Can the Native High Church traditions flourish?

... a sense of habitual native dignity - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

There is a slightly haunting quality to one of the most delightful phrases in Nockles' The Oxford Movement in Context - "native High Church traditions".  In both the pre-1833 Church of Ireland and Scottish Episcopal Church, Nockles sees vibrant High Church traditions.  In the Church of Ireland, this tradition "had its roots in the Caroline era".  In Scotland, it was shaped "by representatives of the Nonjuring and Hutchinsonian traditions".

1833 had, Nockles states, "damaging consequences" for both, as he refers to the "Movement's negative impact on the fortunes of the native High Church traditions".  Above all, both the ritualism and the doctrinal innovations which emerged from later Tractarianism undermined the long existing claims of both the Irish and Scottish High Church traditions to be native to their respective churches and societies.

We might also point to the native High Church tradition of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States - the tradition of Seabury and Hobart, building on the witness of the SPG in the pre-Revolutionary colonial Church.  Here too, however, what Robert Bruce Mullin termed "the Hobartian synthesis" was undermined by Tractarianism.  As Mullin notes, "American Tractarians ... seriously weakened the constitutional fiber of the church", a particular achievement of the Hobartian high church movement, ensuring that a High Church tradition could flourish in a "republican and popular" polity.

That said, I do wonder if Nockles somewhat overstates his case.  In Ireland, for example, despite the difficulties for the native High Church tradition occasioned by later Tractarianism, and the desire of low church evangelicals to fundamentally reform the BCP, the revisions of 1874 proved to be minor (with none of the proposed low church changes to Holy Communion, Baptism or the Ordination of Priests), while the 1870 Preamble and Declaration was actually a quite traditional statement of Old High Church principles.

Perhaps one sign of the continued vitality of the native High Church traditions in Scotland and the United States has been the failure of the Anglo-papalism to take roots in these churches, in contrast to Anglo-catholicism in the CofE.  For example, the use of the Roman rite for the Eucharist and Daily Office, while common in English Anglo-catholic circles, is almost non-existent in Scotland and rare in the United States. 

Alongside this, there are also post-Tractarian examples of native High Church traditions being renewed.  For example, 'Sewanee Churchmanship' and William Porcher DuBose offered an alternative to "the extremes of Tractarianism", not "supposing that we have to be ... Latin in our exhibitions of reverence".  Sewanee's website continues to carry a description of itself as "pre-Tractarian catholics in the prayer book tradition".

We might also point to the continued 'evangelical catholic' tradition evident amongst Anglicans in the Maritime provinces of Canada.  While this tradition in its contemporary form owes much to Robert Crouse, it is also part of the legacy of Charles Inglis and his articulation of pre-1833 High Church principles, the Anglican experience taking root in and shaping a culture.

Such native High Church traditions are not mere ecclesiastical antiquarianism.  They are suggestive of how Anglicanism is to be lived, how it evangelises, how it nurtures in the Faith.  Words from David Curry summarise this:

But what is the particular form of our Christian identity? For like it or not, our Christian identity comes with adjectives attached. It cannot be otherwise because our Christian lives are lived in certain places the places where we belong and to which we are attached – and we all carry with us certain histories – there is a story which belongs to who we are and which attaches itself to us individually and collectively. The net of memory gathers us to Christ through the particular forms of our attachments and from all the particular places of our lives.

Native High Church traditions are bound up with place and experience and culture - as they should be.  When prayer, sacrament and attentiveness to Scripture are not bound up with with place and experience and culture, then the myth of the 'secular' emerges, of place and experience and culture untouched by the grace and glory of the Triune God.  The native High Church traditions gather up our particular attachments into grace and glory, sanctifying them, that they too might be perceived as ordinary experiences of grace.  

Let us then encourage and foster the "habitual native dignity" of High Church traditions, embedded in place and culture, offering a richer vision of flourishing than the secular myth.  

(The second photograph is of St John's Anglican Church, Prince Edward Island - taken from Facebook.)