Burke, Anglican Thomist

Despite the deeply inaccurate portrayal of Burke's Anglicanism ("semi-detached adhesiveness") in Peter Stanlis's Edmund Burke and Natural Law - a view that owes something to the fanciful, unstable imaginings of the extreme Tractarian Froude - this description of his vision of Natural Law coheres with J.C.D. Clark's magisterial account in which Burke's defence of the Anglican settlement in Church and State is an expression of classical Anglican political theology:

Certainly Burke's interpretation of the Natural Law was identical with the Catholic principle, taught by all the Scholastic philosophers, that sovereignty lies in God's reason and justice, rather than, as the Calvinists held, in His private will and power. On this essential point Burke was in the mainstream of the High Church Anglican tradition of Hooker, Laud, Lancelot Andrewes, Bramhall, Jeremy Taylor, and many other seventeenth-century Anglican divines.

As John Milbank emphasises, Burke, and the wider High Church tradition of political theology flowing from Hooker, is here thoroughly Thomist:

he speaks of the power of ruling as something “which to be legitimate must be according to that eternal immutable law, in which will and reason are the same.” Here, in striking agreement with Aquinas, Burke both insists that the test of the legitimacy of the positive law is its consonance with natural equity and (unlike Suarez) identifies will and reason as coinciding sources of legality in the divine.

Comments

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders. With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter. The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition). Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical). Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition. A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics". Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics. What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition. Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

1928 practices and the 1979 book: unthinking conservatism or popular piety?

Those responsible for Earth & Altar - a new blog emanating from a group within TEC - are to be congratulated for an excellent contribution to wider Anglican discussion and debate. The commitment to "an expansively conceived credal orthodoxy as fully compatible with LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice" is an important part of a wider retrieval of creedal orthodoxy within what we might call the post-liberal generation. It is in this spirit that I want to respond to a recent post on the site by Andrew McGowan , Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. Against the background of another round of "ill-defined" liturgical revision in TEC, he understandably urges that a fuller reception of the 1979 BCP should occur before further reforms. In doing so, however, he takes aim at what he describes as "clinging to the ritual structures of 1928" while using the text of 1979. We ...

laudable Practice

Search This Blog