Generosity and pluralism: why we need the Formularies
Another way to understand Anglican identity is to attempt to locate a fixed center of practice or belief, deviation from which is generally thought to be the reason for modern Anglicanism’s ecclesial woes. The most common “center” consists in the final shape of the documents of the Elizabethan Settlement, specifically the 1662 Book of Common Prayer with the 39 Articles, and the ordinals of the same. The final form of the homilies may be included for good measure. After a hundred years of discord in the wake of Henry VIII’s reign, it is supposed that the Church of England settled into the distinctive form, the true form, of its life: Catholic order, Protestant doctrine, and royal supremacy. In most modern forms of this, “cultural” tendencies of (usually) English genius are included. Unfortunately, what counts as “properly” English is so plastic that this tendency not-uncommonly devolves into racism or nostalgia for Boomer childhoods. Rather than being synthetic, this way of seeking to articulate Anglican identity relies on exclusion. Those forms of Anglicanism that do not conform to the gold standard are aberrant, and (so the logic goes) ought not to be tolerated or encouraged. It is thought that spiritual renewal would naturally flow in such places as true Anglicanism is allowed to flourish.
What is perhaps most striking about this characterisation is that it is an attempt to portray a rather common, ordinary, and historically unsurprising understanding of Anglicanism as inherently reactionary. What it ignores is that, rather than such a rejection of the Formularies being the norm for contemporary Anglicanism, it remains the fact that the Formularies continue to define the 'centre' for many Anglican provinces. Ireland's Preamble and Declaration, Canada's Solemn Declaration, and Australia's Constitution each receives the Formularies. In the words of the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia:
This Church, being derived from the Church of England, retains and approves the doctrine and principles of the Church of England embodied in the Book of Common Prayer together with the Form and Manner of Making Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons and in the Articles of Religion sometimes called the Thirty-nine Articles.
In other words, rather than being a 'lost centre' which a reactionary minority look back upon with nostalgia, the Formularies remain the 'centre' for many contemporary Anglicans. The Formularies do no represent forth-at-the-mouth reaction: they are ordinary, routine Anglicanism.
The allegation that this is caught up with racism comes perilously close to a breach of the Ninth Commandment. The Formularies should indeed find expression in "'cultural' tendencies of (usually) English genius" because these documents are not abstract propositions but part of a historical experience deemed to particularly embody a guiding example what it is to be Catholic and Reformed. In a range of ways - the centrality of the parish, what Milbank describes as being "sturdily incarnated in land, parish and work", the nature of cathedral worship, the dignity of the laity (which was the point of the Royal Supremacy and the ecclesial role of Parliament), an understanding of ecclesial authority limited by civil and religious liberty - historic cultural expressions of Anglicanism have been adopted in many parts of the Communion, not least in African provinces. Indeed, it is precisely apart from these cultural tendencies that the Formularies can become a 'dead letter', used as means of exclusion rather than comprehension.
Related to this, it is important to note the number of African provinces of the Communion which align with the Jerusalem Declaration and its affirmations:
We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today ... we uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer, to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.
To be clear, highlighting this is not to support GAFCON nor to endorse the Jerusalem Declaration (there are good classical Anglican reasons for questioning both). However, the reality is that a very significant proportion of African Anglicanism - South Sudan, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Congo, and Rwanda - views the Formularies as the Anglican centre. This is much more representative of contemporary black Anglican experience than TEC's 'doctrine-lite by sidelining the historic Formularies' approach. Indeed, to suggest that the TEC approach is somehow normative for Anglicanism hints, rather unfortunately, at American cultural imperialism.
Finally, the purpose of the Formularies as a 'centre' is not to create a "way of seeking to articulate Anglican identity [which] relies on exclusion" but, rather, to enable meaningful comprehension. This was the historic role of the Formularies: a centre around which Anglican theological debate could meaningfully occur rather than degenerate into disparate and unrelated discourses. There is a sense here of Macintyre's definition of tradition:
A Tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and whose progress a tradition is constituted.
For this extended debate to occur there needs to be a common, shared centre. This is how the Formularies enable comprehension. Various theological perspectives are related to one another because they are readings of the same texts, ensuring that vigorous debates do not negate coherence (i.e. they are 'internal'). Without this centre, coherence is lost and exclusion inevitably occurs. In Macintyre's words:
adherents are transformed into external critics of each other's positions, or else the tradition loses all coherence and fails to survive.
The Formularies are a means of ensuring that Anglicans do not become "external critics" to each other. One result of this role of the Formularies is the considerably greater theological diversity in the Church of Ireland, the Anglican Church of Australia, and (to some extent) the Anglican Church of Canada than is the case in TEC. Abandoning the Formularies as a centre leads to less comprehension and less pluralism because it replaces common, shared historic texts, part of "an argument extended through time", with a much narrower set of contemporary assumptions and propositions defining ecclesial life.
In other words, abandoning the Formularies becomes a means of shutting down debate and restricting engagement. And in the words of the Earth & Altar article, invoking the thinking of Rowan Williams, "churches that are concerned primarily with negotiating conflicts of ecclesial identity are ones that have taken their eye off the ball". What is more, it is a failure "to give patient attention to the ones Christ is already at work in, to learn to see in our siblings the active, foundational life of God", cutting ourselves off from the witness given by the Formularies to the Catholic and Reformed life which we have received from those who have gone before us in this part of the Body of the Christ.
Any tradition needs formularies, shared texts to engage with and debate over, if it is to truly be an "extended argument over time" rather than entirely disparate multiple conversations. The question for Anglicanism becomes 'which formularies?': the generous Reformed Catholicity of the historic Formularies, designed to secure comprehension, or whatever contemporary assumptions and propositions, often formulated to end contemporary debates, are chosen as their de facto replacement. To abandon the Formularies is to abandon the comprehension for which they were designed and the pluralism to which they gave rise in favour of a narrower, less generous vision of Anglicanism.
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