Anglicanism is . . . 1. Biblically Focused, but not Literalistic

Introduction
 
I am going to do a series of posts with quotes that I believe capture something of the spirit of the Anglican tradition to which the Episcopal Church belongs. Since I have not read everything and everyone, the quotes included are a bit eclectic idiosyncratic. They deliberately will come mainly from authors who represent the “Liberal Catholic” take on Anglicanism with which I identify. There will be a few exceptions to this, but I hope for a catholicity that includes them as well. I also hope for a catholicity that embraces people who disagree on any number of things (as the authors I am quoting would) while agreeing on the broad Catholic faith of the creeds (as the authors I am quoting also do).
 
The men and women I will be quoting are all part of the Anglican tradition. But pretty much everything that follows could be supported by quotes from early and Medieval saints and theologians.
 
This is not exhaustive and none of these by themselves is unique to Anglicanism. But, taken together, they begin to give a picture of what the Anglican tradition of Christianity might be about.
 
Anglicanism is . . .
 
1. Biblically Focused
 
The Anglican Tradition is centered in the Scriptures. But it is more “Prima Scriptura” than “Sola Scriptura.”

“Unto a Christian man there can be nothing either more necessary or profitable than the knowledge of holy Scripture; forasmuch as in it is contained God’s true word, setting forth his glory and also man’s duty. And there is no truth nor doctrine necessary for our justification and everlasting salvation, but that is or may be drawn out of that fountain and well of truth.”
– Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture (Part 1), First Book of Homilies
 
“Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. . .” 
– The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, Article 6 (1571)
 
“Scripture is perfect, without error, and sufficient – for the end towards which it is ordered, namely, for providing ‘a full instruction in all things unto salvation necessary, the knowledge wherof man by nature could not otherwise in this life attaine unto.’ And if some err in denying that sufficiency in matters of salvation, others err by ‘racking and stretching it further then by him was ment.’”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
 
“The same body of saving truths which the Apostles first preached orally, they afterwards, under the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost, wrote in Holy Scripture, God ordering in His Providence that, in the unsystematic teaching of Holy Scripture, all should be embodied which is essential to establish the faith.”
– Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Eirenicon
 
“Holy Scripture, according to the Anglican view, is the treasure-house of God's revealed truth.”
– William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), The Church-Idea
 
“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.”
– Austin Farrer (1904-1968), Saving Belief
 
“If there is to be a religion of trust, and not of slavish cowardly fear, that religion must have a Revelation, the revelation of a Name for its basis. A religion which creates its own object cannot be one of trust. I cannot rest upon that which I feel and know that I have made for myself. I cannot trust in that which I look upon as a form of my own mind or a projection from it. . . Neither can I trust in any shadowy, impalpable essence, or in any Soul of the world. If this be the God I worship, my worship will be one of doubt and distrust, whenever it is at all sincere.”
– Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), Sermons on the Prayer-Book’, Sermon X, ‘The Creed
 
“Christians are committed to the belief that the triune God has revealed a passionate desire to have fellowship with them, even in the light of their manifest sin. Scripture is chief among God's providentially ordered gifts directed to bringing about reconciliation and fellowship with God despite human sin. Thus, Scripture is holy because of its divinely willed role in making believers holy.”
– Stephen Fowl (1960 - ), Theological Interpretation of Scripture
 
Biblical, but not Literalistic
 
“Scripture is perfect, without error, and sufficient – for the end towards which it is ordered, namely, for providing ‘a full instruction in all things unto salvation necessary, the knowledge wherof man by nature could not otherwise in this life attaine unto.’ And if some err in denying that sufficiency in matters of salvation, others err by ‘racking and stretching it further then by him was ment.’”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 
 
“In respect of the Holy Scriptures: the Anglican Church stands for truth. It places no ban on research into the origin of the various biblical books. It encourages priests and laymen to study God’s Holy Word. Nothing that science can discover concerning the origin of the books or the method of their compilation can affect their corroborative value as to the teaching of the Church. It is by living in the Church, and primarily listening to her teaching, that the written word is best understood. What the Holy Spirit has enlightened the Church to read out of Holy Scripture, the Holy Spirit put into it, to be so read. Differences of interpretation may exist about different texts, but the mind of the Spirit is to be found in the Church's common and enduring consent.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), A Journey Godward
 
“The Church has no opposition to the investigation of science in any department of knowledge. Nothing has so far been demonstrated that contradicts the dogmas she has declared essential. We may allow, for instance, the allegorical character of the early chapters of Genesis without denying the sinful tendency found in man's nature by reason of heredity. Man has fallen away from God.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), A Journey Godward
 
“It is a common fallacy, which has caused much needless difficulty and fruitless discussion, to suppose that the religious value of Genesis depends upon its scientific and historical accuracy. This confusion of thought is due to a mistaken theory of inspiration which maintains that every word of Scripture, every statement contained in the Bible, is divinely inspired and is therefore to be accepted as literal truth. Such a theory is . . . one which can only be maintained either by obstinately ignoring the established facts of science and history or by imposing a forced and artificial, interpretation upon narratives of Genesis to try to reconcile them with scientific facts by extracting from them a meaning which they do not contain.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture
 
“If, instead of trying to manipulate the words of Scripture to fit an arbitrary theory to which the Bible itself gives no support, we examine the Scriptures carefully and deduce a theory from the evidence they themselves furnish, we find that their religious value is independent of scientific or historical accuracy. The writers are inspired to reveal the religious truth necessary for man’s eternal salvation.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture
 
“Thus something originally merely natural—the kind of myth that is found among most nations—will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature—chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God’s word. . . The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Reflections on the Psalms
 
“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible . . . as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), letter to Mrs. Johnson on November 8, 1952 in Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 3. Mrs Johnson had asked, “Is the Bible Infallible?”
 
“Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, ‘What does God want to tell us?’ If we hang our faith on the absolute historical accuracy of Scripture in every detail, we risk making Scripture a sort of ‘magic’ book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions, instead of being a book that gives us, in the wonderful words of the Coronation service, ‘the lively oracles of God’. The Bible is not intended to be a mere chronicle of past events, but a living communication from God, telling us now what we need to know for our salvation.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Being Christian

Next: Rooted in Tradition, but not Traditionalist