RECONSIDERING THE ARTICLES OF RELIGION: THE CONTEMPORARY VALUE OF THE ARTICLES

Over the course of my consideration of the Articles of Religion as a confession thus far, I’ve made two arguments: that the Articles of Religion are best understood as a broadly Reformed statement of faith, and that for most of the history of ‘Anglicanism’ as an independent form of Christianity, they have functioned as our confession. Both of these are essentially descriptive claims, about what the Articles are and about the most plausible reading of Anglican history. Now, in the final part of this piece, I want to move onto a more normative claim: we should retrieve the Articles as our confession of faith for contemporary Anglicanism. There are two parts to this argument. First, I will make a general argument for the value of a doctrinal understanding of Anglican belonging. Second, I’d like to make an argument for value of giving the Articles specifically a central role in this doctrinal account of Anglicanism. I’m then going to conclude with some reflections on what this could actually look like in practice.

The first question to tackle here is why one ought to have a doctrinal account of Anglicanism (or any church) at all. Particularly in a context in which religious belief is often understood as irreducibly personal and many people of good will find even the ecumenical creeds difficult to affirm – to say nothing of the Articles! – why not instead root religious belonging in shared worship or even simple self-identification? I’d like to make a sociological and a theological observation here. Sociologically, human communities organized around some goal or object pretty invariably have a ‘doctrine’, a set of beliefs or attitudes towards that end which it is acceptable for community members to have. Sometimes this is explicit, sometimes implicit – but either way it becomes very apparent when you have crossed the line into an unacceptable view. Having a formally articulated doctrine has the advantage of making this line public and unambiguous. It is a matter of justice: people should be able to know what it is they are signing up for. I know of too many new Episcopalians who have been surprised and hurt to find that their beliefs about matters like the resurrection or the second coming, though perfectly within our doctrine as formally defined, are not in accord with our ‘implicit’ doctrine. This is, I think, a real problem.

But of course, as Christians we have more reasons beyond the idea that it’s good for the conditions of group membership to be publicly available to support a doctrinal articulation of our identity. Simply put, the Christian community is called into being by the proclamation of a message, a message about who Jesus is and what he has done. Without the Gospel, there is no Christian church. This doesn’t mean that there is no place for more organic or sacramental accounts of the nature of the church. Such language is, of course, robustly Scriptural. But these accounts ultimately need to be referred back to the message of the Gospel. This is hardly an ultra-Protestant claim, either. Michael Ramsey makes much the same point in The Gospel and the Catholic Church. And Christian doctrine, then, is an articulation of that message which created the Christian church. Doctrine, therefore, isn’t a sort of optional add-on to a unity that is actually found elsewhere. Theologically speaking, doctrine is the source of our unity: God calls the church into being and into unity by the efficacious proclamation of the message of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Now, I imagine that for Earth & Altar readers, none of this is terribly shocking stuff. But none of it requires an embrace of the Articles as an articulation of doctrine for us today. On the basis of what I’ve offered thus far, one could argue for credal minimalism, where the ecumenical creeds are a sufficient confession of faith for Anglican church bodies and specific Anglican identity is to be sought elsewhere than in doctrine. Or one could argue for something like the current doctrinal position of the Episcopal Church, where our doctrine is (at least de jure) set by the ecumenical creeds, key liturgies in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and the 1979 Prayer Book’s catechism. So, why dust off a sixteenth-century confession of faith?

This is why: precisely because of their origin in sixteenth-century theological controversy, the Articles provides clear teaching (‘doctrine’) about a set of questions that are existentially central for Christian faith today, but are addressed by neither the creeds alone (because they deal fairly narrowly with Christological and Trinitarian theology) or the late-twentieth century liberal Catholicism of the 1979 prayer book (because it sought to avoid them). It is our great good fortune that the Articles reflect the theological landscape of the 1550ss and 1560s, because it enables them to articulate a generous Protestantism that speaks keenly to contemporary life. Call it politics or providence or both, but Elizabeth’s intransigent refusal to allow further alteration of the Articles meant that they didn’t rule on the sorts of increasingly detailed and specific controversies that roiled the Reformed world in the latter part of the 16th and early 17th centuries, nor reflected the increasingly important status of predestinarian teaching in the period. Instead, unlike many later Reformed confessions or the Lutheran Formula of Concord, the Articles remained quite capacious: strongly Augustinian, broadly Protestant, with undoubted Reformed accents that nonetheless remained somewhat restrained. As such, they articulate the doctrines of salvation, the church, Scripture, and sacraments in a vital way for us today.

Most importantly, the Articles unambiguously point us to the glorious truth that our salvation is by divine, not human agency – that God acts unilaterally to save us in Jesus Christ and makes that salvation ours by a faith which God himself gives through Word and Sacrament. This is what is meant by justification by faith alone; it is the doctrine at the heart of the great split in sixteenth century western Christianity. Now, I think this doctrine is good news at all times and in all places. But I think there are reasons why it is particularly significant for the church’s contemporary proclamation of the Gospel.

Our moment is one in which all of us (and perhaps especially the middle- to upper-middle-class strivers who make up a disproportionate amount of the Episcopal Church’s members) are encouraged to ground our identity in our achievements – professional, political, relational, you name it. At best this produces exhaustion and a sense of never quite measuring up. And when you inevitably fail to perform, if for no other reason than age and infirmity, the result can be existential crisis. For those dissatisfied with this mode of existence, the other option our culture gives is largely over-the-top, faux-therapeutic self-affirmation: “you’re worthy, you’re enough, you’re perfect just the way you are,” etc. But I’m not sure we’re ever really convinced; the very fact that we have to repeat it so frantically suggests that it rings hollow; it is, I fear, a form of self-gaslighting. And once again, at the end of life (if not before), justification by self-affirmation fails just as much as justification by your accomplishments. Death is a problem that neither hustle culture nor positive self-talk can solve.

And this is where the Articles’ teaching on salvation is such good news: we don’t have to affirm ourselves out of our fundamental sense that something is wrong, nor do we have to frantically work ourselves into God’s good graces. Rather, we can be entirely honest about the fact that we are not all right, that “we are very far gone from original righteousness, and…of [our] own nature inclined to evil,” that even our best deeds are touched by pride or vainglory (Art 9). And rather than responding to this admission by frantically seeking to pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps, earning our way into favor with God by “our own works or deservings’” we are shown another way (Art 11). We are given Christ as a free gift of God to us, invited to embrace the “most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort” that our standing before God rests not on what we have done but what Jesus did for us (Art 11). And then good works of love for God and neighbor follow, not as a way of earning divine favor but as “fruits of Faith,” deeds done in thanksgiving for God’s free gift to us (Art 12).

There are other places, too, where the teaching of the Articles is particularly helpful right now. It combines a sense of the church as the God-ordained, authoritative instrument of salvation with a realistic sense of any given visible church’s fallibility (Arts 19-21). In a moment in which we are reckoning with a legacy of clerical misconduct and institutional cover-ups in the Episcopal Church and beyond, and a moment in which the mainline churches in general seem pathologically unwilling to adapt in the face of precipitous decline, a somewhat deflationary account of the visible church strikes me as both true and, frankly, psychologically healthy. Similarly, the reminder that it is Scripture, not ecclesial pronouncement, which is ultimately authoritative for doctrine (Art 6), that the church is Scripture’s keeper not its master (Art 20) is good news at a moment when our churches sometimes fail to clearly articulate the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection. The Articles’ teaching on the sacraments (Arts 25-31) connects them clearly to the Gospel and to faith, warning against a temptation to see them as quasi-magical means of controlling divine power. And if the Articles’ teaching on salvation, Scripture, the church, and sacraments does prevent ecumenical challenges in our relationship with Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, realistically, our church’s commitments around the inclusion of women and LGBTQ people make real ecumenical advance with these communions largely impossible anyway. But what the Articles might facilitate is closer relationships with those churches with whom we already have eucharistic sharing and in some cases joint ministries, like the Presbyterians and the Methodists.

Now, the point is not that the Articles are perfect or that theological development stopped in the sixteenth century. It would have been entirely fine with me if Elizabeth had kept Article 29 out of the Articles and left them capable of either a Reformed or Lutheran reading on the Lord’s Supper, and I celebrate the achievement of the 1973 Leuenberg Concord which arrived at a consensus statement on the Eucharist between the Reformed and Lutheran churches of Europe. I’m not convinced that councils must be called by princes or that the magistrate must have ecclesiastical jurisdiction (indeed, the articles in which these claims were made, Arts 21 and 37, were modified by the Episcopal Church in their version of the Articles). While I certainly have my disagreements with both Anabaptist and Roman Catholic theological distinctives, I think some of the condemnatory language of these traditions was unhelpfully polemical to begin with and certainly no longer applies given the advances in ecumenical understanding over the last five hundred years. Indeed, while I don’t think it resolved all issues around soteriology, I think the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation and later joined by other church bodies including the Anglican Communion, represents a genuine ecumenical accomplishment. Yet with all these caveats, I think that the Articles, properly contextualized, do provide us with something very necessary: clear, Biblical answers to a set of existentially crucial questions, above all the question, “how can I be right with God?”

So what would a return to using the Articles as an Anglican confession look like today? I am not in principle opposed to subscription requirements for clergy. I think that confessional traditions have developed ways to both allow confessions to fulfill their norming function and allow some liberty on secondary issues treated in those confessions. For example, I think of the practice of ‘scrupling’ in many Presbyterian contexts, where ordinands can describe their concerns about or deviations from (“scruples”) specific articles of their confession and the ordaining body can decide whether or not these scruples pose an impediment to ordination. But this is somewhat beside the point, because (re-)introducing subscription or taking existing subscription requirements more seriously isn’t really on the table in any mainline Anglican denomination. Churches like the Episcopal Church can’t even enforce the existing doctrinal standards they have, never mind more demanding ones.

And so, while my discussion of the Articles as confession necessarily dealt a lot with matters like subscription requirements or the laws around “reading yourself in”, I actually think it is the commentary tradition on the Articles that provides the best example for us of a way forward. What really-existing ‘reconfessionalization’ around the Articles can look like now in mainline Anglicanism is simply clergy and laity choosing to re-enter the centuries-long conversation about this text and how it sets forth the good news of Jesus Christ. It’s a matter of reading the Articles (and the other formularies: the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal) and the tradition of commentary upon them, meditating upon them, allowing them to shape our preaching and teaching and praying. It’s putting these texts and this tradition in conversation with other articulations of Christian theology.

It’s showing to a church often allergic to any normative account of doctrine, never mind a sixteenth century one, that there is real, capacious life to be found here. I’ve tried to do something like this in my own occasional writing on specific articles for Earth & Altar and on my Substack. I’m glad that other people are doing the same: take, for instance, the podcast “Walking the Dogma,” which brings together a priest of a more Reformed leaning and a priest of a more Anglo-Catholic one to consider the Articles together. The point is to invite people into what an Anglicanism with the Articles as confession looks like, to restore (to paraphrase Paul Zahl) the Protestant face of Anglicanism – not only in the interest of fidelity to the Anglican past, but for the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ today.