A deep coinherence: thanksgiving as we remember the Fifth of November
The contemporary Anglican embarrassment regarding the failure of the Gunpowder Plot is all too evident in the silence surrounding the anniversary. A range of factors perhaps contribute to this embarrassment - that it is rooted in the history of England; a desire to appear 'edgy' and thus sympathise with Fawkes and his fellow-conspirators; discomfort with the Royal Supremacy; unease with the historically Protestant nature of the commemoration.
A deep irony is present in each of these causes of embarrassment. Anglicanism itself, after all, is rooted in the history of England. Rather than being a cause for embarrassment, such particularity is in the very nature of lived Christian faith - in much the same way that Lutheranism is caught up with a German experience; in the tradition of Scotch Presbyterianism; in Greek and Russian Orthodoxy; and, indeed, in the communion of churches centred around a particular See, the See of Rome.
As for appearing edgy by sympathising with the conspirators, Andrewes' words should be heeded - "if it had been done, we had all been undone". Yes, Anglicanism could have disappeared. The Church of Cranmer, Hooker, and Andrewes would have been overthrown, in favour of the imposition of Tridentine Roman Catholicism. Edgy indeed.
The same applies for discomfort with the Royal Supremacy. No Royal Supremacy, no national churches in the Anglican tradition. And what about the Protestant nature of the celebrations? Hooker, Andrewes, James I, Laud: each would have been bemused by Anglicans stating they are not Protestant. The heart of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana - the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, and the Royal Supremacy - defined, in a phrase used by Judith Maltby, the 'Prayer Book Protestantism' that enabled the flourishing of the Anglican tradition.
Put simply, the failure of the Gunpowder Plot ensured the survival of Anglicanism. For Anglicans to not want to recognise this might just possibly suggest a chronic lack of confidence in the Anglican story.
For Anglicans in the United Kingdom, the failure of the Gunpowder Plot should also have significance because of its place in our national story. (Mindful of the cultural links with the United Kingdom that have influenced many Anglicans elsewhere in the world, that significance also has wider reach.) Andrew Brown has recently commented on how Anglicanism should be a part of our national story:
historically, the culture of the Church of England ... was of the church embedded in Englishness, in the way that church spires are just part of the rural landscape. The language and the bible characters were just part of English self-understanding.
What is more, the Plot's failure was for the good of the polity in these Islands. In that first Gunpowder Plot sermon, Andrewes celebrated its failure in these terms:
to save the effusion of so much blood, to preserve the soules of so many innocents, to keep this Land from so foule a confusion, to shew still some token, some sensible token upon us for good.
Likewise, Jeremy Taylor in his 1638 Gunpowder Plot sermon declared:
For had this accursed Treason Prosper'd, we should have had the whole Kingdome mourne for the inestimable losse of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for the future.
If the Plot had succeeded, the result would indeed have been "so foule a confusion", condemning these Islands to a religious war almost certainly of greater intensity and bloodletting than the conflict of the 1640s. Why, then, should its failure not be a cause for celebration?
Recognising, and giving thanks for, the providential failure of the Gunpowder Plot is a means of ensuring that our national story - a national story with consequences for Anglicans outside the United Kingdom - is told with Anglican Christianity as integral to it, rather than being simply dismissed in a Whiggish, secularist retelling.
The interweaving of the Anglican story and a national story is particularly seen in how Anglican political theology responded to the papalist claims caught up in the Gunpowder Plot - that the Roman see had an authority to excommunicate Christian Princes and call on subjects to rebel. Taylor in his 1638 Gunpowder Plot sermon stated:
I cannot sufficiently wonder that any man should obtrude so illiterate, and so impious an interpretation upon the Christian world, under the Title of Catholique Doctrine.
It was a recurring theme in Anglican political theology. G.W.O. Addleshaw has summarised its theological importance:
The Anglicans' bete-noire in the Roman position is the deposing power of the papacy; in their eyes it stands for all the faults of the Roman theory, bringing in its train the disintegration of society, and all the agony of divided loyalties. To them the Catholic Church is something which brings wholeness to society and brotherhood to man; it unifies all his natural loyalties and places them in the supernatural setting of the Church.
This sanctification of "natural loyalties", seeking to orient them towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, has traditionally been a defining feature of Anglicanism, a characteristic both of Anglican political theology and of Anglican political experience in polities outside the United Kingdom. In other words, Anglican reflection on the failure of the Gunpowder Plot is a resource for renewing Anglican political theology in an age of characterised by a searching for renewed foundations for and a renewed grasp of the telos of our polities amidst the exhaustion of liberalism.
So I give thanks for our deep coinherence
Inwoven in the web of Gods own grace.
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