On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan
raised against any discussion with the Articles, especially when the modern partner is an Anglican theologian. Is it fitting, in an age striving for ecumenical advance, that we should pursue our theological concerns in such a narrowly sectarian fashion? The Articles, together with the Book of Common Prayer, are the foundation of Anglican theology. What status has Anglican theology as such, when we have admitted, in principle at least, the common task of living and thinking together as Christians? And why should further currency be given to a polemical document when all our efforts are devoted to overcoming these traditional polemics? Such an objection has, to my mind, a prima facie validity; and I would not be prepared merely to brazen out the charge of being an ecumenical reactionary. Let me try to answer it autobiographically, giving the reader at the same time some idea of how this book came to birth.
When I began teaching theology at an English college some years ago, I would have reacted to the idea that I should use this document as a text for instruction with frank distaste. We still lived under the shadow of the old party controversies which had raged about the Articles for a hundred years or more because of the requirement of subscription by candidates for ordination. We were trying, if anything, to wean our students away from the old handbooks on the Articles which had provided the staple doctrinal teaching for the previous generation of clergymen. They were conceived as manuals for induction into a party tradition, comfortably reassuring about what it was permissible for an Anglican parson of the right persuasion to believe, uncomfortably challenging to the doubtful convictions of the other party. They inculcated minute scholarship on details, disagreeable prejudices on generalities. The picture that they gave of the Articles was lopsided, preoccupied by the polemical concerns of the late Victorian age. On such modes of instruction we turned our backs with sighs of relief (too fulsome, perhaps) and congratulated ourselves on rediscovering what the true task of theology ought to be: to respond to the intellectual and spiritual challenges of our day under the tutelage and authority of Scripture alone.
But in England we were all Anglicans without trying to be. When I learned what ought to have been an elementary lesson — that our universal communion in the truth of the gospel will not come about by the denial of denominational traditions, but only by the critical appropriation and sharing of them. I think I was not deceiving myself when I observed that my Canadian Anglican students began to make an altogether more confident use of the ecumenical resources of their School when they had first been introduced to what Tudor Anglicans understood the essential truth of the gospel to be. But to assure ecumenical good faith, and to quieten a nagging scruple that I might be guilty of purely polemical indoctrination, I added to my course on the Articles on the last occasion that I taught it a new feature, which quite transformed it. Promising (with some trepidation) not to alter a word to accommodate him, I invited my friend Dr George Schner SJ to attend the course throughout and gave him an opportunity at each meeting of the class to comment from a Roman Catholic perspective on how we Anglicans were presenting ourselves in the eyes of our fellow-Christians. I can only wish it were practicable to incorporate some such feature into a book; for thanks to Dr. Schner’s sensitivity and acuteness, we were all helped to see how, in reaching to recover our Anglican tradition, we were being led into areas of theological concern that we held in common with those whom we would once have identified as our opponents. It is in the same spirit, and hoping for the same sort of result, that I dare to put our conversations with the Articles, somewhat revised, into public circulation.
For the benefit of those who used to know but have forgotten, it may be as well to rehearse very briefly the origins of the English Articles of Religion as we now have them. (‘We’ here refers to all Anglican churches except for the Episcopal Church of America, which produced a conservative revision to meet its changed circumstances in 1801). They went through two recensions, the earlier appearing at the end of the reign of Edward VI (1553), the later at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The Elizabethan Articles themselves appeared in two versions, one in Latin (1563) and the other in English (1571). The differences between the two Elizabethan versions are not of great moment. Nervousness about Catholic-leaning sentiment led to the withdrawal of one Article (29) in 1563, which was restored in 1571. Apart from this discrepancy, we can treat the two versions simply as the Latin and English texts of the one document, the English not quite a straight translation of the Latin.
The Elizabethan Articles are a careful and thorough revision, undertaken by Matthew Parker with the assistance of other bishops, and then further amended in Convocation, of the forty two Articles which had been prepared by Thomas Cranmer (in both Latin and English) on the eve of the Marian crisis. Cranmer is in effect, the ‘author’ of our Thirty Nine Articles; for although Parker’s revisions were extensive, especially in the second half of the document, Cranmer’s conception and order was preserved, and his theological personality continued to give the Articles their distinctive character. The revisers were cautious and tidy. They filled gaps that Cranmer had left (with an Article on the Holy Spirit (5), on good works (12), and with two (29, 30) on the Eucharist); they removed what they thought to be unnecessary or tendentious Articles (10 on the Edwardian list, on grace; 16 on blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and four (39-42) on the Last Things); they tidied away one which they thought out of place (19, on the commandments of the law, incorporated into 7). They edited, corrected, sometimes rewrote. They made the Articles into a better document for church use; but to compare the two recensions is to see how the flash of theological imagination was always Cranmer’s.
The revisers had before them the so-called Confession of Würtemberg, a submission by Lutheran delegates to the Council of Trent, and it has been observed that this document influenced the Elizabethan revisions at various points, though hardly to the extent of a sustained quotation. More importantly, the famous Augsburg Confession had provided a form of words for some passages in the Articles of God and Christ (1,2), on justification (11) and on the church (19). This Confession had formed the basis for 13 unratified articles of agreement between Lutheran theologians and the English Church in 1538, a part of Thomas Cromwell’s ill-fated attempt to lead Henry VIII into alliance with the German princes, and Cranmer made use of those articles in drafting his own. These two influences are responsible for an occasional Lutheran flavour, which is, however, no greater than one would expect, given the influence of Luther upon the early Reformation as a whole. At points where Lutheranism distinguished itself from the other traditions of the Reformation, notably in its doctrine of the Eucharist, the English Articles show no Lutheran leanings. As for the famous tag about the Church of England having Calvinist Articles, that rests upon an anachronistic reading of Article 17.
It is not only the ecumenical question that might cause us to hesitate before embarking on a conversation with the Articles. We may expect quizzical looks, too, from those who doubt whether anything of importance about the Anglican doctrinal tradition can be learned from this source.
It is certainly true that Protestant Anglicans who have championed the Articles have sometimes made claims for their role as a norm of Anglican belief which are too extensive. This has sprung from a desire to interpret the Anglican Church as a church of the Reformation based, like other Reformation churches, upon a great Confession. But although the Anglican Church is indeed a church of the Reformation, it does not relate to its Reformation origins in quite the same way as other churches do, and its Articles are not exactly comparable, in their conception or in the way they have been used, to the Augsburg or Westminster Confessions or to the Heidelberg Catechism. It is not simply that they are supposed to be read in conjunction with the Book of Common Prayer. There is a more important difference, which is that the Anglican doctrinal tradition, born of an attempt (neither wholly successful nor wholly unsuccessful) to achieve comprehensiveness within the limits of a Christianity both catholic and reformed, is not susceptible to the kind of textual definition which the Confessions (on the Protestant side) and the conciliar decrees (on the Catholic) afford. One might almost say that Anglicans have taken the authority of the Scriptures and the Catholic creeds too seriously to be comfortable with another single doctrinal norm.
Nevertheless, it is absurd to suggest that there is simply no immediate authority for doctrine in the Anglican Churches — though the delusion does fall from time to time upon distracted prelates that the Anglican tradition is defined by what they think it is! It is rather that authority is, as we sometimes say, ‘diffused’. And of all the places to which it is diffused, the documents of the Tudor settlement (Articles and Prayer Book — the