A Skilfully Woven Knot

Anglican Identity and Spirituality

Michael Mayne, Joel Huffstetler, Huffstetler

• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786221322
• eBook ISBN: 9781786221346
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This collection of Michael Mayne's unpublished writings and lectures focuses on Anglicanism's distinctive theology and ethos, and how it can help the church speak to contemporary society. It offers a vintage distillation of his wisdom and pastoral understanding that remains extraordinarily relevant.

Part 1

Addresses

1

A Skilfully Woven Knot

Ordained Local Ministry Training, 3 August 2004

For ten years I found myself responsible for the liturgy and the spiritual life of a building, which is at once both the most Anglican of churches and the most ecumenical: Westminster Abbey. That is to say: it is regarded throughout the world as the spiritual heart of the Church of England, the place where kings and queens have been consecrated and crowned for 1,000 years, and where most of them lie buried; and the church in which great services are held that touch on the life of the nation and therefore need to be ecumenical and even sometimes multifaith, and indeed may be broadcast worldwide – such as a royal wedding, or the funeral services for Princess Diana or the Queen Mother. Yet my primary concern was that the ordering of the liturgy at the Sunday and weekday Eucharists, the preaching of the word, the choice of music, and the saying and singing of the Daily Offices, represented Anglican worship at its best.

It was also the most ecumenical of churches in that day by day thousands of tourists from all over the world and from many different traditions came to the Abbey, many of them to join in the worship. For the main Eucharist every Sunday there would be some 500 people present from many different nations and traditions: French, Italian and Spanish Roman Catholics, Old Catholics from Scandinavia, Dutch Reformed from South Africa, Orthodox from Moscow, Mennonites from Iowa, and Baptists (thousands of them) from Texas. As I stood at the door I was often asked – especially by Roman Catholics – ‘We are puzzled. What are you – Protestant or Catholic?’ And I would reply, ‘In a sense, we are both. We are catholic, in that we believe in the continuity of the Church of England as part of the worldwide church of God, and place a high emphasis on the sacraments, with the Eucharist as central to our lives; we wear vestments, and sometimes we use incense. But equally we are protestant in that we protested against the abuses of the Church at the time of the Reformation and do not recognize papal authority or his infallibility in matters of faith and morals; and we give a high place to the importance of Scripture and the ministry of the word. In a word, we’re Anglican.’ And, though I said it much less pompously and more accessibly, they would frown and shake their heads and go away even more puzzled than before.

A regular demand on the Abbey is to devise memorial services for those who have contributed in a major way to our national life: everyone from a Prime Minister to a great artist, actor or footballer. It might be Harold Macmillan one week, and Laurence Olivier or Bobby Moore the next. And, like those endless parish funerals in church or at the crem., the departed may or may not have had any obvious Christian belief. And it seemed to me wonderfully Anglican that we had the freedom to devise a different style of memorial service for each: one that met the demands of integrity, both for what we believed and also for the unique person being remembered. And that was the strength, not the weakness, of the Church of England.

The other week in The Observer, Will Hutton, not normally sympathetic to the Church, wrote of a memorial service held in St Bride’s, Fleet Street, for their former news editor, attended by many in journalism and politics:

who wanted to spend an hour to honour a man we respected and loved. But notably in a church. Few of us in a secular age manage a deep-felt commitment to religious faith, but once again the Church of England had opened its doors to a group of scarcely religious people with whom it had the slightest of relationships but who needed the combination of shrine and liturgy to express a deep appreciation of somebody they had loved and lost … Twice this year I have found myself in different Anglican churches: once at the funeral of a friend who had died of breast cancer, the other at the funeral of my father. And once again, the same Anglican culture seeped from the walls. The openness is but one component of a relaxed, profoundly tolerant faith that kindly accepts our fallibilities and which is fundamentally reassuring at moments of loss. Our collective relationship with the Church of England runs very deep. I concede my attachment to the church is as much cultural, attracted by its inclusiveness, kindness and tolerance, as any faith I may have. It represents, for all its weaknesses, the best of England. It is about being open to everyone in all their imperfect and sometimes non-existent relationship with faith.

‘Inclusiveness, kindness and tolerance’: in defining the Anglican spirit no one could have put it better. And I’ll come back to those deeply attractive qualities. For first, we must dip our toes into the past. Not that I want to bore you with facts that you have studied and know as well as I do; but maybe a brief refresher will do no harm, especially as, if we want to go forward into any future undivided Church, then the steps that have got us where we are have to be understood and incorporated into where we are going next. Unless, of course, we subscribe to John Betjeman’s reactionary cry: ‘Thy Kingdom come, from see to see, Till all the world is C of E.’

So how did it emerge, this Church of England, which has spawned a worldwide communion of 70 million Anglicans in 164 countries, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is primus inter pares, first among equals? The 1066 and All That answer is that it came about because King Henry VIII wanted a male heir and needed a papal decree of nullity for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Impatient at the long delay, Henry married Anne, was at once excommunicated, and in his turn rejected papal authority and in the Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared himself ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia’. But history is never so simple, and Henry’s desire to take on the papacy and curb its power was simply the occasion that dates the recognition that the religious life of Europe was in the midst of the most profound and traumatic upheaval.

On the Continent, the Reformation challenged a Church that was mired in abuse and corruption, and was the product of a new theological dynamic, a new discovery of the gospel in all its primitive freshness and power. In Germany, Martin Luther was protesting against the corruption of Rome and the great abuses attending the sale of indulgences. He called for a radical reform of the religious orders, and an equally radical shift of emphasis from the preaching of salvation in terms of good works to one of the sheer grace of the love and forgiveness of God as seen in Jesus Christ. In Zurich, Ulrich Zwingli was calling for similar papal reforms, and after his death the more extreme and puritanical John Calvin in Geneva became the founder of a movement that was to sweep across Europe and become synonymous with a church tradition that sees the Scriptures as the sole rule of faith, which believes in great simplicity of worship, and absolute predestination.

But corruption was not confined to the Continent. In England there was graft, simony and indiscipline. Henry VIII’s physician, Linacre, had been rector of four parishes, canon of three cathedrals simultaneously and precentor of York, and all before he was ordained priest. Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s Chancellor, kept a mistress by whom he had a son who was made, while still a schoolboy, Dean of Wells. In France, the Archbishop of Sens only entered his cathedral for the first time when he did so in his coffin. That great Renaissance prince, Pope Julius II, put himself at the head of the papal armies in Italy, and the Archbishop of York commanded one of his regiments. The great scholar Erasmus (whose translation of the Greek New Testament was to have a profound effect, sending people back to the source of their faith) also wrote a scurrilous pamphlet of Pope Julius arriving in heaven and being met by St Peter, where the following conversation takes place:

The Pope: Open the door quick. If you had done your duty you would have met me with the full ceremony of heaven.

St Peter: You seem to like giving orders. Tell me who you are.

Pope Julius: You recognize me, of course.

St Peter: No, I’ve never seen you before, and at the moment I find the sight quite extraordinary.

The fact that Julius was the patron of Michelangelo does not seem to have worked in his favour.

By the middle of the sixteenth century the English Church was ripe for reform. It had been planted by the Romans in the third century, expanding under the Irish and Scottish Celtic influence of St Columba and St Aidan, and in the south under the Roman influence of St Augustine, in the sixth century. It had its rich monasteries, its cathedrals and its parish churches in every town and village. Now, in the turmoil of reform, Cambridge was to be the centre of scholarly renewal, where not only Erasmus was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, but the heads and fellows of colleges included Matthew Parker at Corpus, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and John Whitgift at Trinity Hall, and Thomas Cranmer at Jesus. With the invention of printing, folk could own their own Bible for the first time and read it in the vernacular in their own homes; and Owen Chadwick writes how it became possible for ‘the brazier, the feltmaker and the coachman – the working people – [to go] into the Bible to fetch their divinity for themselves’.

While Henry VIII suppressed the wealthy monasteries and ordered the English Bible to be set up in churches, he only tolerated the new spirit of Protestantism up to a point. It was not until after his death, when the young Edward VI became King, that doctrinal Protestantism became the official ecclesiastical policy. Within a year or two, Archbishop Cranmer issued his incomparable Book of Common Prayer, devising (from the seven monastic Offices) the two Orders for Morning and Evening Prayer. It is still the classic statement of the ethos of the Church of England. He also drew up the Forty-Two Articles of religion, which were to form the basis of the later Thirty-Nine Articles, which defined the policy of the new Church of England in relation to the controversies that were still raging. Edward’s short reign was followed by that of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary, who restored the papal supremacy; and it was only the accession of Elizabeth I that finally established the Church of England. Elizabeth sought a comprehensive settlement that would embrace all her subjects. She had a characteristically English aversion to extremes, and sought a middle way, a reconciliation between papists and Puritans, between those who looked to Luther and Calvin and those who looked to Rome. But they were turbulent years, a time of religious ferment, in which a number of remarkable men finally guaranteed the emergence of an established Anglican Church and set its defining marks. Let me name five of them.

First: John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury in 1560. He had fled to the Continent under Mary’s persecution, for he strongly opposed the Church of Rome, taking his stand on the teaching of the Church Fathers of the first six centuries. In his great work Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, he affirmed that by the sixth century the clear outline of Christian doctrine had been drawn, and that all further development must be found within that outline. He is the first to set out the Anglican claim that in faith and order the Anglican Church is continuous in identity with the primitive church.

If Jewel led the defence against Rome, the defence against the Puritans was in the hands of an even greater man, Richard Hooker. The scholarly Hooker first gave the Church of England a solid intellectual basis. His great book Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, has a tolerance and largeness of view that was quite new in religious debate. His book is a defence of the Christian faith and also a discussion of the Order of the Church and the relationship between Church and state. He argued for the identity of the one with the other, in one Christian nation ruled by one monarch and under one law. His great contribution is his defence of reason; reason for Hooker being that faculty within us that makes it possible for us to receive the revelation of God whenever and however he speaks. And Anglicans ever since have placed great importance, in matters of faith and morals, on those two human faculties: reason and conscience.

Hooker’s ideas were carried to their logical conclusion by the third and fourth of my great defining Anglicans: William Laud and Lancelot Andrewes. Laud, a learned, choleric and really rather unlovable man, the son of a Reading cloth-merchant, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, moving to Lambeth with his Smyrna cat and his tortoise. He is the key figure in developing the ethos of the Church of England. He was Catholic in sympathy and his fine mind was matched by great skill, plus a certain ruthlessness, as an administrator. He was a great tidier-upper. His great contribution was a belief in ordered freedom: his ideal being the dual principle of a decent uniformity in worship, and a wide liberty of theological speculation. He insisted that churches be kept in good repair, with the altar restored to the east end, and ordered all bishops to hold visitations in their dioceses, and, set up his own agents to make sure they conformed. Laud believed passionately that liturgical uniformity was the precondition of theological liberty, and he sought to enforce the observance of the Book of Common Prayer by setting up the court of High Commission. The latter was widely regarded as an Anglican form of the Inquisition; and when Charles I fell, Laud found himself in the Tower, and was beheaded four years later, aged 72, before a jeering crowd, and after a moving affirmation of his belief in the Church of E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Jeffrey John
• Introduction by Joel W. Huffstetler
• Part 1 Addresses
• Part 2 Sermons
• Part 3 Articles and Reviews
• Acknowledgements of Sources
• Index of Names
• Copyright