Carson T. Clark and the Essence of Anglicanism: A Critique

By Robin G. Jordan

In his article, “What Is the Essence of Anglicanism,” Carson T. Clark identifies what he beliefs are seven hallmarks around which an Anglican identity revolves. In this article I propose to examine these hallmarks and the conclusions that Clark draws in the light of a lifetime of studying Church history, Christianity, and historic Anglicanism.

1. The first hallmark of an Anglican identity that Clark identifies is sacramental theology. While Clark uses the term “sacramental theology,” what he appears to be referring to in his article is sacramentalism, that is, the ascription of great importance or efficacy to the sacraments. While some historical Anglican figures held sacramentalist views and the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic movements were decidedly sacramentarian, it is highly debatable whether sacramentalism is a distinguishing characteristic of an Anglican identity. While some Anglicans would agree with this view, others would not. All Anglicans may be said to recognize that there is a place for sacraments in the worship of the Church but they do not agree on what that place is. This, however, is not particularly Anglican. So do the Disciples of Christ, Lutherans, Methodists and other Christians.

Only since the 1970s has the Holy Communion become the normative climax of their Sunday services for Anglicans in the United States. Outside the United States there are Anglicans for whom the sermon continues to be the climax of their Sunday services as it was for many Anglicans in the United Kingdom and the United States until the Liturgical Movement and Parish Communion Movement of the second half of the last century. Clark erroneously assumes what is the present norm in the United States is the norm elsewhere. Due to the present state of the economy, shifts in demographics, and other factors it is ceasing to be the norm in the United States especially in yoked mission congregations in which a licensed minister may conduct services and preach the sermon on most Sundays.

It must also be noted even the Baptists have a sacramental theology. They view baptism and the Lord’s Supper as ordinances, practice believer’s baptism, and have a memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper. This, however, is nonetheless a sacramental theology.

2. The second hallmark Clark identifies is the office of bishop. In his explanation he takes an Anglo-Catholic view of bishops that a number of Anglican scholars—Lightfoot, Beckwith, Burkehill, and others—have shown has no Scriptural basis nor is it supported by the historical evidence. We do not find in the New Testament apostles overseeing local churches. We find local elders overseeing local congregations and a wandering apostle Paul who, from time to time, visited congregations he may have helped to start or to the spiritual growth of which he may have made a contribution. The office of bishop evolved from the office of elder-overseer, not from the unique ministry of apostle

As I have written elsewhere, the English Reformers found no evidence of a Scriptural mandate for any particular form of church government or polity. They retained bishops because they were, as Bishop John Jewel, were “ancient and allowable.”

The English Reformers rejected the idea of an unbroken succession of bishops that linked the Church of their day with the Jesus and the apostles, a view that the Roman Catholic Church promoted in support of its claim of papal supremacy. In The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today, J.I. Packer draws to our attention:

Catholicity and apostolicity, to our Reformers, had nothing to do with an (unproveable) ministerial succession, but were matters entirely of doctrine.

The claim of a succession of bishops stretching back to apostolic times, as Packer notes, cannot be proven. In 1896 the Pope Leo XIII declared Anglican orders null on the basis of a supposedly defective Ordinal. Anglican scholars were quick to point to the Vatican's attention that if the Anglican Ordinal was defective for the reasons given in Apostolicae Curae, the Church of Rome’s own ordinal had been defective on the same grounds for several hundred years of its own history. As a consequence Rome’s supposedly unbroken succession of bishops had been broken numerous times during that time, belying Rome’s claim to an unbroken succession of bishops.

Clark would base Anglican identity upon the acceptance of a myth—a prevalent but false belief.

3. The third hallmark of an Anglican identity Clark identifies is historic orientation. He asserts:

Clearly the weight of and emphasis upon tradition varies among provinces, dioceses, parishes, and even individuals. Nevertheless, all Anglicans (at least in theory) lean heavily upon tradition–Patristic, Medieval, and Modern–in both doctrine and practice. There’s this innate impulse to look to the wisdom of the past to guide us in the present and maintain continuity in the future, which is most clearly evident in practices like the recitation of the creeds. The Anglican tradition has never sought to be a recreation of first century Christianity. It has sought to simultaneously and faithfully bear witness both to Christianity’s origins and its transmission through time, space, and culture.

In his assertion he makes a number of generalizations that the facts do not support. All Anglicans do not lean heavily upon tradition. Anglicans have historically accepted the creeds because they were Scriptural and taught what the Scriptures taught. In reciting the creeds, they believed that they were affirming apostolic teaching as written down in the Scriptures.

Contrary to Clark’s assertion that the Anglican tradition has never sought to recreate first century Christianity, the English Reformers sought to return the English Church to what they understood to be the beliefs and practices of the primitive and apostolic Church.

In making these generalizations Clark shows that he is not knowledgable on the subject matter about which he is writing.

4. The fourth hallmark of an Anglican identity Clark identifies is English culture. In this part of his article he indulges in speculation about the origins of Christianity in the British Isles. He concludes this speculation with this assertion:

Anyway, what is certain is that a distinctly English brand of Christianity was exported throughout the world. Even in provinces like Israel, Uganda, Japan, and Brazil, Anglican churches bear a strong, underlying English influence as their name suggests.

The problem with this assertion is that the extent to which a province can be described as adopting “an English brand of Christianity” depends upon the particular time in Anglican Church history missionaries from England and the United States brought their particular brand of Christianity to what is now an Anglican province. The use of name “Anglican” does not always and invariably indicate a strong, underlying English influence. In some cases the underlying influence is not English but American. In other cases an independent Catholic jurisdiction has simply adopted the name to distinguish it from other independent Catholic jurisdictions and has no connection, direct or indirect, with the Church of England. Even those provinces that began as overseas branches of the Church of England have undergone changes that would not support Clark’s conclusion.

5. The fifth hallmark of an Anglican identity Clark identifies is the authority of Scripture. After noting that Scripture is the “highest authority” for “just about every orthodox Anglican,” he makes this assertion.

At the same time, Anglicans tend to concur with Rome and… whatever the Orthodox equivalent is… that Scripture cannot be rightly interpreted outside of apostolic tradition or the Church. It’s a perspective that makes groups like Baptists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans quite uneasy. I suppose it’s enough to say that Anglicans believe they’ve embraced the best of the Protestant Reformation in regards to the Bible’s authority while distancing themselves from its excesses and abuses.

At this point I am prompted to ask, “On what basis is Clark drawing these conclusions?” It is certainly not a careful and thorough study of Anglican church history and historic Anglicanism. Clark appears to confuse Anglo-Catholicism with Anglicanism. What he asserts might hold true in the case of Anglo-Catholics, it certainly does not hold true in the case of conservative evangelicals and other Anglicans who stand in continuity with the English Reformers on the interpretation of the Scriptures. The Church of England and historic Anglicanism does not give Church tradition and the Church equal if not greater authority than the Scriptures as does the Church of Rome and Roman Catholicism.

As for the assertion that the Scriptures are the “highest authority” for “just about every orthodox Anglican,” I would seriously question the orthodoxy of an Anglican who did not recognize the Scriptures as the ultimate authority or the supreme and final authority in all matters of faith and practice to which all human thought must be submitted, including Church tradition. This is the position of historical Anglicanism and it is the position that it shares with Protestantism in what is known as the Reformed tradition.

On the basis of what he has written to this point, Clark in his interpretation of the Anglican tradition appears to have fallen under the influence of Anglo-Catholicism.

6. The sixth hallmark of an Anglican identity Clark identifies is the Book of Common Prayer. In this part of the article he makes another assertion, which of the basis of which is very much open to question:

Obviously this includes Anglican liturgy… The Orthodox are known for their profession that doctrine and practice are inseparable–that each so informs and flows into the other that one cannot be rightly understood without the other. This is why they so disagree with the West’s abstract and almost mechanical doctrinal formulations. Clearly Anglicanism is more influenced by Western thought for historical and geographical reasons. Yet the Church of England seems to have bridged the east-west chasm a bit. Beginning with Thomas Cranmer’s first prayer book in late 1540s, cementing with the official 1662, and continuing through all the subsequent revisions, the Book of Common Prayer has served as the source of Anglican doctrine and practice. Granted, many today don’t use it during their worship services because they’re trying to make the tradition more accessible to those from non-Anglican backgrounds, but in my experience these people still look to the BCP as their basis for their services.

The reasons that the Orthodox disagree with the formulations of the Western Church may be related to a lack of a connection between doctrine and liturgy in the West. But it certainly not Orthodoxy’s sole reason nor is it Orthodoxy’s main reason for its disagreement with these formulations. The Eastern Church disagrees with the Western Church over its interpretation of Scripture, its acceptance of the teaching of Patristic writers like Augustine of Hippo, and its claims of papal infallibility and supremacy in the case of the Church of Rome.

In making this assertion Clark also shows that he has not studied the history of the Anglican Prayer Book. Even Dom Gregory Dix recognized begrudgingly that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had in the 1552 Prayer Book succeeded in giving liturgical expression to the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace by faith in Jesus Christ alone. The 1662 Prayer Book is basically the 1552 Prayer Book. A principle that Anglicans sought to observe until only fairly recently is lex orendis, lex credendis. The law of prayer is the law of belief. The liturgy should not only in text but also usage reflect what the Church believes.

In this assertion Clark makes another statement that is far from accurate.

Beginning with Thomas Cranmer’s first prayer book in late 1540s, cementing with the official 1662, and continuing through all the subsequent revisions, the Book of Common Prayer has served as the source of Anglican doctrine and practice.

The historic Anglican formularies—the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and the Ordinal of 1661—are the long recognized standards of faith and practice for Anglicans, not the Prayer Book by itself. The Anglo-Catholics called for the abolition of the Articles and their replacement with the Prayer Book as the Church of England’s confession of faith in the nineteenth century. The Anglo-Catholics tried to remove the Articles from the American Prayer Book in the 1920s. The Episcopal Church relegated the Articles to the historic documents section of the Prayer Book in the 1970s. TEC claims the 1979 Prayer Book to be the source of its doctrine and practice. Most of the other Anglican provinces continue to recognize the historic Anglican formularies as their standard for faith and practice. Clark is expressing what is an Anglo-Catholic and liberal point of view. It is certainly not the viewpoint of historic Anglicanism.

While making the services more accessible to non-Anglicans is one reason that the Prayer Book has fallen into desuetude, it is not the only reason that Anglican churches are abandoning liturgical forms of service. I am also prompted to ask how wide is Clark’s experience as far as the patterns of worship in Anglican churches that are no longer using liturgical forms of service.

7. The seventh and final hallmark of an Anglican identity Clark identifies is the “principle” of the via media. Clark does not elucidate what he means by via media. He describes it as a conceptual development of the sixteenth century Anglican divine Richard Hooker. Those who have studied this theory, its origins, and development, know that it was first articulated by the nineteenth century Tractarian John Henry Newman who subsequently rejected the theory and left the Church of England for the Church of Rome. Clark may be confusing the via media myth with another myth ascribed to Hooker—the so-called three-legged stool of Anglicanism, which is used to justify giving equal weight to Scripture, tradition, and reason in matters of doctrine and practice.

The conclusions that Clark draws in “What is the Essence of Anglicanism” are not based on solid scholarship. He voices a number of erroneous beliefs that are circulating in the contemporary North American Anglican Church. Being in vogue, however, does not make them accurate or true. It shows how easily in the twenty-first century through the medium of the Internet error is disseminated and spread. What is particularly alarming is the extent of Clark’s erroneous beliefs.

Clark states very early in the article that he loves the ambiguity of what he believes comprises the identity of Anglicanism. It is therefore surprising that he troubles to identity what he describes as hallmarks around which an Anglican identity revolves. It is even more surprising that he in identifying these hallmarks he repeatedly takes an unambiguously Anglo-Catholic view.

What Clark appears to see as ambiguity is from the perspective of historical Anglicanism corruption brought about by the passage of time (see the essay “Concerning the Service of the Church” in the front of the 1662 Prayer Book), the human inclination toward evil (see Article IX), tendency of churches to err (see Article XIX), and tendency of human assemblies to also err (see Article XXI). Ambiguity is not something that we should celebrate. Rather it points to the ongoing need for the Church to reform itself.

In his views Clark shows the influence of liberalism and post-modernism as well as Anglo-Catholicism. If Clark’s views are representative of a large segment of the North American Anglican Church, they are a telling indictment of how far North American Anglicans have drifted from authentic historic Anglicanism. They point, to paraphrase J. I. Packer, to the clear need to lay hold afresh of historic Anglicanism, to grasp again its breadth, and to deepen it in the face of the erroneous beliefs that are seeking to command the attention of North American Anglicans in the twenty-first century.