by Benjamin Barondeau
When reading through the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in the current, 2016, Book of Common Prayer, we eventually come to Article 21, part of the articles on Corporate Religion, which is prefaced by a bracketed note letting us know that this Article was omitted in 1801 when the Articles were accepted by the American Episcopal Church “because it is partly of a local and civil nature, and is provided for, as to the remaining parts of it, in other Articles.” In fact, in the 1789 and 1892 American prayer books, the Article wasn’t even included. The current Episcopal prayer book notes that this Article goes back to the Articles ratified by Queen Elizabeth I in 1571 and the Articles from the revised prayer book issued in 1662 after the Restoration (the latter is still the official prayer book for the Church of England).
In a modernized spelling of the original Elizabethan English, Article 21 reads as follows: “Of the Authority of General Councils. General Councils may not be gathered together without the commandment and will of Princes. And when they be gathered together, (forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the Spirit and Word of God,) they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God. Wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.” [1]
A contemporary adaptation of this Article replaces “Princes” with “rulers,” refers to “the Holy Spirit” instead of to “the Spirit,” and uses the clause “unless it can be shown to be taught by Scripture” instead of “unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.” Moreover, the online resource English History concisely summarizes Article 21 as declaring “that the General Councils can only be called by the monarch, and also [that] they cannot make rules that go against the Bible.” [2]
“General counsels” and “the commandment and will of Princes.” This Article takes us back not only to the Reformation but also to the beginnings of the Roman legalization of Christianity in the 4th century. Most of us have probably read Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps many of us still remember the moment at the beginning of the play when Escalus, the Prince of Verona, frustrated with the Capulets and the Montagues continually fighting in the streets, declares, “If ever you disturb our streets again / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace” (Romeo and Juliet 1.1.89-90: see also Article 37 for the authority of “godly Princes” to “punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offenses”). [3] Many of us have probably also heard something about the 21 Ecumenical Councils (beginning with the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and ending with the Second Vatican Council in 1962-1965), including the seven great ecumenical councils involving both the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches in Late Antiquity: the First Council of Nicaea (325), the First Council of Constantinople (381), the Council of Ephesus (431), the Council of Chalcedon (451), the Second Council of Constantinople (553), the Third Council of Constantinople (680-681), and the Second Council of Nicaea (787).
In his voluminous and engaging The Reformation: A History, Diarmaid MacCulloch explains the importance of the prince during the Reformation: “With the trend in late medieval central Europe for local secular rulers to take more and more power and responsibility away from leading churchmen, it was not surprising that the first reformers in the 1520s looked to princes rather than bishops and abbots to undertake a new round of reforms in the Church, or that much of the Reformation continued to develop with the assumption that a godly prince was the natural agent of religious revolution. Yet it must be remembered that this takeover was in no way a conscious act of defiance against the Pope. Not all such public-spirited rulers turned away from Roman obedience in the Reformation, even when their concern for the Church had previously led them to clash with members of its hierarchy” (Chapter 1; electronic edition). MacCulloch also points out some of the vexing questions involving princes at that time, such as: 1) Should every Christian be expected to practice the ascetical self-restraint of monks and nuns, with the commonwealth as a monastery and the prince as an abbot? And 2) Should Protestants still accept Canon Law and church courts, or secularized law in the hands of a prince or other ruler? [4]
The councils, meanwhile, are historically important events for creating the formation of the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches and for defining and affirming important doctrinal, theological, liturgical, devotional, and disciplinary issues that still impact us today. The First Council of Nicaea, convened by Emperor Constantine in 325, for instance, addressed the nature of the Son in relation to the Father, codifying the original Nicene Creed that ends with a denunciation of ideas concerning Jesus officially considered heretical. This council also addressed a wide variety of issues besides what was codified in the creed, including that people must stand for prayers on Sundays and during the Easter season; a cleric can only live with a woman who is his sister, mother, or aunt; and a cleric cannot lend money with interest.
Nearly 60 years later in 381, the First Council of Constantinople was held by order of Emperor Theodosius, which clarified and revised the Nicene Creed. Whereas the original Nicene Creed reads “And in the Holy Spirit,” the revised Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed reads, “And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets.” Whereas the First Council of Nicaea was concerned with defining the nature of the Son in relation to the Father, the First Council of Constantinople was concerned with defining the nature of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father (the Western Latin reading of this passage that includes the so-called “Filioque Clause” — “who proceeds from the Father and the Son” — wasn’t accepted by Rome until the High Middle Ages in 1014).
The Council of Carthage in 419, meanwhile, assembled in opposition to Pope Zosimus’s interference in Africa, declared that bishops, presbyters, deacons, and anyone else who served at the altar and who performed the sacraments must abstain from sexual relations with their wives; readers might either marry or remain celibate; clergy must not marry heretics; only canonical scriptures can be publicly read in church, though the Passions of the martyrs can be read on their respective feast days; theatrical spectacles must not be performed on Sundays and Saints’ feast days; all relics of pagan idolatry, including images, groves of trees, and individual trees, must be destroyed; babies must be baptized as soon as they are born; and no bishop can be referred to as the “Prince of the Priests or High Priest or any other name of this kind” (Canon 39). [5]
As we can see from the above three examples, the councils addressed a number of different issues. They focused on everything from how a bishop should be addressed to when a baby should be baptized; from when theatrical spectacles should not be performed to what could be publically read from the pulpit to whether or not the readers of those lessons had to be celibate. With this in mind, I think we can better appreciate the stipulation in Article 21 that “things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.” Councils make lots of decisions, but according to Article 21, if a decision is deemed “necessary to salvation,” it has to be backed up with the accepted scriptures of the Bible (Article 5 lists which books are canonical and which ones — that is, the Deuterocanonicals or the Apocrypha — are to be “read for example for life and instruction of manners” but cannot be used “to establish any doctrine”). Basing decisions about issues “necessary to salvation” on the Bible is important because, as the article points out, people have erred, and continue to err, “even in things pertaining unto God.”
So, what are we to make of Article 21 now, in the 21st century, since it has been over 200 years since it was first omitted from the list of the Thirty-Nine Articles? This is a question frequently raised by commentators on the Thirty-Nine Articles. Back in 1999, near the end of the last Christian Millenium, British Anglican Bishop Donald Allister noted, “General councils are gatherings of the leaders of all churches in the world. These were possible in the early centuries but since the massive growth and the great splits of church history they are unimaginable today. Certainly a body like the World Council of Churches is far from being a general council, not least because so many Bible-believing churches will have nothing to do with its radical theology and politics.” [6]
In spite of the impracticality of ever holding another general council, Bishop Allister notes that “Article 21 still has two important lessons for us.” The first lesson is “that churches must not come together to talk or plan in any way that looks politically subversive. In the late Middle Ages this was important: it is equally today. The stipulation that rulers (that is political leaders) must agree on any such gathering is not to force the church into submission to the state. This is so it can be seen by all that the church is above board and has no political ambitions. Even though civil leaders may have no Christian beliefs, the church is not to threaten but to support their role. In many ways the church is to be thoroughly revolutionary — but it is never to be political.” The second lesson is one that we have already looked at — that in order to counter the errors of human beings, all decisions concerning things “necessary to salvation” must ultimately be based on the Bible. Bishop Allister explains that “even a general council (like its smaller national version, a general synod) is a mixed bag consisting of some who submit to God’s word and others who do not.”
In 1715, Thomas Bennett, Rector of St. James in Colchester, England, addressed the problematic issue of whether clergy should subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles as “Articles of Belief, or as Articles of Peace” (An Essay on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Agreed on in 1562, And Revised in 1571, page 411). [7] Bennett referred to the opinion of the Bishop of Sarum, who argued that the Articles “are a standard of doctrine not to be contradicted or disputed; that the sons of the church are only bound to acquiesce silently to them; and that the subscription binds only to a general compromise upon those Articles, that so there may be no disputing nor wrangling about them” (page 411; spelling modernized). Even though Bennett argued that the clergy during the English Reformation “believed the Articles to be true” because they “engage[d] themselves to defend and maintain the doctrine of the Articles as most agreeable to God’s Word” (page 416; spelling modernized), the Bishop of Sarum, much like Bishop Allister, understood that not everyone was going to believe the same way.
Robert G. W. Langmaid, a Canadian Episcopal priest from the Yukon Territory, also begins his devotion on Article 21 by stating, “On the surface, this article may seem to have no bearing on today’s world. After all, general councils are no longer called, and there are no princes today with governing power over much of the world” (Forty Days with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion: A Devotional Guide, “Day 21”; electronic edition). However, Langmaid, like Allister, sees Article 21 as still being relevant. He explains that “Anglicans recognize the authority” of the first four of the seven great ecumenical councils of the Early Church. He therefore rightly points out that “the early general councils still shape our understanding of the Christian faith” because they “help us understand who Jesus is” as well as “help us understand some confusing ideas contained in scripture.” [8]
In addition to the continual importance of the early councils in contemporary Anglican (and thus also Episcopal) life, Langmaid sees Article 21 as having two other areas of relevance: 1) “the church must still take civil law into account when making decisions, as long as civil law does not require believers to violate divine law”; and 2) “Scripture is still the ultimate authority,” since even the “collective will of many believers gathered together cannot override the Word of God.” For Allister, “the church is to be thoroughly revolutionary — but it is never to be political.” For Langmaid, since the church must follow the law of the land, this “affects the manner in which we deal with injustice; we are called to speak out about it, but we must do so in a way that does not break any civil laws.”
So even though we no longer have Princes or other rulers who can call general councils (as well as perhaps interfere with the proceedings, as Emperor Constantius II did at the Milan Synod in 355, when he forced the synod at swordpoint to make the decisions he wanted it to make, and either imprisoned or exiled those clerics who refused to comply), and even though Article 21 has been omitted for over 200 years and Episcopalians do not have to subscribe to the Articles as either Articles of Belief or as Articles of Peace, Article 21 still holds relevance for churches and Christians today. It can still be used as a guide for churches to be “thoroughly revolutionary,” as well as a guide for individual Christians who want to “deal with injustice” in ways that do not break any just laws (though the breaking of unjust laws for the purposes of civil disobedience, social justice, and faithful resistance to Empire, as Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is another matter that is also scripturally-based). General councils may now be part of Christian history, but they and the way in which Article 21 specifies they are to be called and conducted still influence us today.
Notes
[1] The Elizabethan spelling of this Article varies greatly, depending on the source. One variation is the following: “Of the Auƈthoritie of Generall Counſelles. Generall councels may not be gathered together without the Comaundement and wyll of princes. And when they be gathered together (foraſmuche as they be an aſſemblie of men, whereof all be not governed with the ſpirite and word of God) they may erre, and ſometyme have erred, even in thinges parteynyng unto God. Wherfore, thinges ordayned by them as neceſſary to ſalvation, have neyther ſtrength nor auƈthoritie, unleſſe it may be declared that they be taken out of Holy Scripture.” See https://archive.org/details/essayonthirtynin00benn/page/n6
[2] https://englishhistory.net/tudor/39-articles-religion/
[3] William Shakespeare. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, W. W. Norton, 1997.
[4] Diarmaid MacCulloch. The Reformation: A History, Penguin, 2003, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Reformation/dikJzCnL7eUC?hl=en&gbpv=1
[5] http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3816.htm
[6] http://archive.churchsociety.org/crossway/documents/Cway_072_Allister7.pdf
[7] https://archive.org/details/essayonthirtynin00benn/page/n6
[8] Robert G. W. Langmaid. Forty Days with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion: A Devotional Guide, BPS Books, 2013, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Forty_Days_with_the_Thirty_Nine_Articles/KiSll7xVpLoC?hl=en&gbpv=1