Reconfessionalization, Rechristianization

Some reflections on the current state of mainline Anglicanism

I’ve been thinking even more than usual over the last few days about ‘reconfessionalization’ and ‘confessional Anglican,’ both what we mean by them and what their promise for our church might be.

This was spurred by two things in particular. I had the chance to talk a few weeks ago with David Johnston on his ‘All Things Necessary’ YouTube channel about the Articles of Religion and Anglican reconfessionalization (you can watch it here; it’s also available as a podcast on Spotify). The arguments I make there are probably familiar ones to long-time ‘Draw Near With Faith’ readers: the Articles are a confessional statement; the move away from a confessional Protestant Anglican self-understanding was largely regrettable; re-engaging with our Anglican theological heritage is important today not just because it’s our heritage but because this heritage points us to a gracious God.

Around the same time, Richard Pryor released an article in Earth & Altar entitled “In Essentials, Unity”: For Confessional Anglicanism. In this piece, if I’m understanding it correctly, Pryor argues that the Episcopal Church’s allergy to articulating a firm theological identity has left it incapable of addressing the political and social crisis of the contemporary United States theologically. Instead, one gets ideological responses to hot-button issues that are quickly ignored even by our own members. He argues that we need instead to recover a sense that what binds us together is not only liturgy or institutional membership but shared confession, a shared account of who God is, what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, and how this matters for our life together. Pryor doesn’t argue for a given confessional statement but argues for the necessity of a confessional identity for the life of the Episcopal Church today.

I found Pryor’s piece, my own conversation with David Johnston, and the conversation that both sparked to be quite enlivening and exciting. I also thought that they suffered from some terminological and conceptual confusion that muddied the waters. Now, two books that I just happened to read recently — J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism and Paul Zahl’s The Protestant Face of Anglicanism — both, serendipitously enough, seek to address what in their view has gone wrong in mainline (or specifically mainline Anglican) Christianity and explore possible solutions. And so I thought they might be helpful conversation partners in trying to get at some clarity about what the problem is that proposals like mine and Pryor’s are trying to address and how these various attempted solutions fit together.

In short, I want to suggest that our churches at present suffer from insufficient attention to the core Christian message of incarnation and redemption, sometimes because this message is explicitly denied (which, as we’ll see, as Machen argues ‘liberalism’ did) but more frequently because it is deprioritized in favor of secondary issues (which, as we’ll see, Zahl argues flows in Anglican circles from a commitment to the via-media Catholic-Protestant synthesis). And the call to reconfessionalization (to reframe Anglican life around Anglican history, and specifically the formularies) is best understood as one strategy among others for rechristianization, a reorienting of the teaching and life of our churches around the kerygma. I think it is a preferable strategy — but it has as its ultimate goal less producing Articles-loving Anglicans than producing (by the Spirit’s power) Christians.

Now, to think about the problem we’re facing, let’s start with Machen. He was a central figure in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in American Presbyterianism in the early twentieth century, a lightning rod during his life and after. A professor at Princeton, Machen left both the seminary and the Presbyterian Church (USA) to found the more conservative Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In Christianity and Liberalism, Machen argues that, in short, by the early twentieth century two different and opposing religions coexisted within the same ecclesial institutions of the American Protestant mainline, using the same language with very different, incompatible meanings. On one hand, there is Christianity, a religion grounded on the announcement that the transcendent God really took on flesh in Jesus of Nazareth in order to atone for our sins and reconcile us to himself by his life, death, and resurrection. On the other hand, there is what Machen calls liberalism: a form of religion which rejects the specific historical claims made by Christianity as untenable in the face of modern science and history, and instead sees in Jesus an ideal of a life lived in conformity to the will of a (possibly-impersonal) God. The goal is not, for liberalism, faith in Jesus but the faith of Jesus, generally understood as a nondogmatic, experiential commitment to the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

While Machen admits that he is treating these two religions as ideal types, and in the actual lives of mainline clergy and laity some combination of ‘liberal’ and ‘Christian’ beliefs are often held together, he argues that the two religions cannot ultimately coexist within the same ecclesial structure. In fact, the the idea that they can reflects an inability of liberals to understand the theologically conservative point of view: doctrinal questions are only adiaphoral, secondary matters according the liberal position. This is why, as he sees it, separation between religious liberalism and Christianity is necessary. If conservative Christians believe that the basis of the church is a message about Jesus, and there is fundamental and irreconcilable disagreement about the content of that message, then it is simply impossible for these two religions to share the same religious organization. And since the Protestant churches are formally, constitutionally, confessional committed to Christianity rather than liberalism, the honest thing for liberals to do, he argues, is to leave.

The book is certainly polemical, and not infrequently politically tendentious. But as an account of the religious situation within the American mainline in the first decades of the twentieth century, I’ve read enough liberal theology from the period to find it largely convincing. I have to admit that this was something of a surprise. He is such a bogeyman in the mainline historical imaginary that I expected him to be thoroughly uncharitable. Now, to be sure, especially towards the end of the book, I think he does struggle to understand or convey fairly why liberals would remain within the historic Protestant churches. And I do disagree with Machen in making particular theories of Biblical inspiration or the atonement necessary for genuine Christianity. But I think a good deal of his account of early twentieth century theological liberalism is justified, and most basically I think his fundamental thesis is correct. There is an irreconcilable difference between Christianity as the announcement of the salvation the transcendent God entered into human history to win for us and Christianity as the call to shape one’s life according to the sort of God-consciousness exemplarily but not uniquely present in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

The sort of liberalism and doctrinal indifferentism that Machen criticized in the 1920s still exists in corners of North American mainline Protestantism today. You still find people trotting out juxtapositions between ‘the religion about Jesus’ and ‘the religion of Jesus’, arguing that we need to abandon the dogmatic faith of the creeds for a nondogmatic religion of love for all. And the doctrinal controversies of the first half of the twentieth century and the fights about gender and sexuality of the second half have left us with a legacy of widespread doctrinal indifferentism, a sense that the Christian virtue of toleration means accepting incompatible accounts of what it means to be a Christian as equally valid. I often hear ministers say things like “well I personally believe in the resurrection but it’s fine with me if some of my colleagues don’t.” I’ve been accused of “narrowness” for preaching that the bodily resurrection of Jesus really happened (on Easter, natch) rather than providing a sermon equally acceptable to those who believed or disbelieved in such an event. I think that Machen’s argument that the church is a community brought together around an announcement of good news, and if there isn’t a shared message there cannot be a shared church, is still helpful in such a context.

But I’m not sure that 1920s-style theological liberalism is the main theological challenge confronting mainline Protestantism, or at least mainline Anglicanism, in the US or Canada today. My sense is that it’s less common to find leaders explicitly denying core doctrines of the faith than it was a few decades ago. I do not think someone like John Shelby Spong or even James Pike would be able to be elected to the episcopate in the Episcopal Church today. But I share the sense that Pryor articulated in his piece discussed above, that there is something very much awry with our church’s ability to articulate itself theologically. I’ve written previously also about our failures at discipleship and Christian formation. It’s why I think something like rechristianization is called for. But it’s something I’ve struggled somewhat to find language for, until I happened to reread Paul Zahl’s The Protestant Face of Anglicanism, a historical sketch of Protestant Anglicanism and call for its renewal in the Episcopal Church.

In the introduction, Zahl argues that Anglicanism has long been marked by a tension between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ elements, and that one very popular response to this tension has been to argue that Anglicanism is in fact a “balance,” a “synthesis”, a “tertium quid” or “third way” combining Protestant and Catholic ways of being Anglican — the “via media.” While this third-way approach was a good faith attempt address this real historical tension in Anglicanism by claiming the best of both Protestant and Catholic ways of being Christian, Zahl thinks it had serious unforeseen consequences. He’s worth quoting at length:

But there is an important flaw in this way of viewing Anglicanism as the union of opposites resulting in a third, more valid way. It tends to elevate aspects of Christianity that are of secondary importance in responding to the problem of being human. The aspects of Christianity that are of primary importance in addressing the problem of being human are themes such as “redemption and release” (Hymn 539, The Hymnal 1982), atonement and grace, freedom versus bondage, and the question, Who is Jesus Christ? On the view of Anglicanism as a third way of seeing Christianity, these core themes subside to a lesser position of interest. The passion and energy, according to the “third-way” school of thought, relate to Anglican “distinctives” concerning worship and liturgy; so-called sacred time, sacred space, and sacred rhythm; “decency” and “orderliness”; and complicated arguments concerning the sources of religious authority. The Anglican “distinctives” of the third way prove to be tepid and fairly low-octane appeals on the relative scale of response to the furious calls from the world for an antidote to its pain. The third way sells short what we have to offer.

I felt a sudden shock of recognition when I read these lines. It’s worth paying attention to what exactly he is saying. His argument is that Protestantism and Catholicism both have different and ultimately antithetical — but clear and substantive — answers to “the problem of being human,” questions of life and salvation and how to live in the world. And so, for that matter, do unembarrassedly Protestant and Catholic Anglicans. The problem, Zahl thinks, is that the attempt to forge an Anglican identity as a ‘third way’ means that you have to avoid these core questions and instead made a very big deal out of secondary matters — perhaps above all, matters related to liturgy. And so Anglicanism no longer becomes an answer to the central questions of human existence but a style of liturgy, an attitude of open toleration and reasonableness, a way of engaging with contemporary social and political issues.

This picture of Anglican failure to “make the main thing the main thing” resonated immediately with me. And the account of the roots of this theological flabbiness in our beloved via media self-understanding seems plausible. Now, a potential problem with its explanatory power is that other mainline denominations seem to have a similar problem without a similar history of attempted Catholic-Protestant synthesis. Certainly this sort of ‘via media’ attempt isn’t the only way to end up unable to talk about the main questions of human existence in an ecclesial setting. But I think it is true that Anglicans seem to invest a particularly extraordinary amount of “passion and energy,” as Zahl puts it, about questions of, say, clerical dress or liturgical form. The person who has incredibly strong opinions about liturgy and gets incredibly upset about deviations from the rubrics but doesn’t believe any of it is, alas, a stereotype for a reason.

Still, even if you don’t buy Zahl’s argument about via media Anglicanism leading to an obsessive focus on secondary matters, I do think his diagnosis of the current theological malaise in our church is exactly right. I’ll quote him again: “It tends to elevate aspects of Christianity that are of secondary importance in responding to the problem of being human.” Perhaps our commitment to 1920s-style liberal tolerance makes us nervous about preaching distinctly Christian doctrine rather than general moral principles and messages of spiritual uplift which couldn’t be offensive to anyone. Perhaps — more defensibly — our commitment to a broad, charitable Christianity makes us nervous about preaching definitively on questions where Christians of sincere, credal faith disagree. Perhaps the affluence and secularity of our contexts somehow dulls our sense of urgency about questions of life and death, sin and salvation, guilt and forgiveness, freedom and bondage. But however it is that we get there, this, I think, is our church’s great sin: not that we explicitly deny the Gospel (push comes to shove, we generally affirm it), but that we don’t really talk about it or act like it changes everything.

And so, this is why rechristianization is necessary: a reorienting of our preaching, teaching, spiritual lives, pastoral action, and work for service and justice in the world around precisely the great truths of incarnation and redemption that (as Machen argued) are the core message upon which the church is founded.

Now, reconfessionalization as I talk about it — a return to Anglican history and especially the Anglican formularies to norm Anglican theology, worship, preaching, and so on — matters most because it is precisely a way to rechristianize. As I’ve tried to make clear, all other advantages of reconfessionalization (the beauty of our tradition, greater faithfulness to and honesty about our Anglican past, it’s fun to nerd out about old things, and so on) come a distant second to the way that the formularies point us to the grace of the living God shown to us in Christ Jesus. If the formularies didn’t do that, they should be immediately discarded, whatever their other advantages. But, as I said in my conversation with David Johnston, I think they do point us to a gracious God. And this is why the project of reconfessionalization is valuable.

And as such, formularies-centric reconfessionalization can and should exist in a friendly relationship with other projects of rechristianization. One example of this, I think, is the sort of “confessional Anglicanism” that Pryor calls for: it is a call for an unembarrassedly theological Anglican identity rooted in shared confession, but not necessarily (as I read him) the confession articulated in the sixteenth century. And fair enough! As the framers of the Barmen and Belhar confessions did, we might well think that the particular challenges of the moment lead to new status confessionis issues that need a Christian response; the Reformed tradition has never been particularly bothered by a proliferation of confessional statements held by various churches. Nor, frankly, does such reconfessionalization even need to exist primarily in a relationship of antagonism to Anglo-Catholic attempts at rechristianization, precisely because it is the rechristianization that really matters.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am a Protestant because I think Protestantism is true. I don’t mean to suggest that the disagreements between me and, say, a committed Anglo-Catholic are all just matters of taste or preference. I think that we Anglicans should all embrace something more-or-less like the Articles because I think they’re correct and I think that, say, where Trent disagrees with them, Trent is wrong. I’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming piece for Earth & Altar, so keep your eyes peeled! But (and here I’m following Zahl’s insight) both an unabashedly Catholic Anglicanism and a Protestant one are actually concerned centrally with God, the human predicament, incarnation, redemption, salvation. Even if we have somewhat different answers, we’re at least asking the same questions — questions that much of our church seems to have lost the ability to even ask. And, of course, I do think there has been genuine theological rapprochement since the sixteenth century, thank God.

So, I hope that my writing here furthers the project of reconfessionalization (as I have defined it) specifically. I make no bones about that. But I care about that project ultimately because I care about rechristianization, because I am excited about a church on fire for Jesus, committed to keeping the main thing the main thing and proclaiming the good news of salvation to a needy world.