The Historical Moorings of Anglicanism

By Robin G. Jordan

The Protestant, Reformed faith of historic Anglicanism may be summed up in a number of propositions.

--The Scriptures are God’s Word written. They are our supreme and final authority in all matters of faith and practice.

--They contain all that we need to know to be saved.

--Due to sin, our own individual rebellion against God as well as that of humankind, we have become estranged from God, and rightly deserve his just wrath and condemnation.

--Only Christ was free from the human propensity to disobey God and to do evil. Only he was free from the effects of humankind’s rebellion against God.

--We cannot by our own efforts be reconciled to God. We do not even have the will to seek reconciliation with God.

--Our salvation is God’s doing. He provides a way by we may be restored to a right relationship with him. Only God’s influence working in us enables us to have the will to seek reconciliation with God and to take advantage of the way that he has provided to affect that reconciliation. It is by faith in Christ and by faith in him alone that we are reconciled to God.

--Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for the sins of all humankind upon the cross. Christ’s one offering was finished in the cross. There he bore the full consequences of humanity’s rebellion against God and gained God’s forgiveness. Christ’s sacrifice was complete and perfect. We have need of no other sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins.

--Our good deeds are acceptable to God only when they spring from a vital faith in Christ. This faith is not a result of our own efforts but a gift from God.

--Christ instituted two sacraments—baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They are signs and guarantees of God’s favour and goodwill toward us. They answer the purposes for which Christ ordained them.

--Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper to be a commemoration of his sacrifice and to enliven and strengthen our faith in him. Through the Lord’s Supper we participate in the benefits of his sacrifice.

These propositions are the moorings to which historic Anglicanism is tied. They are not its only moorings but they are numbered among its chief moorings—the teachings of the Bible to which it is attached.

When you attend church on Sunday, do you hear these teachings preached from the pulpit and taught in the classroom? Or do you hear a different message taught in their place? If you hear a different message, you are not hearing the New Testament gospel, as the English Reformers understood it.

In the sixteenth century the English Reformers drew up the Thirty-Nine Articles to safeguard the truth of the gospel and to protect the pulpit from heresy and false teaching. The gospel had been lost to the Church of England for centuries. In its place had grown up a false religion which taught that sacraments and good deeds are the way to heaven and which took salvation out of God’s hands and placed it into the hands of a human being—a priest. The English Reformers did not want the gospel to be lost to the English Church again.

Sadly many Anglicans in America have a distorted view of the Reformation. Late Philip Edgcumbe Hughes in his opus magnum, The Theology of the English Reformers explains the true nature of Reformation.

In England, as in other countries, the Reformation of the sixteenth century was in its essence a spiritual movement flowing from the rediscovery of the gospel of divine grace to which the pages of the Holy Scripture bear testimony.

The English Reformers would experience the power of the gospel and it would transform their lives. Having received so precious a gift, they did not want to keep it to themselves but desired to share it with their fellow countrymen and future generations. God was working in them both to will and do his good pleasure. Five centuries later Anglican Christians in Africa, Asia, Australia, the British Isles, Canada, Ireland, South America, and other parts of the world can lift their voices in praise of the God who brought the English Reformers out of darkness into his marvelous light and in turn has done the same thing for them. They too have experienced the dynamic, life-transforming power of the gospel because God caused the English Reformers and those who followed in their footsteps to not only pass on the good news of Jesus Christ to the next generation but also to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission to go into all the world and to proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.

Yet wherever the Holy Spirit is working to bring men and women to the knowledge of salvation, other forces are at work to keep them in darkness, ignorance, and superstition. This includes our own predisposition to rebel against God and to do evil. While the gospel of grace has not been entirely lost, it has disappeared from a number of churches that claim to stand in the Anglican tradition. Elements of the false religion that had displaced the true apostolic faith in the Medieval Church have been reintroduced into these churches along with innovations in doctrine and worship borrowed from a corrupt Church of Rome. Other heretical and false teachings have also been introduced into these churches. This has often been done by men and women who are not trying to deceive the congregations of these churches with teachings that they recognize are heretical and false. It has been done by those who themselves are deceived by such teachings. The “god of this world”, to use the words of the New Testament, along with their own vanity, keeps them from seeing the truth, and encourages them to accept falsehood in place of the truth.

The churches in which Anglicanism has been cast loose from these moorings are drifting toward a maelstrom of destruction. A maelstrom is a great tidal whirlpool that ships caught in its grip cannot escape. They are dragged to the sea bottom or broken on the rocks, and their crew and passengers are drowned.

How can we distinguish those Anglican churches that are adrift? They are churches in which the true gospel is not preached from the pulpit or taught in the classroom. They are churches in which the Protestant, Reformed faith summed up in the foregoing propositions is not found, or if it is found, is greatly diluted or distorted. They are churches that do not accept the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which regard them as historical documents or relics of the past, or where they “have formal authority but are neglected as living formularies.” They are churches in which the Articles are not interpreted in accordance with their plain, natural, and intended sense but in a fanciful, ahistorical manner.

The Articles are compared with a standard of doctrine that does not exist, which is a construction in the mind of the interpreter. The “great historical fact” that “the Articles belonged to an age in which Western Christendom was divided into two great camps, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant, and that the Articles were a declaration that England took her place in the Protestant camp” is ignored. The reference in the Declaration to only “the literal and grammatical sense” of the Articles is held to relieve the interpreter “from the necessity of making the known opinions of the framers a comment upon the text.” “This last evasion,” as Professor Gillis Harp points out in his Churchman article, ”Recovering Confessional Anglicanism,” “…effectively detaches” the ‘train' of the Articles from its ‘engine' (i.e., its original historical context and the original Intent of its authors) and essentially allows one to pull Anglicanism anywhere one likes.”

In the United States in which Christians who have been influenced by the culture’s emphasis upon the maintenance of diversity at the expense of truth seek to outdo each other in showing their tolerance of divergent opinions, the view expressed in this article may seem to be intolerant. However, I doubt that the English Reformers would see it that way. They recognized that where the salvation of humankind was involved, there was only one truth, the truth of God’s Word. Men might differ on secondary matters but not on any matter related to salvation.