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.