Getting to the Root of the Problem

By Robin G. Jordan

“History can be rewritten. A story depends on who tells it. Rule of the Watch.” Catherine Fisher, The Margrave (Relic Master, Book 4), New York: Dial Books (The Penguin Group), 2011, p. 245.

I just finished reading Catherine Fisher’s Relic Master series. According to the London Independent, Ms. Fisher is “one of today’s best fantasy writers.” I would agree.

The foregoing quote at the very beginning of the sixteenth chapter of the last novel in the series caught my attention. Across North America this Sunday Anglican and Episcopal clergy will be telling the story of the Anglican Church and Anglicanism. What story they will be telling will depend upon who influenced their seminary professors, the authors they read, their mentors, and themselves.

Some may have taken time to really dig into the history of the Anglican Church and to read the benchmark Anglican divines. Others will be presenting a particular school of thought’s version of Anglican Church history and its redefinition of Anglicanism. The latter is frequently apt to be the case. The result is that a large number of Anglicans and Episcopalians in North America have a distorted view of the Anglican Church, its history, and its beliefs.

How many Anglicans and Episcopalians in North America are familiar with the Thirty-Nine Articles interpreted in their plain, natural, and intended sense?

How many Anglicans and Episcopalians in North America have any familiarity with the actual doctrine and liturgical usages of the classical Anglican Prayer Book—The Book of Common Prayer of 1662?

How many North American Anglicans and Episcopalians have read the Homilies, much less studied them?

The Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the Homilies are foundational documents of Anglicanism. Yet in the North American Anglican Church they are neglected.

From the pulpit or in the classroom most Anglicans and Episcopalians in North America are likely to hear their clergy dismissing the Thirty-Nine Articles as a relic of the past or as historical background. If the Articles are explained to them, the explanation will not be based upon their interpretation in their plain, natural, and intended sense. Chances are it will be based upon a fanciful, ahistorical approach like John Henry Newman’s. Newman reinterpreted the Articles in a Roman direction.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer enjoyed a brief resurgence of interest in the earlier part of the decade. The Prayer Book Society might have capitalized upon this interest and produced an American edition of the 1662 Prayer Book. Instead the late Peter Toon insisted the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, which had championed for a number of years, was the American edition of the classical Anglican Prayer Book.

While the two books bear a family resemblance, the doctrine of the 1928 Prayer Book is far removed from that of the 1662 Prayer Book. So are a number of the practices that its rubrics countenances. The 1928 Prayer Book is not the 1662 Prayer Book with the prayers for the Queen and the Royal Family omitted and Prayers for the President of the United States and those in authority substituted in their place.

The Anglican Mission in the America and the Prayer Book Society would cooperate upon the production of two modern English service books. The first book was supposed to contain contemporary language versions of the services of the 1662 Prayer Book. But it was quite evident when the book was released for trial use in the Anglican Mission in America that it failed to live up to this description and reflected the influences of other Prayer Books.

The second book was supposed to contain contemporary language versions of services from the 1662, 1928, and 1962 Canadian Prayer Books and to serve as a “bridge” to these Prayer Books. However, alterations and additions were made to these services that changed their doctrine. Like the first book it showed the influence of other Prayer Books, which was not acknowledged by the book’s editors. It was also poorly edited in places.

The failure of the health of Dr. Toon, who oversaw the project, may account for the poor editing. The book may have been released prematurely for the same reason.

A real opportunity was lost and perhaps even squandered to acquaint North American Anglicans and Episcopalians with the 1662 Prayer Book in an American edition and a contemporary language version. The two could have been bound together.

Because the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is not used in some form in their churches, Anglican and Episcopal clergy in North America are disinclined to explain the doctrine and liturgical usages of the classical Anglican Prayer Book to their congregations. Rather they are more likely to focus on whatever service book is in use—the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the American Missal, or the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and in Canada, the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer or the 1985 Book of Alternative Services. All of these service books differ from the 1662 Prayer Book both in the doctrine which they expresses and the practices that they countenance.

The status of 1662 Prayer Book as a classical Anglican formulary, one of three formularies that comprise the long recognized doctrinal standard of Anglicanism is overlooked if not deliberately ignored. Like the Thirty-Nine Articles the 1662 Prayer Book is apt to be treated as a relic of the past or historical background. If its doctrine and liturgical usages receive any explanation at all, the explanation is not likely to reflect the received opinions of the reformed Church of England.

As for the Homilies, I suspect that they receive little attention in Anglican and Episcopal churches in North America except to be misinterpreted to support beliefs and practices that they actually condemn.

For this reason (but not for this reason alone) GAFCON’s call to return to the classical Anglican formularies is falling on deaf ears in North America, not only in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church where it is to be expected but also in the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission in the Americas where due to their participation in GAFCON a more positive response would be expected. Whatever they represent, the ACNA and the AMiA do not represent a significant movement in the North American Anglican Church toward the recovery of the classical Anglican formularies. Individual clergy and congregations in these two bodies may be committed to such a recovery but the ACNA and the AMiA as a whole are not.

As I written elsewhere, the ACNA constitution and canons and its new ordinal and the AMiA’s role in the introduction of the doctrine, language, norms, and principles from the Roman Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law into the canons of the Anglican Church of Rwanda are clear evidence that these two bodies are not really supportive of the recovery of the classical formularies across the Anglican Church. The teaching that is going on in the churches of these two bodies is further evidence of this development.

This is why I maintain that there exists in North America a very real need for an Anglican mission to North America. The Anglican Mission in the Americas may have adopted “Anglican Mission” as its name but its commitment to the classical formularies is minimal at best. A strong commitment to the classical formularies is necessary because they express what authentic Anglicanism has historically maintained to be the essence of gospel teaching—salvation by grace alone by faith alone in Christ alone.

Planting new churches is a commendable activity but unless those churches are gospel churches, it is a meaningless one. The purpose of any new church that is planted must be to reach more people with the gospel.

There is also a very real need for an independent Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans that is not ancillary to the Anglican Church in North America. The negligible commitment to the recovery of the classical Anglican formularies and the lack of support for The Jerusalem Declaration in the ACNA make the establishment of such an organization in North America a must if GAFCON is to have a genuine embodiment of what it believes and values in Canada and the United States.

GAFCON was organized to oppose the spread of theological pluralism from the western Anglican provinces to the larger Anglican community. However, as long as the leaders of GAFCON fail to recognize or acknowledge that the ACNA does not fully stand for the tenets of Anglican orthodoxy set out in The Jerusalem Declaration and countenances theological pluralism, they themselves are giving countenance to what GAFCON was organized to oppose. This may not be their intention but it is what is happening.

At the root of the problem is that the classical formularies in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA never had the authority that they have had in the provinces and dioceses that form the core of the international Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and GAFCON. They have never been fully accepted as Anglicanism’s doctrinal standard. In the PECUSA other standards would gain favor.

Both the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission in the Americas have inherited this legacy. In the ACNA and the AMiA these other standards continue to be favored over the classical formularies.

As the history of the development of the Common Cause Theological Statement, now enshrined in the ACNA’s Fundamental Declarations, shows, the movement of the last decade has been away from the liberalism of the Episcopal Church but not toward the confessionalism of the classical formularies. Indeed the confessional nature of the Anglican Church as an institution is to a large extent denied in the ACNA and the AMiA. It is an anti-confessional view of Anglicanism that is promoted in these two bodies, not the recovery of the classical formularies. It is this anti-confessional stance that sets the ACNA and the AMiA essentially at odds with the international FCA and GAFCON. It may ultimately lead to conflict between the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission in the Americas and the international Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and the Global Anglican Future Conference.