The Thirty-Nine Articles and Anglican Comprehensiveness (Part 1)

By Robin G. Jordan

The Articles of Religion, commonly known as the Thirty-Nine Articles, with the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 and the Ordinal of 1661, form the long-recognized doctrinal standard of Anglicanism. They are the reformed Church of England’s confession of faith. They are also the shortest of the Reformed confessions. As the GAFCON Theological Resource Group emphasizes in Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, acceptance of the authority of the Articles is constitutive of Anglican identity.

The Articles were intended to perform four primary functions.

--To act as the reformed Church of England’s theological identity card.
--To safeguard the truth of the gospel.
--To establish unity and order in the church in the realms of doctrine and discipline.
--To keep within limits the comprehensiveness of the reformed Church of England.

It is this fourth primary function that chiefly concerns us in this article. All of the four primary functions of Articles, however, are related to each other.

The Articles were meant to form an encircling boundary that separated the doctrine of the reformed Church of England from the doctrine of other Churches, in particular that of the Church of Rome and the Anabaptist sects. The English Reformers concluded from their study of the Bible and the early Church fathers that the Church of Rome had fallen away from the primitive and apostolic Christian faith. Her teaching was corrupt. The Anabaptist sects, like the Church of Rome, espoused heresy and false teaching.

Before anyone was admitted to holy orders or a church living in the reformed Church of England, he was required to subscribe to the Articles. Subscription entailed the signing of a document to the effect that he wholeheartedly and without reservation believed that the Articles were in agreement with Scripture. He was also required to subscribe to the Prayer Book in the same fashion. Through the practice of subscription and the disciplining of clergy who failed to conform to the teaching of the Articles and the Prayer Book, the reformed Church of England sought to maintain uniformity of opinion on what she regarded as the essentials of the Christian faith.

From the outset the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA displayed ambivalence toward the Thirty-Nine Articles. In 1799 the following resolution was brought to the floor of the General Convention: "Resolved, That the articles of our faith and religion as founded on the Holy Scriptures are sufficiently declared in our Creeds and our Liturgy as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer, established for the use of this Church, and that further articles do not appear necessary." The House of Bishops voted against the resolution, blocking its passage. When a revised version of the Articles was adopted in 1801, the clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church were not required to formally subscribe to the Articles, as were the clergy of the Church of England. This would have significant consequences for the young denomination.

The course of ecclesiastical study that the House of Bishops adopted in 1804 for candidates preparing for ordination recommended Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1699), against which a committee of the Lower House of Convocation had raised a number of objections in 1701. Burnet was a Latitudinarian and a moralistic Arminian. The committee objected to Burnet’s introduction of too much latitude in the Articles’ interpretation, particularly in the matter of soteriology. This latitude encompassed an Arminian reading of the Articles.

Burnet argued that different interpretations of the Articles could be legitimate. This argument, the committee contended, undermined the principal purpose of the Articles, that is, of promoting unity by avoiding all obscurity and ambiguity. The committee found Burnet’s discussion of Articles 9-18 to be especially problematic. In his discussion of original sin, justification, and predestination, Burnet, the committee maintained, had presented many erroneous or heretical opinions that he had subsequently failed to refute. The committee further contended that Burnet frequently contradicted the true meaning of the Articles and offered views that were clearly opposed to the received opinions of the Church of England. Convocation was prorogued before any action could be taken on the committee’s report.

Justification by faith is expounded legalistically rather than Christologically in Burnet’s Exposition. Faith is, in some sense, treated as a meritorious work. It is also maintained that “the theological concepts and convictions of biblical, patristic, and Reformation theology are not necessarily normative at every point for us today.”

It is noteworthy that the same course of ecclesiastical study included Hugo Grotius’ The Truth of the Christian Religion and a number of other works of Arminian theologians. Fifteen years after her founding the Protestant Episcopal Church was already on a course that would take her away from “the true gospel and the Protestant, Reformed religion established by law” of the 1688 Coronation Act.

By the first half of the twentieth century E. J. Bicknell’s Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles (1919) had replaced Burnet as the most widely read commentary on the Articles in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Bicknell’s “liberal catholic” approach is frequently reminiscent of Burnet.

While the evangelicals in the Protestant Episcopal Church would accept the authority of the Articles, young denomination’s High Church party recognized only the authority of the Creeds and the Prayer Book. This would initially distinguish the American High Church party from the English High Church party. This distinction proved short-lived. It would be eroded with the so-called “Catholic Revival” that followed the publication of the Tracts for the Times in 1833-1841 and the rise of the Oxford Movement. The Tractarians would wrest the leadership of the High Church party in England from the hands of the Protestant High Churchmen and completely change the face of English High Churchmanship.

The Protestant Episcopal Church’s failure to give a central place to the Articles in its teaching and life in its early years and her sanctioning of a Latitudinarian interpretation of the Articles explain subsequent developments not only in that denomination but also in the ecclesial bodies that have broken away from her.

During the 1830s the publications of the Tractarians began to arrive in the United States. They would intensify the growing tension between the High Churchmen and the evangelicals in the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Oxford Movement and Ritualism would find fertile soil in the American Church. As these two precursors of the Anglo-Catholic Movement made inroads into the American Church, the Broad Church Movement also gained ground. Evangelical Bishop Manton Eastburn would repeatedly complain, “The Ritualists and the Broad Churchman, like the canker worm and the palmer worm, were destroying his diocese.”

In 1868 the Ritualists in the Diocese of Kentucky would refuse to permit Bishop Benjamin Bosworth Smith to move to New York when he became Presiding Bishop until he signed an agreement that kept his Assistant Bishop George David Cummins from exercising full episcopal authority in the diocese in his absence. In 1873 Bishop Cummins and a group of evangelical clergy and laypersons would leave the Protestant Episcopal Church and form the Reformed Episcopal Church. They established the Reformed Episcopal Church to protest what they viewed as the Romanizing tendencies of the Protestant Episcopal Church and to safeguard the Protestant and evangelical doctrines of the Anglican tradition

In 1886 the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting in Chicago would adopt a resolution, in which the House of Bishops stated what they believed were the necessary requisites for the restoration of Christian unity. The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops was at that time dominated by Anglo-Catholic bishops. Conspicuously absent from this statement was any reference to the Articles or the doctrines that they affirm especially justification by faith. The resolution asserted that the historic episcopate was an inherent part of “the substantial deposit of Christian Faith and Order committed by Christ and his apostles to the Church unto the end of the world,” a doctrinal position that the Articles do not take.

In 1925 the Episcopal Church’s General Convention would adopt a resolution dropping the Articles from the American Prayer Book. By this time Anglo-Catholicism and Broad Church liberalism were the dominant theological streams in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Classical Anglican evangelicalism had disappeared from the American Church by 1900. To go into effect, the resolution would have needed to be adopted again at the next General Convention. The impetus to remove the Articles from American Prayer Book dissipated with the adoption of the 1928 revision of the American Prayer Book, which removed the American Prayer Book much further from the doctrine of the Articles than any of its predecessors and was itself a repudiation of the doctrine of the Articles.

In the 1929 Clowes Chorley would write in The New American Prayer Book, his popular history of the American Prayer Book, that the Articles were foreign to the genius of the Church of England. He would argue, “the adoption of such a detailed system of theology was contrary to her history and traditions.” He would further maintain that the Articles were no longer relevant for the twentieth century and represented “a watermark of a previous tide.”

In 2001 the trial of Bishop Walter Righter on the charge of heresy would reveal that the Episcopal Church had no official doctrine related to homosexual practice and in a number of other crucial areas. General Convention would subsequently adopt a canon that required a poll of the bishops of the Episcopal Church before a bishop might be charged with promoting views contrary to the teaching of the Episcopal Church. The purpose of the poll was to determine if the views that the bishop in question was promoting were in the opinion of the bishops contrary to the Episcopal Church’s teaching due to the lack of a definitive official statement of that teaching.

In 2003 and 2006 the Episcopal Church’s General Convention would fail to bring to the floor resolutions affirming essentials of the Christian faith. In 2003 General Convention would confirm the election of a practicing homosexual as a bishop; in 2006 General Convention would elect a woman Presiding Bishop who has in public statements affirmed teaching that is contrary to God’s Word and to the Articles.

In 2003 the General Council of the Reformed Episcopal Church would adopt a new Prayer Book that represents a significant departure in doctrine and practice from its predecessor, the 1963 Reformed Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and in which the Reformed Episcopal Church abandons the Protestant and evangelical doctrines of the Anglican tradition that its founders sought to safeguard in the establishment of the Reformed Episcopal Church. In 2005 the General Council would adopt a new constitution and canons for the Reformed Episcopal Church, which provides further evidence of the Reformed Episcopal Church’s abandonment of these doctrines. This past June the General Council authorized a modern language version of the 2003 Reformed Episcopal Prayer Book, which is even further removed from the 1963 Reformed Episcopal Prayer Book.

In 2009 the ACNA College of Bishops would elect former Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh Robert Duncan as the Archbishop and Primate of the ACNA. Archbishop Duncan has so far not articulated what he believes is the gospel. Duncan as the Moderator of the Common Cause Partnership chaired the Common Cause Roundtable that drew up the Common Cause Theological Statement upon which the fundamental declarations of the ACNA are based. He presided over the Inaugural Provincial Assembly of the ACNA and facilitated the adoption of these fundamental declarations, which do not fully accept the authority of the Articles, largely treating them as a relic of the past.

In the second half of the twentieth century comprehensiveness in the Episcopal Church was increasingly interpreted in terms of recognition of divergent opinion even on the essentials of the Christian faith. The Episcopal Church would relegate the Articles to the historical documents section of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Among a large segment of the clergy of that denomination they were regarded as a relic of the past. Most of the laity had no acquaintance with them.

A substantial number of the clergy who left the Episcopal Church in the 1970s brought this attitude with them into the Continuing Anglican Churches. An undetermined number of the clergy who left the Episcopal Church in the first decade of the twenty-first century brought the same attitude with them into the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission in the Americas.

The ACNA does not fully accept the authority of the Articles is evident not only from the wording of its fundamental declarations but also from the prevalence of the aforementioned attitude among its clergy. A member of the Common Cause Governance Task Force told me that the Anglican Church has moved beyond the theological controversies of the sixteenth century. Twenty-first century Anglicans are more theologically sophisticated than the English Reformers. A number of members of the ACNA have accused those who call the Anglican Church back to the Articles, including myself, as wanting to freeze the Anglican Church in time.

All of these people are self-identified conservatives but the views that they express are liberal. They also espouse doctrines and practices that are outside the bounds that the Articles set to Anglican comprehensiveness. In the ACNA the Jerusalem Declaration’s call to return to the Articles largely falls on deaf ears. The ACNA’s affirmation of the Jerusalem Declaration is found in the preamble of its constitution and is incidental to the explanation of how the ACNA was formed in response to the call of the GAFCON primates for a new province in North America.

When the Anglican Mission in America, which subsequently became the Anglican Mission in the Americas, was launched in 2000, its Solemn Declaration of Principles contained a strong affirmation of the Thirty-Nine Articles. But has become more and more apparent since then that the Articles are not a living formulary for a sizable number of clergy in the AMiA.

At least one person who has risen to a position of influence in the AMiA hierarchy is working against the Jerusalem Declaration’s call to the Anglican Church to return to the Articles. This individual served on the Common Cause Governance Task Force that drafted the ACNA governing documents. He was largely responsible for drafting the governing documents of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, the AMiA’s parent province. The Rwandan constitution speaks cryptically of the Thirty-Nine Articles “as adapted through the ages.” The Rwandan canons, which are heavily indebted to the doctrine, language, norms, and principles of the Roman Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law, affirm the dogmas of the Council of Trent, repudiating the doctrinal positions of the Articles.

This shows that the radical liberalism of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church is not the only threat to global Anglicanism, which originates in North America.

We find in the ACNA and the AMiA an understanding of Anglican comprehensiveness that sets no bounds to Anglican comprehensiveness other than what a particular jurisdiction is willing to tolerate at a particular juncture in time. The result is a shifting comprehensiveness that changes with the jurisdiction and over time. It is not the comprehensiveness of the Articles.

This type of comprehensiveness is not that different from the type of comprehensiveness found in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church. It operates on the same principle even though what is tolerated in these two churches would not be tolerated in the ACNA and the AMiA. It is not the type of comprehensive to which the Jerusalem Declaration is calling the Anglican Church.

Rather than encasing the ACNA and the AMiA in amber like insects from the Jurassic period, returning to the Articles, interpreted in their plain, natural, and intended sense, would be a major step toward establishing unity and order in doctrine and discipline in the North American Anglican Church. It would clearly establish the Anglican identity of these two ecclesial bodies, and keep the recognition of divergent opinions in these bodies within limits consistent with historic Anglicanism. Most importantly, it would ensure that the clergy and laity in the same bodies are proclaiming the true gospel.

In the second part of this article I will consider what would and would not be permissible in an ecclesial body in which the bounds to comprehensiveness are set by the Thirty-Nine Articles.