Anglicanism in USA: An Alternative View

Commentary by Robin G. Jordan

I believe that we already know what we need to know about the two successions that preceded the current exodus of evangelical and orthodox clergy and congregations from the Episcopal Church. Sponsoring a series of regional conferences upon these successions may not be the wisest use of Common Cause time, resources, and energies and may have unforeseen consequences. Different regional conferences might draw different conclusions and might become another one of the centrifugal forces that work against evangelical and orthodox unity.

A more practical approach would be for the Common Cause Council to employ a competent research team to examine the successions and to report its findings and conclusions to the Council for dissemination. They may not want to limit their research to the experiences of the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Continuing Anglican Church. They may wish to look the experiences of extramural Anglican bodies outside the United States such as the Church of England in South Africa, the Independent Anglican Church in the United Kingdom, and the Traditional Anglican Communion in Australia.

The growth and increasing influence of the Oxford Tractarian Movement in the then Protestant Episcopal Church prompted the succession of a group of Evangelical Episcopalians from the Church in 1873. The Tractarians’ doctrine of justification and other aspects of their theology – their elevation of tradition over Scripture, their doctrines of baptismal regeneration and the Real Presence and Isaac William’s doctrine of “reserve” greatly alarmed the Evangelicals in the Protestant Episcopal Church. The theology of the Tractarians and the pronounced Roman Catholic leanings of the Ritualists who followed them were too much for Bishop George David Cummins. He and seven other clergy and nineteen laymen left the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1873 and formed the Reformed Episcopal Church. They issued a Declaration of Principles. Other Evangelical Episcopalians would eventually join them.

The Reformed Episcopal Church started small and has stayed small. A contributing factor may have, at least at the beginning, been that Bishop Cummins divided his energies. He sought to unite other Evangelicals outside the Protestant Episcopal Church into a single body. Bishop Cummins also died three years after he founded the Reformed Episcopal Church. The Reformed Episcopal Church has shown over its 134-year history only a lukewarm interest in establishing new congregations in comparison to other Evangelical denominations. Its congregations are scattered around the United States and Canada. It may be noteworthy that the Reformed Episcopal Church has not planted any congregations in Kentucky where Cummins was Assistant Bishop and which was a hot bed of Tractarianism and Ritualism in his day. The neighboring state of Tennessee has only one Reformed Episcopal Church congregation.

In Guarding the Holy Fire, Roger Steers tells what happened to “the majority of committed Evangelicals” who stayed in the Protestant Episcopal Church.

“In the years following 1873 Evangelicals within the Episcopal Church faced problems which effectively destroyed old-style Evangelicalism within the Church for about eighty years. The new generation of leaders, initially Evangelicals, slowly abandoned old party loyalty in favor of the Broad Church whose new emphasis on critical theology and social ministry seemed to them better fitted to address the problems of post-Civil-War America.

At Evangelical Episcopal seminaries in Virginia and Cambridge (ETS) younger faculty members embraced Liberalism, Darwinism and biblical criticism. By the end of the century, all the Evangelical educational institutions had become Liberal. By 1900, there were very few people left in the Protestant Episcopal Church to carry on the Evangelical Episcopal vision.”

By the close of the 19th century Evangelical Episcopalians had became completely extinct. As Gillis Harp points out in A Once & Former Evangelical—Phillip Brooks: A Cautionary Tale, the Evangelicals and their significant contribution to American Anglicanism were forgotten.

“By the 1950s, there was no longer a living memory of genuine Evangelical churchmanship within the Episcopal Church. Many official church histories compounded this institutional amnesia by often slighting the contribution to the denomination made by Evangelicals during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (most “in-house” histories grudgingly acknowledged the Reformed Episcopalians who seceded in 1873 but added that they were never real Episcopalians anyway!).”

With no Evangelical wing to act as a counter-balance the Anglo-Catholic and Broad Church parties in the Episcopal Church came to dominate the worship and life of the denomination. Episcopalians developed an identity that was essentially anti-Evangelical and which affected their attitudes toward the Bible, the atonement, evangelism, and the need for personal conversion and faith. These developments would have long-term ramifications for the Episcopal Church that we are seeing played out today.

Gillis Harp notes that there was an emergence of a kind of Evangelicalism in the Episcopal Church in the 1960s. It was imported from the Church of England and was influenced by Church of England Evangelicals like J. I. Packer and John Stott. The establishment of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in the 1970s was an outgrowth of this development. The ranks of this new Evangelical movement were swollen by others who emerged from the charismatic renewal movement. While the latter were labeled “Evangelicals,” their churchmanship was not as self-consciously Protestant as that of the old Evangelical party. This movement was not strong enough to check the ascendancy of Liberalism in the Episcopal Church.

The Broad Church was not the only segment of the Episcopal Church to experience the influence of Darwinism, Higher Criticism, and modernism. The Anglo-Catholic wing also increasingly became more liberal in the closing decade of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. In the 1960s and 1970s it would become radicalized. There was a split between conservative, or “traditionalist,” elements in the Anglo-Catholic wing and liberal, or “progressive” elements. The second secession was prompted by this split, which centered upon the issues of prayer book revision and women’s ordination. One group of Anglo-Catholic “traditionalists” seceded from the Episcopal Church in 1977 and formed the “Continuing Anglican Church,” which quickly fragmented into several jurisdictions. A number of factors have been identified as contributing to this fragmentation —the personalities of Continuing Anglican Church leaders and the petty feuds and rivalries between them, the desire on the part of individual leaders to establish personal fiefdoms, the lack of flexibility, conflict resolution skills, and a strong commitment to unity on their part, and a tendency to split over even resolvable differences.

Another group of Anglo-Catholic “traditionalists” opted to remain a part of the Episcopal Church. Some eventually acquiesced to using the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and to accepting women’s ordination. Others became a beleaguered persecuted minority in the Episcopal Church, engaged in a desperate holding action against a numerically superior force. They form the core of Forward in Faith North America.

In his article Dr. Toon identifies the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with the “classic Prayer Book.” The 1928 Prayer Book was the first major revision of the American Prayer Book. With the exception of the Scottish Prayer of Consecration the American Prayer was, until the adoption of the 1928 revision, fairly close to the 1662 Prayer Book. The 1928 revision introduced a number of significant changes in the theology of the American Prayer Book so that it no longer adhered to the biblical and Reformation theology of the Prayer Book that Anglicans worldwide regard as the classic Anglican Prayer Book—the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The 1928 revision adopted a number of features of the 1549 Prayer Book that Bishop Stephen Gardiner interpreted as teaching the doctrines of the Sacrifice of the Mass and Transubstantiation. However, the 1928 revision has other features that go well beyond the 1549 Prayer Book in their unreformed Catholic theology.

The 1928 revision was adopted at time in the history of the Protestant Episcopal Church when it was on the verge of abolishing the Thirty-Nine Articles as its standard of faith. With the adoption of the 1928 Prayer Book, the resolution to do away with the Articles, which had been adopted at the 1925 General Convention and faced easy passage at 1928 General Convention, was quietly dropped. The 1928 Prayer Book in its departure from the theology of the 1662 Prayer Book, whether or not we are willing to admit it, established the precedence for the 1979 revision.

The 1928 Prayer Book from a theological perspective is far from a conservative revision of the 1662 Prayer Book. It is time that we ceased glossing over the differences between the two books. For an example of a genuine conservative revision of the 1662 Prayer Book, see the 1926 Irish Prayer Book. It is time to retire the fiction that the 1928 Book is the 1662 Book, adapted to local conditions. While they may employ a number of the same prayers and liturgical texts, the 1928 Book deviates significantly at critical points from the 1662 Book.

Dr. Toon describes the Reformed Episcopal Church as “high church evangelical.” He fails to mention that for most of its history the Reformed Episcopal Church has been low church. This shift in churchmanship is a recent development and is itself a cause of controversy within the Reformed Episcopal Church.

In recent years the Reformed Episcopal Church has been experiencing a movement within its clergy akin to the one that caused its founders to secede from the Protestant Episcopal Church. The influence of this movement can be seen in the Reformed Episcopal Church’s new Prayer Book, which, despite its compilers claim that it brings the Reformed Episcopal Church’s Prayer Book closer to The Book of Common Prayer of 1662, actually contains a number of significant deviations from the 1662 Prayer Book. This material largely comes from where the 1928 Prayer Book deviates the most from the 1662 Prayer Book. The new Prayer Book also tacitly repudiates the Reformed Episcopal Church’s Declaration of Principles.

Dr. Toon notes that the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Anglican Province of America, a jurisdiction of the Continuing Anglican Church, are both signatories of the Theological Statement of the Common Cause Partnership, which establishes the Biblical and Reformation theology of Thirty-Nine Articles and The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as the signatories’ common standard of faith and worship. Both jurisdictions, however, use service books that do not conform to the standard that they have adopted. The Reformed Episcopal Church uses its new Prayer Book and the Anglican Province of America uses the 1928 Prayer Book. It must also be noted that the churches of Forward in Faith North America, another signatory of the Common Cause Theological Statement also use the 1928 Prayer Book.

These are red flags that point to weaknesses in the Common Cause Partnership that threaten its unity. Adopting the Thirty-Nine Articles and The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as the common standard of faith and worship of the Common Cause Partners makes sense since it is the official standard of faith and worship of the Church of England and a large number of the provinces of the Anglican Communion. All of the global South provinces that have offered a safe haven to departing Episcopal congregations affirm the Thirty Nine Articles and use the 1662 Book of Common Prayer or a service book based upon the 1662 Prayer Book. The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer were first adopted as the Anglican standard of faith and worship during the reign of Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan Settlement determined the shape of classical Anglicanism.

The 1559 Book of Common Prayer, the Prayer Book of the Elizabethan Settlement, was the second Prayer Book of Edward VI, the reformed Prayer Book of 1552, with some additions and alterations. As Roger Beckwith draws to our attention in ‘For the More Explanation’ and ‘For the More Perfection’: Cranmer’s Second Prayer Book, the 1552 Book completed the reforms begun with the 1549 Book, bringing “to clear and mature expression the biblical theology which in the 1549 Book was only implicit.” The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is the 1559 Prayer Book with some modest changes.

As long as a number of signatories of the Common Cause Theological Statement are using Prayers Books that do not conform to the doctrine of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the Common Cause Partnership’s Theological Agreement is little more than window dressing. It offers an illusion of doctrinal agreement without any substance. I believe that it will be a real measure of the Common Cause Partners’ commitment to their Theological Statement if they produce a new service book that actually adheres to this doctrine. It will also be a real measure of their commitment to the Common Cause Partnership if they adopt this service book and use it in place of not only the 1979 Book of Common Prayer but also the 1928 Prayer Book. This will also show how willing the Common Cause Partners are to put the Episcopal Church behind them and make a full and genuine realignment.