A dead letter? The Articles of Religion and Anglican coherence

During a Twitter exchange last week, John Milbank referred to the Articles of Religion as "a dead letter".  Subsequent conversation led to an admission that they have "good points of course", but also explanation of the "dead letter" criticism:

It is just that on the sacraments I would want to be much more Catholic and feel the positions of the articles here as maybe also on some matters of grace etc rest on misapprehensions.

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) October 3, 2018

So, are the Articles a "dead letter"?

To begin with - and as mentioned yesterday - the Articles of Religion have historically provided a coherence to Anglicanism, as an expression of Reformed Catholicity.  Not only was this the case historically - in, for example, the adoption of the Articles by the Church of Ireland in 1634 and by PECUSA in 1801 - but it also formally and legally remains the case in many provinces of the Anglican Communion.  In the Church of Ireland, for example, the 1870 Preamble and Declaration states: 

The Church of Ireland doth receive and approve The Book of the Articles of Religion.

All clergy in the Church of Ireland give "assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion".

Similarly, the 1893 Solemn Declaration of the Anglican Church of Canada affirms:

And we are determined by the help of God to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ as the Lord hath commanded in his Holy Word, and as the Church of England hath received and set forth the same in ... in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion; and to transmit the same unimpaired to our posterity.

If - as Milbank has previously stated - contemporary Anglicanism experiences "theological incoherence", a means of restoring a coherent theological centre to Anglicanism should surely be welcomed rather than dismissed.

This is what the Articles do provide - a theological centre.  And it is a deeply patristic centre.  The Trinitarian and Christological affirmations of Articles 1-5 root Anglicanism in the patristic tradition.  Article 6-8 commit Anglicanism to the patristic tradition's attentiveness to Scripture, with the Old Testament read Christologically, and the Creeds providing the regula fidei.

What then of Articles 9-18, of which Milbank states that they "rest on misapprehensions"? Perhaps the best response to this comes from John Hughes, referring to the key Articles:

I think we can discern here in articles 9 to 14, something approaching an integralist account of grace and freedom in the form of minimalist reformed restatement of the Catholic Augustinian-Thomist position against both the Calvinist view and the late medieval semi-Pelagian, proto-Molinist reading of Aquinas which was used to justify the Roman theology of works.

As to the Sacraments, do the Articles need to be "much more Catholic"?  They are a robustly Augustinian statement of the gift of the Sacraments.  For example, Article 25 - identifying Baptism and Eucharist as the "two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel" - echoes Augustine's meditation on the side of the Crucified:

A suggestive word was made use of by the evangelist, in not saying pierced, or wounded His side, or anything else, but opened; that thereby, in a sense, the gate of life might be thrown open, from whence have flowed forth the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entrance to the life which is the true life. That blood was shed for the remission of sins; that water it is that makes up the health-giving cup, and supplies at once the laver of baptism and water for drinking.

In terms of Article 27's teaching on Baptism - "as by an instrument" - and Article 28 on the Eucharist - "The Body of Christ is given, taken, eaten, in the Supper" - the fundamental challenge posed by this teaching is to the sub-Zwinglian understanding which characterises much contemporary evangelical Anglicanism.  As evangelical Anglican Stephen Foster said in the preface to Andrew Davison's Why Sacraments?:

The contemporary amnesia of a theology of the sacraments within some parts of the Church must then be a matter of concern.

The sacramental teaching of the Articles of Religion challenges this amnesia, offering instead a richly Augustinian, "much more Catholic" sacramental understanding.

Finally, we might also consider the too often overlooked Articles 37-39, on the polity.  In The Politics of Virtue, Milbank and Pabst identify 'the Metacrisis of Liberalism', 'the Metacrisis of Capitalism', and 'the Metacrisis of Democracy', arguing for "a return to the common good".  Articles 37-39 provide a framework for affirming the common good, recognising - in a manner surely cohering with Radical Orthodoxy - the enduring significance of Christendom as, in the words of Oliver O'Donovan, a "response to mission", intending "institutions to reflect Christ's coming reign".  These Articles, therefore, give expression to the vision articulated by Milbank:

The promotion of Christianity as a modern privatised belief-system has failed. The only option now for Christians is to seek to restore it as a system of finite order and rule directed to the eternal: Christendom. The real Christianity, as the old meaning of the term tells us.

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) May 16, 2018

Rather than being "a dead letter", the Articles of Religion provide a radically orthodox, deeply patristic, robustly Augustinian theological centre for Anglicanism, a generous, coherent Reformed Catholicity.  No, the Articles are not a dead letter - they are a life-giving witness to be re-received with joy.