J. C. Ryle and Comprehensiveness

http://www.churchsociety.org/churchman/documents/Cman_089_4_Toon.pdf

[Church Society] 24July 2009--Most modern theological statements concerning the existence of diversity or the fact of comprehensiveness in the Church of England or in the Anglican Communion insist that this diversity and comprehensiveness must be taken seriously on fundamental, theological grounds. It is regarded as totally unsatisfactory merely to trace the diversity to its sixteenth and seventeenth century roots and then plot its development. One is expected to confess that comprehensiveness is a necessary quality in any church which makes claims of catholicity and that its absence reduces a church to a sect. The basic theological ground asserted for diversity is that the Faith is a mystery and that God Himself is beyond our comprehension.This means that there must be a legitimate variety of words and images used to describe God, His salvation and His relation to the world. It is further pointed out, as this is a commonplace of New Testament studies, that there are a variety of theologies within the pages of the New Testament; these are different but perhaps complimentary. Also we are told that the very imagery of the church as One Body requires both a diversity of gifts (as St. Paul stated) and a diversity of theological and liturgical expressions. Such diversity and comprehensiveness as this creates problems concerning what are legitimate and illegitimate developments of doctrine, morals and worship and concerning how the variety exists as a unity. However, it is argued that we must live with such tensions for they are part of being the church in the world.1

This kind of thinking has within it the potential to justify virtually any form of words which claims to be ‘faith in search of understanding’ or ‘faith expressing itself in worship’. In our efforts to evaluate it or come to terms with it we may find it worthwhile to look into our Anglican Evangelical tradition and to ask how our forefathers looked at this question of comprehensiveness. It was of course a problem that became acute for Evangelicals in the second half of the nineteenth century when the traditional views of the inspiration and authority of the Bible were called in question and when the Privy Council made various judgments on matters of doctrine and ritual which appeared to question the plain meaning of the Articles and Prayer Book. So we turn specifically to the leading Victorian Evangelical, John Charles Ryle, who if he was not the leading Evangelical theologian, was certainly the most gifted popular writer and defender of the principles of the Evangelical party.2