Affirming Laudianism - on being a 1662 Anglican

Can 'Laudian' be used in any meaningful sense to describe the living out of a tradition within contemporary Anglicanism?  Can the use of a term derived from a (to say the least) somewhat controversial 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury have any relevance to the Anglican vocation and mission in the early 21st century?

To begin with, we can note that 'Laudian' has been used to describe expressions of Anglicanism beyond Laud's time at Canterbury.  Two significant examples come to mind.  R.S. Bosher's The Making of the Restoration Settlement (1951) pointed to the essential Laudian nature of the 1662 settlement - "the Laudian triumph".  Related to this, Stephen Hampton's Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (2008) has described a vibrant Reformed tradition within Restoration Anglicanism sharing a "commitment to the neo-Laudian liturgical agenda of the later Stuart Church".

There is a particular importance to this if we describe ourselves - after Andrew Davison - as 'Being a 1662 Anglican'.  To be committed to "understandings and practices that have been at the foundation of our church order since 1662" is to receive the gift of the 1662 settlement as an expression of Reformed Catholicity.  It is to be Laudian.

Davison's post focussed on the gift of episcopal order.  As Laud himself stated in 1637, in opposition to Puritan critics:

Our main crime is (would they all speak out, as some of them do) that we are bishops ... And I say further, that from the Apostles' times, in all ages, the Church of Christ was governed by bishops, and lay elders never heard of till Calvin's newfangled device at Geneva.

Laud is here echoing Hooker's insistence:

A thousand five hundred years and upward the Church of Christ hath now continued under the sacred Regiment of Bishops (LEP VII.1.4).

And that critique of Calvin is similarly seen in Hooker, who clearly enjoyed emphasising that the "wit ... even of Calvin" was incapable of proving the "divine authority" of the discipline "which Geneva adoreth" (Preface, 2.7-2.9).  To be a '1662 Anglican', to be Laudian, is to adhere to a Hooker-like vision of catholicity and episcopalianism.

Beyond this, however, what else can be said regarding the contemporary relevance of (neo-)Laudian identity?  Three characteristics can be considered.

Firstly, to be Laudian is to recognise the gifts that shape the core of the Anglican experience.  Historian Kevin Sharpe has said of Laud:

Attendance at the parish church and participation in a common service conducted according to the canons and Book of Common Prayer were for him the hallmarks of membership of the Church of England.

Place, Common Prayer, parish community: it was here that Laud saw the ecclesia Anglicana embodied, experienced, and lived out.  There are significant contemporary resonances here, in an age increasingly alert to the shallowness and emptiness of denials of the shared, the common, and the formative.

Secondly, it was at Laud's urging that the Church of Ireland in 1634 adopted the Articles of Religion.  In the words of Canon I of the Church of Ireland Canons of that year:

For the Manifestation of our Agreement with the Church of England, in the Confession of the same Christian Faith, and the Doctrine of the Sacraments: We do receive and approve the Book of Articles of Religion.

The Articles provide a statement of Reformed Catholicism - deeply patristic, robustly Augustinian, clearly yet moderately Reformed - which give a means of expressing the coherence of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana.  This too has contemporary resonance for an early 21st century Anglicanism plagued by, in the words of John Milbank, "theological incoherence".

Thirdly, alongside "theological incoherence", Milbank has also pointed to "[a]lmost ubiquitous liturgical chaos" within contemporary Anglicanism.  A (neo-)Laudian understanding offers an alternative vision of renewed conformity, in which the gift of Common Prayer shapes the prayer and spirituality of the parish over generations.  This includes shared, common practices, what Laud termed "restorations of the ancient and approved ceremonies in and from the beginning of the Reformation". In his study of the Oxford Movement, George Herring describes the essentially Laudian nature of the liturgical practice of the early Tractarians:

What the Tractarians of the earlier period sought to achieve was a ceremonial that was explicitly Anglican, derived from the Prayer Book, the Canons of 1603, and precedent such as the Laudians of the seventeenth century; a ceremonial which was intended to be adopted by all Anglicans irrespective of theological viewpoint or party. 

Far from being an exercise in irrelevant antiquarianism (and, yes, I am thinking about that site), an affirmation of a Laudian vision is oriented towards the renewal of the experience of parish, place, and Common Prayer, the rediscovery of theological coherence, and re-receiving shared liturgical practices.  These gifts can seem quite ordinary and unspectacular, but it is such ordinary and unspectacular characteristics which are capable of nurturing faith, prayer, and discipleship in places, communities, and lives disoriented by the emptiness of secularism's 'buffered self', and in which there is a desire for the meaning, joy, and hope bestowed by grace-filled rhythms and relationships, places and experiences.