A Kind of Noah’s Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness - Latimer Studies 10

Anglicans who call themselves evangelicals, like those who claim to be Anglican (Anglo-) Catholics, see themselves as holding in trust for the rest of the church a heritage of truth and insight, perceptions of reality and duty, and traditions of stockpiled wisdom and spiritual experience, which form part of the wealth laid up in Christ for all, but which, partly through unawareness of true notions and partly through prepossession by false ones, not all up to now have been able to grasp. In my earlier study I noted as chief among the truths of which evangelicals are trustees:

(1) the supremacy of Scripture as God-given instruction, a sufficient, self-interpreting guide in all matters of faith and action;

(2) the majesty of Jesus Christ our sin-bearing divine Saviour and glorified King, by faith in whom we are justified;

(3) the lordship of the Holy Spirit, giver of spiritual life by animating, assuring, empowering and transforming the saints;

(4) the necessity of conversion, not as a stereotyped experience but as a regenerate condition, a state of faith in Christ evidenced by repentance and practical godliness;

(5) the priority of evangelism in the church’s agenda;

(6) the fellowship of believers (the faith-full) as the essence of the church’s life.[2]

Evangelicals stress that faith, like charity, must begin at home, in the sense that convertedness is first to seek because unconverted folk can neither know God’s forgiveness and favour nor serve him or others as they should. Immature evangellcals have sometimes settled for a euphoric, man-centred pietism, concerned only with possessing and spreading the peace and joy of ‘knowing Christ as my personal Saviour’ (sadly, these precious words are nowadays a cant phrase), and never appreciating God’s revealed concern for truth and righteousness in church and community. Maturer evangelicals, however, have always recognized that though personal conversion is the starting-point Christians must learn a biblical God-centredness and seek after ‘holiness to the Lord’ in all departments of the church’s worship, witness and work and in every activity and relationship of human life. Over the past four centuries in England this maturity has been most apparent when evangelicalism has been closest to its historical roots in Reformed (that is, Reformational, or, to use a word which would have distressed John Calvin, Calvinistic) theology.

‘Evangelical’ and ‘Reformed’ are not synonyms. Not all evangelicals, Anglican or other, would call themselves Reformed (some profess to be Lutheran, Wesleyan, Pentecostal or just nondescriptly biblicist); nor can all conservative Calvinists properly be called evangelicals (some are formalists in doctrine and devotion, some are institutionalists in pastoral care and strategy, and some are quietists wholly absorbed in monitoring the drama of God’s life in their souls). But whenever evangelicalism is fuelled by teaching that reproduces the biblical theocentrism of Calvin’s Institutes or the Anglican formularies or the later Westminster standards (drafted, be it said, mainly by Anglicans), all of which documents show the same balanced concern for personal faith, a pure church and a godly society, it manifests the mature breadth of which I am speaking.

To read the entire study by J. I.Packer, click here.