
“I die in the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith, professed by the whole Church, before the disunion of East and West: more particularly I die in the communion of the Church of England, as it stands distinguished from all Papal and Puritan Innovations.”
– Thomas Ken (1627-1711), an epitaph provided in his will
 
Reflecting on the 39 Articles of Religion, F. D. Maurice wrote, “The principles of the Reformation are asserted in the one division, not as necessary qualifications, but as indispensable conditions of the great Catholic truths which had been asserted in the other. And so to whatever cause we owe it, this has been the result of these articles; they have been thorns in the side of those who have wished to establish an English theological system, either fashioned out of the materials which Romanism or Calvinism supplies; they have encouraged persons of all sects and schools to hope that their principles, in some sense or other, might be contained in them, or by some process or other extracted out of them . . .”
– Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), The Kingdom of Christ
 
“In 1868 Bishop [Jackson] Kemper referred to the plans for organizing the Diocese of Fond du Lac in the following words: ‘The example of zeal and true Christian faith would be so beneficial, and so
encouraging to the whole of the Reformed Catholic Church, throughout the world, that I hereby pledge my cordial support’.”
– ‘Bishop Grafton', a Commemorative Volume by Reginald H. Weller, James O. S. Huntington OHC, William Walter Webb, William Harman van Allen, George McClellan Fiske, Erving Winslow (1913)
 
“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.”
– Bishops’ Encyclical, 1930 Lambeth Conference
 
“The Anglican churches have received and hold the faith of Catholic Christendom, but they have exhibited a rich variety of methods both of approach and of interpretation. They are heirs of the Reformation as well as the Catholic tradition; and they hold together in a single fellowship of worship and witness those whose chief attachment is to each of these, and also those whose attitude to the distinctively Christian tradition of a free and liberal culture which is historically the bequest of the Greek spirit and which was recovered for Western Europe at the Renaissance.”
– William Temple (1881-1944), Introduction to Doctrine in the Church of England, The Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine, 1938
 
“First, there are two very definite schools of thought in the Church of England, one of which tends to emphasise that she is a branch of the Catholic Church and the other, that she is a Protestant Church; and secondly, that in spite of acute differences both in ceremonial and in actual doctrine, there are certain points on which all Anglicans would agree together, as against Rome on the one hand and Geneva on the other. She would, for example, agree with Geneva against Rome in repudiating certain Papal claims and certain pronouncements about doctrine which she does not hold to be oecumenical; she would agree with Rome against Geneva in upholding the Apostolic Succession and the formal theology of the Creeds.”
– Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), Worship in the Anglican Church
 
“The Anglican Tradition . . . has its strong Catholic element – which emphasizes the historic continuity and organized life of the Church as the appointed channel of the Divine grace through creed, ministry, and sacraments. It has its strong Evangelical element, which emphasizes Gospel before Church, personal conversion before corporate expression of it, spiritual immediacy, the direct response to the Holy Spirit wherever He may breathe. It has its third strong element, not easy to give a name to, which acts as a watchdog of both the other elements, and brings into our tradition a special element of intellectual integrity, of sobriety and moderation of judgment, of moral earnestness – an element which is as aware of what we do not know as of what we do, which does not wish to go beyond the evidence but to judge all things with a large and reasonable charity.
 
No Anglican should be without something of these elements.”
– Geoffrey Fisher (1887-1972), Archbishop of Canterbury, Address Delivered to the Joint Session of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal in the United States of America, Sept. 12, 1946
 
“While the New Testament emphasises the Catholic truth that the church is the extension of the Incarnation, it stresses also the vital importance of that Faith which is associated with the word Evangelical; for the Indwelling of Christ, which makes possible the Church, is linked to Faith in Him ‘Who loved me and gave Himself for me.’”
 – Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Body of Christ - An Appeal to Anglo-Catholics, The English Catholic: the Quarterly Gazette of the Anglican Society (Summer 1928)

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5. Liberally Catholic and Generously Orthodox

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7. Centered in Worship and Prayer

Anglicanism is . . . 5. Liberally Catholic and Generously Orthodox

As we have seen, Anglicans take the Bible, Tradition, Creeds and theology seriously. But we tend to be generous in interpretation and minimalist when it comes to things that we expect everyone to agree upon.

“Be of good comfort, we have to do with a merciful God, ready to make the best of that little which we hold well, and not with a captious sophister who gathereth the worst out of everything wherein we err.”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), A Learned Discourse of Justification
 
“Although we must neither deny nor doubt of anything, which we know our great Master hath taught us; yet salvation is in special, and by name, annexed to the belief of those articles only, which have in them the endearments of our services, or the support of our confidence, or the satisfaction of our hopes, such as are—Jesus Christ the Son of the living God, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, forgiveness of sins by his blood, resurrection of the dead, and life eternal; because these propositions qualify Christ for our Saviour and our Lawgiver, the one to engage our services, the other to endear them; for so much is necessary as will make us to be his servants, and his disciples; and what can be required more? This only: salvation is promised to the explicit belief of those articles, and therefore those only are necessary, and those are sufficient . . .
 
If any man will urge farther, that whatsoever is deducible from these articles by necessary consequence, is necessary to be believed explicitly, I answer: It is true, if he sees the deduction and coherence of the parts; but it is not certain that every man shall be able to deduce whatsoever is either immediately, or certainly deducible from these premises; and then, since salvation is promised to the explicit belief of these, I see not how any man can justify the making the way to heaven narrower than Jesus Christ hath made it, it being already so narrow, that there are few that find it.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying
 
“My great wish is to show you, that the Anglican Church was led, not by reason of any peculiar excellence or glory in the members or teachers of it, but by a course of providential discipline, to put worship and sacraments before views, to make those acts which directly connect man with God the prominent part of their system, – that which was meant to embody the very form and meaning of Christianity, – and those verbal distinctions which are necessary to keep the understanding of men from error and confusion, as its accessory and subordinate part.”
– Federick Denison Maurice (1805-1872)
 
“I recognize my littleness, my incapacity and my feebleness of attainment in sanctity. It is of little account what I am, but I believe I am a Christian and a Catholic. An evangelical Christian, believing and trusting in Christ's merits only for salvation, and a liberal Catholic, holding as faith that only which is certified by the universal consent and experience of Christendom, and relegating in charity all other matters to the realm of allowed opinion.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), A Correspondence between the Rt. Rev. Bishop of Fond du Lac and the Rev. the Rector of St. Patrick's Church, Fond du Lac
 
“Outside the Creed we need have no settled opinion. When we have said Amen to that, we have said Amen to all that we really know and upon any point we can yield to others.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), Meditations and Instructions
 
“So long as the creeds and dogmas proclaimed and certified by the whole Church are held, differences of opinion on subordinate points are allowable.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), Christian and Catholic
 
“The ideal state is a via media in which the due authority of the Church nourishes the spiritual judgment of the individual into mature life and freedom till ‘he that is spiritual judgeth all things yet he himself is judged of no man.’ The extremes are represented by a dogmatism which 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.
– Charles Gore (1852-1932), Roman Catholic Claims
 
“No reference is made to the Devil or devils is included in any Christian Creeds, and it is quite possible to be a Christian without believing in them. I do believe such things exist, but that is my own affair.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Answers to Questions on Christianity in God in the Dock

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4. Creedal

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6. Catholic and Reformed/Evangelical