Between Two Hedges

Commentary by Robin G. Jordan

The Anglican via media can be compared to an English country lane with a hedgerow on either side of the lane as it winds through the English countryside. A hedgerow is a row of bushes and low trees planted along the edge of a lane. The bushes and trees are planted fairly close to each other and their branches are often woven together. The hedges form a fence that keeps cattle and sheep from straying into the lane from the fields alongside the lane. They also keep livestock that a farmer may be driving along the lane from straying into the adjoining fields. English hedgerows are the home of birds and hedgehogs and other small animals. In the spring they are bright with flowers. In the summer they may yield hazel nuts, wild rose hips, and blackberries. They are part of what makes England distinctively England.

On the right side of the Anglican via media is a hedge that separates the Anglican Church from Romanism and unreformed Catholicism. This hedge was planted at the time of the English Reformation. It was uprooted during the reign of Queen Mary but was replanted during the reign of her half-sister Elizabeth. It was broken down in places by the Oxford or Tractarian Movement and the Ritualists in the 19th century, which sought to remove any barrier between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. It was repaired and strengthened in places by Evangelical Churchmen who were faithful to the Protestant and Reformed faith of the Church of England.

On the left side of the Anglican via media is a hedge that separates the Anglican Church from radical Protestantism. In the 16th century this hedge was planted chiefly as a barrier against those whom the English Reformers and the Elizabethan bishops called “Anabaptists”. The latter were the extremists among the Continental Reformers. They generally practiced rebaptism, hence the name “Anabaptists,” or re-baptizers. Some asserted that Jesus was not divine but just a great religious teacher or prophet. All people were saved whatever belief they held or what sect they belonged to, provided they sincerely led their lives according to these beliefs and to the light of nature. Christians were free from obedience to God’s moral commandments. The authority of individual revelation was in addition to and even replaced the authority of the Holy Scriptures. Others believed that Christians should hold all wealth, possessions, and property in common. Christians should bring about God’s kingdom on earth through economic, political, and social change, revolution and violence.

Later in the same century and in the 17th century this hedge became a fence against certain beliefs and practices imported from Geneva, as well as those of the Anabaptists. In the English Church a tension would exist between those who believed that the Church was sufficiently reformed and those who wished to reform the Church more thoroughly along the lines of the Genevan Church throughout the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I.

Where the Church of England and the Church of Geneva differed the most was in the areas of the place of the clergy in civil society, the relationship of church and state, church government and discipline, worship, ceremonies, and vestments. In other areas such as doctrine the positions of the two churches were closer to each other. The positions of the English Church in doctrine, the place of the clergy in civil society, and the relationship of church and state were not much different from those of the other Reformed Churches in Germany and Switzerland. Indeed the Elizabethan bishops considered the Church of England one of the Reformed Churches, as did the bishops in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. Both Archbishop Laud and Charles I died with the word “Protestant” on their lips. Anglicanism can be viewed as a distinctively English form of Protestantism and the Church of England as a distinctively English Reformed Church.

During the English Civil Wars and the Interregnum Parliament broke down the hedge between the Church of England and the Church of Geneva. It abolished the episcopacy and replaced the Book of Common Prayer with a Directory of Public Worship. The Westminster Confession was drawn up. However, Parliament was unsuccessful in establishing a presbyterian form of church government. Oliver Cromwell, the New Army and Independency, or congregationalism, won the day. Cromwell adopted a policy of tolerance toward most sects that he would have extended to the Anglicans but they were staunch Royalists and would not agree to any settlement under Cromwell. Widespread tolerance would not have not been the order of the day if presbyterianism had prevailed.

With the restoration of the Stuart monarchy this hedge would also be restored. Those clergy who would not conform to the Restoration Settlement, which reestablished episcopacy, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and the Book of Common Prayer, were ejected from their livings.

In the 21st century the similarity between a number of beliefs of those the English Reformers and Elizabethan bishops called “Anabaptists” and a number of beliefs of liberal Episcopalians is striking. Those who planted the hedge on the left of the Anglican via media did so with foresight, recognizing that the Anglican Church needed a fence to separate the Church from those who would seek to lead the Church away from the one holy catholic and apostolic faith.

In a growing part of The Episcopal Church the English country lane of Anglican via media with its two hedges has vanished (See Pondering in my heart: Reflections on personal experiences of ECUSA, six years ago by Bishop Harold Miller, Bishop of Down and Dromore of the Church of Ireland, published in The Church of Ireland Gazette. It can be found at the Anglican Mainstream website at http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/?p=2084.) In its place is an open waste, a barren expanse, where no clear track can be discerned. This is what liberal Episcopalians would have us believe is the Anglican via media.

People generally avoid wastelands in England. They are filled with all kinds of hidden dangers—abandoned mines, pits and quarries; tumble-down buildings that can collapse on those foolish enough to enter them; bogs and quicksand that can swallow up those blundering into them; and of late large predators that have been illegally imported into the British Isles and then released into uninhabited areas of the countryside. At night strange lights will lead the lost even further astray, often into one of these dangers.

Yet for our liberal friends this trackless waste appears to hold a particular allure. It is affected with a glamour like the magic enchantment that deceives visitors to the realm of the Fairie. Poisonous mushrooms and toadstools are thought to be a rich banquet; ditch water in an acorn cup, vintage wine in a bejeweled goblet. They cannot see things as they are. All they see is a delusive beauty—lush meadows and fields of ripening grain, gently rippling in the wind.

Lured by these illusions, they are mindless to the absence of a well-trodden path to safely guide them. Those who may have noticed the disappearance of the track comfort themselves with the thought, “We’ll make our own path.” “We’re pathfinders, pioneers,” they tell each other. Without map or compass or anyone to show them the way they rush on, heedless of the dangers.

Nightfall finds them wandering in circles, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and totally lost. Yet they are unable to shake off the glamour that befuddles their minds and deludes them. They will continue their flittering in the dark, each pursuing his own phantom light until one by one they fall prey to the waste.

One by one their cries will be heard no more. The last to perish will hear mocking laughter in his last moments. Perhaps in those moments he will come to the final realization that he has been mislead and with that realization experience cold fear and dread as he passes from this life into a Godless eternity.