On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

In offering the public a new edition of this book 25 years after its first appearance I have done no more than remove an occasional word or adjust the punctuation, to make the reader’s journey a little smoother. Otherwise the confident and voluble voice that raised itself 25 years ago is heard as it spoke then, with all its now-unidiomatic he’s and his’s. Without being too indulgent to our own faults, we owe our younger selves a modicum of respect, and it does nothing for a writer’s integrity if the thoughts of youth are constantly checked and corrected by age. I must report, however, that I now feel some discomfort at the unsympathetic reading that I gave the Lambeth Quadrilateral (p. 96).

The past quarter-century has been kind to the study of Anglican history, and were the book to be written afresh, there would be much to expand upon. Diarmaid McCullough’s biography of Cranmer and Eamon Duffy’s controversial probings of English piety on the verge of Reformation have changed the whole tone of historians’ treatment of the Tudor period. New views have been opened up on what may still be thought of as the classic period of Anglican life and letters through a new appreciation of the long undervalued achievement of the Scottish Anglican King James VI/I. The era of Establishment Anglicanism, too, 1662-1832, has appeared in a new and exciting light as the result of the work of J. C. D. Clark. But to go into these matters, however enticing, would be to lose the thrust of the book, which marginalized historical and textual context to make space for the Anglican Reformers to intervene conversationally in our contemporary theological questioning. This is a work of high catechetics rather than scholarship.

In 1985 I gave little thought to the other partner in this conversation, the ‘we’ who turn to Tudor Christianity as a source of understanding. Various facets of Anglican experience are simply missing from this book. Nothing is said of the polar tension between high-church and low-church (an echo of that between Tory and Whig in secular politics), the fruit of the English Civil War and the Ejection which followed the failure of reconciliation in 1662. (Have we ever sufficiently appreciated what it meant that in Britain alone the seventeenth-century civil-religious wars pitted Protestants directly against Protestants?) Also passed over is the international missionary expansion which transformed the Anglican churches into a worldwide communion by the end of the nineteenth century. These omissions were defensible, even necessary, given the aim of the book, but would be difficult to sustain if the book were written today, now that the future of the Anglican family of churches has become a matter of doubt. Being an Anglican Christian over the past quarter-century has indeed been a heart-in-mouth ride. Mutual excommunications by Anglican bishops, counter-dioceses set up in opposition to one another, primates refusing to receive communion together at the hand of the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘flying bishops’ criss-crossing the country to visit parishes which will have no truck with their diocesans, all these bewildering experiences have transformed the nature of the Anglican identity. And, finally, there is ‘the Covenant’, an instrument which seems to some to sound with a perturbingly un-Anglican note.

I mention one other factor, less observed but probably of greater significance than all the others: the general disuse of the Book of Common Prayer, even in England where its position is protected by law. A church that conceived its relation to doctrine liturgically — for that was Thomas Cranmer’s chief legacy — was bound to be deeply tied to the language of its prayer. If the first cause of the Anglican Reformation was the English Bible, its decisive form was the English Prayer Book. For many generations it could plausibly be said that Anglicans needed no ongoing conversation with the Articles or other Reformation documents, since their shared liturgical texts and translation of the Bible gave sufficient content to the claim that the rule of prayer was the rule of faith. Anglican forms of prayer and Christian belief were transported across the globe on the sea-going vessels of the English language. And if, as some now prognosticate, the Anglican communion will shortly disappear from the family of Christian churches, that will be due not least to the dissolution of the language formerly called ‘modern English’ into a structureless lingua franca of the worldwide web. New liturgies, already replacing the common book when this essay first appeared, were an attempt — unavoidable, and by no means badly conceived — to respond to the instability of the linguistic

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On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

On the Thirty-Nine Articles

On the Thirty Nine Articles A Conversation with Tudor Christianity Second edition

Oliver O’Donovan

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

On the Thirty Nine Articles

A Conversation with Tudor Christianity

Second edition