Thanksgiving ... for the magisterial Protestantism of early PECUSA
This is now the fifth year of this practice. It emerges from my own affection for Episcopalianism in the Great Republic, rooted in happy experiences in years past of worshipping in Episcopal congregations in the north-east during visits to the United States. It also reflects a sense of gratitude for those I know in Episcopalianism in the States who are encouraging a generous orthodoxy. (And, mindful of "unhappy divisions", I also think of those in the Reformed Episcopal Church who give expression to the traditions of Protestant Episcopalianism.)
On this Thanksgiving Day, I give thanks for the magisterial Protestantism of the early PECUSA, in the hope that this rich vision of episcopal, liturgical, and sacramental Protestantism will be a source for Episcopalian and Anglican renewal in the United States.
I turn to five particular expressions of magisterial Protestantism in early PECUSA.
Firstly, the adoption of the Articles of Religion. An 1808 Pastoral Letter from the PECUSA House of Bishops reflected on the process whereby, in 1801, the Church officially adopted the Articles of Religion:
There remained a work, in itself more fruitful than any hitherto noticed, of discord and dissent. Our Church had not made a profession of Christian doctrine, with a reference to the points on which it has been contradicted, by what we conceive to be dangerous error. It is true, that the Articles of the Church of England, except the parts of them abrogated by the Revolution, might still be considered as binding on Churches, which had been founded on a profession of them. There was, however, wanting an explicit declaration to silence all doubt, in regard to their binding operation. And this, although a matter encumbered with much embarrassment, was at last happily effected.
Torrance Kirby rightly places the Articles of Religion in the context of "a remarkably rich period for the production of Reformed Confessions":
In doctrinal substance, particularly on crucial matters concerning Grace and the Sacraments, the Articles are comparable to both the French Confession of 1559 and the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, authored by Jean Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger respectively. On matters of ecclesiastical polity and discipline the Articles lean more towards Zurich than Geneva.
He also notes that Articles II, V, X, XI, XII, XIII, and XX "all include phrases or adaptations of language found in the" Lutheran Confessions. It was this magisterial Protestant confession that PECUSA adopted as its "profession of Christian doctrine".
Secondly, an 1811 letter from a member of the laity to the PECUSA Journal The Churchman's Magazine provides an insight into a characteristic of early PECUSA worship:
While the minister and people are engaged in reciting the psalms appointed for the day, the congregation very properly stand. But while they are singing the same psalms in metre, they irreverently sit. Surely the change of the psalms into metre does not alter their nature. They still remain psalms of adoration, of supplication, of penitence, and of praise ... In the congregations of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, the people, I believe, stand while they are singing the praises of God; and I am informed the same laudable custom prevails in Christ Church in this city.
Such use of metrical Psalms was also the practice in the United Church of England and Ireland well into the mid-19th century. This, of course, was a common feature of Reformed worship, with the sung praises of the congregation rooted in the Psalter rather than in hymnody. Here was an historic, sober Reformed practice shaping the worship and piety of early PECUSA, contrasting with the Enthusiasms that had swept through the colonies before the Revolutionary War and would again in the so-called Second Great Awakening.
Thirdly, while Episcopalian advocates in the Jeffersonian Republic routinely promoted episcopacy as apostolic order as a means of distinguishing PECUSA from a generic Protestantism, John Bowden - one of the High Church circle centred on Bishop Hobart - emphasised in his 1808 work The Apostolic Origin of Episcopacy that this apostolic order was shared with other magisterial Protestant churches:
We have seen that not only the Churches of England and Ireland, and the Episcopal Church in Scotland and in this country, place episcopacy upon the ground of apostolic institution, but that also the Moravian Church, and the Churches of Sweden and Denmark place it upon the same ground ...
the regimen of the Church of England was formed upon a principle of imparity by apostolic institution ... of the Church of Sweden and Denmark, upon the principle of apostolical imparity; and that the Churches of Geneva and Holland wished for episcopacy, and plead necessity for their departure from it ...
[rejecting the accusation that episcopacy equates to ecclesiastical tyranny, he denies this can be true of] our Church in view, or the moderate Church of England, or of Ireland, or the episcopal Church in Scotland, or the Church of Sweden, or of Denmark, or of the Moravians.
While episcopacy, therefore, distinguished PECUSA from the orders of other Protestant traditions in the United States, it placed it alongside magisterial Protestant traditions - the Scandinavian Lutherans and the Moravians - who maintained this apostolic order. Looking eastward across the Atlantic, then, one could see an arc of Protestant Episcopal churches stretching from Ireland to the borders of the Russian Empire, and with roots also in the Bohemian lands from which the Moravians had emerged.
Fourthly, Robert Bruce Mullin notes that it was through the rite for the 'Burial of the Dead' in PECUSA's BCP 1789 that "many [non-Episcopalians] first came into contact with the liturgy". The example of the Reverend Cornelius R. Duffie (a Rector of Saint Thomas, New York City, who died in 1827) is an example of this:
The funeral service first drew his attention to the offices of our Liturgy. Soon he purchased a Prayer Book, and would often comment on the beauty of many of its parts. He began occasionally to attend the services of our Church: and continued to do so, with gradually increasing frequency, while he remained in College. Having satisfied his mind that there were peculiarities in the system in which he had been educated, that would prevent his ultimately adopting it as the religion of his choice, he commenced, soon after leaving College, an inquiry into the distinctive principles of several religious denominations. The result was a deliberate conviction of the duty of connecting himself with the Protestant Episcopal Church.
The burial rite in BCP 1789 was largely that of 1662. As Eamon Duffy notes, 1662 (basically unchanged from 1552 and 1559) is a thoroughly Protestant rite. There is a modest commendation of the departed but no petitions for the dead. And, of course, it is a non-eucharistic rite. Comparison with PECUSA's 1928 rite indicates the definitively Protestant nature of the 1789 rite. The Episcopalian liturgical rite which most non-Episcopalians encountered, in the face of the common human experience of death, was robustly grounded in a magisterial Protestant vision and magisterial Protestant concerns.
Fifthly, what of the Supper of the Lord? Was it not the case that the Holy Communion in PECUSA BCP 1789 was derived from the Scottish rite and its affinity with 1549? Leaving aside the fact that the 1789 Holy Communion was not actually a straightforward copy of the Scotch liturgy, the Eucharistic theology of the High Church Hobart would have been acceptable to Calvin:
the sublime mystery of the Holy table, where he who gave himself for us, the incarnate Son of God is present—not in that body, into which the bread is said to be changed which was offered on the cross; not in that blood, which the wine is said to be changed that was shed from his side; not in that divinity which now abides in his glorified human nature in Heaven. This is a doctrine as absurd as it is impious. But Christ is spiritually present under the emblems of the bread and wine; conveying and assuring to all the faithful the efficacy of that body which was offered, of that blood which was shed, of that incarnate Divinity which now reigns in Heaven.
This was Virtualist sacramental teaching common to the pre-1833 Old High tradition and an expression of a high Reformed eucharistic doctrine. When others - as John Williamson Nevin would demonstrate in 1846 - had abandoned this rich Reformed theology of the Supper of the Lord, it was to be found in PECUSA.
I know, of course, that - to say the very least - much has changed in The Episcopal Church in the intervening two centuries. This invocation of the magisterial Protestantism of early PECUSA may seem hopelessly nostalgic - although, as Andrew Rumsey has said, "a little 'living in the past' can be a vital means of regaining one’s bearings, as well as consoling and creative". It remains the case, however, that this episcopal, liturgical, sacramental, magisterial Protestantism can still, at times, be glimpsed in The Episcopal Church: I am grateful for those times when, as a visitor, I have experienced this. And, at least for this crusty Old High Irish Anglican on Thanksgiving Day, it remains the most theologically coherent and attractive vision for a renewed Episcopalianism, holding together evangelical truth, catholic order, and generous latitude.
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