By the way, to speak less historically and lay my own cards on the table: I personally think it would have been entirely fine and even a good thing if Article 29 hadn't been included in Articles of Religion, leaving the Articles open to both Lutheran and Reformed views on the sacraments. I think the Leuenberg Agreement gets things right regarding the Lord's Supper.
So this is all to say that I have no personal theological opposition, and indeed am personally supportive of, a broad tent Protestantism that allows both Lutheran and Reformed views on sacramental matters. I just think that at the end of the day, this isn't quite what the Elizabethan Settlement was, because it did come down on the Reformed side on what everyone agreed was THE primary dividing question between the two camps of magisterial Protestants.
This was really helpful. I think it’s hard to distinguish between “Reformation Anglicanism” and “Westminster Anglicanism,” and this response helps draw those differences out. I’m surprised when I read 16th century Reformed writers like Calvin and Bullinger and Calvin and see how different they sound from post-Dort writers. If Reformed means the church of Bullinger, Bucer, Vermigli, and Calvin, then the Anglican Church of Jewell, Becon, Newell, and Hooker definitely belonged to that.
As usual - excellent piece. Thank you for mentioning the Polish Reformed of course :) Also, lets not forget that the obsession on double predestination was not shared just by the CoE: the Anhalt Reformed clearly were not enamored with Dort, neither were the Polish Calvinists (I mentioned that in my book). So thank you for this piece!
A capacious moderate Protestantism is certainly something I can get behind. I too find the caricatures of Reformed belief, and desire to squeeze this belief into a much smaller box than it warrants, rather frustrating.
Thank you for writing, as always, Ben. This was incredibly helpful. I continue to find the riches of the capacious yet convicted Protestantism of you, Laudable Practice, and others extremely nourishing. Keep it up!
Lovely reading. This tends to corroborate my suspicions around a narrow definition of "reformed" that arise from reading capacious Mercersburg theology, for example. Learned about something new: Harmonia Confessionum!
Thank you for writing this. I struggle to see the impetus for divorcing the historic or contemporary Anglican church from reformed identity. Partly, I think if people are forced to accept this reality then other dominoes fall that they hold dear. Hard to say.
Also, the literal guy credited with starting the literal reformation would like a word about not being considered reformed. Maybe he should’ve written a 96th thesis about that.
The section on Doctrine is important and there's a thing that needs to be wrestled with by everyone involved in the conversation over Anglican identity - that the "Young Restless Reformed" types have narrowed the understanding of 'Reformed' to mean something other than what the first generation of Reformers meant by the term; an outsized emphasis on election (which our Formularies rightly reject), Puritanism of worship and historical emphasis, an overwrought sense of pastoral control, etc. That seems to be muddying the waters considerably and makes the argument for a Reformed emphasis in Anglicanism a more difficult endeavor. I'm not saying - necessarily - that Snyder is doing that here, but the audience may be.
I am normally a big fan of his, but I think one of the areas that he fails on when talking about Anglicanism and how worship makes us non-reform is actually not in an Anglican document. The odds were confession. The centerpiece of Lutheranism is essentially a defense of the mass. And I don’t think that anybody would question Luther‘s bona fides when it comes to being in a reformer.
Ben, I've read your essay twice and I'm still not sure whether this is a valid argument or not. I sympathize with your irenic thesis overall, although I would probably go further than you and admit all manner of Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman vestiges as part of the tradition. But set that aside for my comment. The argumentative structure of your essay is to present one of Snyder's claims and then identify counter-examples from the time period, e.g. "it’s not uncommon to find..." or "the idea that Presbyterian polity is a sine qua non of Reformed identity just is not the unanimous view". I think part of the problem is that you are trying to provide a modus tollens to Snyder's position. But reasonably we could take him to be making a generic statement, not a universal statement, about what constitutes a church being Reformed. Generics are statements like "Humans are bipedal." If you find a human who has lost a limb or who was born with a deformity resulting in an extra leg, that doesn't refute the claim "humans are bipedal." Under the logic of generics, exceptions do not defeat the claim, because the claim is normative, not descriptive. Your summary of Snyder's position leads me to think he's making a normative judgment about the CofE, which cannot be rebutted with your descriptive counter-examples.
As I read your essay, I found myself thinking back to Bart Ehrman's book Lost Christianities, which essentially aims your structural argument against orthodoxy. Ehrman's claim is that in the second and third centuries, there was far more diversity among the churches, and it wasn't until Nicea and Constantinople that a narrow "orthodox" position excluded many of the earlier traditions and beliefs like the Arian. Ehrman of course pushes for a more expansive conception of who counts as Christian in the pre-Nicean centuries between the Apostles and the council. That's basically your argument: you contend that the latter narrow "Reformed" position should not exclude the wider doctrinal diversity of the Reformed churches in previous century, a wideness that would include doctrinal decisions in the CofE. Likewise, Ehrman wants to contend that we shouldn't use the definition of orthodoxy to decide who is a Christian, and Arian or Marcionite churches should count as reasonable options in a more inclusive orthodoxy.
Snyder seems to be hewing closer to traditional Christian historical theological methodology than you are. Snyder accepts that the Reformed tradition is a tradition, that it was in flux for a period of time before it settled on a series of definitive hallmarks. It is appropriate to read that later definition back through history to discern which of the earlier church communities or theologians were Reformed and which fall outside of the definition. That's what we do with historical creedal theology: we accept the Nicean-Constantinople and Chalcedonian understandings of orthodoxy, and then read the centuries between the Apostles and those councils accordingly, dividing theologians and churches between those who were orthodox and those who were heretical.
This leaves us two logical possibilities given my analogy. Either we reject your argument and allow historical theologians to take later definitions of Reformed theology as normative for earlier history, or we accept your argument and reject the imposition of the later definitions of orthodoxy on the early churches when doing pre-Nicean historical theology.
Thanks for the comment, Michael, and I certainly feel the force of your worry here. But I don't actually think it applies, both because he explicitly makes the conversation a matter of the Reformation rather than the later development of Reformed churches and, more broadly, simply because I do not think the hallmarks he outlines are *ever* definitive of the Reformed tradition as a whole even as it developed. That is, for the analogy you make to work, there would have need to be a clear and unambiguous narrowing of the Reformed tradition on these questions of worship, polity, and doctrine he raises, which was then used by the truly Reformed churches in question to exclude others from the category of 'Reformed.' But this just isn't really what happened -- unless one wants to count Scottish and English Presbyterianism as the entirety of the Reformed tradition, which just doesn't seem remotely plausible to me.
At the risk of repeating my original piece: on worship, the idea that the necessity of worship being based in Scripture meant that nothing whatsoever could be legislated by the church apart from what was clearly found in the Bible was never held by the continental Reformed churches. Similarly, on polity, the idea that presbyterianism was required or episcopacy was unacceptable for a church to count as 'Reformed' was never embraced by the Swiss churches and those in close relationship with them, and was not even unambiguously embraced by the Genevan ones. I note that at the Synod of Dordt, the closest thing we have to a Reformed council, English bishops were welcomed and given particular places of honor because of their episcopal status. It is on predestination that your worry is, I think, most plausible. But even here I don't quite think it holds. The reception of Dordt in Switzerland and Germany is quite complicated, and those churches which did generally accept double predestination did not feel a necessity of revising their Reformation-era confessions. The Reformed situation isn't even comparable, in my view, to the late-sixteenth century Lutheran elaboration of the Formula of Concord -- and of course there were always churches that everyone agreed were Lutheran that didn't really receive the Formula.
Now, by way of conclusion, I'll note that I'm not actually sure that the traditional, confessional Christian way of looking at, say, the pre-Nicene fathers is simply sorting them into lists of (proto-)orthodox and (proto-)heretical. Granted that there are changes in how history and historical processes are conceived of by Christians over time, but in the period I study (the 16th c.) there is often a willingness to claim figures as mostly/largely orthodox albeit with some errors, and a certain degree of leeway given for these errors made before definitions of orthodoxy were established. In these 16th c. figures, we're a long way from Newman-esque ideas of development of doctrine, to be sure, to say nothing of Ehrman's suggestion that we can only look at how groups or individuals self-identified and make no normative historical judgments as to whether or not they belong within a certain tradition. But I don't think that a confessional approach requires the sort of ahistorical sorting that, on my reading anyway, you seem to be describing.
But this is all somewhat besides the point, because I just don't think we should grant that the account of 'Reformed' identity which he offers was *ever* widely accepted as normative across the Reformed world. What he's doing is less like using Nicaea as a lens to determine the orthodoxy of pre-Nicene thinkers than like using Baptist Faith & Message (2000) so to do. One could certainly do it. And a committed confessional Baptist might have good reasons to do so. But as a matter of historical plausibility it runs into some real issues.
Ben, that's a fantastic response. To make sure I have understood you correctly, would it be consistent with your position to treat the word "Reformed" somewhat like the word "Religion" -- it names some historically distinct trajectories and communities, but should not be taken to name some narrow conception of what a Reformed tradition or a religious tradition is, because people will always be able to find Reformed strands or religious traditions that resist neat categorization. Is that a fair way to synthesize your many nuanced replies here?
I'm sympathetic to your argument; I'm not sure the label "Reformed" is all that important except as a post-hoc artificial term acknowledging a sort of loose historical association between various communities. I've always thought we should care deeply about what it means to be a Christian and sit lightly about what it means to be an Anglican or a Roman Catholic or whatever. I am by temperament a broad church type that finds these distinctions historically helpful for our mental organization, but not particularly important for normative theology (because there we just want what bits are *true*, not what bits are Reformed or Baptist or Anglican). I say that as someone who loves, loves the Anglican tradition and think it is a gold mine for Christian thought. As much as I love it, I also think that when we're in the presence of Christ at the end of all things, we're going to find that the degree to which one was or wasn't Reformed is going to part of that which rust and moth destroys.
These distinctions I suspect matter a tad bit more to you, especially as you're trying to reclaim a lot of lost Protestant identity for application in Anglican church and practice today. I commend that work; in some ways, you are the Protestant complement to the Tractarians. You're making sure that we don't lose important treasures in our tradition as the cost of emphasizing the presence and importance of other treasures. Thank you!
By the way, to speak less historically and lay my own cards on the table: I personally think it would have been entirely fine and even a good thing if Article 29 hadn't been included in Articles of Religion, leaving the Articles open to both Lutheran and Reformed views on the sacraments. I think the Leuenberg Agreement gets things right regarding the Lord's Supper.
So this is all to say that I have no personal theological opposition, and indeed am personally supportive of, a broad tent Protestantism that allows both Lutheran and Reformed views on sacramental matters. I just think that at the end of the day, this isn't quite what the Elizabethan Settlement was, because it did come down on the Reformed side on what everyone agreed was THE primary dividing question between the two camps of magisterial Protestants.
This was really helpful. I think it’s hard to distinguish between “Reformation Anglicanism” and “Westminster Anglicanism,” and this response helps draw those differences out. I’m surprised when I read 16th century Reformed writers like Calvin and Bullinger and Calvin and see how different they sound from post-Dort writers. If Reformed means the church of Bullinger, Bucer, Vermigli, and Calvin, then the Anglican Church of Jewell, Becon, Newell, and Hooker definitely belonged to that.
As usual - excellent piece. Thank you for mentioning the Polish Reformed of course :) Also, lets not forget that the obsession on double predestination was not shared just by the CoE: the Anhalt Reformed clearly were not enamored with Dort, neither were the Polish Calvinists (I mentioned that in my book). So thank you for this piece!
A capacious moderate Protestantism is certainly something I can get behind. I too find the caricatures of Reformed belief, and desire to squeeze this belief into a much smaller box than it warrants, rather frustrating.
Thank you for writing, as always, Ben. This was incredibly helpful. I continue to find the riches of the capacious yet convicted Protestantism of you, Laudable Practice, and others extremely nourishing. Keep it up!
Lovely reading. This tends to corroborate my suspicions around a narrow definition of "reformed" that arise from reading capacious Mercersburg theology, for example. Learned about something new: Harmonia Confessionum!
It's a really interesting volume! Published in English translation too, and widely used.
Thank you for writing this. I struggle to see the impetus for divorcing the historic or contemporary Anglican church from reformed identity. Partly, I think if people are forced to accept this reality then other dominoes fall that they hold dear. Hard to say.
Also, the literal guy credited with starting the literal reformation would like a word about not being considered reformed. Maybe he should’ve written a 96th thesis about that.
The section on Doctrine is important and there's a thing that needs to be wrestled with by everyone involved in the conversation over Anglican identity - that the "Young Restless Reformed" types have narrowed the understanding of 'Reformed' to mean something other than what the first generation of Reformers meant by the term; an outsized emphasis on election (which our Formularies rightly reject), Puritanism of worship and historical emphasis, an overwrought sense of pastoral control, etc. That seems to be muddying the waters considerably and makes the argument for a Reformed emphasis in Anglicanism a more difficult endeavor. I'm not saying - necessarily - that Snyder is doing that here, but the audience may be.
I am normally a big fan of his, but I think one of the areas that he fails on when talking about Anglicanism and how worship makes us non-reform is actually not in an Anglican document. The odds were confession. The centerpiece of Lutheranism is essentially a defense of the mass. And I don’t think that anybody would question Luther‘s bona fides when it comes to being in a reformer.
Ben, I've read your essay twice and I'm still not sure whether this is a valid argument or not. I sympathize with your irenic thesis overall, although I would probably go further than you and admit all manner of Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman vestiges as part of the tradition. But set that aside for my comment. The argumentative structure of your essay is to present one of Snyder's claims and then identify counter-examples from the time period, e.g. "it’s not uncommon to find..." or "the idea that Presbyterian polity is a sine qua non of Reformed identity just is not the unanimous view". I think part of the problem is that you are trying to provide a modus tollens to Snyder's position. But reasonably we could take him to be making a generic statement, not a universal statement, about what constitutes a church being Reformed. Generics are statements like "Humans are bipedal." If you find a human who has lost a limb or who was born with a deformity resulting in an extra leg, that doesn't refute the claim "humans are bipedal." Under the logic of generics, exceptions do not defeat the claim, because the claim is normative, not descriptive. Your summary of Snyder's position leads me to think he's making a normative judgment about the CofE, which cannot be rebutted with your descriptive counter-examples.
As I read your essay, I found myself thinking back to Bart Ehrman's book Lost Christianities, which essentially aims your structural argument against orthodoxy. Ehrman's claim is that in the second and third centuries, there was far more diversity among the churches, and it wasn't until Nicea and Constantinople that a narrow "orthodox" position excluded many of the earlier traditions and beliefs like the Arian. Ehrman of course pushes for a more expansive conception of who counts as Christian in the pre-Nicean centuries between the Apostles and the council. That's basically your argument: you contend that the latter narrow "Reformed" position should not exclude the wider doctrinal diversity of the Reformed churches in previous century, a wideness that would include doctrinal decisions in the CofE. Likewise, Ehrman wants to contend that we shouldn't use the definition of orthodoxy to decide who is a Christian, and Arian or Marcionite churches should count as reasonable options in a more inclusive orthodoxy.
Snyder seems to be hewing closer to traditional Christian historical theological methodology than you are. Snyder accepts that the Reformed tradition is a tradition, that it was in flux for a period of time before it settled on a series of definitive hallmarks. It is appropriate to read that later definition back through history to discern which of the earlier church communities or theologians were Reformed and which fall outside of the definition. That's what we do with historical creedal theology: we accept the Nicean-Constantinople and Chalcedonian understandings of orthodoxy, and then read the centuries between the Apostles and those councils accordingly, dividing theologians and churches between those who were orthodox and those who were heretical.
This leaves us two logical possibilities given my analogy. Either we reject your argument and allow historical theologians to take later definitions of Reformed theology as normative for earlier history, or we accept your argument and reject the imposition of the later definitions of orthodoxy on the early churches when doing pre-Nicean historical theology.
Thanks for the comment, Michael, and I certainly feel the force of your worry here. But I don't actually think it applies, both because he explicitly makes the conversation a matter of the Reformation rather than the later development of Reformed churches and, more broadly, simply because I do not think the hallmarks he outlines are *ever* definitive of the Reformed tradition as a whole even as it developed. That is, for the analogy you make to work, there would have need to be a clear and unambiguous narrowing of the Reformed tradition on these questions of worship, polity, and doctrine he raises, which was then used by the truly Reformed churches in question to exclude others from the category of 'Reformed.' But this just isn't really what happened -- unless one wants to count Scottish and English Presbyterianism as the entirety of the Reformed tradition, which just doesn't seem remotely plausible to me.
At the risk of repeating my original piece: on worship, the idea that the necessity of worship being based in Scripture meant that nothing whatsoever could be legislated by the church apart from what was clearly found in the Bible was never held by the continental Reformed churches. Similarly, on polity, the idea that presbyterianism was required or episcopacy was unacceptable for a church to count as 'Reformed' was never embraced by the Swiss churches and those in close relationship with them, and was not even unambiguously embraced by the Genevan ones. I note that at the Synod of Dordt, the closest thing we have to a Reformed council, English bishops were welcomed and given particular places of honor because of their episcopal status. It is on predestination that your worry is, I think, most plausible. But even here I don't quite think it holds. The reception of Dordt in Switzerland and Germany is quite complicated, and those churches which did generally accept double predestination did not feel a necessity of revising their Reformation-era confessions. The Reformed situation isn't even comparable, in my view, to the late-sixteenth century Lutheran elaboration of the Formula of Concord -- and of course there were always churches that everyone agreed were Lutheran that didn't really receive the Formula.
Now, by way of conclusion, I'll note that I'm not actually sure that the traditional, confessional Christian way of looking at, say, the pre-Nicene fathers is simply sorting them into lists of (proto-)orthodox and (proto-)heretical. Granted that there are changes in how history and historical processes are conceived of by Christians over time, but in the period I study (the 16th c.) there is often a willingness to claim figures as mostly/largely orthodox albeit with some errors, and a certain degree of leeway given for these errors made before definitions of orthodoxy were established. In these 16th c. figures, we're a long way from Newman-esque ideas of development of doctrine, to be sure, to say nothing of Ehrman's suggestion that we can only look at how groups or individuals self-identified and make no normative historical judgments as to whether or not they belong within a certain tradition. But I don't think that a confessional approach requires the sort of ahistorical sorting that, on my reading anyway, you seem to be describing.
But this is all somewhat besides the point, because I just don't think we should grant that the account of 'Reformed' identity which he offers was *ever* widely accepted as normative across the Reformed world. What he's doing is less like using Nicaea as a lens to determine the orthodoxy of pre-Nicene thinkers than like using Baptist Faith & Message (2000) so to do. One could certainly do it. And a committed confessional Baptist might have good reasons to do so. But as a matter of historical plausibility it runs into some real issues.
Ben, that's a fantastic response. To make sure I have understood you correctly, would it be consistent with your position to treat the word "Reformed" somewhat like the word "Religion" -- it names some historically distinct trajectories and communities, but should not be taken to name some narrow conception of what a Reformed tradition or a religious tradition is, because people will always be able to find Reformed strands or religious traditions that resist neat categorization. Is that a fair way to synthesize your many nuanced replies here?
I'm sympathetic to your argument; I'm not sure the label "Reformed" is all that important except as a post-hoc artificial term acknowledging a sort of loose historical association between various communities. I've always thought we should care deeply about what it means to be a Christian and sit lightly about what it means to be an Anglican or a Roman Catholic or whatever. I am by temperament a broad church type that finds these distinctions historically helpful for our mental organization, but not particularly important for normative theology (because there we just want what bits are *true*, not what bits are Reformed or Baptist or Anglican). I say that as someone who loves, loves the Anglican tradition and think it is a gold mine for Christian thought. As much as I love it, I also think that when we're in the presence of Christ at the end of all things, we're going to find that the degree to which one was or wasn't Reformed is going to part of that which rust and moth destroys.
These distinctions I suspect matter a tad bit more to you, especially as you're trying to reclaim a lot of lost Protestant identity for application in Anglican church and practice today. I commend that work; in some ways, you are the Protestant complement to the Tractarians. You're making sure that we don't lose important treasures in our tradition as the cost of emphasizing the presence and importance of other treasures. Thank you!