The sounds of Anglicanism

An Anglican should sound like a reformed Catholic Christian, grounded in the genuinely humanist implications of the Bible and the writings of the church Fathers. Someone committed to an authentic local and rooted expression of a universal faith. Someone with a strong sense of the integral unity of reason, scripture, and tradition. Of the unity, also, of artistic expression with care for nature and metaphysical vision.

John Milbank, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham - Church Times 1st October 2021.

John Milbank's words were in response to a Church Times request for "concise suggestions ... about what an Anglican sounded like".  Note, not a definition of doctrine (a debate for another time), more a description of ethos. I confess that I think Milbank has done so in a superb and deeply evocative manner.   

Reading the description over the past week, I was particularly struck how it brings to mind what it feels, looks, and sounds to like to be an Anglican, and does so in a way which wonderfully draws together various voices and sounds within the Anglican tradition.

There are deep roots to Anglicanism understanding of itself as a Reformed Catholic tradition.  We hear it in the voices of Cranmer and Jewel, Cranmer describing the Prayer Book eucharistic rite as "agreeable with ... the old primitive and apostolick church" and Jewel's account of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana as "come as near as we possibly could to the Church of the Apostles and of the old Catholic bishops and fathers".

The humanism of Anglicanism is heard in Hooker, the Cambridge Platonists, and the Latitudinarians, heard in Benjamin Whichcote's affirmation, "God, as the author of Nature and of Grace, does agree perfectly with Himself" and  in the Latitudinarian vision of civility and the peaceable order.

Attentiveness to the voices of the Church Fathers echoes in Anglicanism across the centuries, from Cranmer's praise for the "godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers" to the Canons of 1571 directing preachers to teach that which was agreeable to the "catholike fathers", from Bishop Charles Inglis in 1788 urging his clergy to read "the primitive Fathers" to the Tractarians urging attention to "our Fathers of the Primitive Church".

The local and rooted character of Anglicanism is heard in the parish church, with communal and national life caught up in the church's prayer, with national and civic commemorations, and with the rights and liberties of national churches fundamental to the Anglican discourse and self-understanding, defining who we are.  To say I am Church of Ireland is to give expression to the importance of this local and rooted character, so rooted, in fact, that John Hughes said, "as the name itself indicates, we are not a Church defined by a confession or a founder, but by geography and culture".

The integral unity of reason, scripture, and tradition is heard in Anglicanism from Richard Hooker to Lux Mundi, shaping a critique of enthusiasm and biblicism not on the grounds of an Erastian secularism but, as Milbank has stated elsewhere, a deeply Christocentric rejection of "any facile separations between the sacred and the secular or between faith and reason, grace and nature".  As Hooker declared, Wisdom has in "manifold ways ... diversely imparted her treasures unto the world"(LEP II.1.4), while Lux Mundi asserted "because 'the truth makes her free'  [the Church] is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification of each new social order".

The unity of artistic expression with care for nature perhaps finds its greatest voice within Anglicanism in Choral Evensong, with the quiet beauty of choral music, the gentle evening light streaming through stained glass, the aesthetics of the wood, stone, and glass of the parish church, the parish church itself a part of the landscape. This also embodies the metaphysical vision which Hughes identified as "characteristically Anglican: a sense of all creation being in God and God being in all creation, through Christ".  

And so Choral Evensong gathers up scripture, prayer, reason, locality, nation, culture, music, architecture in a reflection of all creation being in God through Christ.  Perhaps it is the voice of C.S. Lewis, describing the vision articulated by Hooker, which draws this together, providing something of an anticipation of Milbank's description and indicating its Hookerian quality:

Every system offers us a model of the universe; Hooker's model has unsurpassed grace and majesty.  from much that I have already said it might be inferred that the unconscious tendency of his mind was to secularise.  There could be no deeper mistake.  Few model universes are more filled–one might say, more drenched–with Deity than his.  'All things that are of God' (and only sin is not) 'have God in them and he them in himself likewise', yet 'their substance and his wholly differeth' (V.56.5).  God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent.  It is this conviction which enables Hooker, with no anxiety, to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular.  We must not honour even heavenly things with compliments that are not quite true: 'though it seem an honour, it is an injury' (II.8.7).  All good things, reason as well as revelation, Nature as well as Grace, the commonwealth as well as the Church, are equally, though diversely, 'of God'.  If 'nature hath need of grace', yet also 'grace hath use of nature' (III.8.6).