Where does all this leave us as Anglicans? Our problem, as has been made painfully clear in the current crisis, is that we do not really know who we are. It will not do to defer to scripture as if scripture stands outside the catholic and ecumenical tradition, for this attitude easily suggests, however unintentionally, that we read the scriptures alone, and that we alone mediate their interpretation.
Instead, let us follow the vision of Lambeth 1920, at which the bishops urged “every branch of the Anglican Communion” to “prepare its members for taking their part in the universal fellowship of the reunited Church, by setting before them the loyalty which they owe to the universal Church, and the charity and understanding which are required of the members of so inclusive a society” (Resolution 15).
Articles XIX and XXI gave the game away before the first upper-class English intellectual lost his faith during the ‘Enlightenment’, the first Oxbridge don read German higher criticism, the first bishop took gentlemanly discreet unbelief out in the open, the first woman was ordained and the first person was ordained specifically to condone homosexuality. Fallible church = it’s Protestant. (Which ironically means claiming a power to change things that the Pope never claimed.) Ironically it was semi-congregational polity not episcopal authority that made Anglo-Catholicism seem possible.
Fogey, I’d tend to agree with you. I am very sympathetic to the Tract 90 approach to this Article, but I do not, like Newman, have any particular interest in proving the worth of the Articles. The trouble with “infallibility” is that is not an instantly accessible term; what I take it to mean, and what I think the Church means by it, is not the same as what your average Anglophone hears in it.
What you’re suggesting, though, is that once Scripture is divorced from Tradition (and though I’m not a Hooker expert I gather that he continues this, if in a more nuanced way), with the assumption that it speaks for itself, Scripture can be taken by individuals as an unequivocal proof for whatever strange doctrines happen to be floating around. If I recall, Tom Wright says some helpful things about this in his article (or book?) about the authority of Scripture.
To say that Scripture is inseparable from the Tradition is not to claim, as the former Bishop of Pennsylvania did, that “the church wrote it so we can re-write it” (or whatever), for that is to impose exactly the same kind of divorce as the Puritans, if from an opposite perspective.
Sam – great to see your essay published in TLC.
But, as I’m sure you would agree, this is all question-begging, isn’t it? [b]Which Church is infallible?[/b] (I ask this even as I believe that the Church is indefectible and have [i]de facto[/i] recognized the Church’s infallibility, at least insofar as the theological definitions of the first five centuries, and the definition of the scriptural canon, are concerned.)
Even from a Nicene perspective, there aren’t “seven councils of the undivided Church”, but only two – or perhaps four, if we recognize what the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox, and Rome and the Oriental Orthodox and Assyrians (“Nestorians”) have recognized within the past couple of decades, that the disagreements surrounding the third and fourth Ecumenical Councils were of a semantic nature and that there is truly a christological consensus amongst all Nicene Christians. But the Church of the East doesn’t recognize the succeeding five councils, nor the Oriental Orthodox the succeeding four, and while the Oriental Orthodox practice iconodoulia, the Church of the East has no tradition of icons. Holy Scripture cannot be interpreted outside the Church’s own interpretation (which, in its quintessence, is precisely what catholic Tradition is – how the Church reads the Bible), but – which interpretation? (No, I’ve not gone over to the dark side of liberal protestant interpretive pluriformity! Nor am I hung up on the matter of iconodoulia, though it’s starting to sound that way.)
As Catholics, we can certainly say that the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition are definitive markers of that authoritative interpretive tradition, but – to hone in on what ACNA’s constitution dances around – what about the canons of the Seventh Council that define iconodoulia? Do we simply state that the Seventh Council is authoritative because we (Anglicans) are in our theological DNA Western Catholics? Or because the council antedates the “Great Schism”, neatly ignoring the schisms that separated the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox Churches from the rest of us? Or do we instead draw the line of interpretive authority where the Caroline Divines (in the main) did – at the first four Councils, which is essentially what ACNA has done?
(This has the attraction of being – materially/theologically, if not formally – essentially what the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Churches have in various configurations recognized as being the common Catholic faith, even while the latter two traditions haven’t conformed formally to the christological definitions of Ephesus for one, or Chalcedon for both.)
I’m sure that you know that I’m not being merely argumentative, and you know full well that I’m no [i]sola scriptura[/i] Protestant, but it seems that there is still a place for the Articles-derived assertion that nothing may be declared to be “believed for necessity of Salvation” that cannot be clearly drawn [i]by the Church[/i] from Holy Scripture – and this is precisely the place where any such insistence on iconodoulia and the dogmatic definitions of Marian doctrines (Immaculate Conception and Assumption) hit the shoals for classical Anglicanism.
Yes, Todd, that is the question, though we could also ask, even more simply, “Where is the Church?” (And to answer this in any of the usual ways, e.g., “where the Eucharist is,” only leads to further questions.)
I think that these are questions that the Articles and other Anglican formularies beg, not just me. I have no problem with the assertion that nothing may be declared to be believed for necessity of salvation that cannot be read in Holy Scripture — but this is because I do not know of any Holy Scripture other than the Holy Scriptures of the Catholic Church — just as I know of no other Jesus than the Jesus of the Catholic Church. To say that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe there is a “historical Jesus” or a “historical New Testament” or whatever, just that the Christian does not receive Jesus and his Bible in a vacuum but in the Church, and thus neither Jesus nor the Bible can be judged on extra-ecclesial terms. It is a matter of insisting on the Incarnation, really: Jesus is not just some first century Jew, he is also his Body the Church; likewise the Scriptures are not just some old writings, they are the Word of God in a way that cannot be ultimately separated from the way that Jesus is the Word of God.
I was once told, in response to my statement that there could be no “Catholic faith” abstracted from the Catholic Church, that I wasn’t accounting for the work of the Holy Spirit in illuminating the hearts and minds of the faithful. That may be right. I don’t know… This is, for me, the question of the age: what does it mean for the Holy Spirit to guide the Church?
When I say “The Catholic Church” I do not mean an abstraction of “those churches which believe the Catholic Faith.” I mean, on the one hand, all baptized Christians (something I think Hooker would say), but also, the visible community of churches in communion with the see of Rome. That contradictory assertion is good Vatican II theology, and obviously it is what makes me an “Anglo-Papalist.” I am not consistent in this belief, nor do I really know what to do with it, because I have no real conviction to leave the Anglican Communion and swim the Tiber — it is, after all, the context of Anglicanism that has led me to believe that the Church cannot be a mere idea. What I think I suggested in the above essay, however obliquely, is that Anglicanism’s problem is not that it is not Rome, but that it refuses the claim to be the Church even while acting like the Church. Claiming to know what Scripture means is exactly what it means to act like The Catholic Church. That is what the ecumenical councils all set out to do — not to invent doctrine, but to interpret Scripture.
It is not good enough, then, to say that we are “part of” the Catholic Church, for that makes the Catholic Church an abstraction. That is the protestant principle — which I don’t object to people holding — from which there can be no relief from the current crisis of authority.
Sam, with the exception of your assertion in the fourth paragraph regarding the visible community of churches in communion with the See of Rome, I don’t disagree with a word that you’ve written.
Especially the last paragraph. Fie on the branch theory, the Anglo-Catholic restatement of the protestant principle!
Thanks, Todd… My thoughts on Rome are full of contingencies, but I feel a need to react strongly to Anglo-Catholic ecumenical smugness. (The whole “we have valid orders, the catholic faith, blah blah” which belittles questions of visible unity and the organic nature of the Faith.)
Todd (and Sam),
With regard to what you wrote, here, at #3:
(I ask this even as I believe that the Church is indefectible and have de facto recognized the Church’s infallibility, at least insofar as the theological definitions of the first five centuries, and the definition of the scriptural canon, are concerned.)
I really must ask — what, or whose, “definition of the scriptural canon?” The Catholic Church — or, if you prefer, “papal communion” — authoritatively, under anathema of those holding the contrary, defined the Canon of Scripture as regards the OT to include the “deuterocanonical books,” in the decree “Cantate Domino” of the Council of Florence (1441) — a “reunion agreement” with the Egyptian Copts, and so possibly meant obliquely to disparage the extra books that the Copts were wont to include in their OT — and again in 1547 at the Council of Trent, this time specifically anathematizing those (i.e., Protestants) who denied the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books (the Lutherans and the Reformed were to have somewhat different attitudes to those books, but let that pass). The Orthodox have never themselves produced such an “ecumenical” decision, and various Orthodox Churches include various books in their OT Canon, above and beyond, but including, those accepted by the Catholic Church; and at their Council of Jerusalem in 1673, to which some Orthodox attribute “quasi-ecumenical” authority, they insusted that the deuterocanonical books were part of the OT Canon, and authoritative. All Protestant churches disagree, and reject these books (completely in the case of the Reformed; the Lutherans and Anglicans seem to regard them as “good and edifying to read,” but not as canonical Scripture).
So what do you guys mean?
For what it’s worth, a friend pointed out that in my essay I sort of implied that the canon was decided at Nicea, and obviously that’s not true. The issue is, how do you declare that the Bible is the final authority in everything unless you have an “infallible” definition of what the Bible is? The Articles provide that definition themselves, even while asserting their own fallibility. Weird.
The issue of the canon suggests yet again that appeals to scripture or tradition depend on what church you’re in, so the fundamental question is not, first of all, whether one is in accord with scripture and tradition, but whether one is in the Catholic Church.