The Heritage of Anglican Theology

J. I. Packer

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781433560149
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

Historical and Theological Reflections on the Anglican Church from J. I. Packer

The Anglican Church has a rich theological heritage filled with a diversity of views and practices. Like a river with a main current and several offshoot streams, Anglicanism has a main body with many distinct, smaller communities. So what constitutes mainstream Anglicanism?

Influential Anglican theologian J. I. Packer makes the case that "authentic Anglicanism" is biblical, liturgical, evangelical, pastoral, episcopal (ordaining bishops), national (engaging with the culture), and ecumenical (eager to learn from other Christians). As he surveys the history and tensions within the Anglican Church, Packer casts a vision for the future that is grounded in the Scriptures, fueled by missions, guided by historical creeds and practices, and resolved to enrich its people.

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Taking the Measure of the Anglican Mainstream

Defining Anglican Theology

Our purpose in this book is to study and appreciate Anglican theology—to take the measure of it, that is, as theology, not as anything else.

The word theology in that phrase signifies what, in its criteria, theology always does: it explores what can and should be affirmed about God. This is something that can be done effectively only in fellowship, a two-sided alternating activity that, on the one hand, is God-centered, Christ-centered, church-centered in its very nature and, on the other, is life-centered in all its implications and applications.

By prefixing the word Anglican to theology, we immediately raise long-standing questions. Within Anglican circles it is often stated—even officially—that there is really no such thing as Anglican theology; what goes by that name is just catholic, biblical, churchly, Christian theology of a mainstream sort, a theology seeking to be as God-honoring and practical as can be. And, when you have said that, so it is declared, you have said everything. That is the ideal, of course, not just for Anglican theology but for everybody’s theology. Roman Catholic theology, Presbyterian theology, Baptist theology, and every sort of theology with a distinctive denominational label attached to it are aspiring not to be distinctive from all the others but simply to be accurate mainstream Christian theology, according to God’s own mind, embodying that which all Christians eventually, in glory, will identify with and come to appreciate.

Although this is the official line for Anglicans as well, Anglican theology is actually a jungle of lush growths of all sorts with a number of tangled cross-purposes, like ivy strands encircling a massive tree trunk. The only way to study it is by trying painstakingly to extract and relate those strands, taking apart the component elements and energies that make them up.

That is what we are going to do in this book.

Holding to the Mainstream

But do not get the idea that Anglican theology, to anybody who engages in it, embraces the idea of an ultimate theological pluralism. All who attempt to practice Anglican theology see themselves—and ask others to see them—as seeking to hold to the mainstream of pure truth. The problem, however, is that different people have different ideas as to what constitutes the mainstream of pure truth. There are, in fact, three quite distinct types of perception.

1. There are those who think that the Anglican mainstream—the truly Christian mainstream—flows clearly within the world of Protestant and Reformed evangelical thought. (I am one who inclines to think so.) The constant and controlling reference point of Anglican thought is thus: the true gospel as set forth in the Bible.

2. Others view the mainstream as centered in the kingdom of Christ, embodied in the church of Christ as an ongoing network of spiritual life; they see church-centeredness as the mainstream’s characteristic feature. These Anglicans often describe themselves as High Church or Anglo-Catholic.

3. And then there are those who have been described as Broad Church or liberal in the past, and who usually today call themselves radical or modern churchmen. They believe Christianity’s mainstream is always a dialectical stream, that is, one in which opposed operations of mind, intellectual tensions, and debate are ongoing. They say that every generation, having inherited their forefathers’ way of understanding the faith, is placed in a particular cultural frame in the world where the church does its work, and that within this cultural situation are found true insights that must interact with the inherited tradition of the faith. These insights are certain, one way or another, to require and bring about some adjusting of certain elements in that tradition, so that the outward shape of confessional faith is always changing. They will say, in effect: “In the twenty-first century, when confessing our faith, we will not talk the language of the fathers in the church’s early centuries, or of the medievals in the age of Thomas Aquinas, or of the Reformers in the sixteenth century, or of the venerable Platonistic Victorian church leaders a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago. No, the outward form of our verbalized faith must change in order to interact with the culture, and it must do this in order to stay substantially the same.”

As I said, people who take that line have been called Broad Church, but they now often call themselves progressives. Those outside their circle regularly call them liberals, as they will from time to time call themselves.

There we have the three types of understanding of the mainstream. The three cannot easily live under the same roof. There will always be tension between them. Such indeed has been the Anglican story ever since the Reformation, especially since the post-Reformation century—the seventeenth century—when these three ways of understanding Anglican theology clearly separated out, each essentially distinct from then on.

As representatives of these three points of view converse and interact, that inevitably creates a jungle of alternative options at point after point in the spelling out of the faith and the discipling of the faithful. Which means that Christians in the pew are taught different things by different people. How are we to deal with this?

First, we are to recognize that this situation is inescapable. If you identify wholeheartedly (as, again, I do) with one of those three traditions, you cannot hermetically seal yourself off against the other two so that you do not have to take notice of them. They are there in the Anglican fellowship, and one has to take account of them, interact with them, and distinguish one’s own position from the other two.

We have to appreciate the whole sweep of Anglican history, and, without in any way weakening our own convictions, we need to know what is going on around us and where people who differ from us are coming from. Otherwise we shall not be of much use in the church of God, let alone in the bonding of Anglican fellowship. Why not? Because we shall generate confusion.

Second, we must recognize something that is shared in all three sorts of Anglican theology. Anglicanism works with a shared liturgy that specifies how God shall be worshiped. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer gives a set of statutory services and forms for worship that has found a place at some point virtually everywhere in the Anglican world. In recent years, Anglicans have worked with alternative service books alongside it, but in every part of the Anglican Communion there is an authorized Prayer Book as a shared standard of worship, with whatever variant forms may be allowed in various places.

Because it contains declarations and prayers that embody doctrine, this authorized Prayer Book, passed along from generation to generation, inevitably becomes a doctrinal standard in all branches of Anglican theology. And the continued use of the same services prescribed in the authorized Prayer Book generates a certain attitude: this is what we do, and it is right that we do it. That is the conservative mindset which such a liturgy always produces; and there need not be anything wrong with that.

Nevertheless, there is always a counter-tension. You may be familiar with a Latin motto dating from the Reformation era Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, which can be translated, “The church that has been reformed needs always to be reformed.” Why? Because the church is never perfect. This is basic Christian doctrine—that nothing in this life is ever quite perfect. And as the church moves into culturally new situations, as understanding of the Scriptures deepens, as liturgical wisdom increases—yes, things need to be improved, which means changed. So there are always debates going on within all three schools of thought, as well as across the borders between them, debates that range, and sometimes rage, between two attitudes: we are concerned to preserve the true wisdom of our heritage yet also concerned to be up-to-date and fully in touch with our times in order to bring the word of God effectively to bear on them.

These crosscurrents operate in Anglicanism all the time. It is a great deal more complicated than the theological process occurring in, shall I say, the Southern Baptist world or the Plymouth Brethren world or the Salvation Army. Those worlds simply do not have this array of theological crosscurrents constantly flowing.

Whenever we have Anglicans from various places meeting together, we shall gain by having all these different views making their presence felt, and the discussion will be the less significant if we do not. There should also be a constant endeavor on the part of leaders to achieve consensus statements that address all the concerns of all the parties in the discussions. The interaction of all parties involved in Anglican discussions is often near to unique among Christian churches today.

Evangelical Catholicity, Catholic Evangelicalism

In this world of ongoing and sometimes confusing debate—which is not likely ever to be less confusing than it is at the moment—what should Anglicans be aiming at?

My answer is that our aim should be something that hardly exists at the moment because so few people seek after it. This goal can be captured in two comprehensive phrases that belong together: evangelical catholicity and catholic evangelicalism. What do I mean by this pairing?

One of the good things that has happened in these last fifty years is that the words evangelical and catholic have both been reviewed and redefined in a relatively authoritative way. What is an evangelical? The British historian David W. Bebbington has produced a four-point descriptive account of what evangelicalism is, a definition that has rung a bell among both historians and theologians, with his analysis being accepted as accurate by just about all of them. The essence of evangelicalism, Bebbington affirms, is reflected in these four terms:

1. Bible-based

2. Cross-centere...