RECONSIDERING THE ARTICLES OF RELIGION: THE ARTICLES IN ANGLICAN HISTORY

Early manuscript of the Articles, Corpus Christi college. Public domain.

In my last piece introducing this little series on the Articles, I focused on the content of the Articles of Religion, arguing that they are best read as an irenic Reformed statement of faith written before the intra-Reformed controversies of the late sixteenth century. Today, I’m going to shift gears from the Articles’ content to a consideration of their function over the course of Anglican history. I’m going to argue, in short, that the Articles did indeed function as the recognized statement of faith of the Church of England and Anglican churches broadly until the second half of the twentieth century.

The first published commentary on the Articles of Religion, the 1585 book by Thomas Rogers called The English Creede which I mentioned last time, gives us an important clue. Rogers tells us that the Articles are (or, at least, should be) seen as the “English Creed,” the statement of faith of the English church rather like the various statements of faith put out by other Protestant churches. And indeed, this is what it was intended to be. The Ordination of Ministers Act 1571 makes this particularly clear. It introduced requirements that all clergy to subscribe to (that is, confess belief in) the Articles and read the Articles and their assent out loud to their congregations. Interestingly, the loudest opponents to this were not crypto-Catholics or so-called ‘church Papists’ but some members of the Puritan party, who objected in particular to the requirement to affirm the hated Ordinal (Art 36). While subscription was unevenly enforced through Elizabeth’s reign, the goal was clear. A similar declaration of assent and public reading of the Articles was the condition for assuming any new ministerial posting. This practice survived in the Church of England until 1974. The phrase “reading himself in” that you sometimes find in older literature to refer to clergy taking on a new post refers to this requirement. This 1571 act also made subscription to the Articles a condition of ordination. The language of this ordination subscription would later be specified by canon; the 1604 canon declared in particular that this subscription had to be made “ex animo,” from the soul.

It is true that from the reign of Elizabeth on, explicit subscription requirements only applied to clergy. What most of the laity had to confess was the catechism, which they would learn as preparation for confirmation (there were exceptions: students at Oxford and Cambridge, for example, did have to subscribe to the Articles). But this should not surprise us; this was broadly true of the magisterial Protestant churches of Europe. It was ministerial subscription to specific confessions that they introduced, not lay subscription. Lutheran churches, for instance, did not require the laity to explicitly subscribe to the Augsburg Confession, to say nothing of the entire Book of Concord! The Small Catechism was generally enough – as is the case for Lutheran churches to this day, even quite conservative ones. But we shouldn’t take this to mean that the Articles and the teaching they contained were supposed to play no role in the life of ordinary English Christians. Recall that the ministers were to publicly read the Articles at various points in their ministry and teach according to them; laity were certainly to be taught the Articles as authoritative. And while laypeople were not required to subscribe to them, the Declaration of Charles I (which is still prefaced to the Articles in the English Book of Common Prayer) called all English Christians to hold them and the 1604 canons punished anyone who attacked them. My point is not that excommunication ought to be the penalty for contemporary Anglican laity who publicly disagree with the articles, to be clear. But the fact that excommunication was the de jure penalty for such disagreement is powerful evidence of the Articles’ nature as the Church of England’s confession.

The requirement to subscribe to the Articles was abolished over the course of the English Civil War. The Westminster Confession of Faith was drawn up as a replacement for the Articles – which is itself evidence that they were seen as the same genre of document by seventeenth century English divines! – although never adopted entirely by the English Parliament. At the Restoration, the Articles came back along with the Prayer Book. And if the Prayer Book came to play an increasingly dominant role in Church of England identity vis-à-vis nonconformists, this does not mean the Articles were neglected. Indeed, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a number of popular commentaries on the Articles emerge, of which Gilbert Burnet’s An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England was most prominent. This text, in fact, would show up in the official reading list drawn up for ordinands in the Episcopal Church by William White and approved by the House of Bishops in 1804. This commentary tradition would continue to flourish into the twentieth century, with both ‘high church’ and ‘low church’ examples. Names like Browne, Bicknell, and Litton were once quite well-known, and the Anglo-Catholic author C.B. Moss complained in the introduction to his 1943 The Christian Faith that many otherwise sound theological books suffered from being organized around the Articles. These authors disagreed about many matters – not least the relationship between and relative importance of the Articles and the other Formularies (the Prayer Book and the Ordinal) – but they were carrying on these theological disagreements within a discrete confessional tradition, normed by the words of the Articles. Indeed, writers like Oliver O’Donovan have carried this tradition forward to the present day.

Nor was this interest in the Articles merely an English affair. As the Church of England spread around the world and something like global Anglicanism came into being, the Articles came along. A full telling of the Articles’ place in global Anglican history is beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice it here to say that the Articles continue to show up (along with the 1662 Prayer Book and the Homilies) in the constitutional documents of many Anglican church bodies, and subscription among clergy was widely required until the last fifty years or so. While the Episcopal Church is often treated as an outlier in not having a formal subscription requirement, this somewhat overstates the case. As I’ve argued in print before, the oath that Episcopal ordinands make to conform to the doctrine of the Episcopal Church was generally understood to mean conformity to the Articles as lightly revised and adopted in 1801 by General Convention. This sense of the Articles’ importance was not only characteristic of specific Anglican churches but also the nascent international bodies binding such churches together. At the first Lambeth Conference, the bishops declared that unity among the various Anglican churches required that daughter churches of the Church of England “receive and maintain without alternation the standards of faith and doctrine as now in use in that Church” – standards which comprised the Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the place of the Articles in the Church of England or in global Anglicanism was unquestioned until the late twentieth century. As we’ve seen, they have been contested from the very beginning! Interestingly, within Anglican churches, it was mostly radical Protestants who objected to them initially, whether Puritans and Presbyterians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or Arians in the eighteenth. But the rise of the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century meant that it would be increasingly high churchmen who chafed at the Articles, especially once the utter implausibility of John Henry Newman’s attempt to harmonize the Articles with Tridentine Roman Catholicism in his infamous “Tract 90” became clear and he departed for Roman Catholicism – although it is worth remembering that Newman is not the only Oxford Father to treat the Articles. In this context, one party in the church, the evangelicals, came to focus increasingly on the Articles not only as the Church of England’s statement of faith but as a banner of church party identity within that church, whereas Anglo-Catholics increasingly gave them lip service at most. But, with a slight amendment to the subscription oath in 1865, the Articles remained the de jure English confession.

It took the twentieth century, and especially the second half of the twentieth century, to see significant changes to the Articles’ formal status. Lambeth 1930 proved a sign of things to come when its famous definition of the Anglican Communion listed the Book of Common Prayer rather than the Articles of Religion as the doctrinal expression of Anglicanism. At Lambeth 1968, then, the Lambeth Conference recommended an end to clerical subscription. A few years later, in 1975 the Church of England modified its declaration of assent for ordinands to belief “in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness.” Why did this change happen? I think these were some of the key motives: committed theological opposition to the moderate Reformed position that the Articles represented, a sense that with the rise of a permanent Catholic party in global Anglicanism the Articles no longer functioned as an accurate description of Anglican belief, a liberal suspicion of doctrinal standards tout court, a desire to return to the early conciliar and credal consensus borne out of enthusiasm for the ecumenical movement. But from whatever combination of motives or arguments, de jure deconfessionalization is a late development. It is really only in the second half of the twentieth century that global Anglicanism becomes “deconfessionalized,” and even this deconfessionalization has been uneven and coexisted with pockets of increased interest in the Articles and other formularies.

The fundamental point of this treatment of the Articles in Anglican history is this: the Articles clearly functioned as the de jure and usually de facto confession of faith for Anglican churches from the sixteenth century until halfway through the twentieth. It was the statement of faith to which ministers were required to subscribe and according to which ministers were expected to teach the people under their care. It was how the Church of England defined its doctrine (eventually, along with the other formularies) both for itself and in relation to other churches. It generated a robust commentary tradition through the ages. Of course, this form of confessionalism isn’t the same as the caricature of ‘confessional churches’ Anglican often have, in which every single church member is required to personally subscribe to the confession and generally treat it as the uniquely best expression of the Christian faith, without which one’s orthodoxy (or even salvation) is suspect. But if this describes any churches whatsoever, it describes voluntary churches of gathered believers born out of American-style denominationalism, not the historic churches of the Reformation. Anglicans were not the only ones to require ministerial (not lay) subscription while holding a generous view towards similar confessions of faith. It’s commonplace among the churches of the sixteenth century magisterial Reformation. And while the importance given to the liturgy in the Church of England especially after the Restoration – both as a locus of identity and (in many cases) as a source of doctrine – is in some ways unique, it makes Anglicanism a variation on a confessional Protestant theme rather than marking an abandonment of confessional identity.