As a member in good standing of one of the Anglican Church of Uganda’s parishes here in the United States, and a long time observer of the current unpleasantness which I refer to as the “Anglican Follies”, I’ve been meditating recently on the meaning of the phrase “Anglicanism has always taught that…”. I’ve frequently heard folks on both sides of the Anglican divide use that phrase to justify their position, and so I’ve been wondering what the truth of the matter is. What, in fact, has Anglicanism always taught?

I approached my rector with this question, and he directed me to several books, including this one: Doctrine in the Church of England: The Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922, published in 1938 by the Society for Promoting Church Knowledge (SPCK). (Some editions include 1935 in the subtitle rather than 1922, as that is when the commission finished its deliberations. It’s the same book either way.)

The commission included twenty-five Anglican theologians, including several bishops, a number of university professors, and many priests. Their charter was to sit down together and document the breadth of Anglican theology at that time, which special emphasis on those points of doctrine about which there was a wide variance of opinion. Note that they were not to produce a catechism, or any other kind of normative statement of doctrine; nor were they to determine the extent to which the Church of England was within the bounds of orthodoxy; in short, they were not concerned with what the Church of England ought to teach, but rather with determining what leading divines within the Church of England were actually teaching. Or, rather, what leading divines within the Church of England actually thought, within their inmost selves. The question of what the laity in the church were actually being taught seems not to have been raised.

Given my questions, this was a fascinating book to read; and I suspect I could fill a book with my thoughts and reactions about its contents. For now I’ll settle for following one thread I see running through it. The book grants due reverence, here and there, to scripture and to the historic creeds as being the foundation of Anglican doctrine, and indeed, most of the book is soundly orthodox. The occasional heterdox statement is always clearly the opinion of a small minority of the commissioners. That some were heterodox does not surprise me; it was ever thus. What disturbs me far more are the principles of intellectual discourse on which the book is based. There are numerous statements like this:

It is truly said that to become bitter in controversy is more heretical than to espouse with sincerity and charity the most devastating theological opinions.

This appears to me to be saying that one can hold whatever beliefs one likes within Anglicanism so long as one is both polite and sincere. I suspect that the man who wrote this sentence did not expect this principle to be taken to such extremes as it has been by the reappraisers in our own time; but this is a regular pattern throughout the work. Here and there, for example, concessions are made to those who in good conscience cannot affirm doctrines such as the Virgin Birth or Resurrection of Jesus Christ, although these beliefs are stated clearly in the (supposedly foundational) Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Given such an operating principle, one that values charity over truth, it seems impossible to me that the truth should ever be arrived at; or sustained in the face of opposition if once discovered. If God is Truth, as scripture says, surely determining and preserving the truth about God is a key role of the Church?

Let’s look at this more deeply. The creeds are to be foundational for Anglicanism, that is, they state truths which all Anglicans should accept. On the commission were some who found that they could not in good conscience accept two points of the creeds, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Jesus. This use of the phrase “in good conscience” surprises me; it seems to me that, as Anglican priests, they should be conscience-bound to accept the foundational doctrine of the Church. Clearly, then, they must be referring to some other principle than moral duty. I imagine that what they are really saying is that the doctrine of the Resurrection is logically inconsistent with the other propositions to which they feel they must assent. Given their presuppositions, principles, and philosophical position, they find they must reject the Resurrection, at least as it has traditionally been understood.

Now, if an Anglican theologian finds that he cannot believe some important tenet of the faith, it is at least intellectually honest of him to admit that fact. I can respect that, and I can respect the sincerity of his belief. But I have two further observations. First, on what moral ground can he be encouraged to go on thinking of himself as an Anglican theologian if he has rejected the foundations of Anglican thought? And yet, this is what the Anglican churches have been doing for at least a century. My second observation is thoroughly practical.

I was a math major in college; I’ve proved more theorems and solved more math problems than you can shake a stick at. Now, the interesting thing about the exercises in math textbooks is that the solutions to some of the problems (usually the odd-numbered ones) are usually in the back of the book. Thus, you may not know how to do the problem, but you can often know where you should end up—and if you do not end up there, you know you made some mistake in your reasoning. The mistake might be subtle or it might be stupid, but there must be one.

It seems to me that an Anglican theologian who finds his conclusions contradicting the creeds is in a similar situation. The Nicene Creed, for example, was the product of a century of dispute among the finest minds in Christendom. If the Bible were a math text, the Creed is the set of answers in the back. It says, if you start reasoning there, you should end up here. And if you don’t, the correct action to take is to check your premises and your reasoning and see where you went wrong. And while you’re figuring out how you can possibly get from here to there, you still hold fast to there as your eventual destination.

What Doctrine in the Church of England has to say about assent to the creeds and other Anglican “formularies” is this:

1. The Christian Church exists on the basis of the Gospel which has been entrusted to it.

2. General acceptance, implicit if not explicit, of the authoritative formularies, doctrinal and liturgical, by which the meaning of the Gospel has been defined, safeguarded, or expressed, may reasonably be expected from members of the Church.

So far, so good.

3. Asset to formularies and the use of liturgical language in public worship should be understood as signifying such general acceptance without implying detailed assent to every phrase of proposition thus employed.

4. Subject to the above, a member of the Church should not be held to be involved in dishonesty merely on the ground that, in spite of some divergence from the tradition of the church, he has assented to formularies or makes use of the Church’s liturgical language in public worship.

Here we must be careful. If, by the above, the commission means that those who are struggling intellectually with some part of the creeds may still say them during Sunday worship and thus accept the truth of the creeds with their will while still failing to understand that truth intellectually, then I can accept these statements. If, by the above, they mean that those who have determined to reject the truth of some part of the creeds altogether may continue to pretend to accept them during Sunday worship, I find I am hard put to call that anything but dishonesty. And yet, given the state the Church is in, it appears that many of the clergy must have taken this principle in this second sense, and have been encouraged to go on about their ministry as though nothing was wrong.

A final thought. As C.S. Lewis points out on several occasions, the danger with trying to make yourself stupider than you are is that you very often succeed. Failing to treat the foundational statements of the faith as foundational strikes me as an example of this principle in action; I suppose the eventual outcome shouldn’t surprise me.