The Misuse of the Three-Streams Model in the North American Church

By Robin G. Jordan

The topology of three streams of Anglican faith and practice—evangelical, catholic, and charismatic—has been used to promote a revisionist, hyper-Catholic view of Anglicanism in North America. This is evident when the application of this typology to Anglicanism in The Way, the Truth, and the Life: Theological Resources for a Pilgrimage to a Global Anglican Future is compared with the interpretation of the three-streams model in North America. As a consequence this typology no longer has value when applied to the North American Church.

In the North America Church one encounters a reductionist view of evangelicalism that is divorced from how evangelicalism has been historically understood in the Anglican Church. In this view evangelicalism is reinterpreted in terms of an emphasis upon Scripture and evangelism. North American Anglicans identify themselves as “evangelical” because they recognize the Bible as authoritative and divinely inspired and seek to convert others to the Christian faith as they understand it. Liberal Anglo-Catholics like Archbishop Robert Duncan claim to be “High Church Evangelicals” and traditionalist Anglo-Catholics like Forward in Faith North America claim to be “Evangelical Catholics.” Evangelicalism, as it has historically been understood in the Anglican Church, refers to the doctrine of the Protestant school maintaining salvation by faith (as opposed to good works and sacraments) as the essence of Gospel teaching. However they view themselves, those who do not submit to the rule of the plain sense of the Scriptures and the classic Anglican formularies are not evangelical!

As I have written elsewhere, the Episcopal Church in the United States at a very early stage fell away from the teaching of the Scriptures and the classic Anglican formularies. The Thirty-Nine Articles would not occupy the central place in the life and teaching of the Episcopal Church that it occupied in the Church of England and would occupy in other Anglican provinces. The first American Prayer Book of 1789 would depart from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer with the adoption of the 1764 Scottish Non-Juror Prayer of Consecration. Each successive revision has moved the American Prayer Book further away from the doctrine and liturgical usages of the 1662 Prayer Book.

One of the first breakaway Anglican churches—the Reformed Episcopal Church—was established by conservative members of the Episcopal Church’s evangelical wing in the nineteenth century. They fled the growth and increasing influence of Anglo-Catholicism in the Episcopal Church. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century the Reformed Episcopal Church lost its evangelical identity due to a number of factors. These factors include its present leaders who are not committed to maintaining that identity and have actively sought to undermine it.

Subsequent breakaway Anglican churches—the Continuing Anglican Churches, the Anglican Mission, and the Anglican Church in North America—have followed in the footsteps of the Episcopal Church. The classic Anglican formularies have formal authority in the Anglican Mission but they play a negligible role in shaping faith and practice in that ecclesial body.

As Roger T. Beckwith who participated in the GAFCON Theological Resource Group meetings writes in The Church of England: What It Is, And What It Stands For, the Anglican Church “is catholic, in that it retains the ancient common heritage of Christendom, in a biblical form.” (Roger T. Beckwith, The Church of England: What It Is, And What It Stands For, p. 25) But it is a reformed catholicism. The Anglican Reformers “used the standard of Scripture, applied by reason, to correct whatever needed correcting in the church’s inherited forms.” (Ibid., p. 25)

The GAFCON Theological Resource Group in The Way, the Truth, and the Life states the position of historic Anglicanism:

Anglican orthodoxy is catholic in that it values the
catholic creeds and the ecumenical Councils of the early Church, recognizing that these have provided a ‘rule of faith’ that is derived from Scripture. While honouring the creeds, Anglican orthodoxy also upholds the substance of the Protestant confessions, recognizing that they contain key insights into the truth of the Gospel. In particular, it offers the Articles of Religion as an abiding contribution to the wider Christian church, and claims them as normative for its members. (Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, p. 101)

Clause 3 of The Jerusalem Declaration states:

We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

Clause 4 of The Jerusalem Declaration further states:

We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

Both clauses reflect this position

Those who use the three-streams topology in promoting a revisionist, hyper-Catholic view of Anglicanism in North America, when they refer to the Catholic stream in Anglicanism are not referring to the reformed catholicism of historic Anglicanism. The Catholicism to which they refer is the unreformed Catholicism of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. It is directly antagonistic to the reforms of the sixteenth century.

The third stream in this topology is the charismatic stream. To identify a distinct theological stream in Anglicanism centered on the Holy Spirit is a twentieth century development. In his examination of the twentieth century charismatic movement, Keep in Step with the Spirit, J. I. Packer identifies that movement as the “step-child of Pentecostalism” and “evangelicalism’s half-sister.” (J. I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit, pp. 172-173). Pentecostalism, he writes, “sprang at the start of this century out of the older Wesleyan heritage.” (Ibid., p. 172) This is a reference to the holiness movement. In the last decade we have seen an attempt to Catholicize the origins of this theological stream, focusing upon the place that Eastern Orthodoxy gives to the work of the Holy Spirit in its theology. It seeks to subsume the charismatic theological stream as it does the evangelical stream so that they are reduced to particular emphases in unreformed Catholicism.

Like the analogies of a three-legged stool and the via media, or middle way, the three-streams topology is being exploited to redefine Anglicanism and to market this redefinition of Anglicanism. What is being passed off as Anglicanism is represented as embodying three emphases—Scripture, Sacraments, and Spirit. Each emphasis is identified with one of the three streams of this topology—evangelical, catholic, and charismatic. But how these emphases are interpreted has little connection with how the Scriptures, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit are viewed in historical Anglicanism.

Conspicuous by their absence are the great truths of the Reformation. It is these truths that are formulated in the Thirty-Nine Articles and the doctrinal parts of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The Thirty-Nine Articles, which affirm the catholic creeds with their teaching on the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, “add teaching on three other important areas of biblical theology, namely
Revelation, Salvation and the Sacraments.” (Roger T. Beckwith, The Church of England: What It Is, And What It Stands For, p. 17) What the Anglican Reformers maintained in connection to the doctrine of the sacraments was closely related to the doctrine of revelation and the doctrine of justification by faith.

The doctrine of revelation was the basis on which they attempted to get back to biblical teaching about the sacrament; and, as to the doctrine of salvation, Cranmer's Communion service (substantially that of the 1662 Prayer Book) has been well described by Gregory Dix as 'the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. (Ibid., p. 7)

Missing is a major principle on which the Anglican Church is founded and which link it to the reformed churches. The Anglican Church is a confessional church. It “uses confessions of faith to express the teaching of the Bible.” (Ibid., p. 17)The GAFCON Theological Resource Group affirms this principle in The Way, the Truth, and the Life:

The Anglican Church has always been a confessional institution, but its confession does not seek to be comprehensive on every issue, or to foreclose discussion. Over the last two hundred years, however, an unwillingness has grown up, in some parts of the Church, to bind itself to confessional formulae, such as the Thirty-nine Articles. Instead, there has been a strong move towards a more general affirmation of the Thirty-nine Articles, accepting them as a historical background which informs our life and witness, but not as a test of faith. As long as this unwillingness remains, there is little hope for an effective Covenant within the Anglican Communion.(Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, p. 91)

The GAFCON Theological Resource Group subsequently would emphasize in Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, its commentary on The Jerusalem Declaration, that acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles’ authority “is constitutive of Anglican identity” (Ibid., p. 35). The GAFCON Theological Resource Group goes on to stress:

The Jerusalem Declaration calls the Anglican Church back to the Articles as being a faithful testimony to the teaching of Scripture, excluding erroneous beliefs and practices and giving distinct shape to Anglican Christianity. (Ibid., p. 36)

Rather than to make clear the distinct character of Anglicanism, the three-streams model is used in the North American Church to help forward a revisionist, hyper-Catholic view of Anglicanism that repackages Anglican Catholicism’s disregard of the Bible and its restoration of medieval tradition for a new generation. The product may bear the Anglican label and have “evangelical” and “charismatic” listed on the package but the main ingredient is unreformed Catholicism. Because of the misuse of this topology in the North American Church a more accurate descriptive model is needed.