On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan
that was intended for them) are certainly the most important. That is not offered as a purely normative judgment, but also as a descriptive one. The Tudor church has exercised the most profoundly formative role in determining what Anglicanism ever since, in all its varieties, has been and now is. Each century has left its stamp on us; but the sixteenth has determined the shape of the whole.
In that century English Christians had heard some of the most important things that Northern Europe as a whole had heard from the word of God. Yet ought we rather to say that they had overheard them? Look at the shape of the Articles: eighteen on God, man and salvation, twenty one on the ‘visible’ church, its institutions, its relation to government and its sacraments! Do we not say, ‘Here is the church of Laud, of the Lambeth Quadrilateral, of the 1928 Prayer Book controversy, already declaring itself! A church concentrating, in defiance of all that Luther would have told it, upon maintaining the external forms of religion!’? But that would be one-sided and hasty. It would be truer to say that it was not then, and has never been to this day, the genius of the Church of England to grow its own theological nourishment, but only to prepare what was provided from elsewhere and to set it decently upon the table. But in that early period this minor genius actually served its purpose. The nourishment it brought in from Europe was good; the preparation was judicious, and the service never more decent. The English Reformation supported a Christian culture — a factor that is too easily overlooked when we turn our attention to the narrowly ecclesiastical concerns of the period. Shakespeare and Spenser flourished in its ethos; Herbert and Donne (in a later reign, but before the great sea-change of the seventeenth century) grew up in its wake. The Merchant of Venice and The Faerie Queene also provide evidence for the theological health of the Elizabethan age, just as Paradise Lost does for the Puritan.
There is, in truth, a great gulf between the preoccupations of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries — so great that one could almost, at a pinch, claim the Reformation as the last great flowering of the mediaeval era and the seventeenth century as the moment at which the modern broke in. Of course, it is more complicated than that; already in the Reformation we find ourselves peering across the threshold of modernity. Nevertheless, such a claim would be no more misleading, and perhaps rather less, than the view which conceives of the Reformation as a radical announcement of the supremacy of the individual conscience. The Reformers were concerned especially with the mediaeval question of justification, which they reinterpreted radically in a Christocentric way. From the seventeenth century on, this question sinks out of sight in the English-speaking tradition like a stone in a deep pond. In its place we find new questions about individual human agency and natural causes, transforming theology, natural philosophy and political theory out of all recognition. The early seventeenth-century preoccupation with predestination, represented in Anglicanism by the unofficial Lambeth Articles of 1595 and the Church of Ireland Articles of 1615, forms a bridge between the two quite different intellectual eras. For predestination, itself a mediaeval issue, proved a natural way of approaching newly-urgent questions about causation and agency in terms which were familiar. But we must not read our Tudor authors as though they were the conscious harbingers of this intellectual revolution. Cranmer’s seventeenth Article is not an early draft for the work of Whitgift and Ussher. One of the services which Cranmer and his contemporaries may render us, us late-moderns whose conceptions have been shaped by the maturing of that liberal-scientific culture which was born in the seventeenth century, is to take us behind it, back to a time when other questions, closer to the centre of Christian proclamation, took priority.
We will learn from them better than from Anglicans of any other age of that distinctive theological virtue in which Anglicans have sometimes spoken as though they had a monopoly, the virtue of‘moderation’. The word is appropriate enough, though it need to be used with some subtlety and not a little irony. The popular account of Anglican moderation, that it consisted in steering a steady middle path between the exaggerated positions of Rome on the one hand and Geneva on the other, simply will not bear examination. As our knowledge of late-mediaeval thought grows greater, forwarded by the scholarly studies of the last half-century, it becomes more apparent that Calvinism, on all issues except that of church-order, took as much of the late-scholastic tradition into its system as any of the other schools of Protestantism. Its doctrine of predestination can arguably claim to be less ‘reformed’ — in the sense of bring more mediaeval — than that of the Council of Trent! There was nothing particularly ‘middle’ about most of the English Reformers’ theological positions — even if one could decide between what poles the middle way was supposed to lie.
Their moderation consisted rather in a determined policy of separating the essentials of faith and order from adiaphora. Of all the continental spirits, they had learned most deeply, perhaps, from Melanchthon. ‘Surely odious it must have been’, Hooker exclaims, ‘for one Christian church to abolish that which all had received and held for the space of many ages, and that without detriment unto religion so manifest and so great, as might in the eyes of unpartial men appear sufficient to clear them from all blame of rash and inconsiderate proceeding, if in fervour of zeal they had removed such things.’1 Anglican moderation is the policy of reserving strong statement and conviction for the few things which really deserve them. Yet that does not mean that it is incapable of conveying certainties. Think of the church music of the Tudor period, after its composers had turned over to English and put away their soaring cloud-peaks of polyphonic sonority. It moves along at a deliberate, purposeful walking-pace — not dancing like Purcell, not clapping its hands like Handel, not swelling its breast like Stanford. It articulates its text clearly in cool and measured understatement, without embellishment. It conveys confidence and assurance; and it can even suggest excitement, though under the strongest self-restraint.
The moderation of Anglicanism has proved invaluable in those heady moments of the history of the modern church at which truth has broken, with shocking suddenness, upon the whole culture. But it can also be treacherous when the culture is drifting without truth and without certainty. We may compare it with the secular English conservatism of our own century. Far from being a refusal of change, English conservatism is rather a way of excusing it, by maintaining the pretence that change has simply been forced upon it. Scrupulously preserving apparent continuity in everything inessential, it manages to dissimulate altogether the profundity of the revolution that has overwhelmed it. The Anglican genius, similarly, is not sufficient on its own to provide a strong sense of direction, but depends upon the guidance of other Christians’ dreams and visions. But it is precisely that, and not some supposed ‘middleness’ between Catholic and Protestant, which gives it a critically important role in twentieth-century ecumenism.
It is none of the Christian theologian’s business, in the end, to make great boasts for his denominational tradition or for any era in its history. His task is to bend his mind, under the authority of the apostolic witness to Christ, to the demands of Christian faith and obedience as they confront him and his contemporaries in their own time. If he does that, let him learn from whom he will, as he will. Yet those of us who have learned to follow Jesus Christ here, within the Church of England or one of its sister-churches, have our purely domestic reasons for gratitude. As a token of which I offer this essay to the glory of God and in thanks to those who are responsible for my Christian education as well as to those in England and Canada whom it has been my privilege to teach. And it is my pleasure to salute the Council and staff of Latimer House on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and especially to thank the Warden, the Revd. Roger Beckwith, for detailed comments, which have been of great assistance.
June 28th 1985
Christ Church, Oxford.
1 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity IV. 14.6.
1
Faith in God and in Christ
(Articles 1, 2)
The Thirty Nine Articles begin with five articles on the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation.
We may observe in the first place a certain perfunctoriness about them. It is not simply that out of thirty nine, five seems few for the