Author: Hannah

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.

A recent discussion on Twitter (aimed at explicating the Episcopal Church’s inherently vague theology of sacramental confession, that is, Reconciliation of a Penitent) brought up a fraught question: what sins are worth confessing?

After all, in the Catholic Church there is only a requirement to confess “mortal” sins (although Catholics are also strongly encouraged to confess venial sins any time they feel the need to). And although the Episcopal Church has no official theology of “venial” and “mortal” sin, the focus among clergy seemed to be on sacramental confession as a marker of moral crisis, or when reconciliation to the church, not just to God, was seen as necessary. For other sins, shouldn’t the promise of God’s forgiveness, and the Eucharist, and the general confession be enough?

Confession is—as we all know—not much practiced in the Episcopal Church, at least outside of Anglo-Catholic piety. And surely one reason for the reticence is this: most of the time our sins are embarrassingly banal and boring. Surely, confession of such sins is a waste of everyone’s time. Surely, we should just be able to “get over” them, give them up, move on.

Upon theological reflection, of course, this argument falls apart. The forgiveness of God isn’t something we grasp for ourselves: it comes to us from outside us. It comes to us mediated by the church community. That’s why, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us in Life Together, “Self-forgiveness can never lead to the break with sin…Who can give us the assurance that we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins? God gives us this assurance through one another.”[1]

Besides which, the New Testament doesn’t so much deal with gradations of sin: rather the opposite. (See, for example, Matthew 5:21–48.) So why do we take it upon ourselves to consider our sins to be too trivial to be worth God forgiving them? There’s a memorable phrase from Edna Hong’s book The Downward Ascent that comes to my mind frequently: “We prefer to be reconciled to our sins, rather than to our God.”

The fact is that we spend most of our lives stuffing our sins away and telling ourselves they don’t matter. We have to, to survive in a world of cruelty and inequality! When I walk by the homeless woman sleeping in my alley to go into my nice warm house, is that a sin for which I’m responsible? Of course it is. The inequality between rich and poor means that all of us who have more than we need – all of us living nice middle-class lives – are living in sin. But how do we survive, on a daily basis, if we take all those sins in which our existence is enmeshed seriously? We don’t. So to go through our lives, we reconcile ourselves to our sins, reminding ourselves of the ways that systems are outside our control, that we don’t have bad intentions, that only a small share of the responsibility can be ours, that the bad things we’ve done are really just “venial,” that we don’t want to waste our time or our confessor’s or God’s.

But we don’t need to reconcile ourselves to our sins, because we can always be reconciled to our God. And what relief to be honest with our consciences, even occasionally, to admit that that the situation of our world, our relationships, our lives, even when we can convince ourselves it’s not that bad, is untenable.

The desire for scarcity to make sacraments seem more warranted or valuable is hardly restricted to confession. In many Protestant churches (although thankfully not our tradition!) the same argument is used to restrict reception of the Eucharist to being infrequent. Even in the Anglican tradition, there’s skepticism about the casual use of the sacrament of unction; Lizette Larson-Miller writes: “One of the challenges [in developing a sacramental rite at time of death] has been the overuse of anointing of the sick, to the extent that it has become almost trivialized in many parish communities.”[2]

My experience with unction is this: I’m a chaplain in the LA County jails. At every service in the jails and whenever we walk the rows, we offer oil for anointing for healing if we can. Most Sundays I anoint 30–50 men. We anoint profligately, because physical touch and sweet-smelling oil consecrating bodies that have been denied their liberty and dignity are some of the most powerful tools we can offer to connect to them.

Does this profligate use of unction diminish its power in extreme cases of death? No, rather it ties us all together in solidarity due to our common suffering (suffering in which God shares on the cross, as Jürgen Moltmann notes in The Crucified God), recognizing that all of us are in extremis, subject to the powers of sin and death.

The same is true for our confessions. When we practice speaking the truth about the world and receiving the grace of God in response, we form our consciences, we prepare ourselves to receive reconciliation when we do find ourselves in moral crisis and divided from the church, and we recognize our solidarity with all humanity in our common sinfulness.

So let’s be profligate in confessing our sins, trusting that no sin is too small to merit the forgiveness of God.

—Hannah Bowman

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[1] Fortress Press paperback edition, 2005, p. 113.

[2] In The Study of Liturgy and Worship, ed. Juliette Day and Benjamin Gordon-Taylor, p. 184.

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