Paul Zahl

http://anglicaneucharistictheology.blogspot.com/2007/08/paul-zahl.html

[Anglican Eucharistic Theology] 28 Aug 2007--Paul Zahl, an Evangelical Anglican in the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, in his book entitled The Protestant Face of Anglicanism, published in 1998, sets out “to restore the image within the Anglican tradition, indeed within the larger Christian Church, of the Protestant legacy of faith” (Zahl, 1998: 2). He suggests that within Anglicanism there are two different faces – one he terms “Catholic and Apostolic” and the other “Reformed and Protestant” (Zahl, 1998: 2). Zahl suggests that each face has been prominent within Anglicanism, with the visibility of each face being more prominent at certain times. He argues, for example that the Reformed and Protestant face was more prominent in the eighteenth century, while the Catholic and Apostolic face was more prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed Zahl argues that there has been an historic tension between the two faces of Anglicanism, but that in more recent times there has been an attempt to form a balance rather than a tension between these two faces, a synthesis rather than an antithesis. He describes this balance as a “reformed Catholicism” and a “catholic Evangelicalism”, such that, “either it is a tension between two contrasting views of Christianity, one Catholic and one Protestant; or it is union of opposites” (Zahl, 1998: 3). This is an interesting view since it argues that opposite views have in some way come into union in a third face, that of a deliberate ambiguity that attempts to reflect the world (in this case the Anglican world) as it really is (Zahl, 1998: 4). Zahl rejects such a view on the argument that “it tends to elevate aspects of Christianity that are of secondary importance in responding to the problem of being human” (Zahl, 1998: 4). By this Zahl means that the third face argument elevates aspects such as Anglican ‘distinctives’ in worship and liturgy, sacred time and space, decency or orderliness and sources of religious authority, at the expense of what Zahl sees as more primary themes, such as atonement and grace, freedom versus bondage, and the question ‘Who is Jesus?’. It is Zahl’s view that “the third way sells short what we have to offer” (Zahl, 1998: 4). Zahl therefore rejects the idea of a third face of Anglicanism and returns to his theme of a tension between two divergent schools of thought within Christianity, although he acknowledges that the third face view is popular in the present day (Zahl, 1998: 6).