Month: June 2019

by the Rev. K. Nicholas Forti

The second article addresses the Incarnation of God the Son—the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. In this way, it follows doctrinally from the first article, which dealt with the nature of the one God, the divine attributes and perfections, as well as the tri-unity of the hypostases or persons—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Just as the first article recapitulated the truths of the Nicene Creed (BCP 326-328) and the Apostles’ Creed (BCP 53 & 96), as well as the Athanasian Creed (BCP 864-865), the second article summarizes and echoes the Chalcedonian Definition (BCP 864).

Looking back over nearly five hundred years, this way of beginning the Confessional Statement of Anglicanism may not seem particularly noteworthy to us. At the time, however, it was deliberate and distinctive. This can be seen by a comparison of the Articles with the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) and the Westminster Confession (1646). Both of these prominent Reformed confessions begin with the doctrine of Scripture as the means by which knowledge of saving faith can be obtained. These confessions—and the Reformed tradition—anticipated the modern turn to the subject and epistemology because their starting point includes as implicature the human subject as knower and how she knows of God—(see Calvin’s Institutes).

It should come as no surprise that the Reformed tradition was already making the move to establish as foundational the human subject as knower even before the ascendancy of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies. The groundwork of those philosophies was laid by the humanism of the Renaissance. The Reformed tradition largely emerged out of that very same humanism and savored more fully of it than either Lutheranism or Anglicanism did. Recall that the founder of the Reformed tradition, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) claimed to have hit upon the primary insights of the Reformation independently of Martin Luther (1483-1546). This bold claim has been deemed incredible by some historians; however, it seems less outrageous when we remember that both Zwingli and Luther were deeply influenced by the humanism of their day and in similar contexts. Still, the debates that raged between Zwingli and Luther suggest that they didn’t entirely agree on what those primary insights of the Reformation were—or, at least, how they were to be understood.

The crucial divide between the two reformers was over the presence of Christ in the Eucharist—a debate which came to a head at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529. Fifteen articles had been drawn up to establish the cooperation of the two primary leaders of the Reformation and the unity of the Reformation as a whole. Luther and Zwingli were able to agree on all but one of those articles, the one concerning the Eucharist. However, it’s instructive to note that there were, among the Marburg Articles, no statements on Holy Scripture (except one against the schwärmer, noting that the Holy Ghost does not speak directly to the hearts and minds of individuals apart from Scripture). It’s this lacuna that helps us understand why the agreement broke down on the fifteenth of the Marburg Articles.

The debate between Luther and Zwingli over the Eucharist was a consequence of their different understandings of the Reformation’s scripture principle, or sola scriptura. For Luther, Scripture is determinative for the Christian Faith because it contains God’s Law and Gospel, the latter word being a true promise by which Christ gives us himself, he who is the object of the faith that justifies. Therefore, a sacrament is the joining together of the word of the Gospel with a creaturely and material thing, in the manner of Christ’s own hypostatic union. On the other hand, Zwingli’s commitment to the humanist call for ad fontes—going back to the original sources or texts rather than relying on the long stream of tradition to bear the meaning of those texts to the present—seems to have been more determinative for his understanding of sola scriptura. Hence, for Zwingli, the Church is to administer the sacrament because Scripture records that the Lord commanded this to be done in remembrance of him and his passion, and Christ is spiritually present to those who thus remember him by faithfully doing as he commands. Put more simply, Scripture is of utmost importance for Luther because Christ gives himself to us through its word of Gospel; however, Scripture is of utmost importance for Zwingli because by our exhaustive study of it, we may come to know who God is, what He has done for us in Christ, and what He requires of us.

Luther himself had been more susceptible to this humanist influence in his younger days, but he pulled back from this way of thinking as his theology matured. In a sense, Luther’s Christological Law-Gospel hermeneutic, which he found in Scripture and ancient tradition, saved him from the perspective that takes Scripture as the highest and most determinative principle for the Church and theology apart from any explicit hermeneutic for interpretation. The almost inevitable end of that trajectory is the exaltation of the individual reader and expositor of Scripture, himself as the hermeneutic key. Ultimately, this is the turn away from the object of Scripture and Faith—namely, Christ—and the turn toward the subject and their own subjective reading of Scripture. When this happens, Pandora’s Box has been opened and all manner of demonic attacks on true doctrine are made possible.

The individual reader and expositor of scripture, unmoored from tradition and its correlative Trinitarian-Christological hermeneutic, may realize that theological terms like “trinity” and “incarnation” cannot be found within the biblical text. And if these doctrinal words appear to be missing from Scripture, all the more undiscoverable is the sophisticated and philosophically nuanced language of the creeds and councils that defined these doctrines (or, at least, defined their limits). Hypothetically, those doctrines might then come under the critique and judgment of the individual expositor’s interpretation of the “plain sense” of scripture. And, actually, that’s just what happened.

For example, the humanist physician and enthusiastic proponent of the Reformation, Michael Servetus (1511-1553) found Nicene Trinitarianism to be unbiblical since he interpreted scripture to teach a kind of modalist unitarianism, albeit with his own idiosyncratic views of Christology and Pneumatology. Servetus wrote that the plain sense of Scripture, according to his reading, nowhere supported or bore witness to the Nicene teaching that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three hypostases or persons of the one God, each person being fully God. Since Scripture did not support it and reason could not abide it, Servetus concluded, Nicene Trinitarianism simply was not the true gospel and doctrine of Christ.

Servetus wasn’t the only theological thinker in the Reformation to turn their reading of Scripture against the doctrines of orthodox Christian Faith, reviving ancient heresies. During the aforementioned Marburg Colloquy, Luther expressed concern over a report he had received that some of the Reformers in Strasbourg were teaching Arianism. This was the very teaching that had been debated and rejected as heresy at the councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). Indeed, the Nicene Creed that emerged from those two councils bears language meant to counter an Arian interpretation of the person of Jesus Christ and his relation as God the Son to God the Father. Arius taught that the Son was a kind of lesser god, not one with the Father in Being but of a different substance from the Father and that “there was when the Son was not.” The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, affirms that the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being (homoousios) with the Father” (BCP 326).  

Luther and the other magisterial Reformers, like Zwingli, were committed to this creed and Nicene Trinitarianism. However, Luther may have brought up the reports of the Arian revival to imply that the approach to Sacraments and Scripture characteristic of Zwingli and his Reformed companions at the colloquy—Johannes Oecolampadius (1482-1531) and Martin Bucer (1491-1551)—were simply an earlier stop along the way to such heresy. In his Brief Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament (1544), Luther explicitly suggested that Zwingli’s rejection of the real, corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist (because a human body can only be in one place) was bound to lead to an eschewal of the Chalcedonian Definition of Christ’s full humanity and full divinity united inseparably in his person. This, in turn, led Luther to identify Zwingli with the Nestorian heresy.

A Nicene Trinitarian, Nestorius (c.386-450) had turned his theological mind to understanding the Incarnation. He had concluded that when the Virgin Mary conceived by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, God the Son united himself to that human person at the moment of conception. In this way, Nestorius clearly distinguished between the human person named Jesus and the eternal Word that is the second person of the Trinity. Hence, Nestorius rejected the popular theological appellation for the Virgin Mary, Theotokos (God-bearer) or Mater Dei (Mother of God), claiming that she could only properly be called Christokos or Mater Christi. Nestorius’ teaching was rejected at the councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), which favored the account of the Incarnation argued by Cyril of Alexandria (c.376-444).

According to Cyril, God the Son in his full divine nature does not attach himself to a human person but takes on the fullness of human nature, thereby becoming incarnate as a person who is fully human and fully divine. In other words, the person of Jesus just is God the Son, in his full divinity, inextricably joined to creaturely human nature. So, there is nothing about the person of Jesus—his life and work, his words and deeds—where we can say, ‘here he is simply human,’ and ‘there he is fully divine.’ Even those aspects of his person that are proper to his human nature, such as change and suffering, cannot be isolated from his divine nature since his divine nature fully inheres within his person; therefore, everything that is true of Jesus according to either of his natures is true of and in his one person, which unites the natures—a communicatio idiomatum.

Of course, even Cyril’s theology of the Incarnation could be taken too far. Following an encyclical from the Bishop of Rome known as the Tome of Leo, the Council of Chalcedon insisted that, though the two natures are inseparably united in the person of Christ, those natures remain distinct. This was a rejection of a particular reading of Cyril by an abbot and priest named Eutyches (c.380-c.456) who held that when the two natures were united in the person of Christ, they combined to create a single nature (monophysite) as a kind of tertium quid.

For Luther, the contemporary Eutyches was the Teutonic Knight turned Reformer, Kaspar Schwenckfeld (1489-1561). In fact, Schwenckfeld was more like a mirror image of Eutyches. According to Eutyches the divine nature had to be combined with the human nature beyond differentiation in Christ—dissolved into the human nature of Christ—if humanity was to be redeemed. However, for Schwenckfeld, the human nature was subsumed into the divine nature in Christ; his human nature was divinized. Moreover, Christ’s body was not earthly like ours but heavenly. These views were picked up by the Radical Reformer, Melchior Hoffman (c.1495-1543) who also held that Christ’s body was celestial, and therefore, he didn’t receive his flesh or human nature from his mother Mary.

Hoffman’s views may have struck a chord with Lollards in England. It was certainly found on the lips of one Joan Bocher of Kent, who suffered execution in 1550 for her conviction. Many of these ideas found there way into England by way of the Stranger Church established during the reign of Edward VI for Protestant refugees escaping persecution on the continent. For example, George van Parris, a member of the Stranger Church, was accused and convicted of Arianism, and like Joan Bocher, suffered for his conviction in 1551. Meanwhile, the Reformed views of Zwingli, Bucer, Peter Vermigli (1499-1562), and John Calvin (1509-1564) were finding purchase in the hearts and minds of the English Reformers. Archbishop Cranmer (1489-1556), for example, abandoned his Catholic and Lutheran commitment to Christ’s corporeal presence in the Eucharist in favor of a Reformed view, which—as we’ve mentioned—Luther had denounced as crypto-Nestorian.

Despite this move from the Lutheran to the Reformed wing of the Reformation, Cranmer nevertheless drafted the Forty-two Articles of Religion (1553), from which our Thirty-nine Articles are derived, on the model of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530). This means that the Articles do not begin (as later Reformed confessions do) with an epistemological claim and the human subject as knower but with the ontological confession of the Triune God as source and sustainer of all created Being. And, insofar as the second article follows from the first and incorporates the key elements of the Chalcedonian Definition, the Articles make of equal importance to the orthodox doctrine of God an orthodox Christology. So, before anything true can be said of the human subject as knower and revelation, first must be confessed that (contra Arianism) Christ is the incarnation of God the Son, who is “of one substance with the Father,” and that (contra Nestorius and Eutyches) in his incarnate person, the divine nature of the Son and human nature are not merged but “joined together . . . never to be divided” in a hypostatic union, whereby he has a true human body “of the blessed Virgin, of her substance” (contra Schwenckfeld and Hoffman), and that this very same person, Jesus Christ lived, died, and was raised for us and for our salvation.

Finally, the content and placement of the second article suggest that we are to read and understand the following articles in light of it. So, for example, Holy Scripture (dealt with in Article VI) “containeth all things necessary to salvation” because it is the means by which, through the Gospel, Christ gives himself to us as grace to be received with faith (see also Article XVIII). The Creeds (Article VIII) “ought thoroughly to be received and believed” because they help us to read Scripture truly and thereby receive Christ who is giving himself to us in the Gospel. The Sacraments (Article XXV), because they combine with a material thing the Gospel-word by which Christ gives himself to us, are “not only badges or tokens . . . but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace . . . .” And so on. In this way, the Thirty-nine Articles save Anglicanism from the modern epistemological obsession with its attendant sophistry and solipsism. Following Luther, and through him the more ancient Catholic Faith, the Articles ground Anglicanism in Nicene Theology and Chalcedonian Christology, making the Incarnation of the Word of God determinative for all else that may and must be confessed.                 

The Rev’d K. Nicholas Forti is rector of the Fork Church of St Martin’s Parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. He received his MDiv from Virginia Theological Seminary and his STM from the School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South. He’s the Associate Ecumenical Officer of the Diocese of Virginia and the author of the chapter, “Persons and Narratives: A Physicalist Account of the Soul” in the book, The Resounding Soul: On the Metaphysics and Vivacity of the Human Person. 

“The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins of men.”

by Brendan Case

The first of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) summarized the church’s historic affirmation that there is one God, the creator of all that is not he, who nonetheless subsists eternally in three “persons,” the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The second article focuses particular attention on the divinity and assumed humanity of that Son. This article, like the Lutheran Confessions which were its parents (see below), summarizes and endorses central teachings from the Councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451), thus demonstrating its drafters’ commitment to catholicity and tradition, while also obliquely criticizing some Anabaptists’ denials of the Trinity and the Incarnation, as well as the Roman Catholic account of the Mass as a “sacrifice.”

An overview of the Articles’ background and provenance can be found elsewhere in this series, but it’s important for our purposes to keep in view that the second of the Thirty-Nine Articles, like many of the others, is largely drawn from prior Lutheran Confessions, notably the Augsburg (or Augustana, 1530), and the Württemberg (1552).These and other texts from the Continental Reformation exercised a profound influence in England, particularly on Cranmer, the principal author of both the draft Thirteen Articles (1538?), and the Edwardian Forty-Two Articles (1552), which were finally revised by Matthew Parker and others into the Thirty-Nine Articles which have largely endured to the present. (For the above and more, cf. Charles Hardwick, History of the Articles of Religion (1851), p. 21-138.)

Article II opens with a summary of the Son’s divinity and Incarnation (“the Son…her substance”), taken largely taken from the third article of the Augustana, with a substantial insertion from the second article of the Württemberg Confession (“we believe and confess the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, eternally begotten from his Father, true and eternal God, consubstantial with his Father”). Nonetheless, it also neatly summarizes the second article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed regarding Christ’s eternal deity and Incarnation in time.

The Council of Constantinople (381) settled a decades’-long theological struggle sparked in Alexandria in 321, when a priest named Arius (250-336) took a long tradition of subordinating the Son to the Father to new extremes, with his teaching that “there was a time when [the Son] was not.” The emperor Constantine himself ultimately intervened in the ensuing debate, calling a council at Nicaea (325) that excommunicated Arius, anathematizing anyone who denied the Son’s eternal generation, and maintaining that Father and Son were “of the same nature,” “homoöusios” in Greek, quickly rendered into Latin as “consubstantialis,” which reappears in our Article.

In the near term, Nicaea settled little, however, as many balked at the extra-biblical provenance and apparently modalist implications of “homoöusios.” Opposition to Nicaea was fractured and fractious: some proposed to describe the Son as only “of a similar nature” (homoiousios) to the Father; some to dispense with “substance” talk altogether, in favor of simply affirming that the Son is “like” the Father (the “Homoians”); some to describe the Son as “of a different substance” (heteroöusios) than the Father.

Defenders of Nicaea – in the early stages, particularly Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 296-373), and then later the Cappadocian trio of Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa – insisted upon the homoöusion as the best gloss for passages such as John 1:1-3 (alluded to in the opening of Article II), in which it is the Word, who was “with God” and who “was God,” through whom all things were made (cf. also 1 Cor. 8:6, Heb. 1:2). After a sequence of emperors who favored one or another of the anti-Nicene positions, the pro-Nicene faction found decisive support from the newly-appointed Theodosius (347-395), who convened a second council at Constantinople (381), presided over by Nazianzen, which ratified and expanded the Trinitarian theology of Nicaea.

After the fifth century, increasingly strict ecclesiastical and legal sanctions against heresy left little room for continuing public debate over the doctrine of the Trinity. That changed with the Reformation, however, as the shifting and fracturing landscape of church and state surfaced dissent, not only regarding papal authority or the nature of the sacraments, but also, if much more marginally, regarding the Trinity and the Incarnation itself.

This dissent sprung up from the earliest days of the Reformation among the diverse range of groups lumped together as “Anabaptists.” There were those who denied the Trinity, such as Michael Servetus (1509-1553), famously burned for heresy in Calvin’s Geneva, or the slightly later Faustus Socinus (1539-1604). And there were others who revived the ancient “Docetism” of Valentinus (ca. 100-160), which denied that the Son was actually conceived by Mary. These included the Kentish Joan of Bocher, who, according to Hugh Latimer, said that “our Saviour was not very Man, and had not received flesh of His mother Mary…Her opinion was this. The Son of God, said she, penetrated through her, as through a glass, taking no substance of her” (quoted in Boultbee, A Commentary on the Articles of Religion, 15-16). The revival of this anti-Incarnational teaching doubtless accounts for the pointed insistence in Article II on Christ’s conception, not only (as in the Augustana) “in the womb of the Virgin Mary,” but indeed “from her substance.”

Having affirmed the fact of the Incarnation, Article II proceeds to explore its structure (“so that…very man”), as a union of the divine and a human nature in the single person of the Son. Though still following the Augustana closely, the Article also echoes the “Definition” of the Council of Chalcedon (451), at the close of “the Christological Controversy,” which was in fact a further stage in the debate launched by Arius about whether and how the transcendent God might appear, not merely among, but even as one of his creatures.

Where Arius had sought to protect God from contamination by the Incarnation by attributing it to an inferior deity, Nestorius (386-450), an enthusiastic Nicene Trinitarian, sought to relocate Arius’s barrier between God and humanity within the person of the God-man himself. The controversy began when Nestorius (386-450), newly-installed as archbishop of Constantinople, sought to reform his congregation’s liturgy, by expunging from it all reference to Mary as the “God-bearer” (Theotokos). It was at best nonsense, Nestorius thought, to attribute an action such as “being born” to the person of God the Son, who is immutable by nature. He preferred instead to reason backwards from the distinct classes of actions in Christ – his human acts of weakness and suffering, his divine acts of healing and forgiving and saving – to two distinct agents, each manifesting his distinct nature, albeit perfectly united in will.

Nestorius’s nemesis was Cyril (376-444), the irascible archbishop of Alexandria. From Cyril’s standpoint, Nestorius’s Christology was fundamentally idolatrous, since it teaches that the man we worship isn’t really God, but only united to God, greater in degree but not different in kind from the biblical prophets. Where Nestorius began his reflections from the properties of the two natures of Christ, Cyril (particularly in his masterwork, On the Unity of Christ) began from the sole protagonist of the Gospels, God the Son himself, who assumed a complete human nature as his “sacred instrument,” and so infused every aspect of human life with his deity. This coincidence of the two natures in the person of the Logos allowed a “communion of attributes” to open up between Jesus’ divinity and humanity, so that we can properly speak of his blood as saving us, and of God as crucified.

The Council of Ephesus (431) quickly condemned Nestorius and affirmed the Virgin’s title of “Theotokos.” (The location was chosen in part for its historic associations with Mary, who was believed to have lived there with the Apostle John to the end of her days.) In the wake of Cyril’s death in 444, however, fierce debate arose around how best to continue his legacy, with a vocal minority insisting upon a “single-nature” (monophysite) interpretation of Cyril’s thought, according to which the two natures remained only conceptually distinct after the Incarnation. Monophysitism was eventually condemned at the Council of Chalcedon (451), which taught that Christ’s two natures are united “without confusion,” but also (against Nestorius) “immutably, indivisibly, inseparably.”

It’s perhaps significant that Article II, following the Augustana, remarks only that Christ’s natures are “never to be divided,” without adding Chalcedon’s balancing comment on their equally remaining “unconfused.” The Reformation saw a sharp revival of the Christological controversy in an intra-Protestant dispute over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, which pitted Zwingli and then Calvin, who insisted that Christ’s bodily ascension to the Father’s “right hand” precluded his bodily presence in the Eucharistic elements, against Luther, who (notably in his Treatise on the Lord’s Supper) drew on the “communion of attributes” to insist that Jesus’ human nature possessed divine properties such as ubiquity. For Luther, Zwingli was Nestorius redivivus, separating what God had joined, while the Swiss regarded Luther as a new and cruder Monophysite, confusing the natures. The Augsburg Confession’s particular focus on the dangers of “separating” the natures seems to reflect Luther’s concerns in this Eucharistic debate.

The final clauses of the Article follow the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed’s itinerary through the Passion, affirming Christ’s crucifixion, death, and burial. It glosses these events in two ways, first noting that Christ came “to reconcile us to the Father,” perhaps alluding to 2 Cor. 5:18 (“God…through Christ reconciled us to himself”), and second, insisting that Christ was a “sacrifice” “not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins.” This expression is clarified by its reappearance in Article XXXI, which attacks the Roman Catholic belief in “sacrifices of Masses” as “blasphemous fables,” since “the Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual.”

The view implicitly criticized here seems to be one in which Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is regarded as atoning for “original sin,” while the separate “sacrifices of Masses” atone for “actual sins” committed by Christians after baptism. In support of the view that this was in fact the Roman Catholic understanding of the Mass, Leif Graine cites the Council of Trent’s teaching that “that sacrifice [sc. the Mass] truly is propitiatory” (Sess. 22, ch. 2, quoted in Graine, The Augsburg Confession: A Commentary, 52n5).

However, Graine doesn’t quote the next sentence but one from this canon: “For the victim is one and the same, the same now offering by the ministry of priests, who then offered Himself on the cross, the manner alone of offering being different. The fruits indeed of which oblation, of that bloody one to wit, are received most plentifully through this unbloody one; so far is this (latter) from derogating in any way from that (former oblation).” This canon (solemnized in 1563) admittedly postdates the Augustana, but it also clearly applies the standard scholastic understanding of the sacraments’ relation to Christ’s Passion to the Mass itself; as Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote, “the sacraments of the Church derive their power specially from Christ’s Passion, the virtue of which is in a manner united to us by our receiving the sacraments” (Summa Theologiae 3.62.5). It would go too far to say that there was nothing in 16^th-century Catholicism which merited the Augustana’s criticism; but it goes equally too far to say that Catholicism’s dogmatic understanding of the sacrifice of the Mass is well-represented by it.  

Brendan Case is a recent graduate of the Doctor of Theology program at Duke Divinity School, where he studied systematic and historical theology, with a particular focus on the high scholastics. He will begin work this fall as a postdoctoral Research Associate at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

by Wesley Hill

The Thirty-Nine Articles open with a vision of a God who is incomprehensibly other. In language borrowed from the Hebrew Bible (or, as Christians know it, the Old Testament), Article I first speaks of God as utterly unique: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4, RSV). Article I presupposes the Jewish conviction that the God who is revealed in the events of Abraham and his descendants’ election and redemption is fundamentally unlike the gods of other nations. The Gentiles may have their mute and dumb idols, but Israel’s God is alive — free to speak and surprise (Jeremiah 10:10; Wisdom 12:17; Sirach 18:1) — and, just so, the true God who exposes would-be rivals as ultimately shadowy nonbeings.

But when Article I says that God is singular, living, and true, it is not simply renouncing polytheism. More fundamentally, it is pointing to God’s incomparability, God’s transcendence. Nothing in the world of created goods is like God. God is sui generis: without peers or rivals. If God compares Godself to created realities — such as a rock (Psalm 18:2) or a shepherd (Psalm 80:1) — it is not because those terms tell us exactly what God is like, as though God could be apprehended by frail human language. God makes use of metaphor and analogy to communicate with us, but we must never think that because we know what a rock or a shepherd (or a father or a warrior or any of the other images God uses) is in our terms, that God is exactly the same. As theologian Katherine Sonderegger reminds us, “[T]here can be no affirmation of God that is not controlled by the radical negation of form, image, and likeness.” We can know God truly because of God’s self-communication, but we should never think that we thereby comprehend God fully or escape the need to qualify all our speech with “but also unlike….”

And that brings us to the Article’s next moment. After describing God as one, living, true, and everlasting, Article I says that God exists “without body, parts, or passions.” The Article is not shy about speaking positively of God’s eternity, power, wisdom, and goodness, but it is at the same time anxious to underscore how God exceeds any idea we have of what God’s power, wisdom, and goodness amount to. Upon hearing God described as a king or a provider, we may find ourselves picturing the mercurial and passionate rulers in our geopolitical scene, projecting traits from the creaturely realm onto God as if God were a king like the ones we know — only bigger and better. Well before Enlightenment thinkers taught us to be suspicious of such “onto-theology,” the “negative,” apophatic emphasis in the Christian tradition — represented here in Article I’s “without…” clause — was designed to safeguard the doctrine of God from the encroachment of idolatrous divine misattribution. Saying that God exists without a body, without composition, and as impervious to the whims of passion is to say that, when we characterize God as alive, eternal, powerful, wise, and good, we should always remember that God is so in a way fundamentally, ineffably different from us us. “[T]he Glory of Israel… is not a mortal” (1 Samuel 15:29, NRSV). We can and should say that God is all that God is revealed to be, but we should always be prepared to turn back on the language we use in prayer and theology and be aware of the ways it fails to package or control or exhaust the mystery of who God is.

Article I goes on to describe God’s relation to what is not God: God is “the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.” According to this affirmation, everything material — and every thing immaterial, which is to say, creatures that take up no space in our cosmos, like angels — owes its existence to God. God, in other words, is the reason anything exists at all. It’s important to linger on this point because it is today among the most misunderstood affirmations found in the Thirty-Nine Articles (and in Christian theology more generally). The Christian (and Jewish) doctrine of creation is not that God is to be found somewhere along the timeline of the universe’s unfolding, such as at the Big Bang and/or at the hinge points of, say, the emergence of new life forms or the appearance of human language. Rather, to call God “maker” is to invoke God as the underlying and intimate sustainer of the entire fabric of the universe(s). God is not a bigger, stronger version of other finite causes; God is whatever — or, better, Whomever — holds the entirety of life as we know it in being. So, contrary to the likes of Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson, it is no defeater for belief in the God to whom Article I refers if scientific observation needs no recourse to an unexplained intervention in order to account for the workings of nature. Christians can simply nod their heads in agreement whenever Dawkins and his tribe reject belief in an old man in the sky who occasionally intervenes in the world’s causal chains. We don’t believe in a creator like that either because we don’t think that really counts as “creation” to begin with. For God to be the “Maker and Preserver of all things” is a different thing entirely; God is the unseen One whose love and ongoing generosity are the reasons for there being a world at all.

With those affirmations in place, Article I begins to speak of God as triune. There is, it says, a “unity” in the Godhead. In the metaphysical language that the Church Fathers took over from Hellenistic philosophy and baptized, there is one divine “substance” or “essence” (ousia in Greek). While not explicitly found in Scripture, this language is meant both to translate for a non-Jewish audience as well as to safeguard the conviction that the apostles found in Israel’s Scriptures — namely, God’s oneness that we’ve been discussing above. Nonetheless, what the apostles witnessed in the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and through their experience of his Spirit on the day of Pentecost and beyond (Acts 2:1-4), forced them to understand God’s oneness differently than they had before.

Jesus had affirmed his own faith in the oneness and uniqueness of the God of Israel, in part by quoting the book of Deuteronomy’s “Hear, O Israel…” (Mark 12:29). Jesus embodied an unprecedented intimacy with God, preferring above all other designations the title “Father” for God. Certainly there was precedence for the use of this title in Israel’s Scriptures. The Jewish people understood themselves to be, collectively, God’s adopted child (Exodus 4:23), and Israel called upon God thus: “you, O Lord, are our father; our Redeemer from of old is your name” (Isaiah 63:16). But Jesus went further. Not only did he borrow one of his people’s favorite designations for God; he also claimed that his intimacy with the One he called Father far surpassed anything known before. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27). More succinctly: “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30).

To many of his first hearers and followers, this presented a seemingly insoluble dilemma. Either God had a Son, Jesus, who was as divine as God was, in which case Israel’s monotheism was fatally compromised, or else Jesus wasn’t equal to God, in which case his grandiose claims to be able to forgive sins and remake the world were nothing more than the pipe dream of an idealistic but ultimately ineffectual prophet. And the situation with Jesus’ “Spirit,” his unbodily personal power (as Dallas Willard nicely expresses it), was similar. The apostles throughout the New Testament seem to vacillate between saying the Spirit is different from God the Father and God’s Son Jesus and saying that the Spirit says and does things that only God can do (for instance, John 6:63: “The Spirit gives life” [NIV]).

The solution to this challenge that the church eventually found — a solution that took centuries of theological wrangling and writing to appear in the form that we now know as the Nicene (or Niceno-Constantinopolitan) Creed of 381 CE — was to say that, while truly human, Jesus was at the same time God; and that the Spirit, while distinct from the Father and the Son, was at the same time fully God — but that there remained only one God.

The church continued to feel the constraint of the Old Testament and to confess its basic affirmation: God is one. But God’s oneness was now seen to be irreducibly — and mysteriously — threefold. The sonship of Jesus, like human sonship, meant that God the Father gave the Son his being (“For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” [John 5:26]); but unlike the case with human fathers and sons, the divine Son’s relation to the Father did not have a temporal beginning point. There was, as the early church’s anti-Arian slogan goes, never a time when the Son was not. Thus the creed, on which Article I depends, says that the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made” (emphasis added). And the Spirit, likewise, depends on the Father and the Son for his life — the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” — in such a way that the Spirit thereby possesses identically the same divine essence as the Father and the Son: “With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified,” as the creed has it. And it is this set of convictions and claims that Article I aims to encapsulate.

It is worth asking, at this point, the question that every preacher asks when Trinity Sunday rolls around: So what? Or, with less bite: All this is well and good, but how does it intersect with lived Christian experience?

The doctrine of the Trinity, with which Article I closes, is meant, among other things, to offer assurance to wavering consciences. If we ever wonder whether the grace and new beginning we have experienced through Jesus’s love and the Spirit’s presence among us is merely the momentary kindness of an otherwise unpredictable God, Trinitarian theology says, “No, this is how God fundamentally is — all the way back into eternity, and all the way into the coming kingdom.”

The late Reformed theologian T. F. Torrance tells a story of when he worked as a chaplain during World War II. On a battlefield in Italy, a dying soldier grasped Torrance’s arm and said, “Padre, is God really like Jesus?” Torrance spent the rest of his theological career spelling out the answer he gave to the soldier that day: Yes.

God is not one thing in himself and another thing in Jesus Christ—what God is toward us in Jesus he is inherently and eternally in himself. This is the fiducial significance of the central clause in the Nicene Creed, that there is a oneness in Being and agency between Jesus Christ the incarnate Son and God the Father. What God is in eternity, Jesus Christ is in space and time, and what Jesus Christ is in space and time, God is in his eternity. There is an unbroken relation of Being and Action between the Son and the Father, and in Jesus Christ that relation has been embodied in our human existence once and for all. There is thus no God behind the back of Jesus Christ, but only this God whose face we see in the face of the Lord Jesus. There is no deus absconditus, no dark inscrutable God, no arbitrary Deity of whom we can know nothing but before whom we can only tremble as our guilty conscience paints harsh streaks upon his face. No, there are no dark spots in God of which we need to be afraid; there is nothing in God for which Jesus Christ does not go bail in virtue of the perfect oneness in being and nature between God and himself. There is only the one God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ in such a way that there is perfect consistency and fidelity between what he reveals of the Father and what the Father is in his unchangeable reality. The constancy of God in time and eternity has to do with the fact that God really is like Jesus, for there is no other God than he who became man in Jesus and he whom God affirms himself to be and always will be in Jesus.

(Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 243-244)

That is where the Thirty-Nine Articles begin: with a God whose infinite power, wisdom, and goodness are turned toward us in love.

Wesley Hill is associate professor of New Testament at Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Paul and the Trinity (Eerdmans, 2015).His book on the Lord’s Prayer is forthcoming in 2019.

by the Rev. Dr. Daniel W. McClain

1. There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Perhaps you’ve heard that old rectors’ gag: “It’s the curate’s/associate’s/seminarian’s job to preach Trinity Sunday.” As a joke, I suppose it seems harmless. Yet, I wonder if it reveals more than we’d like to admit about the contemporary Anglican disposition toward Trinitarian theological thinking. Sure, many of us (Anglican clergy) can rattle off dusty bits of theological trivia from seminary. But, take for instance, a common revision to the opening acclamation of our Eucharist—we’re tongue-tied when it comes to explaining why the opening acclamation in the liturgy drops the names “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” for “Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer.” And, while we’re fluent in respecting “the dignity of every human being,” we’re unclear about why we recite the Apostle’s Creed as the first part of our baptismal covenant. It’s not that we intentionally are trying to be modalists. It’s just that for most clergy and laity, certain political pressures make the “Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer” revision a quick and easy solution to an apparent problem. Indeed, most Episcopalians are probably just as happy to accept what seems to be a rather handy description of God via God’s activities, regardless of the fact that it does so at the expense of the three triune persons. It saves face for those who either dislike theological reflection or find the doctrine of the Trinity counter-intuitive, or embarrassing.

I mean, why do we even have a day set aside to celebrate a doctrine anyway?

But the problem goes deeper than expecting any rector or layperson to give a coherent account of the Trinity. We like people and the creation, a lot. And so we understandably cling to the dignity of every person and seek to use creation’s resources rightly. We don’t appear to understand, however, how that human dignity and the dignity and goodness of all creation are anchored in the eternal and undivided life of the Trinity, the “maker and preserver of all things visible and invisible,” the one in whose image every person is made. Consequently, our theological rationale for why we affirm the goodness of creation and human dignity is thin.

And that’s unfortunate, not least because we have ample resources for theological reflection and justification. The Trinity is the foundation of the Anglican rule of life, which encompasses how we should live, pray, and think. The Bishops of the Church of England, and then again of the Episcopal Church, made this clear when they placed teaching about the Trinity as the first of the 39 Articles, signaling the primacy of the doctrine of the Trinity for all doctrine that follows. This is not simply a matter of emphasis. Rather, Trinitarian teaching informs our beliefs as well as our social imaginary, that is, the way we think about being followers of Christ in the world. And that is all-encompassing. A Trinitarian social-imaginary includes our social relations, our patterns of education and habits of self-reflection, and above all our relationship to God, expressed primarily through prayer and liturgy.

For example, the Trinity informs Eucharistic celebration in the Book of Common Prayer: we acclaim the Trinity; we address the prayer of the Eucharist to the Father, through the Son, in the Unity of the Holy Spirit; and we receive the blessing of the Trinity as the consummation of the Eucharist. And, of course, we recite the Nicene Creed before the Eucharistic prayer begins. Likewise, the Apostles’ confession of the Trinity structures the oath of the baptismal covenant. Our liturgy is rife with the Trinity.

This teaching not only universal; it is alive and dynamic. As E. L. Mascall once said about confessions of the Trinity, “they have unexpected implications in previously unexplored areas of human concern, they come to new life in bypaths where to all appearance they seemed to have reached a dead end, and from time to time they link on an invigorating way to new advances in the secular sciences and in philosophy” (Mascall, The Triune God: an Ecumenical Study, 8). And as much as this dynamic leads to discoveries, it also leads to limitations, especially in the language and concepts we use and don’t use for the Trinity. Theologians typically employ analogy to overcome these limitations. For instance, God is considered supreme oneness and unity, and yet we discover how excellent and superlative that unity is in the perfect love of the three persons for each other. Likewise, we affirm the complete deity of all three persons against the heresy of modalism, and yet we resist its counterpart, tri-theism. Here, Augustine developed the notion of subsistent relations, or one being constituted relationally, in order to preserve the Unity of the Godhead and the integrity of each Triune Person.

This relationship of unifying and self-giving love of these three persons can be described according to any number of analogies, such as memory, understanding, and love, also popularized by Augustine. And we employ the analogy of the gift to reflect the relationship of the members to each other and to us. Hence, God the Father is the perfectly abundant source of all good gifts, the preeminent of which is the gift of the Holy Spirit. And yet, God is also that Gift wholly-given. Perhaps we see a glimmer of such persons constituted eternally and relationally in our own finite social relations, but our language and experiences struggle to adequately reflect the excessive perfection of the divine, triune life, however much we must speak and, indeed, are called to speak truthfully about God.

Finally, we should remember that no doctrine or dogma of the faith is an end unto itself, but always another tool or resource for shaping our love of God, for bringing us to the threshold over which we enter into our homeland, which is eternal life and joy with God. This is why our affirmation of the Trinity, perhaps best expressed in the Creeds, is meant to be studied, then prayed, and then finally left behind in the summit of perfectly loving union with God. But before we can leave behind the doctrine itself, as Austin Farrer once reminded us, we must meditate continuously upon it. “For no spiritual truth, however fundamental, is once and for all acquired like gold locked in a safe. We think it is there… But when we look for it, either it has vanished or it is no longer gold. It has turned as dull and soft as lead, and must be transmuted back to hold by the alchemy of living meditation” (Farrer, Lord I Believe, 16).

Whether we are layfolk or clergy, is it not a privilege, indeed, an exalted privilege to participate in the Spirit’s work of shaping the prayer, meditation, and imagination of the Church? Why would we shy from that privilege, even especially on a day dedicated to the three persons of the Trinity? How better to foster the meditation of the Trinity, what better way to incite love for our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, than to preach about God regularly, to bring the good news, however mysterious, about the perfect unity and love of our God, who calls us to participate and share in the love through adoption in Christ?

The Rev. Dr. Daniel Wade McClain is an Episcopal priest, an adjunct professor at the General Theological Seminary, and the Episcopal Chaplain at the College of William and Mary.

by the Rev. Porter C. Taylor

Like many elements of Anglican theology and practice, the 39 Articles of Religion are often used as a means of division rather than having a unifying effect. You can divide Anglicans into any grouping you desire (i.e. High, Low, and Broad or 4 streams, or Anglo-Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical, and Classical etc. etc.) and you will find the 39 Articles at the core of each grouping. It is not that the Articles are a driving factor in the distinctives and charisms of a particular Anglican sub-set, but that one’s churchmanship often drives how one reads, interprets, and values the Articles.

Let the reader be warned from the outset: this blog series is not designed to value or highlight one reading over another. This is not a series for Anglo-Catholics, Reformation Anglicans, or cradle Episcopalians. This is a blog for anyone who is an Anglican Christian and is looking for a resource to accompany their reading of the Articles. In particular, this introductory post will not settle anything but rather seeks to provide a lens through which or a framework by which we read this historic document together.

One of my mentors in the earliest days of my ministry training, Bishop Fitzsimmons Allison, would often remark that, “Those who think the English Reformation was about King Henry’s marriage(s) deserve Henry.” I believe we should add to this statement that such people would also be deserving of Henry’s 6 Articles.

As with many elements within Anglican thought there is little to no agreement as to what the Articles are, what they mean, or why they matter. To quote the famous philosopher, Humpty Dumpty, words can mean anything we want them to as long as we “pay them enough.” Sadly, or perhaps confusingly, the language of the Articles has been paid a great price by every stripe and corner of the Anglican Communion and extant are a plethora of interpretations, applications, and meditations as to how they should function in our common life.

Though a tiresome analogy, the concept of Anglicanism as being a “big tent” is not entirely worn out and can be useful in the proper setting.  One can take shelter under the expansive covering inside the tent and feel at home. As Anglicans, we organize ourselves based on our reception of the prayer book, our understanding of ordination, our theological interpretation of the sacraments, our vestments, and so on and so forth. We treat the Articles as something by which we can organize once inside the tent and I believe this is where we get into trouble. We have expended and exerted such great energy in making sure that the tent is large and exhaustive, but we have done this to the detriment of making sure the tent is held up by sturdy posts and nailed down around the outside with stakes and markers.

If you will allow me to continue using the analogy here, my goal is to provide this significant blog series with the framework by which we can read the Articles together. This introductory post is not an attempt to settle the meaning of specific Articles once and for all, but rather to attempt to look through and beyond the varying camps of churchmanship in order to see the foundation underneath. Originally, I intended this essay to be a setting of the table for the other authors in the series but I now see that it is more of a fencing of the table (liturgical pun intended). At the end of the day, we may still disagree as to the importance of the Articles and what some of them may mean, but when we honestly read them together in their proper context, we are engaged in something that is building up the community of faith rather than tearing it down.

Context is everything. Many Anglicans get themselves into trouble when they begin ripping the Articles out of the historical context in which they were originally compiled and for which they were intentionally written. The same is true of biblical interpretation but we have no problem labeling such carelessness as “proof texting.” This ought to be applied universally when it comes to the Articles. Any interpretation of an individual article or the whole collection which does not pay attention to historical context is automatically starting from a place of deficiency and bias. The unique and precise historical situation which is the English Reformation, as seen through the lens of Cranmer’s liturgical revolution, the long-standing tradition of translating the Bible into English, and the need for the Elizabethan Settlement all provide the rich soil out of which our Articles grew.

We must treat the Articles as a contiguous collection, as a text which was written by a specific people, for a specific people, and during a specific historical, political, socio-economical, and theological context. Just as one cannot ignore Romans 9-11 while interpreting Paul’s letter to the church in Rome or neglect to pay adequate attention to the more “difficult” verses, passages, and books (has anyone read Job, Leviticus, or Ecclesiastes?!) of the Bible, so too must we take the Articles as a whole and not just the sum of its parts.

The language of the Articles can also provide an interpretive battle ground. We find ourselves caught up in asking questions such as, “But what does it mean when the Reformers used the word ‘transubstantiation?’” or making comments about “what they really meant to say was…” No text is without interpretation, but we find ourselves on faulty ground when we ignore the literal, grammatical meaning of the document in an attempt to “pay” it enough to make it say what we want it to say.

For those of us today who are worshipping in the Anglican tradition around the globe, the 39 Articles provide the boundaries within which we find ourselves existing ecclesially. The tent is held up by those truths which we cannot ignore, the commitments we have made as Anglican Christians for centuries. We are held up by Scripture, Prayer Book, Creed, historic episcopate (locally adapted), sacraments. There can be no argument here. The tent is staked to the ground (Cranmerian pun intended) by the Articles because together as one cohesive and comprehensive unit do they provide the boundaries and fencing we so desperately need.

What then do the Articles provide for us? With the understanding that they are neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, one can see that the Articles provide the rules for our own language game, the building blocks for our distinct way of doing theology, and the stakes which hold down the tent. Perhaps our attention would be better spent figuring out what it means to wrestle with the issues and questions of our present day along the same lines as the Reformers of the 16^th century instead of arguing about what the Reformers actually meant as we seek to parse out Rome, Canterbury, Geneva, and Wittenberg.

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer includes the Articles within the section “Historical Documents” sandwiched between the Athanasian Creed and Preface to the First BCP on one side and the Lambeth Quadrilateral on the other. Do we find this to be a coincidence? The Creed and Preface are foundational to our belief and the Quadrilateral is a measuring tool for ecumenical relationships…and the Articles float betwixt the two. That they are included in the BCP at all suggests they are important for our common life and worship; that they are included in the “Historical Documents” section implies that they are a historical hook upon which we can hang our hats; that they are next to the Quadrilateral could be seen as an attempt to use the Articles as a means of differentiating ourselves from other Christian traditions. Is this not in fact the very situation the Reformers were in? Were they not trying to differentiate the Church of England, the ecclesia Anglicana, from the Church of Rome and the reformations on the continent? You would be hard pressed to argue otherwise.

There is more, much more, to be said on many of these important issues but the Reformers have helped us by providing a standard against which we cannot nor should not seek to wander. The questions asked and answered in this blog series have a great deal to do with living and applying the Articles within a 21^st century, North American Anglican context and exploring what they may mean for our common life together. Join us on this journey as we read together, setting aside biases of churchmanship and school theology, and allow yourself to ponder answer the pressing questions of today as read and examine through the guiding framework of the Articles.

The tent is as big and as expansive as ever, friends, but it is not limitless. We have boundaries, stakes if you will, which outline the tent as if saying, “You may go no further.” There is freedom within fences, as the adage goes, and plenty of room to run and play, but the markers are always and only meant to protect, guide, and ensure the passing along of tradition as we have received it. Do not cast the Articles aside as irrelevant because that is lazy; do not make them into more than they are because that is proof texting; do not continue the arguments over language and theological minutiae because that only isolates within the community. Let them be what they are: a theological response to distinct controversy and unique division within a historical context…and a model by which we can continue living as Anglican Christians in the world today.

Porter C. Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen where he is writing his dissertation on liturgical theology. He is a priest in the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh and serves at Church of the Apostles, Kansas City as Theologian in Residence. Porter lives in Kansas with his wife, Rebecca, and their three sons. His work can be found on his website www.porterctaylor.com.

by the Rev. Thomas Ferguson

I was teaching a class session once on the English Reformation, and, as part of breaking down the different ways Elizabeth I’s reign helped shape and define what we know as the Church of England, we had a discussion on the Thirty-Nine Articles.  I went through the history of their drafting and adoption; talked about the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed influences in them; and noted where they were clear and where they were masterfully ambiguous. I then asked for questions. One student raised a hand and asked, “Do we have to know this?”  It was not the question I had been expecting, I had thought maybe people were unaware of what supererogation was. “What do you mean?” I replied. “Well,” the student said, “does The Episcopal Church require us to know or believe this, and, if not, why are we studying it?”

That student had innocently stepped right into the middle of the broader and more complex issue of the role and function of the Thirty-Nine Articles in The Episcopal Church.  As part of this Thirty-Nine Articles Project, in this opening salvo we will look at precisely that question.

In giving an overview of the place and role of the Thirty-Nine Articles in The Episcopal Church, it is important to note the way in which The Episcopal Church has a rather doubly distinct position with regards to confessional theological statements.  In the first case, as a member of the Anglican Communion and shaped by its theological and ecclesiological inheritance from the Church of England, The Episcopal Church likewise shares a common Anglican perspective on confessionalism. The Church of England, and subsequently the members of the Anglican Communion as it developed, do not hold to doctrinal confessionalism in the same ways as churches of the Reformed or Lutheran traditions.  This is not to say that the Thirty-Nine Articles have not been an important doctrinal touchstone, nor that the Articles do not function in a binding manner in some provinces of the Communion: only that they do not function in exactly the same way as, say, the Augsburg Confession does within the Lutheran tradition.

While standing in that same shared tradition, The Episcopal Church also has had a different history with regards to the Articles as compared to other provinces of the Anglican Communion.  For one, since The Episcopal Church was disestablished in the 1780s when colonies began to rewrite their state Constitutions, and since the Bill of Rights forbade Congress to establish a particular religion, the Articles never served any kind of broader civic role.  For instance, given the established nature of the Church of England, subscription to the Articles were required at Oxford University and Cambridge University well into the 1800s.

But perhaps most significantly, the Articles were never specifically adopted as a doctrinal standard by The Episcopal Church, nor was subscription to the Articles required in any way.  This is a second distinctive aspect of The Episcopal Church’s relationship to the Articles. While no longer required for enrollment in universities or for the basis of what we would consider civil oaths, nonetheless the Articles are still part of the oath clergy swear at ordination in many provinces of the Communion.

The Episcopal Church adopted a Book of Common Prayer, Constitution, and initial set of canons at the second General Convention held in 1789.  The Constitution of 1789 stated that:

A Book of Common Prayer, Administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites arid Ceremonies of the Church, Articles of Religion, and a form and manner of making, ordaining, and consecrating Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, when established by this or a future General Convention, shall be used in the Protestant Episcopal Church in those States, which shall have adopted this Constitution.

Twelve years later, the General Convention finally got around to addressing the question of the Articles of Religion.  The 1801 General Convention declared that the articles of religion are hereby ordered to be set forth with the following directions to be observed in all future editions of the same [i.e., the Book of Common Prayer]; that is to say following to be the title; viz. “Articles of religion, as established by the Bishops, the Clergy and the Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, in Convention, on the 12th day of September, in the year of our Lord 1801.

A slightly edited and amended version of the Thirty-Nine Articles was thus “established” by the Convention.  However, nowhere in the Constitution or Canons did it explain what “established” or “shall be used” meant.

Perhaps seeking some clarification, a proposed canonical change at the 1804 Convention would have included the Articles of Religion in the declaration that clergy were required to sign at ordination (currently Article VIII of the Constitution, in 1804 this was then Article VII).  The proposal was not passed. As the minutes of the Convention note,

A proposed canon, concerning subscription to the articles of the church, was negatived, under the impression that a sufficient subscription to the articles is already required by the 7th article of the constitution.

It would thus seem it was the mind of the Convention that the promise to conform to the “doctrines and worship” at ordination already incorporated the Articles of Religion – however this understanding is captured only in the minutes, and was not part of any resolution or canonical action of Convention.  

The Articles were printed in subsequent printings of the Book of Common Prayer, between the Psalter and the Ordinal until the 1892 Book of Common Prayer.  In the 1892 and 1928 Books of Common Prayer, they were printed at the end.

The 1871 General Convention included an examination on Articles as part of the requirements for preparation for ordination, a requirement which lasted until the 1904 General Convention, when it was removed.

The next significant discussion of the Articles takes place at the 1907 General Convention.

The 1907 General Convention received a proposal to amend the Constitution to remove the clause mentioning the Articles of Religion from Article X of the Constitution.  William Reed Huntington, driving force behind the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, presented the legislative Committee’s report. The Report notes that “Precisely what standing the Articles enjoyed in the American Church during the first years of its post-revolutionary revival it is difficult if not impossible to say.”  It further goes on to argue that “The whole ecclesiastical sky has changed since the Articles were originally imposed upon the Church of England…In a word, the Articles are antiquated without being ancient.”

These concerns about being “antiquated,” are in part, tinged by the anti-Catholicism common at the time.  What the Committee has in mind here is the introduction of papal primacy at the First Vatican Council in 1870 and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary promulgated in 1854.  If the Articles are to counter the errors of the Catholic Church, then they are not effective anymore, since there are new, post-Reformation Romish errors needing correction.

The Report questions the inclusion of the Article in the Book of Common Prayer:

This state of things tends to demoralization of both the Clergy and the Laity. Of the Clergy since it leaves them helpless to answer with any definiteness the question, What is the Doctrine of the Episcopal Church? Of the Laity because they are thoroughly perplexed by the sight of what looks to be a Creed supplementary to the other Creeds, while at the same time they are assured by their spiritual guides that it is something about which they need not at all concern themselves. Why should it be here in the Prayer Book, they ask, if it be unimportant? Why, if it be important, should we be told that as Laymen we need not care?

Lastly, the Report argues, “The Articles are a bar to Church Unity both at home and abroad; at home because they constitute a wall over which we have to talk with our neighbors at a great disadvantage, abroad because in the great Church of the East which holds passionately to the Nicene Faith, their very existence is unknown.”

Despite the Committee’s report and recommendations, the House of Bishops did not consent with the House of Deputies, and the commission to revise the Articles was not established, nor was Article X amended to remove mention of the Articles.  

The question of the Articles came up again in the process leading towards revision of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  At the 1928 General Convention, numerous proposals were presented for dropping or revising the Articles as well as for their continued inclusion in the Book of Common Prayer – including one petition which claimed to have 34,057 signatures in support of continued inclusion of the Articles.  None of the competing proposals were adopted, and the Articles were printed in the new Book of Common Prayer with the same prefatory language, unchanged since 1801.

In the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Articles were included in a section titled “Historical Documents,” and, by doing so, perhaps continued to muddle the situation.  Not all of the documents in the historical documents section would seem to be of equal authority. For instance, the Chalcedonian Definition has never been used in worship as, for example, the Nicene and Apostles’ Creed.  The Athanasian Creed used to be used in worship, but is no longer, yet is included in the Historical Documents section. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, while included in the historical documents section, actually derives authority not from that placement but because of the numerous times it has been reaffirmed by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (more than nine different times).

The 1988 General Convention removed whatever ambiguous authority the Articles might have claimed.  An amendment to Article X of the Constitution was passed on a second reading, shortening the official title of the Book of Common Prayer:

Resolved, That the first sentence of Article X of the Constitution is hereby amended to read as follows:

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating Bishops, Priests and Deacons, the Form of Consecration of a Church or Chapel, the Office of Institution of Ministers, and Articles of Religion, as now established or hereafter amended by the authority of this Church, shall be in use in all the Dioceses.

RIP, ambiguous meaning of what “established” and “shall be used” meant with regards to the Articles: 1801-1988.

The last time the Articles would be the focus of discussion at General Convention as a kind of doctrinal standard came in 2003, at the same Convention considering giving consent to the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.  Resolution B001 was submitted, which proposed, in part, specifically affirming two of the Articles of Religion:

Resolved, the House of Deputies concurring, That the 74th General Convention affirm that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation,” as set forth in Article VI of the Articles of Religion established by the General Convention on September 12, 1801; and be it further

Resolved, That the 74th General Convention re-affirm that “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain [that is, establish or enact] any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another,” as set forth in Article XX of the Articles of Religion established by the General Convention on September 12, 1801;

Some saw the Resolution as an effort to try to deny the authority of the General Convention to consent to the election of an openly gay man as bishop, largely because of the following resolved clauses in the Resolution:

Resolved, That the 74th General Convention affirm that every member of this Church is conscience-bound first of all to obey the teaching and direction of Our Lord Jesus Christ as set forth in Holy Scripture in any matter where a decision or action of this Church, or this General Convention, may depart from that teaching; and be it further:

Resolved, That the 74th General Convention affirm that councils of the Church have, and sometimes will, err but that Our Lord Jesus Christ, present through the person of the Holy Spirit, can and will correct such error…

The resolution was defeated, 84-66, with 8 abstentions.  

So we return to the original question the student asked:  “Do we have to know this?” On the one hand, it is clear that the Articles were never formally adopted as any kind of doctrinal standard with any clarity.  It is only from 1871-1904 were they specifically named as something clergy should be examined on for ordination. On the other hand, they were certainly a part of many seminary curricula and a number of manuals and books devoted to the Articles were common in the 19th and early 20th centuries: at one point the trustees of the Virginia Theological Seminary, for instance, required students to memorize the Thirty-Nine Articles.  

As we look towards the 21st century, perhaps in a sense we can return to that Report from 1907 General Convention.  Though its proposals were not accepted, the report asked a pertinent and valid question: if the Articles helped shape and define Anglicanism in a particular context, do we need to ask ourselves how we shape and define Anglicanism for our own context?  In this sense, the Articles could become not an ends, but a means; not only a touchstone, but a resource; not antiquated, but a living legacy.

The Rev. Thomas Ferguson, PhD, is Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Sandwich, MA, and Affiliate Professor of Church History at Bexley Seabury Seminary.

by the Rev. Canon Greg Goebel

When we approach the 39 Articles of Religion, we are often focused on controversies during the Reformation or today, or we are asking questions about how the Articles compare and contrast with Creeds and Confessions. The kinds of questions we usually ask the Articles can be quite theoretical. So we may miss out on the pastoral use of the Articles. What if we asked how the 39 Articles help us in the cure of souls?

I want to ask pastoral questions of the Articles. And I will do this primarily by focusing on the anthropology of the Articles, and how it may help us encourage and comfort people, guiding them toward acceptance of the love of God and toward healing from a sense of alienation. I will primarily look at a few of the first sixteen articles as examples, with application that extends to the rest of them. Or at least most of them.

I will start with a few observations on the needs of people and the role of the priest today.

Most of the people that I’ve encountered in twenty plus years of ministry have a strong desire to know and be known by God. Some have a mix of guilt with shallow self-righteousness. I’m good at detecting that mix because it is my own experience. Others have a mix of fear with resentment of God. Still others seem to have an entitled of God, but often mixed with a lonely sense of distance from God. Some just feel overwhelmed by God or religion, and sadly, some have been abused by churches or leaders. Most people seem to be talking about God, but asking anthropological questions, which ultimately are about identity and relationship.

The role of the priest as pastor is to listen to people, to understand where they are and who they are, and then to guide them toward a place of reconciliation with God so that they can be at peace with themselves and be in loving relationships with others. We want to help them find how God has been present in their lives, even when he may have seemed absent or distant. We do this in a variety of ways, but personal conversations and preaching are two primary opportunities we practice. The Articles can inform both.

The Articles of Religion assume that people are asking questions about God and humanity. They assume that how we answer these questions is important to the souls of people in real life. Let’s look at a few examples.

Some people sense a deep disconnect between the god they picture, or were taught to picture, and the real world we live in. God is in heaven, watching us. For some reason he has allowed a painful, broken world to exist while he rides high in the clouds, angry at us for messing things up.

Article II is all about dismantling that false image of God. God became a human being and truly suffered. He had a mom named Mary. He wasn’t a mirage or a hologram or a sprite. He was a human being. And he experienced suffering and pain.

Why? To reconcile us. God isn’t pushing us away, he is drawing us close. All of our guilt, our sins, any shame we carry for any reason, he took that upon himself. He wants nothing to be in the way of his love for us. Christ went all the way to hell and back for you! (Article III).

People live, and people die. We suffer and we exult, we groan and we rejoice. God lived that life alongside us, and he experienced pain and death too. God remains a mystery, and yet he showed us his character and his care by being here with us. Articles II and III can be a new vision of God for people who may have a sense of distance and alienation.

And then we skim ahead to everyone’s favorite Articles, IX and X: “Of Original or Birth-Sin” and “Of Free-Will.”

Original sin has been so vastly misunderstood that to most people you encounter, it will have the opposite meaning than the Article intends. To most people “original sin” means that Christians believe that everyone is inherently worthless, bad, evil, and terrible. Everyone should feel guilty all the time and grovel before God until he capriciously decides to forgive us as long as we work really, really hard to try not to sin again. Original sin is often seen as another way of saying that human beings are inherently evil, or at least inherently flawed in our fundamental nature as humans.

And yet Article IX says that original sin is a corruption of our nature. Human beings are not inherently sinful. Originally, we were fully human and yet not sinful. That means that our natural state is good.

According to the Articles of Religion, the world has been infected by a disease called sin. It isn’t native to humans, be we all have it. No one is born without it, unless that person happens to have been the One Person born by divine conception in order to save the rest of us.

The Articles teach that this infection effects all of us and every part of each of us. Our emotions, our senses, our actions, our outlook. If you are human you have it. And that’s good news, because it means you are not in one of two groups, sinners or non-sinners. There is just the one group.

God condemns this disease. Why would he not? We all hate diseases because they destroy people. God condemns sin because it has infected the human race. Even though God is love, we have a sin-distorted view of him and he hates that because he loves us. It can be healing for people to see that God condemns something that is alien us, and has attached itself to us, not our fundamental human nature.  

Today, almost everyone agrees that the world is a broken place and that human beings are a part of breaking it. Racist systems abound and violence is around us in every part of the world. Children suffer and addiction claims lives. Many have been physically, sexually, or emotionally abused. All of our relationships have some form of dysfunction.

Yet almost everyone agrees that no one and no group is exempt from some level of responsibility for the broken world we live in. Original sin is not merely individual, it is systemic. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have at least a partial sense of guilt or awareness of ways they have hurt others in some way. This is original sin, and helping people come to grips with it, while still receiving and affirming God’s love and the original goodness of humans at the same time, has a curative effect.

God is redeeming the world because sin is alien to us. Article IX, rather than being a cynical downer about how worthless we all are, can actually be a way to encourage people that they aren’t the only one with the disease, and that it has a cure. God isn’t condemning them, he is condemning the disease. And no one is able to self-righteously condemn anyone else. We can condemn the actions of others, and the way the disease of sin is expressing itself through them. But we must always look beyond that to the original goodness that God created in and for them. We have to love them and see ourselves as part of them. Ultimately, Original Sin is a leveler which can help us see one another as equals. While we must always condemn and oppose racism, abuse, violence, injustice and other individual or systemic expressions of our fallen world, we must also always seek redemption and healing for all persons at the same time.

Article X deals with our good works and salvation. People today are still asking the age-old question, “What must I do to be saved?” We all struggle to understand how our actions have anything to do with our own salvation. On the one hand, we aren’t God. The older we get, the more we realize that willpower and really detailed personal growth plans don’t save us. Good works are good, plans are good, self-care is good, but these things are full of unintended consequences and are limited by our willpower. They don’t save us.

And so Article X tells us what we do have to do: “nothing.” Only God can save us. Christ invaded our broken world from the outside. He came from a relationship of eternal, equal love (Article I) and brought that love with him. Articles X-XV are all about how our works don’t save us, because Christ saves us.

Our job as pastors is to comfort the weary souls that seek rest. We aren’t drivers who push people to achieve more and more. We are undershepherds who care for and comfort the flock of God. And in a counterintuitive way, this set of Articles can do just that. Stop trying to save yourself! As they say in AA, “let go and let God.” You don’t have to try to do more good deeds than bad in order to balance a ledger (Article XIV). You don’t have to pretend to have never sinned (Article XV). You don’t have to try to do good deeds to atone for any bad deeds you’ve done (Article XII). You don’t have to try to justify yourself or make a case to God for why he should love you (Article XI).

Yet we also sense that we aren’t supposed to just sit around doing nothing either. An archaic word in Article X holds a clue to all of this. It says that the grace of God by Christ prevents us. This word has taken on an almost opposite meaning from the one intended in the Article. Today, it sounds like it means that Christ is stopping us from having a good will to do good things. He prevents us from goodness.

Back in the day, however, it meant that he would go before us, working in us before we even knew he was doing it, preparing our way for us.

We worship a God who loves us so much that he goes before us in life, preparing us and turning us toward love. God’s relationship with us is one of grace and love, not of demand and performance. So God guides us, and prepares us, and turns us so that we start to get a glimpse of that love and we start to respond to it. Before we know it we are part of the good, redemptive, healing work of God in the world. And instead of anxiously working so that we won’t be punished or miss out, we are enjoying God’s love while we work. These Articles can pack a powerful pastoral punch against the heavy burdens that most of us carry around from childhood.

Finally, Article XVI is helpful to people like me who are recovering Pharisees. We are the ones who grew up in church. We are the ones who know how to talk the talk. We have the knowledge and we know how to behave, at so others will approve outwardly, at least for a while. People like me need to hear that we will sin after baptism. We will need to be forgiven again. Salvation isn’t an instant zap of perfection, so we can stop the denial and the pretense. Salvation is a healing cure that, like antibiotics, takes time to work all the way through our system. In fact, as the Article says, in this life we will always be saved sinners, and will need to stay humble. While we take comfort in our baptism, we can still avail ourselves of confession of our sins and the regular reception of the Eucharist. I find this reality refreshing because it moves me away from denial and toward honesty and truth. And, to borrow from psychological terminology, it normalizes my need to continually amend my life. We all have to do that.

There are so many more examples of the Articles for use in pastoral ministry and preaching. The Sacraments, which are sure signs of God’s grace and love. The unworthiness of ministers, which means that God works in our lives even if the people who often represent him are also flawed sinners. There are many other examples.

It is true that some of them are not as helpful. The Articles about oaths, Queens, and socialism are not relevant to pastoral ministry. Perhaps. But most of the thirty-nine have messages of love and grace. Of course, because of our human limitations and the limitations of words to fully convey God’s mysteries, they are not a complete or perfect set of statements. They also contain statements about Reformation era controversies and anathemas against those who disagree on some points which appear to be minor today. But overall they can be very useful in the cure of souls.

Greg Goebel is an Anglican Priest and the founder of AnglicanPastor.com.