Anglican Churches are in trouble today for a lack of historical context and definition. This is easily traced to the accidents of history that include the Enlightenment and the rise of moralism (17th and 18th centuries), Romanticism that led to the 19th century Oxford Movement, and the Christian Socialist Movement of Frederich Denison Maurice that led inevitably to Essays and Reviews (1860) and Lux Mundi (1890), and the seemingly endless iterations of modern-day broad church progressivism. A very nice lady once said, “I love being Episcopalian—you can believe anything and still be one!” She would probably agree with William James’ earlier observation that “Anglicanism remains obese and round and comfortable and decent with this world’s decencies, without one acute note in its whole life or history”?[1] It is our conviction that the church today will find its way out of the wilderness of competing and contradictory ideas by remembering the inviolable and biblical core values that were rediscovered in the English Reformation. The church that stands for nothing will fall for anything! In the roominess and generosity of this church is a Reformation heritage with a clearly defined theological core.

The sixteenth-century English reformers were willing to die for certain doctrinal beliefs. They were a diverse bunch, to be sure, but they were united in their commitment to the supreme authority of Holy Scripture, the catholic faith of the church universal, the central doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, and to a sacramental understanding that the grace of Holy Communion is Christ’s spiritual presence reviving the hearts and affections of faithful recipients. These Anglican doctrines are enshrined in the Elizabethan Settlement and in the recognized formularies of the English Reformation.[2] The historic formularies—the books of Homilies, Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer—as understood in their original sense—describe the core, unchanging doctrines of the Anglican Communion.[3] The foundation for our unity as Anglicans is not structural, but theological. What keeps us together and focused in our mission is not a made-up connection to the Archbishop of Canterbury, or invented ideas of “three-streams” or “Instruments of Unity,” but rather in a cohesive theology confirmed over time and preserved in the historic formularies.

The modern inclination, however, is to stroll through our five hundred year history (really two-thousand years!) picking and choosing from the buffet of different movements, trends, and theological aberrations to fit our personal tastes. That road always leads to disaster. The church that stands for nothing will fall for anything, and this explains the near-death decline of the Episcopal Church and the theological confusion in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), and other churches that have moved away from the unyielding topography of historic Anglicanism. This question is always before Anglicans and Episcopalians: if our tradition is not defined and guarded by traditional Anglican formularies as confirmed over our history until recent times, then where does innovation stop?

The nice lady who said that Anglicans can believe anything was simply wrong. The most dangerous threat to Anglican identity is the culture’s infatuation with “tolerance.” It sometimes seems more important to be polite than truthful, to celebrate our differences than to assert that we know something with confidence. Diversity, once only a description of the colorful variety that makes up our Church, has seemingly become the objective of our faith. A bishop I once heard said that it is better to be loving than correct. This must be true, as far as it goes. But the best is to be loving and correct. In fact, something cannot be really loving unless it is based on truth (“Love rejoices in the truth,” 1 Corinthians 13:6). To pursue unity at the expense of truth does not lead to unity in the church, but a surrender of the church to the world. Jesus said that the truth will make us free (John 8:32), not some hollow sentimentalism that embraces the next teaching that comes down the road.[4] The hope for unity for Anglicans and Episcopalians in America and around the world lies in its history that is founded on the enduring truth of God’s revealed Word as reflected the historic formularies.

[1] Quoted by Stephen Sykes in “The Genius of Anglicanism,” Geoffrey Rowell Ed., The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1992), 228.

[2] The Settlement was Queen Elizabeth’s attempt to unite the country after the upheaval of Mary’s reign. The Act of Supremacy (1559), established the queen as “Supreme Governor” of the Church of England, insuring that the pope and the Roman Church would have no authority over the workings and beliefs of the Church of England. The Act of Uniformity (1559) firmly established Cranmer’s Prayer Book: its liturgies, theology, and directives about how churches decorated and how clergy should vest.

[3] In more recent times the historic formularies have been replaced by the “Four Instruments of Unity” in an attempt to emphasize structural unity over doctrinal unity.  The Four Instruments are the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates Meeting. Paul Zahl has observed that “The emergence of the ‘Four Instruments of Unity’ reflects an important historical phenomenon: the consistent and long-term weakening of the old and more ancient instruments of unity which were enshrined by the Articles, the Homilies, and the Prayer Book.” (Ian Douglas and Paul Zahl, Understanding the Windsor Report (Church Publishing: New York, 2005), 79.

[4] “It doesn’t occur to many people that what they call ‘tolerance’ is really sheer lack of conviction. It is not particularly significant if a man who has no great convictions says he is tolerant. Indeed, tolerance is a virtue only if a man believes something very strongly, yet respects the rights of others to disagree.” Leighton Ford, The Christian Persuader (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1988), 18.