More From Archbishop Haverland on ACC Formularies

Archbishop Haverland kindly sends an occasional note, which I gratefully use (with his permission, of course) as blog material while I am mired in the busyness which keeps me from blogging regularly.

I mentioned in a previous post on Retro-Church some examples of things clearly present in the Henrician Church but not found in the Anglican Catholic Church now due to authoritative ACC formularies to the contrary or due to desuetude. In that category I mentioned 'mandatory clerical celibacy, legally-enforceable tithing, mandatory Latin liturgy, and many other things which the ACC does not retain'.

Likewise I mention positively a number of things from the Henrician Church that the ACC does keep. These include 'rejection of the papal office in its late medieval form; episcopal and synodal Church government; three-fold Holy Orders; the doctrinal and credal orthodoxy found in the large number of patristic authorities named in the C&C; the sacramental system which the Henrician Church retained; and large chunks of the Corpus Juris Canonici and the custom and common law of the Church'.

Some have wondered about the significance of the ACC's canonical starting point in the Henrician, rather than Elizabethan, settlement of religion. To explain that significance it might help to expand the list of positive elements in the ACC flowing from Henrician Catholicism. An expanded list might include the permissibility of the invocation of the saints; the objective (though not magical) efficacy of the seven sacraments; baptismal regeneration; and a high doctrine of the Real Presence. These beliefs are all features of the faith of the Universal Church which were preserved in the Henrician Church and are believed in the ACC. Such beliefs are not authoritatively contradicted by anything that binds us in the ACC, whatever contrary views one might cite from some in the Elizabethan Church of England. If the Articles seem to teach something to the contrary, either the Article in question has been misunderstood or is not authoritative, since it contradicts the more central and authoritative tradition of Christendom to which it is the purpose of the Articles to bear witness. Tract 90 and Bicknell and Father Robert Hart generally would say that the Article would in such a case have been misunderstood.

I try to be an ecclesial thinker. I joined the ACC as soon as it formed and have never looked back. I begin with the actual faith and actual formularies of the actual Church in which I actually find myself. I think the faith that I hold is Anglican in a variety of ways which are very important to me. However it is much more important to me to maintain the faith of my Church and to be squarely within the consensus of the central tradition of Christendom on controversial matters. If that approach is insufficiently 'Anglican' in the minds of some, I am not too worried. I am more interested in being a faithful Anglican Catholic and in standing within the central tradition of Christendom than in meeting some criterion of Anglicanism that is not itself firmly rooted in the ACC's actual formularies.

For the most part the central tradition of Christendom can be identified simply by looking for the consensus of East and West even today. I see nothing in the actual faith of the ACC which contradicts anything actually held by both the East and West. The only exception might be the marriage of bishops, but on that matter everybody admits that our position is in fact consistent with Scripture and the earliest Church, while the contrary position is a disciplinary matter rooted in no doctrinal necessity. The supposed agreement of East and West against Anglican Orders is clearly contradicted by actual Orthodox positions in the 20th century. Is there anything else held by Rome and the Orthodox but rejected by the ACC? Perhaps that there is One True Church. But as the Two One True Churches disagree about which is True and which Not, I am content with our charitable position that both are True, as are we.

Another advantage to a doctrinal starting point in Henrician Catholicism is that it historically antedates the most revolutionary claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants. Everyone now agrees, I think, that the late medieval Western Church had many serious problems, practical and doctrinal. For instance, the late medieval Church had a powerful Pelagian strand which Trent, a reforming synod in many ways, rejected as did Luther, Calvin, and the Articles. Everyone also agrees that all early modern monarchs sought to control their national Churches and to limit papal authority therein. But both the continental Reformers and Trent responded to the problems of the late medieval Church and the challenge of the monarchs by a radical abandonment of the Conciliar movement. Both radically abandoned Erasmian and Conciliarist reason, one for fideism and the other for the authoritarianism of an absolute ecclesiastical monarchy. The Henrician reformation at its best may be seen as an attempt to reform rather than revolutionize. Henry's bishops only abandoned the effort when forced to choose between the Romanism of Mary and the new-model revolution of Edward's later reign. But already with the Elizabethan anti-Puritans and Hooker the moderate, reasonable spirit began to revive. We in the ACC combine unambiguous doctrinal Catholicism (looking back to the Henricians and reasserted in the Affirmation of Saint Louis) with the riches of the later Anglican patrimony (literary, musical, architectural, spiritual), and the liturgical glories of the Prayer Book tradition. We have the best of all theological worlds.