Читать книгу On the Thirty-Nine Articles - Oliver O'Donovan - Страница 7

What excuses can I make to the reader of theological books for asking him to entertain, in this ‘conversation’ with Tudor Christianity, a rather self-indulgent undertaking? It is evident to myself, and will be more so to others, that I have no qualifications to write a historical work about the sixteenth century church; while such credit as I might have as a theologian will quickly be dispelled, it must seem, by my grave lack of seriousness — I having it in mind neither to raise disturbing questions about faith for someone else to answer, nor to reflect inconclusively on a multitude of theological methodologies, nor even to ‘reconstruct’ theology by way of a new synthesis with the social sciences! I am driven back upon the lame defence that this is the kind of enterprise which theologians ought from time to time to set their hands to.

It is intended as a conversation with a Christian text from the past, the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England. It is not a study of that text, for that would imply that the text itself had become the sole objection of attention. In conducting a study the scholar puts his intellectual powers completely at the service of the text, and makes it his only business to enable the text to speak clearly. It is a weakness in his work if his own concerns and the fashions of his time intrude. What I propose in this case, however, is not to talk solely about the Articles, but the talk about God, mankind and redemption, the central matters of the Christian faith, and to take the Tudor authors with me as companions in discussion. Two voices will be speaking, a late modern and an early modern one, discussing (as equal partners, we shall hope) matters of concern to both, each raising the questions that Christian faith in his time forces upon him.

Surprisingly enough, this is a type of discussion which is not too frequently undertaken. Surprisingly, because it is the paradigm of what our theologians of the late twentieth century, who are not lacking in a sense of their duty to ‘the tradition’, most commonly see themselves as doing. And it would be hard to devise a better discipline for them than such a conversation affords: to develop their thoughts in sustained response to the thinkers of another age, accepting the others’ priorities and answering their questions, interpreting the others’ views and developing the modern perspective in counterpoint to them, all the time restraining themselves, as good conversationalists, from haranguing God and man with the urgent preoccupations of their own day. Yet it has its disadvantages too. Tact forbids the participant in such a dialogue to develop the modern questions as extensively as they demand; nor is he free to turn away from his chosen companions to take up points of interest with his coevals. It is best undertaken, then, as a propaedeutic exercise, a preliminary to the more elevated and demanding tasks of theology. And it is best approached in a comparatively relaxed way, not in the academical full dress of the Schools but informally beside the fireplace — yet never forgetting that if (as we are told) evil conversation corrupteth good manners, so bad academic manners can also corrupt good conversation.

We have taken for our partner in this conversation the kind of theological text that is most suited for it, a church document intended to exercise a normative role as a standard of belief in its community. The very features which make such a text less interesting to read than the work of a maj or individual thinker, make it more rewarding to have a discussion with. It is brief. It invites elaboration, providing a skeletal structure which its readers may cover with the flesh and blood of their own argumentation. It purports to speak for a whole community, and to say only that which the community can and must say together. It intends to confine itself to the most important things. A conversation with Tudor Christianity requires a text that is, in a strong sense, representative. When we engage with the Articles we engage with a whole community, and not with an individual genius (for even Cranmer does not speak simply for himself), the peculiarities of whose outlook, the waywardness or compellingness of whose arguments, the distinctiveness of whose position vis a vis his contemporaries, may quite possibly leave us absorbed in the sheer task of exegesis and put to silence in respectful admiration. This is not to doubt that we may learn infinitely more by waiting upon the great thinkers; but we develop ourselves in certain ways by venturing upon discussion with the church document that speaks for the whole age.

But we must acknowledge an objection which will be raised against any discussion with the Articles, especially when the modern partner is an Anglican theologian. Is it fitting, in an age striving for ecumenical advance, that we should pursue our theological concerns in such a narrowly sectarian fashion? The Articles, together with the Book of Common Prayer, are the foundation of Anglican theology. What status has Anglican theology as such, when we have admitted, in principle at least, the common task of living and thinking together as Christians? And why should further currency be given to a polemical document when all our efforts are devoted to overcoming these traditional polemics? Such an objection has, to my mind, a prima facie validity; and I would not be prepared merely to brazen out the charge of being an ecumenical reactionary. Let me try to answer it autobiographically, giving the reader at the same time some idea of how this book came to birth.

When I began teaching theology at an English college some years ago, I would have reacted to the idea that I should use this document as a text for instruction with frank distaste. We still lived under the shadow of the old party controversies which had raged about the Articles for a hundred years or more because of the requirement of subscription by candidates for ordination. We were trying, if anything, to wean our students away from the old handbooks on the Articles which had provided the staple doctrinal teaching for the previous generation of clergymen. They were conceived as manuals for induction into a party tradition, comfortably reassuring about what it was permissible for an Anglican parson of the right persuasion to believe, uncomfortably challenging to the doubtful convictions of the other party. They inculcated minute scholarship on details, disagreeable prejudices on generalities. The picture that they gave of the Articles was lopsided, preoccupied by the polemical concerns of the late Victorian age. On such modes of instruction we turned our backs with sighs of relief (too fulsome, perhaps) and congratulated ourselves on rediscovering what the true task of theology ought to be: to respond to the intellectual and spiritual challenges of our day under the tutelage and authority of Scripture alone.

But in England we were all Anglicans without trying to be. When I learned what ought to have been an elementary lesson — that our universal communion in the truth of the gospel will not come about by the denial of denominational traditions, but only by the critical appropriation and sharing of them. I think I was not deceiving myself when I observed that my Canadian Anglican students began to make an altogether more confident use of the ecumenical resources of their School when they had first been introduced to what Tudor Anglicans understood the essential truth of the gospel to be. But to assure ecumenical good faith, and to quieten a nagging scruple that I might be guilty of purely polemical indoctrination, I added to my course on the Articles on the last occasion that I taught it a new feature, which quite transformed it. Promising (with some trepidation) not to alter a word to accommodate him, I invited my friend Dr George Schner SJ to attend the course throughout and gave him an opportunity at each meeting of the class to comment from a Roman Catholic perspective on how we Anglicans were presenting ourselves in the eyes of our fellow-Christians. I can only wish it were practicable to incorporate some such feature into a book; for thanks to Dr. Schner’s sensitivity and acuteness, we were all helped to see how, in reaching to recover our Anglican tradition, we were being led into areas of theological concern that we held in common with those whom we would once have identified as our opponents. It is in the same spirit, and hoping for the same sort of result, that I dare to put our conversations with the Articles, somewhat revised, into public circulation.

For the benefit of those who used to know but have forgotten, it may be as well to rehearse very briefly the origins of the English Articles of Religion as we now have them. (‘We’ here refers to all Anglican churches except for the Episcopal Church of America, which produced a conservative revision to meet its changed circumstances in 1801). They went through two recensions, the earlier appearing at the end of the reign of Edward VI (1553), the later at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The Elizabethan Articles themselves appeared in two versions, one in Latin (1563) and the other in English (1571). The differences between the two Elizabethan versions are not of great moment. Nervousness about Catholic-leaning sentiment led to the withdrawal of one Article (29) in 1563, which was restored in 1571. Apart from this discrepancy, we can treat the two versions simply as the Latin and English texts of the one document, the English not quite a straight translation of the Latin.

The Elizabethan Articles are a careful and thorough revision, undertaken by Matthew Parker with the assistance of other bishops, and then further amended in Convocation, of the forty two Articles which had been prepared by Thomas Cranmer (in both Latin and English) on the eve of the Marian crisis. Cranmer is in effect, the ‘author’ of our Thirty Nine Articles; for although Parker’s revisions were extensive, especially in the second half of the document, Cranmer’s conception and order was preserved, and his theological personality continued to give the Articles their distinctive character. The revisers were cautious and tidy. They filled gaps that Cranmer had left (with an Article on the Holy Spirit (5), on good works (12), and with two (29, 30) on the Eucharist); they removed what they thought to be unnecessary or tendentious Articles (10 on the Edwardian list, on grace; 16 on blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and four (39-42) on the Last Things); they tidied away one which they thought out of place (19, on the commandments of the law, incorporated into 7). They edited, corrected, sometimes rewrote. They made the Articles into a better document for church use; but to compare the two recensions is to see how the flash of theological imagination was always Cranmer’s.

The revisers had before them the so-called Confession of Würtemberg, a submission by Lutheran delegates to the Council of Trent, and it has been observed that this document influenced the Elizabethan revisions at various points, though hardly to the extent of a sustained quotation. More importantly, the famous Augsburg Confession had provided a form of words for some passages in the Articles of God and Christ (1,2), on justification (11) and on the church (19). This Confession had formed the basis for 13 unratified articles of agreement between Lutheran theologians and the English Church in 1538, a part of Thomas Cromwell’s ill-fated attempt to lead Henry VIII into alliance with the German princes, and Cranmer made use of those articles in drafting his own. These two influences are responsible for an occasional Lutheran flavour, which is, however, no greater than one would expect, given the influence of Luther upon the early Reformation as a whole. At points where Lutheranism distinguished itself from the other traditions of the Reformation, notably in its doctrine of the Eucharist, the English Articles show no Lutheran leanings. As for the famous tag about the Church of England having Calvinist Articles, that rests upon an anachronistic reading of Article 17.

It is not only the ecumenical question that might cause us to hesitate before embarking on a conversation with the Articles. We may expect quizzical looks, too, from those who doubt whether anything of importance about the Anglican doctrinal tradition can be learned from this source.

It is certainly true that Protestant Anglicans who have championed the Articles have sometimes made claims for their role as a norm of Anglican belief which are too extensive. This has sprung from a desire to interpret the Anglican Church as a church of the Reformation based, like other Reformation churches, upon a great Confession. But although the Anglican Church is indeed a church of the Reformation, it does not relate to its Reformation origins in quite the same way as other churches do, and its Articles are not exactly comparable, in their conception or in the way they have been used, to the Augsburg or Westminster Confessions or to the Heidelberg Catechism. It is not simply that they are supposed to be read in conjunction with the Book of Common Prayer. There is a more important difference, which is that the Anglican doctrinal tradition, born of an attempt (neither wholly successful nor wholly unsuccessful) to achieve comprehensiveness within the limits of a Christianity both catholic and reformed, is not susceptible to the kind of textual definition which the Confessions (on the Protestant side) and the conciliar decrees (on the Catholic) afford. One might almost say that Anglicans have taken the authority of the Scriptures and the Catholic creeds too seriously to be comfortable with another single doctrinal norm.

Nevertheless, it is absurd to suggest that there is simply no immediate authority for doctrine in the Anglican Churches — though the delusion does fall from time to time upon distracted prelates that the Anglican tradition is defined by what they think it is! It is rather that authority is, as we sometimes say, ‘diffused’. And of all the places to which it is diffused, the documents of the Tudor settlement (Articles and Prayer Book — the Books of Homilies have hardly achieved the significance that was intended for them) are certainly the most important. That is not offered as a purely normative judgment, but also as a descriptive one. The Tudor church has exercised the most profoundly formative role in determining what Anglicanism ever since, in all its varieties, has been and now is. Each century has left its stamp on us; but the sixteenth has determined the shape of the whole.

In that century English Christians had heard some of the most important things that Northern Europe as a whole had heard from the word of God. Yet ought we rather to say that they had overheard them? Look at the shape of the Articles: eighteen on God, man and salvation, twenty one on the ‘visible’ church, its institutions, its relation to government and its sacraments! Do we not say, ‘Here is the church of Laud, of the Lambeth Quadrilateral, of the 1928 Prayer Book controversy, already declaring itself! A church concentrating, in defiance of all that Luther would have told it, upon maintaining the external forms of religion!’? But that would be one-sided and hasty. It would be truer to say that it was not then, and has never been to this day, the genius of the Church of England to grow its own theological nourishment, but only to prepare what was provided from elsewhere and to set it decently upon the table. But in that early period this minor genius actually served its purpose. The nourishment it brought in from Europe was good; the preparation was judicious, and the service never more decent. The English Reformation supported a Christian culture — a factor that is too easily overlooked when we turn our attention to the narrowly ecclesiastical concerns of the period. Shakespeare and Spenser flourished in its ethos; Herbert and Donne (in a later reign, but before the great sea-change of the seventeenth century) grew up in its wake. The Merchant of Venice and The Faerie Queene also provide evidence for the theological health of the Elizabethan age, just as Paradise Lost does for the Puritan.

There is, in truth, a great gulf between the preoccupations of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries — so great that one could almost, at a pinch, claim the Reformation as the last great flowering of the mediaeval era and the seventeenth century as the moment at which the modern broke in. Of course, it is more complicated than that; already in the Reformation we find ourselves peering across the threshold of modernity. Nevertheless, such a claim would be no more misleading, and perhaps rather less, than the view which conceives of the Reformation as a radical announcement of the supremacy of the individual conscience. The Reformers were concerned especially with the mediaeval question of justification, which they reinterpreted radically in a Christocentric way. From the seventeenth century on, this question sinks out of sight in the English-speaking tradition like a stone in a deep pond. In its place we find new questions about individual human agency and natural causes, transforming theology, natural philosophy and political theory out of all recognition. The early seventeenth-century preoccupation with predestination, represented in Anglicanism by the unofficial Lambeth Articles of 1595 and the Church of Ireland Articles of 1615, forms a bridge between the two quite different intellectual eras. For predestination, itself a mediaeval issue, proved a natural way of approaching newly-urgent questions about causation and agency in terms which were familiar. But we must not read our Tudor authors as though they were the conscious harbingers of this intellectual revolution. Cranmer’s seventeenth Article is not an early draft for the work of Whitgift and Ussher. One of the services which Cranmer and his contemporaries may render us, us late-moderns whose conceptions have been shaped by the maturing of that liberal-scientific culture which was born in the seventeenth century, is to take us behind it, back to a time when other questions, closer to the centre of Christian proclamation, took priority.

We will learn from them better than from Anglicans of any other age of that distinctive theological virtue in which Anglicans have sometimes spoken as though they had a monopoly, the virtue of‘moderation’. The word is appropriate enough, though it need to be used with some subtlety and not a little irony. The popular account of Anglican moderation, that it consisted in steering a steady middle path between the exaggerated positions of Rome on the one hand and Geneva on the other, simply will not bear examination. As our knowledge of late-mediaeval thought grows greater, forwarded by the scholarly studies of the last half-century, it becomes more apparent that Calvinism, on all issues except that of church-order, took as much of the late-scholastic tradition into its system as any of the other schools of Protestantism. Its doctrine of predestination can arguably claim to be less ‘reformed’ — in the sense of bring more mediaeval — than that of the Council of Trent! There was nothing particularly ‘middle’ about most of the English Reformers’ theological positions — even if one could decide between what poles the middle way was supposed to lie.

Their moderation consisted rather in a determined policy of separating the essentials of faith and order from adiaphora. Of all the continental spirits, they had learned most deeply, perhaps, from Melanchthon. ‘Surely odious it must have been’, Hooker exclaims, ‘for one Christian church to abolish that which all had received and held for the space of many ages, and that without detriment unto religion so manifest and so great, as might in the eyes of unpartial men appear sufficient to clear them from all blame of rash and inconsiderate proceeding, if in fervour of zeal they had removed such things.’1 Anglican moderation is the policy of reserving strong statement and conviction for the few things which really deserve them. Yet that does not mean that it is incapable of conveying certainties. Think of the church music of the Tudor period, after its composers had turned over to English and put away their soaring cloud-peaks of polyphonic sonority. It moves along at a deliberate, purposeful walking-pace — not dancing like Purcell, not clapping its hands like Handel, not swelling its breast like Stanford. It articulates its text clearly in cool and measured understatement, without embellishment. It conveys confidence and assurance; and it can even suggest excitement, though under the strongest self-restraint.

The moderation of Anglicanism has proved invaluable in those heady moments of the history of the modern church at which truth has broken, with shocking suddenness, upon the whole culture. But it can also be treacherous when the culture is drifting without truth and without certainty. We may compare it with the secular English conservatism of our own century. Far from being a refusal of change, English conservatism is rather a way of excusing it, by maintaining the pretence that change has simply been forced upon it. Scrupulously preserving apparent continuity in everything inessential, it manages to dissimulate altogether the profundity of the revolution that has overwhelmed it. The Anglican genius, similarly, is not sufficient on its own to provide a strong sense of direction, but depends upon the guidance of other Christians’ dreams and visions. But it is precisely that, and not some supposed ‘middleness’ between Catholic and Protestant, which gives it a critically important role in twentieth-century ecumenism.

It is none of the Christian theologian’s business, in the end, to make great boasts for his denominational tradition or for any era in its history. His task is to bend his mind, under the authority of the apostolic witness to Christ, to the demands of Christian faith and obedience as they confront him and his contemporaries in their own time. If he does that, let him learn from whom he will, as he will. Yet those of us who have learned to follow Jesus Christ here, within the Church of England or one of its sister-churches, have our purely domestic reasons for gratitude. As a token of which I offer this essay to the glory of God and in thanks to those who are responsible for my Christian education as well as to those in England and Canada whom it has been my privilege to teach. And it is my pleasure to salute the Council and staff of Latimer House on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and especially to thank the Warden, the Revd. Roger Beckwith, for detailed comments, which have been of great assistance.

June 28th 1985

Christ Church, Oxford.

1 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity IV. 14.6.