“IN ESSENTIALS, UNITY”: A CALL FOR CONFESSIONAL ANGLICANISM
The Shorter Catechism is one of twelve Confessions included in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A)’s Book of Confessions.
In a July 3 opinion article for Religion News Service, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe argues that, in the words of its headline, “The Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.” (1) In reading the piece, what was most notable to me was the use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church as his primary examples. Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church was a unified Protestant denomination that primarily existed to oppose the Nazi regime’s attempts to establish and impose a unified denomination controlled by Hitler’s underlings.
Beyond the optics of selecting a form of white Christian resistance as his primary example, one motivated by, in Rowe’s words, “its belief in the autonomy of the institutional church” as opposed to the theological and ideological decisions made by the Nazi regime, what struck me, and continues to strike me in other venues, is the preference of many in the church (including myself) to frame these and other hot-button issues in ideological terms as opposed to theological ones.
The Confessing Church traces its origin to a synod of rebellious pastors who sought to oppose the Nazis’ changes to the church – both structural and theological. Meeting in Barmen in May 1934, the theologian Karl Barth led the writing of a document now called the Barmen Declaration, a document with six theses that, yes, was primarily about the autonomy of the institutional church, but was also a rejection of ideas found in certain theological concepts like natural theology. (2)
Half a century later, two separate groups of multi-racial religious leaders in South Africa, one in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and one an ecumenical group including Anglicans, published two confessional and theological statements – the Belhar Confession and the Kairos Document (KD). (3) In both statements, the situation in apartheid-era South Africa was considered through a lens of theology and how, in the words of the KD, there was a “state theology” that was tied to the ideological and structural challenges.
I offer these histories because, if one reads any of these documents, the real and pressing political concerns of their day are addressed, not just through the language of politics or ideology, but that of a unified theology. They stand in stark contrast to how The Episcopal Church and many of its leaders at all levels have been historically unwilling, if not unable, to stop our patchwork approach towards our social witness, while we face a more unified state theology of our day coming from the White House and its allies amongst the religious right. (4) We cannot only oppose it on the level of individual issues as opposed to the larger theological schema that holds their whole programme up, because our forefathers and foremothers in faith have shown us how to resist state theology with a theology for all people, and it is incumbent on us to follow their lead.
If one attends a General Convention of The Episcopal Church, they will see that there are a lot of discussions on political issues. The two legislative committees on Social Justice Policy - either international or domestic (United States-specific) had to consider 46 of the 394 total resolutions at the most recent General Convention, but each operates primarily in a vacuum from each other. We make statements that we then tell the Office of Government Relations (OGR) to advocate for on our behalf, but that does not mean individual churches have to preach in favor of or even do anything about those issues on a local level, meaning that our social witness is shaped primarily by our legislative process and how we believe our legislative process impacts the wider discourse rather by a particular theological framework or by a common understanding of how we read the Bible or discern the call that God has placed on our church at a particular moment in time.
We no longer live in a world (if we ever did) where the President, let alone the multiple Episcopalians in Congress, care what the General Convention and other leaders of our Church have to say on individual issues. (5) If our current approach, where we believe that we matter to those in power because we host important funerals and occasional Presidential prayer services, as well as present and lobby on nicely-written resolutions to Congress, has not worked, we need a new way forward.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul exhorts us to consider the body of Christ as an actual body, and thus we cannot say that we have no need for one part, because the body must work together. A confessional structure works together, like how the United Methodist Church’s Social Principles run a gamut of issues united by an understanding of what it means to be in a “covenantal relationship with God.” (6) With that in mind, I want to ask a deceptively simple question – what must The Episcopal Church say about our faith, and might adapting our structures to allow for our church to become confessional make us better communicators about the demands that our faith places on each of us?
The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, our statement as to what determines what theological ideas we need to advance towards “Home Reunion,” is only four items, but the only “sufficient statement of the Christian faith” is the Nicene Creed. (7) There is a huge diverse realm of different theological opinions one can have without rejecting the Creed or the role of the Bible as “the rule and ultimate standard of faith,” and that is why our institutional witness based on theology, not just politics, can be weaker than some of our fellow Christians. We pass small resolutions and write statements on individual positions without considering them as part of larger programs, and thus, our witness is diminished because confessional churches like the PC(USA), UMC, or the Reformed Church in America can speak to a wider array of issues spurred by one document, at local and national levels, not requiring a patchwork solution of different resolutions on individual issues.
The well-known saying “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity” is used by many to describe the theological tenets of The Episcopal Church, namely the belief that we all only need to agree on a small number of essential beliefs (like the Creed, as postulated by the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, in addition to the Baptismal Covenant), and as long as we are charitable to our neighbors, we can believe whatever we want or worship however we want. In fact, I have consistently advocated against the continual push in some corners of the church that are pushing for the latter option. Up until the second half of the twentieth century, the Thirty-nine Articles, one of the great documents of the first confessional age, formed part of the doctrine of The Episcopal Church before they were “effectively erased.” (8) With them now in the Prayer Book’s ‘Historical Documents’ section and that same Prayer Book’s Catechism being woefully underutilized, we have no shared sense of what our doctrine or belief is, with teaching and preferred sources differing from one teacher to the next.
At this moment in our communal life, we are in a state of flux and uncertainty. We are in one that is very obvious politically, but one that might be less obvious in the church.We may not have the words to describe it, but we are, as Bishop Andy Doyle of Texas has stated, facing “a moment of profound moral reckoning.” In a recent blog post, Bishop Doyle commended the Barmen Declaration to his readers, writing that “As Christian leaders, we do not stand apart—we stand within this moment, compelled by our faith to act with encouragement, faith, and hope.” (9)
Given the current political climate and state of our communal life, and with the establishment of a “General Convention Reinvention Steering Committee” and the shifts in priorities brought about by a new Presiding Bishop, I believe the time has come for us to consider that the church needs to be confessional, whether to the individual documents bound together like other Protestants or a larger overarching magisterium like our Roman siblings.
In a 2011 article on the ultimately doomed Anglican Covenant, Bishop Matthew Gunter noted how confessions were “sources of cohesion” and how they “delineate communal boundaries.” Anglicanism, he wrote, “did not need a ‘robust’ confession because it had another source of identity and loyalty, the crown (or more broadly, the incipient nation-state that was England). … This Erastianism — the doctrine that the state is supreme over the church — is our tradition’s original and besetting sin.” (10) As Presiding Bishop Rowe himself has noted, we were once associated with the powerful people in our pews, with over half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and 11 different Presidents of the United States sharing membership in our church during their lifetimes. But without that power, our role in, as Gunter calls it, “the unofficial, but de facto, Protestant establishment that was dominant in the United States up until the middle of the 20th century,” we are left to flounder about with no sense of our identity beyond a liturgical one that grows more fractured because, as the Anglican liturgical scholar Bosco Peters observed, we are currently on the side of a pendulum “where all of us act according to our own desires (Deut 12:8), and all the people do what is right in their own eyes (Judges 17:6; 21:25).” (11)
Barth believed that the church didn’t always need to write a new confessional document that responded to every little specific issue, telling Bonhoeffer the year before Barmen that there existed a status confessionis, a state where the church must look inward less it loses its prophetic voice and power, a matter of life and death. (12) Over the course of my lifetime, The Episcopal Church has talked about full communion, Communion Across Difference, an Anglican Covenant, and so many other ways to describe the unity of the church without saying the unity of the church. Our church, which held a place of privilege and power, no longer has that, and in an increasingly pluralistic and secular society, we need a new identity beyond three-legged stools, (13) our liturgical life, and the Baptismal Covenant. In considering a return to confessional Anglicanism, we will find the church’s unity and the church’s voice – a way to interpret all the things that matter to us, not just saying the same things over and over again.
Sean Rowe, “Once the church of presidents, The Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance,” Religion News Service (blog), July 3, 2025, https://religionnews.com/2025/07/03/once-the-church-of-presidents-the-episcopal-church-must-now-be-an-engine-of-resistance/.
See: Kimlyn Bender, “5 Lessons Christians Can Learn From The Barmen Declaration,” Christianity Today, October 9, 2024, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/10/barth-bonhoeffer-barmen-declaration-evangelical-confession-5-lessons/.
Among the Anglican signers of the KD was the future Bishop Suffragan of Cape Town Edward Mackenzie, who, in his retirement, served in The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. His grandson, the Rev. Lester Mackenzie, is The Episcopal Church’s Chief of Mission Program.
Katherine Kelaidis, “Donald Trump is building a strange, new religious movement,” Vox, June 13, 2025, https://www.vox.com/politics/416042/religion-politics-trump-christian-nationalism-liberty-maga.
Just to pick one example, Representative Andy Barr (R-KY), whose late sister was a priest in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, was “profoundly disappointed” by Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump in January of this year.
United Methodist Church, Social Principles: Preamble, https://www.umc.org/en/content/social-principles-preamble.
Lambeth Conference of 1888, Resolution II, quoted in Book of Common Prayer 1979, 877-878.
Benjamin Crosby, “The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States,” The Anglican Way, December 2, 2024, https://anglicanway.org/the-thirty-nine-articles-and-the-protestant-episcopal-church-in-the-united-states/.
C. Andrew Doyle, “A Christian Declaration Amid Crisis,” The Ninth Bishop of Texas (blog), June 14, 2025, https://texasbishop.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-christian-declaration-amid-crisis.html?m=1.
Matthew Gunter, “Embodying a Self-aware Anglicanism,” Covenant (blog), March 11, 2011, https://livingchurch.org/books-and-culture/embodying-self-aware-anglicanism/.
Bosco Peters, “The LORD’s song in a foreign land” in When We Pray: The future of Common Prayer, ed. Stephen Burns and Robert Gribben (Melbourne: Coventry Press, 2020), 148.
Karl Barth, Letter to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, September 11, 1933, quoted in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes 1928-1936 from the Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vol. I, trans. Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 231.
See: Jeremy Bergstrom, “The So-Called ‘Three-Legged Stool’ of Anglicanism,” The Anglican Way, October 11, 2024, https://anglicanway.org/the-so-called-three-legged-stool-of-anglicanism/.
