ON ANGLICAN IDENTITY: A RESPONSE TO TONY HUNT

In his recent piece in Earth & Altar, Tony Hunt joins a long-running debate within Anglicanism about the nature of Anglican identity, drawing upon Rowan Williams to argue against those who would articulate Anglican identity in terms other than nonanxious inference from what the people called Anglicans do and believe. For Hunt, to attempt to ‘fix’ an Anglican identity, especially in relationship to the doctrinal standards of the Church of England but also in postulations of a distinct Anglican “spirit”, is to fail to recognize that the church is grounded in God’s prior activity and, relatedly, to attempt to separate ourselves from those with whom God calls us to be. Attempts to prescriptively define Anglican identity are always awry, from the start. Now, this argument clearly rests on a deep concern for the health of global Anglicanism and a desire to focus our energies on the central points of the Gospel rather than ecclesiastical squabbles, and here I heartily agree with Hunt. But I hope nonetheless to suggest that there are some problems with Hunt’s argument that are worth attending to in order to help us more productively grapple with the fraught issue of Anglican identity. On my reading, Hunt’s argument rests on a very selective appropriation of Williams and Hooker and an unnecessary positing of a competitive relationship between divine and human activity in the church, which – though clearly well-intentioned – has unhelpful ecclesial consequences. In the end, without wishing to belittle real feelings of exhaustion or frustration with the tenor of intra-Anglican debate, I believe there is no way out of the debate over Anglican identity other than through it. We should be willing to engage in it with good faith and charity rather than attempting to rule the whole discussion pre-emptively out of bounds.

It is striking to me that Hunt’s piece, relying as it does in large part upon Rowan Williams’ reflections in Anglican Identities, leaves out Williams’ quite clear and succinct definition of Anglicanism. It is worth quoting at length:

The word ‘Anglican’ begs a question at once. I have simply taken it as referring to the sort of Reformed Christian thinking that was done by those (in Britain at first, then far more widely) who were content to settle with a church order grounded in the historic ministry of bishops, priest and deacons, and with the classical early Christian formulations of doctrine about God and Jesus Christ – the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. It is certainly Reformed thinking, and we should not let the deep and pervasive echoes of the Middle Ages mislead us: it assumes the governing authority of the Bible, made available in the vernacular, and repudiates the necessity of a central executive authority in the Church’s hierarchy. It is committed to a radical criticism of any theology that sanctions the hope that human activity can contribute to the winning of God’s favour, and so is suspicious of organised asceticism (as opposed to the free expression of devotion to God which may indeed be profoundly ascetic in its form) and of a theology of the sacraments which appears to bind God too closely to material transactions (as opposed to seeing the free activity of God sustaining and transforming certain human actions done in Christ’s name) (2-3).

While it is certainly true that Williams does not here adopt a definition of Anglicanism grounded, say, in explicit adherence to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, and the Ordinal, this is an understanding of Anglicanism which it seems to me Hunt’s argument would rule out! After all, Hunt explicitly castigates articulations of Anglican identity as in terms of “Catholic order, Protestant doctrine, and royal supremacy” stemming from the Elizabethan Settlement, arguing that this is an attempt to define Anglicanism which “relies on exclusion.” Here we have Williams himself defining Anglicanism as a specifically Reformed appropriation of the patristic and medieval heritage linked to the theological debates of the English Reformation! We’re a far cry here from Anglicanism as the things which Anglicans happen to do, unless one wants to argue that this particular reformed catholic shape was merely epiphenomenal, an accidental expression of Anglicanism which could equally be expressed in any number of other, even potentially contradictory, ways and has no prescriptive weight whatsoever.

I too find Hunt’s use of Hooker curious. To be sure, as Williams notes in Anglican Identities, Hooker was manifestly (and laudably!) unwilling to unchurch Roman Catholicism even in an aggressively polemical environment. Indeed, I think a reticence to declare other expressions of Christianity clearly outside the Church is a strength of the Anglican theological tradition; one thinks, for example, of Wesley’s willingness to grant that Roman Catholics could be Christians and the regular practice early in the Church of England of not requiring reordinations of ministers ordained in continental Reformed churches taking up parish placements in England. In fact, this is precisely a place where I think ressourcement of traditional Anglican thinking on this question is potentially beneficial, as the new emphasis on apostolic succession via laying on of hands (which emerged due to the Oxford Movement) has made it significantly harder for contemporary Anglicans to acknowledge the church in other Christian bodies. 

But Hooker’s willingness to recognize Roman Catholicism as an authentic church in no way meant that he considered the responsibility of his particular part of the church to set and enforce liturgical and doctrinal standards of no import. Indeed, the primary thrust of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was precisely to defend the religious settlement under Elizabeth against opponents who argued that it demanded conformity in matters they believed were at best adiaphora and at worst opposed to the Gospel. Someone who justified the legal enforcement of the duty to wear the surplice is a rather odd resource for Hunt’s argument. Indeed, Chapter X of Book V of Hooker’s Laws is dedicating to expounding the position that the church is competent to “make a choice of her own ordinances” about those matters which Scripture does not contain a full prescription, and that such choices are binding on church members whatever their own private judgments may be! It’s true that Hooker does not explicitly engage with the problematic of ‘Anglican identity,’ but he has no problem at all with the notion that a particular part of the Church might make definitive demands which themselves are not explicitly scripturally required. 

Of course, one might argue that this is all somewhat irrelevant to the primary thrust of Hunt’s argument. Sure, one might grant that Williams does provide a quite rigorous descriptive definition of Anglicanism, and even that such a descriptive definition might have prescriptive consequences for him. One might admit that Hooker’s thought as such (rather than the quite narrow point about being unwilling to unchurch Rome) might not be terribly friendly to Hunt’s position. But it might still be the case that those who wish to provide a prescriptive account of Anglicanism are necessarily giving into their own desire for a relief from ecclesial anxiety in a way which erases or ignores the work of God in the Church. I, however, am unconvinced, and believe that this dichotomy (human articulations of definitive doctrine or practice vs. the work of the Spirit) is an ecclesially dangerous and theologically unsupportable one. 

It is ecclesially dangerous insofar as it threatens the ability of the Church to promulgate any sort doctrine, practice, or discipline authoritatively. Were the pro-Nicene theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries, demanding adherence to an old conciliar definition even despite the manifest faithfulness and good intentions of many homoan, homoian, and heteroian theologians, to whom they were bound by a common baptism, taking their eyes off the ball? Or those who seek to authoritatively articulate a liberating credal orthodoxy in mainline church bodies today, including our own Episcopal Church? After all, the arguments for doing so rest on the notion that credal adherence is normatively part of Christian or specifically Episcopal identity. We Episcopalians may not subscribe to the Articles, but our priests are required to uphold the Book of Common Prayer, the Canons, and the Creeds, after all. It is unclear to me how, on the grounds Hunt offers, one might accept these as appropriate but reject, not any particular attempt to prescriptively articulate Anglican identity, but the very project of prescriptively articulating Anglican identity itself.

It also seems to me to rest on a competitive relationship between human and divine activity, wherein one can as a church body normatively adopt particular theologies or worship practices, or one can attend to what God is up to, but cannot do both. I see no good reason to embrace this position, and many good reasons not to; a properly transcendent account of God makes it clear that divine and human activity simply do not need to occupy the same causal plane. That is to say, precisely because God is wholly transcendent, God can be (and in fact is) an active cause of the things which we cause as human agents. Now, this is not to say that Anglicans should view our articulations of ecclesial identity as equivalent to divine decree of course, or even of the same significance as the Bible or the classical Creeds and trinitarian and Christological formulae. But it is in fact perfectly possible to recognize that the Church is always God’s creation and yet say that, for example, Anglicanism has and should have something to do with the classical prayer book tradition or the Articles (or, for that matter, the liberal Catholicism of the early 20th c., Lambeth 1920 and 1930, and so on).

Now, this is not the space to make a full argument for the much-maligned 1662 BCP, Articles of Religion, and Ordinal as norms of Anglican identity. I will say that my own attraction to them is not due to their ‘Englishness’ – an accusation which seems to be something of a red herring to me, given that many of the most enthusiastic proponents of the Church of England formularies as arbiters of Anglican identity are found in the Global South – nor simply because of their hoary old age, but rather because I think that they are, on the balance, true and edifying expositions of reformed catholic doctrine and practice. But more importantly, I’m troubled by the attempt to simply rule the discussion of Anglican identity out of bounds, arguing that it is in se a frivolous and possibly unfaithful one. Ironically, this posture of refusing the argument is in fact engaging in it, for a particular position of unfussy Anglican ‘comprehensiveness’ with a long history in Anglican theology and especially latitudinarianism. That is, it is to offer a particular vision of what our common ecclesial life together should like, under the guise of refusing to offer such a vision. But I’m not so sure that the question is escapable, especially in a context in which (praise God!) Anglicanism is less closely identified with British colonial ventures, no matter how frustrating and unproductive such conversations may often feel. Indeed, one might easily cast Hunt’s own proposal as a particular prescriptive construal of Anglican identity: Anglicanism as defined by a great deal of liturgical and theological diversity, unified by a commitment to doctrines broadly shared amongst Christians as a whole and a contingent yet meaningful set of historical relationships. This is a reasonable proposal, and one that should be taken seriously – but it is in fact a proposal for what Anglicanism ought to look like, rather than avoiding the problem! And so, what I hope for our life together as Anglicans, both in the Episcopal Church and globally, is the willingness to have honest and forthright conversations about our prescriptive accounts of Anglicans and Anglicanism, to argue and disagree with charity and goodwill, and to trust that God is perfectly able to work in and through the often unedifying muck of ecclesial struggle and theological disputation.