Yes, the Articles of Religion functioned as a confession

On getting the Anglican past right

On the website of the Anglican Church of Canada, under the “Our beliefs” heading, there are sections devoted to various standards of Anglican doctrine: the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Solemn Declaration of 1893, the Lambeth Quadrilateral, the 39 Articles of Religion, and the ACC’s Mission Statement. Each of these (except the mission statement) has an introduction of a few sentences that describes the history of that doctrinal text and its use. But there’s something a bit odd about the introduction to the 39 Articles:

As you can see, the introduction to the Articles takes rather more pains to clarify what the Articles are not than to explain what they are. It makes a few claims abut them: that the Articles were incorporated into the 1604 English Book of Common Prayer and, much later, the 1962 Canadian BCP and that they have never been adopted as a confessional statement by any province of the Anglican Communion but “serve as a window onto [sic] the theological concerns of the reformed English church.”

It’s true enough that the Articles can be found in the Canadian 1962 BCP, but the rest of these statements are at best highly tendentious and at worst simply false. First of all, yes, the Articles were often printed as part of the prayer book - including in the 1604 printing - but they (much like the ordinal) were not strictly incorporated into it. More to the point, their authority did not rest on being published with the prayer book.

Rather, contra the statement that the Articles of Religion “have never been officially adopted as a formal confession of faith in any province of the Anglican Communion,” the Articles’ authority rested precisely in their legal status as the Church of England’s statement of faith. The Articles were passed by the clergy convention of the Church of England in 1563 and then published with slight revisions in 1571, when they were also officially adopted by Parliament. The 1571 royal injunctions required clerical subscription to the Articles, a requirement reiterated by the 1604 canons. In fact, per these canons, a minister upon ordination had to subscribe ex animo (from the soul, ie, sincerely) “That he alloweth the Book of Articles of Religion agreed upon by the Archbishops, and Bishops of both Provinces, and the whole Clergy in the Convocation holden at London, in the Year of our Lord God, One thousand five hundred sixty and two: and that he acknowledgeth all and every the Articles therein contained, being in number Nine and thirty, besides the Ratification, to be agreeable to the Word of God.” Furthermore, the canons declared that anyone - clergy or lay - who impugned the Articles, saying that they “are in any part Superstitious or Erroneous, or such as he may not with a good Conscience subscribe unto,” was to be excommunicated.

Needless to say, this all sounds rather like a confession; the Articles norm the preaching and teaching of the church and so clerical subscription is required; dissent from them is liable to punishment. I could go on. Ministers would also have to publicly read the Articles upon institution into a new living (ie, upon beginning a new position) and declare their assent to them. Subscription was required for admission to Oxford and Cambridge. Even upon the (much) later 1689 Act of Toleration, dissenting Protestant ministers were still required to subscribe by oath to most of the Articles. Small wonder, then, that King Charles I would in a 1628 royal declaration refer to the Articles as “the true doctrine of the Church of England,” or that churchmen like Thomas Rogers, John Prideaux, and Samuel Ward would refer to them as the English confession of faith.¹

It is true, of course, that how to construe the Articles was nearly always contested in the history of the English church. Before the English Civil War, there were those - the ‘Puritan’ party, broadly - who argued that the 1595 Lambeth Articles or the decrees of the Council of Dort (which had an English delegation) should supplement the Articles as doctrinal standards. Others - the ‘Laudians’ - argued first the Articles should stand alone as a doctrinal standard, without Lambeth or Dort as supplements, and later that the Articles needed to be read alongside and even interpreted by the text of the Book of Common Prayer. But this does not detract from the Articles’ confessional status. Quite the opposite: it confirms it! If indeed the Articles were seen as articulating the boundaries of allowable doctrine in the Church of England, you’d expect to see arguments about what exactly they meant or how they should be read. And so there were.

And this concern with the Articles did not end at the Restoration. Ministers who were frustrated by the strictures of the Articles demanded relief from subscription in the Feathers Tavern petition of 1772 - a proof, if a negative one, of their continued relevance. More positively, a significant commentary tradition on the Articles emerged, with various parties in the church offering their own account of how the Articles should be read. This tradition, in fact, was influential into the twentieth century - and new commentaries are being written even today! That some of these commentaries made some somewhat historically dubious arguments - ie, one finds arguments that the Articles were opposed to late Calvinist orthodoxy because they were framed at a time prior to its emergence - is beside the point. The fact that various church parties sought to articulate their views as interpretations of the Articles of Religion (whether they always fit comfortably or no) is a clear sign of their importance. Consider that well into the nineteenth century, even John Henry Newman felt the need to attempt to justify his beliefs as in accordance with the Articles in his notorious Tract 90! The story of the gradual loosening of subscription formulae in the Church of England is beyond the scope of this little piece, but the point is that the Articles clearly functioned as a confession within the English Church and in fact remain, even today, the canonical doctrinal standard.

And not only in England. Clergy of the Church of England in Canada, which would come to be called the Anglican Church of Canada, continued to subscribe to the Articles of Religion upon ordination well into the 1960s. In fact, the 1893 Solemn Declaration, the foundational document of the Anglican Church of Canada which remains part of our constitution, declares the following (formatting added):

And we are determined by the help of God to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ as the Lord hath commanded in his Holy Word, and as the Church of England hath received and set forth the same in ‘The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, according to the use of the Church of England; together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, pointed as they are to be sung or said in Churches; and the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons’; and in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion; and to transmit the same unimpaired to our posterity.

That is to say, the Articles of Religion functioned as a confession of faith, as part of a family of texts setting forth “the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ” as understood by the church, in the very Anglican Church of Canada itself! And, given the current constitutional status of Solemn Declaration, arguably still de jure does even today!

Unfortunately, this is quite a common mistake. Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher once said, “We have no doctrine of our own. We only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church, enshrined in the Catholic Creeds, and those creeds we hold without addition or diminution.” Scholars committed to readings like his of Anglicanism as ‘mere Christianity’ (or, for that matter, of Anglicanism as a via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, or as the third branch of the apostolic church) have consistently diminished the long-lasting importance of the Articles as confession in Anglican history. They have been helped here by an understanding of confessionalism that best matches free-church reformed traditions and does not reflect well, say, German and Scandinavian Protestantism (both Lutheran and Reformed). But in the end, the claim simply cannot be squared with the historical record.

Of course, I cannot pretend to be a neutral observer calling balls and strikes here. As someone committed to a vision of Anglicanism as an irenic Protestant tradition who finds that irenic Protestantism well-expressed in the Articles, I am obviously interested in drawing attention to evidence of their significance. But you do not have to have the same commitment to the Articles that I do to see the problems in statements like the one on the ACC website. In fact, it can be perfectly coherent to say “yes, the Articles once functioned as a confession in Anglicanism, and it is a good thing that they mostly don’t anymore.” But what is not helpful is accounts of Anglican history that deny or elide inconvenient facts about that history.

And here, I think, there is some connection to a broader problem in mainline Anglicanism, a problem for both fans of the Articles and those quite happy that they have been largely eclipsed. For here we find a quasi-official statement of the church - a statement which is much more accessible than our constitutional documents - contradicting those theoretically authoritative documents! We have a public, relatively transparent process involving clergy and laity for establishing the doctrine of our church, and this flies utterly in the face of it. For ultimately, what this shows is that to remove the authority of the Articles in the ACC, one needn’t amend or remove the Solemn Declaration or pass a constitutional amendment declaring that its inclusion is merely for historical interest. Instead, the ACC website itself asserts the Articles’ unimportance - never mind what our actual constitutional documents say!

To give another example, the Episcopal Church’s website provides a glossary of terms drawn from Armentrout and Slocum’s An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church. In one of the entries, it defines Biblical infallibility as the idea that “the Bible is completely infallible in what it teaches about God and God's will for human salvation, but not necessarily in all its historical or scientific statement,” and then asserts that Biblical infallibility is “not accepted by the Episcopal Church.” But the Episcopal Church has never rejected this view! In fact, at ordination, I swore an oath that I believed the Bible to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation, a position certainly consonant with, and arguably requiring, Biblical infallibility in the sense defined above. Yet the average person looking for what the Episcopal Church believes about the Bible is much more likely, I suspect, to look at the TEC website than consult our ordinal. And one can hardly blame them for this! It’s a problem that the website does not actually reflect the doctrinal position of our church.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that whoever was charged with putting together the 39 Articles of Religion page on the ACC website was consciously involved in a plot to suppress the importance of the Articles. But I do think that the website, as it currently exists, is in error. And, knowingly or unknowingly, it participates in - and lends official standing to - a longer tradition of sweeping the place of the Articles in Anglican history under the rug, a tradition which is strongly operative in the Anglican Church of Canada today.² In so doing, it supports an unhealthy mainline Anglican culture in which we ‘all know’ that our authoritative documents aren’t actually authoritative. Even if you aren’t a particular fan of the Articles, this should worry you. It is a violation of our polity for sweeping doctrinal statements to be made without the consensus of General Synod or General Convention. And people don’t just like to assert that ‘we all know’ that xyz thing is no longer authoritative in reference to the Articles. People make the same claims about the Creeds.

1. I am indebted to Stephen Hampton’s chapter “Confessional Identity” in The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Vol 1. for these references.

2. A friend of mine once asked a senior cleric in the Anglican Church of Canada about the current legal status of the Articles in the ACC. The response was “what, do you think we should read the Homilies again?” Note that this response is something of a non sequitur; it doesn’t actually address the question of the current canonical status of the Solemn Declaration. It does, however, denigrate the Articles and those who like them as impossibly old-fashioned, and indicates - with characteristic mainline Anglican superiority - that we all know that the Articles aren’t taken seriously anymore.