and groups stay together, speak earnestly with one another of things that matter to them, and listen with great care to what others are saying, then out of this creative tension comes a harmony, a music that carries us to the truth and to action that most nearly corresponds to the truth.
This particular dynamic relationship of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience that characterizes the Episcopal Church began in sixteenth century England at the time of the Reformation. During the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, the English Reformation began, developed, and matured so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century people had become accustomed to the change, internalized the results, and acknowledged a tradition subsequently called Anglican.
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Kings Henry and Edward, with the first official English Bible in print, provided The Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion. Both emphasized the overwhelming importance of Scripture as containing all that is necessary to salvation. Like Luther and Calvin, Cranmer sought to remove all that obscured the Word of God in Scripture and in those visible words, the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion.
Grounded in the reform movement, Anglicans needed a way to distinguish between things essential and non-essential to salvation. This they sought to do through the use of reason or what English humanists called “right reason” because it was not mere rationalism, but rather Spirit-filled reason. Richard Hooker called it “the moral law of reason.”
Cranmer attacked superstitious abuses not only because they had no basis in Scripture, but also because they were irrational and immoral. He, along with such Christian humanists as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, desired only that people might live by the precepts of the Gospel to build a Christian society.
English reformers retained from the Church of their youth that which could be proven ancient by reference to early church writings, and they therefore opposed the Puritans who condemned everything associated with the Middle Ages and thus with the Church of Rome. Consequently, as they sought to suppress all that inhibited the working of God's Word, they did away with minor orders and denied the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The English Church retained the threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, and the Prayer Book consecration in Holy Communion retained much of the Canon of the Mass in a way no other non-Roman Church did.
Queen Elizabeth I let her Puritan subjects know she did not agree with them, and Richard Hooker, sixteenth century theologian, supported her with reasonable arguments for toleration. The Anglican roots of reformation and Christian humanism were nourished by the earliest Christian tradition as transmitted through the medieval Church but cleansed of superstition and corruption.
These roots were nourished, too, by the experience of the reformers and of those for whom they labored. The sixteenth century was an age of great personal peril, a time of plagues and warfare, for which the dance of death was a chilling symbol. It was also an age of great social distress, inflation out of control, agriculture and husbandry undergoing costly changes, and the poor increasing in number, in suffering, and in restlessness.
The Scripture was read; the Word was preached; sacraments were administered; discipline was meted out in large part to condemn injustice, to minister to suffering, and to lead the people of God into the construction of a godly kingdom. The Prayer Book emphasized Communion—with God and with neighbors—requiring communicants to cleanse themselves of their sins by the grace of God in Christ who died that they might be made new. The Prayer Book rhythm of repentance and thanksgiving was meant to affect personal and social behavior. Anglicanism was rooted in the realities of the time and in the experience gained by both the leaders and those whose fate it was to be led.
In an important sense, the history of Anglicanism from the sixteenth century to the present is a history of the four strands or elements, the bases of authority, and of the individuals and groups that represent them.
In the Church of England in the seventeenth century, the Puritans and Calvinists championed scriptural authority, and the Laudians sought to instill a greater respect for tradition; the Cambridge Platonists emphasized the importance of right reason, the “candle of the Lord”; and one might suggest that in striving to maintain the most intimate relationship between religion and the new science, the botanist John Ray and the chemist/physicist Robert Boyle testified to the importance of experience for the Church of England and its members. But all acknowledged the necessity of all four elements.
In the eighteenth century, the Evangelical Revival, which Wesley and Whitfield led, sought to free Scripture from bondage to tradition, rationalism, and the corrosive errors of deists and atheists. They sought to emphasize its centrality in relation to tradition, right reason and experience, maintaining what William Meade, third Bishop of Virginia, called the “law of proportion”—loving the Church, its ministry, and its sacraments without elevating any of them to the level of Scripture.
In the nineteenth century, tradition was emphasized anew by Tractarians and by the Anglo-Catholics who followed them. But John Henry Newman from the pulpit of St. Mary's, Oxford, explored the necessary use of reason, and John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, proclaimed, “Evangelical the High Churchman must be!”
So-called liberals such as Frederick Temple and Mark Pattison, contributors to the controversial Essays and Reviews (1860), insisted on the critical use of reason and tradition to interpret Scripture. To some they appeared to be attacking Scripture in such a way as to deny divine inspiration although Benjamin Jowett in his essay, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” was trying, like Erasmus before him, to free the scriptures from the obscurities in which scholastic theologians had buried them, that the faithful might be awakened to “the mind of Christ in Scripture.”
None of these groups could escape taking experience into account. The Evangelicals and Tractarians at times seemed to concentrate solely on personal religious experience; but the Evangelicals fought for the abolition of the slave trade and against slavery itself, and the Tractarians, chiefly through their successors, the Anglo-Catholics, sought to minister to the poor in urban slums. The Christian Socialists in England and the Social Gospelers in America so emphasized experience in their struggle to convert society from ruthless competition for profit to practical cooperation for mutual welfare that they stand forth as champions of experience.
Frederick D. Maurice (1805-1872) in England and Vida Scudder (1861-1954) in America are representative of those who sought to confront the challenges of modern society while adhering to the heritage contained in Scripture and tradition. Maurice's aim was to socialize Christianity and to Christianize socialism. Scudder, Wellesley professor from one of the first families of New England, highly educated, steeped in English literature, an ardent feminist and socialist as well as theologian, was outraged by injustice.
The American scene provides experiences peculiar to our place on planet earth, and here, perhaps, the harmony of this quartet of elements of authority is most severely tested. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the Episcopal Church both enriched and troubled by them. The separation of Church and state together with proliferation of Churches and sects—all in tension but all compelled to live together—the amazing mixture of races and ethnic groups, the conquest of the frontier through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the conquest of space in the twentieth, rapid economic and industrial growth and the force of the idea of progress, the challenges of world power and global crisis, the struggle for civil rights and women's liberation, and much, much more have influenced the environment in which Scripture is read, tradition is received, and reason operates. All in one way or another differentiate the Episcopal Church from the Church of England. And one can safely say that where Anglicanism is creative and lively, tensions will exist.
The interplay of elements persists, and American Episcopalians struggle to live creatively through and in present experience while maintaining fidelity to Scripture as the rule of their lives, tradition as the interpretation of that rule, and reason as the God-given but far from perfect instrument by which we apprehend the truth and do it.
In this book, I explore each of these four strands of authority without artificially isolating one from the others, rather focusing on one in the midst of the others, trying to discover just what makes us Episcopalians.
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