The ACNA Theological Lens: The Guiding Principles Behind the Proposed ACNA Prayer Book—Part 4

By Robin G. Jordan

In this article we continue our examination of The Initial Report of the Prayerbook and Common Worship Taskforce of the Anglican Church in North America with an examination of Section VII of Part 2 of the report. The first thing we notice is that the Prayerbook and Common Worship Taskforce in its title to this section omit any reference to the Thirty-Nine Articles.

VII. The catholic faith, as set forth in the Creeds and expressed in the liturgical life of the Church, provides our common praxis (lex orandi est lex credendi)

As J. I. Packer points to our attention in The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today, one of the four main functions of the Articles is to act as the Church of England’s theological identity card. They were drawn up to make good the English Reformers’ claim that the Church of England is “a true apostolic church, teaching and maintaining the doctrine of the apostles, and “to show that the English Reformation, so far from being, as Rome supposed, a lapse from catholicity and apostolicity on the part of ecclesia Anglicana, was actually a recovery of these qualities through recovery of the authentic apostolic faith." [J.I. Packer; R. T. Beckwith, The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today, Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2007, p. 67.]

This omission is significant. The reason for this omission becomes self-evident in the first subsection.

1. The Holy Trinity communicates the love between the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit in the act of creation. As created in the image of God, we were made for union with God, and so are instinctively drawn to God in all of our choices [Emphasis added]. However, as creatures who have fallen into sin, our loves have become distorted and turned inward.

We inevitably choose self-gratification and lesser goods over the love of God and love of one another. We thus live in a tension between satisfying immediate desires and wanting to please God and benefit humankind. We are called to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, but we find ourselves entrapped in false loves.

Compare this subsection with Article 9:

Original sin stands not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusts always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserves God's wrath and damnation [Emphasis added]. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerated, whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek phronema sarkos (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire of the flesh), is not subject to the law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized, yet the Apostle confesses that concupiscence and lust has itself the nature of sin.

In the next subsection we read:

2. God’s grace and initiative are always prior to all our responses; As God has given us both intelligence and will, we alone of all God's creation can (through grace) choose to respond to God’s initiative in love; but we refuse the love of the Holy Trinity: We can offer God our worth-ship or turn away from Him to value other things. The choice is ours.

Grace is mentioned in the second sentence of this subsection almost as an afterthought. If the phrase “through grace” had not been added to the second sentence, it would convey the idea that God’s grace and initiative is manifest in the gift of intelligence and will. What we have here is semi-Pelagianism if not Pelagianism in disguise. Compare this subsection with Article 10:

The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God. Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us that we may have a good will, and working with us when we have that good will.

The third subsection separates God’s Word from Holy Scripture, referring to God’s Word in Holy Scripture. It makes no mention of the New Testament teaching that “faith comes by hearing the word of God.” We only told that God’s Word convicts us of sin and guides us in fulfilling God’s will.

3. God’s Word in Holy Scripture both convicts us of sin, and provides guidance in fulfilling God’s will. The admonitions and warnings given by God throughout the Old Testament, as well as throughout the New Testament, remain as instructions necessary to our own present growth in Christ’s Body.

The fourth subsection fails to mention that the Creeds are authoritative because they agree with the Holy Scriptures. Rather it stresses that they authentically express the “rule of faith” of the Church in the second century. This is an example of giving more authority to antiquity and therefore tradition than to Scripture, placing the “rule of antiquity” above the “rule of Scripture.” While asserting that the Creeds are “authoritative statements of Trinitarian Christian belief, it neglects to identify the basis of their authority.

4. The three Creeds--the Apostles, the Nicene, and the Athanasian--are authentic expressions of the second century “Rule of Faith” and are authoritative statements of Trinitarian Christian belief. Along with the Holy Scriptures, the faithful historic episcopate, and worship in Word and Sacrament, the Creeds distinguished apostolic faith from heresy in the early Church, and continue to be authoritative to the present day.

The Creeds tell us who God is, and what He has done for our life and our salvation in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The fifth subsection makes no mention of the Scriptures. By the use of such phrases as “Apostolic witness” and “practices of the first Christians” the taskforce appears to imply that tradition is revelation equal to Scripture. Both Scripture and tradition are the “Apostolic witness.”

5. The Church as the Body of Christ, in spite of the distortions of belief or the misuse of authority due to human sin, has been continually called back to the Apostolic witness and practice of the first Christians as the normative standard and “lens” through which present-day belief and practice must be evaluated.

Here again the rule of antiquity is placed above the rule of Scripture.

The taskforce identifies what it describes as “definitive marks of Christian identity” but does not specify what it means. For example, the phrase, “continuity with the apostolic Church,” is open to a wide range of interpretations, as is “worship in Word and Sacrament.” Are we to conclude on the basis of a lack of these marks that Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians are not Christians because they do not conform to Anglo-Catholic ideas of “continuity with the apostolic Church”? Are we likewise to conclude that members of the Salvation Army and the Society of Friends are not Christians because they do not take an Anglo-Catholic view of the sacraments? With this particular choice of marks the taskforce appears to have adopted an exclusionary policy similar to that of the nineteenth century Episcopal Church that dechurched all denominations that did not have bishops and forbade Episcopal ministers from associating with their ministers. According to this subsection congregations that do not recite the Creeds every Sunday or “celebrate God’s gracious presence in the sacraments” are not a part of the Church.

6. Canon and Creeds, continuity with the apostolic Church, and worship in Word and Sacrament continue to be definitive marks of Christian identity. All play definitive roles in Christian worship. When she gathers to worship, the Church reads the Scriptures, proclaims her faith in the Creeds, proclaims the Word of God in the preaching of the Gospel, and celebrates God's gracious presence in the sacraments. Through the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Church is shaped through Scripture and Sacraments, and thus lives the faith expressed in the Creeds upheld from the time of the Apostles.

Article 19 tells us that the visible Church of Christ is a gathering of believing people in which the pure Word of God is preached and the sacraments are ministered with due order and discipline as ordained by Christ. It does not prescribe how often the sacraments must be administered. Nowhere in Article 19 or elsewhere in the Articles do we find any reference to the celebration of “God’s gracious presence in the sacraments,” an inference that Christ is present in or under the forms of bread and wine in the Holy Communion, or Lord’s Supper.

Historic Anglicanism recognizes the Word and the Holy Spirit as the means through which God works to make us willing and able to obey God’s purpose. Historic Anglicanism does not separate the sacraments from the Scriptures, as the taskforce appears to do in this subsection. The sacraments are God’s Word made visible. The Scriptures and the sacraments both proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Lord’s Supper makes known the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). The sacraments are effectual because they answer their purpose, the purpose for which they were instituted. They both arouse and also strengthen and confirm our faith in God (Article 25).

The taskforce in this subsection appear to suggest an equivalence of the authority of the Creeds with the authority of the Bible. The authority of the Creeds comes from their agreement with the teaching of Scripture. Article 8 states, “The three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius' Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles' Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed; for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.” They derive their authority from the Scriptures. They have no authority of their own.

The seventh subsection not only gives a place to tradition as a form of revelation but also makes room for John Henry Newman’s doctrine of development.

7. In this time between the Ascension and the second coming of Christ, God has not left the Church without guidance. Through meditation on the Scriptures, through worship and prayer, through faithful theologians and saints, the Holy Spirit has continued to guide and revivify the Church throughout her history. The Holy Spirit guides the Church through enlarging our understanding rather than imposing new doctrines or disclosing new revelations contrary to the catholic and apostolic faith the Church has inherited, and of which she is the trustee.

It makes the Church’s “inherited” faith the test by which the truth of a doctrine must be tried, not Scripture. In doing so, it clearly departs from the Thirty-Nine Articles and historic Anglicanism.

Consequently, the dialectical view of the Anglican theological vocation expressed in the eighth subsection is not particularly surprising.

8. Faithfulness to Scripture and apostolic faith does not mean simply repristinating the practices of a bygone period. There will always be an on-going dialectic between reformation and “return to the sources,” and preaching the Word, administering the Sacraments, and living faithful lives in such a way as to communicate Christ in our contemporary world.

As R. T. Beckwith draws to our attention in The Church of England: What It Is And What It Stands For, the Church of England and historic Anglicanism are confessional:

The Church of England is a church that uses confessions of faith to express the teaching of the Bible. This means that it a confessional church - something which is often denied, but in the teeth of the facts. Even the laity are required to accept the catholic creeds as conditions of being baptised and confirmed and partaking of holy communion. The catholic creeds, handed down to us by the early Fathers, concentrate on teaching about the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ; but the 39 Articles (to which the church’s authorised teachers are required to assent) add teaching on three other important areas of biblical theology, namely Revelation, Salvation and the Sacraments. [R. T. Beckwith, The Church of England: What It Is And What It Stands For, London: Latimer Trust, 1992, 2006, p. 17.]

Any Prayer Book based upon this “theological lens,” as examined so far, while it might be well received by Anglo-Catholics and Broad Church Anglicans, would be thoroughly unacceptable to conservative Evangelical Anglicans and Anglican Evangelicals committed to the classic Anglican formularies and authentic historic Anglicanism. The College of Bishops’ approval of the report raises serious questions about the College’s own commitment to the classic Anglican formularies and authentic historic Anglicanism. The GAFCON Theological Resource Group in Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today stress that acceptance of the Articles’ authority is “constitutive of Anglican identity.” [Nicholas Okoh, Vinay Samuel; Chris Sugden, General Editors, Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, London: The Latimer Trust, 2009, p. 37.] A body that does not fully accept their authority, as is the case of the Anglican Church in North America, is not fully Anglican. A key ingredient that goes into the making up of an Anglican identity is missing.