Anglicanism: an Introduction

[Music] Welcome back to Word and Table, a weekly podcast about liturgy, sacrament, and the great tradition of Christian worship, and why it is vital in our world today. I'm your host, Alex Wilgis, and I am back as usual with Father Stephen Goetheye. Welcome back, Father Stephen. Good to be back, Alex. Father Stephen is the canon theologian of the diocese of the Upper Midwest in the Anglican Church in North America. Father Stephen, I wanted to talk to you today about Anglicanism. Ask you about it, rather. Our podcast kind of has a larger scope than just Anglicanism, but you and I are both in the Anglican Church, the Anglican Church of North America to be precise. But today, yeah, I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about our tradition and what makes it distinct. There are so much history and so many figures and so many distinctives that we can talk about with Anglicanism, but today I just want to start with a couple of questions. So don't think of this episode as an exhaustive account of Anglicanism, but I just want to start with a couple of questions. First one is one that I often get from my evangelical friends who come to an Anglican Church for the first time and they come out saying, "Gosh, it's so Catholic. It feels so Catholic. There's the priests and deacons and we have bishops and all the robes and a lot of the dress looks similar." But it's an interesting question, Stephen, you know, as Anglicans, what are we? Are we Protestant or are we Catholic? Well, we are both. That's sort of a unique position to be in, in this sense, is that if they get the time of the Reformation, one side you're emphasizing the historic continuity of the Church has found in its orders and across time the Church of the Creed and the Councils, emphasizing that historic connection, also emphasizing our sacramental life. And the Church of England, that's what we mean by the Anglican Church. Anglican Church means the Church has always been in England. It has a history, but it long precedes the Reformation. We often use Anglicanism to describe the Church simply since the Reformation, but it was always the Anglican Church. Just as in France, people in French history, for example, talk about the Gallic in Church, you know, had its own life, the Church in France had a life of its own. It had a relationship to the Church in Rome, it was part of, there was a connection, but it very much had a life of its own. So what we have is to the extent that even through the Reformation, we insist on a historical connection to the Catholic faith, in the sense of the Church of the Councils, the Church of the Creed, the three orders of ministry. And sacrament of life. But we are also very much at Church of the Reformed, which we often use the word Protestant. We absolutely agreed in the primacy of Scripture, the sole basis for, you know, everything necessary for salvation is to be found in the Scriptures of the Old New Testament, Scripture of the Sola. Mind you read together, the undivided Church, but nonetheless, Scripture of the Sola is the foundation of faith, and the idea that the essence of our faith is, we are justified by our faith. Justification by faith. So I think sometimes people use the term for via media the middle way. I don't really like the term because it sounds like a lowest common denominator. So you mean like the idea that the Anglican Church is kind of in the middle between Protestant and Catholic and kind of a way of reconciling the two? A third way, and what I don't like about it is I think it really doesn't do justice because that could sound like a reductionism, a lowest common denominator. Whereas I think it's actually the opposite. I think Anglicanism reaches out to the fullness of both sides. It is truly Catholic and it is truly Reformed. It's a Reformed Catholic Church in England. It's our ideal. Okay, fully Catholic and fully Reformed. So but that whole Reformation thing did happen, right? Totally did. So let's talk about the Reformation. What happened in England at the Reformation? Well, maybe we should talk for what happened in Europe at the time of the Reformation. A lot of things, a lot of dissatisfaction was coming across in European life about the Church. Everyone agrees. There's no disagreement anywhere, especially within the Roman Church and the need in the Western Church for Reformed. Okay. There certainly was a need for Reformed. So that's a universal that was given. The question is what nature would that Reformed take? And there are a number of challenges that might help our listeners to, that might be unaware of. One thing, for example, is in the late Middle Ages when we come to this time, we have a whole new class of people who are really arising, a very powerful class, a money middle class, the bourgeoisie, right? Basically, moneyed city class, you know, people who make money in a profoundly different way than people who made it in the past and they're powerful force. And because of their money, they're getting educations, we have the introduction of movable type, etc. People are more demanding about their religious faith. In a sense, as people have these opportunities and things, people are asking hard questions. Okay. Everyone knew that Reformed was necessary, but there were hard questions here, but part of that would be the increased group of people with the direct interest, other than professional religious. Okay. You know, a whole middle class, we had a serious interest in faith. So all of a sudden, people sitting in your pews and your parish are asking you pretty tough, tougher theological questions than you're used to as a priest. I think you have, you have more of that. Another thing that we would have, for example, would be, there are a lot of institutional crisis in the church. One of the things we have, for example, with religious orders and like, is there would be a difficulty. Religious orders have their ups and downs as far as over history. At the time of the Reformation were in a down period, there are many fine religious people that could be wrong here. But what we also had is the social rule, what two things would happen often caused a scandal. One would be, is that people would donate money to, let's say, to a monastery. And let's say the monastery used to have 200 monks. Okay. Well, that was 150 years ago. Now we have five left, but they're still sitting on all that money. Okay. You know, et cetera, there was a sense of the disproportionality of ecclesiastical resources. It often caused a scandal to people. So you might have a monastery over here with not very many monks in it, but it's still sitting on a pile of cash. And then you got a little parish over here serving a ton more people and their dirt poor or something like that. Right. Exactly. Okay. Also, you had trouble with basically in the religious life. Just remember that at this time, people had, how do you put it, had to basically park extra children in the like, like unmarriageable daughters to cost money to marry your daughter, et cetera. So what do you do with the extra, extra sons? So what you're saying is that at this point, there wasn't exactly a job market as we know it that you should go to college, get a job. No, it didn't work like that. Your parents would place you. Okay. Okay. You could, you could go into the, you know, again, for the, for the nobility, you could, with the son, you could go into the military, et cetera. But that's only so many basically extra sons and things often were put into the religious life, et cetera. But we also had part of our problem could be is some people went into religious life with minimal vocations. They weren't necessarily religious, but even in religious orders in Convence, for example, we think of Theresa Vavala, the great reformer in the Carblight Order. The reason that her, that the Convence of the Incarnation, for example, was a sinkhole and vice. These are good women. Yeah. It was more like a sorority house. When you hear the descriptions of the fact is not surprising, so then most of these women were sort of parked there. Okay. They tried to do the one to mass. They, they said the office, but a lot of the other time they spend visiting with people from town. So you're saying they weren't exactly taking it real seriously. The whole religious life aspect of it. Well, they weren't professionally. They, they, they tried to do their job as it were, but they weren't particularly necessarily impassioned, called. Now there were, this was not always true. There was some remarkably devout. So you gave Theresa, et cetera. Of course. But the point is there are a lot of these. It's up and down. It's a, you know, you have these kind of things that cost scandal. We have multiplicity of posts and people often had multiple different posts. Imagine if you had a, you know, people who are having several different posts to combine salaries. Oh, wow. Okay. This is happening. So you have a lot of these kind of abuses. Okay. Yeah. So all of these things are sort of coming, but everyone agrees that there's a, there's a need and there are doctrinal problems, frankly, that come from a lot of folk religion had crept in. How people looked at things. And so everyone agrees something needs to be done now. In our particular case in England, the operative factor for this is going to be a strange, diagnostic problem. You know, one of the things we, we, we can take as a given one of the joys of living in the modern age has been like a modern democracy. Is we take the transition of power as an automatic thing? We don't have to worry about civil wars and things in, in violence and things. When we have elections and things that this has been one of our, an amazing thing when you look at human history. In monarchies, a question as to who would succeed could lead to wars, would be the diagnostic struggles that involve everybody. Wars really were pretty, we're pretty awful. England, for example, got to the road, the roses and things over a dynastic struggle. Okay. I know what, I'm going to stop you right there because I know where this is going, right? We're about to get into Henry VIII. This is going to be my next question, Stephen, and there's no getting around it. The next one I always get is, "Oh, Anglicans, isn't that the church that simply existed to give Henry the 8th a divorce, right?" Yeah, there's no getting around Henry. No one's proud of Henry. I've got to tell you that. You're not going to see windows and Anglican churches celebrating Henry. However, to understand what happened here, and then to see how sometimes good can come out of bad, is what originally motivated. Henry later on, we know it's the famous six wives of Henry the 8th, etc. But that's not what happened originally with the famous divorce. What happened with the divorce is Henry, first of all, it's sort of an odd situation. He had an older brother Arthur who was supposed to be king. He's one of those junior varsity children. His brother was the one who placed kids. Actually, he did theological training. So he actually knew something. It's quite serious. He wrote a book for which he received title defender of the faith, called Defense of the Seven Sacraments. The kings and queens of England to this day retain the title defender of the faith. For the king of the queen? Yes, from that. People claim, well, no, he actually had some real theological training. No, he was serious training though, is that people might remember from Thomas Moore's trial, for example, if you've ever seen Man for all seasons, where Thomas Moore, when he was accused of writing that book, he said it is from first to last the king's book. But the point with Henry was that Arthur dies. Now we know marriages weren't a love match as when it came to kings. One of the disadvantages of being a king is your spouse would pretty much be chosen for political necessity, is the way you bound alliances, you bound houses together. And so Arthur was married to one of the most eligible women in Europe, as far as this way, was Catherine of Erigan. So when Arthur dies leading his widow, how do we maintain that alliance is she, well, the trouble was, she was his brother's wife. So what do we do about that? You're not supposed to marry your brother's widow. That's one of the commandments in the Torah, right? That's one of the prohibited degrees. You don't marry, remember, we have John the Baptist talking about, that's your brother's wife. You can't marry, but mind you, he was still alive. But in any of that, you can't believe he was still alive. But the point is this was an issue. But what happened is it got a dispensation from Rome. And the grounds for the dispensation of how could he marry was that the marriage had never been consummated with Arthur. They had been married, but they never actually lived together as men and wife. He died before that could happen. So the argument that that was a basis of declaring the marriage null, which allowed him. Now, he can't produce a male heir. Okay. Yeah. Now, unfortunately, knowing his little what they did about biology, they assumed that was the wife's fault. But he honestly thought, and also, because in the books of Moses, it actually talks about one of the punishments of violating this, would be not producing errors. So he actually, we probably would also say, he came to actually believe that he was being punished for that the church had authorized him to do something. It shouldn't have authorized him to do. But regardless, politically, there's a strong motivation. You've got to do something to produce a male heir, because especially a woman being in line of succession wouldn't be the obvious thing of our day, could seriously result in people trying to move in, push her out, and put someone else on the throne. So what basically happens, you could, some other show, when people are really, really tired and want to get some sleep, we could talk about some of the details, it's actually a fascinating story. But what really happens, though, is that those are the practical reasons that lead to the break with Rome. You know, over this is the divorce. Rome will not grant the divorce. It has to balance things on the continent. There are issues about questioning its dispensation, but it does not give the divorce. It's being actually being leaned on by Catherine's brother. On the other side, at one time, I believe you actually occupied Rome. Wow. Not for that reason, but the point would be, a lot of people thought this is a good time with a break, anyway, to really reevaluate the relationship. Okay. There are two things I should say here. If we said the national churches were much more independent than we would think. For example, the church in France called the Gallican Church had considerable autonomy from Rome. They were Roman Catholics. They never broke from the church of Rome. However, the church had a separate life of its own. For example, when the Council of Trent meets, the decrees cannot be put into place. It has no power legally to enact decree until they were approved by the King of France. He has to approve them before they can be implemented in France. So we have that issue. Also, the idea of the state getting involved and cleaning up the church is a pretty old Christian idea from this. Sadly. Remember Constantine? Why do we have the Council in ICA as there is division in the church? Empire wants this to be a source of unity and believe that it's duty if you're the Christian prince. You're coming into… Part of your responsibility is to help to protect the church. Where Charlemagne was involved in church reforms to help the church, you know, live its life better to clean things up to help with the liturgy and things. This was considered a sort of natural thing. King's did. He did have a history of being involved. Okay. So we'd strike us as odd today. Right. So but back then that would not have been considered odd. Okay. The extent to which government would think of somehow getting involved. If you are the Christian king of England, that you would actually as part of your response to some connection with the well-being of the church in England. Okay. I see. So that would have been a more natural idea than it wouldn't be for us today. So that wouldn't have been way, way out of bounds. But the important thing for us is what does happen is this is a point which everyone's going to have to deal with whether Roman Catholic with a counter-reformation with us is how are we going to deal with this need for reform? Right. And this is what gives way to our unique reform in England. And thanks partly to Henry's conservatism in theological matters. Henry was very Catholic. Yeah. Really? That's right. It's a ironic-- Very Catholic. Yeah. To the extent that he resisted moving away from the traditional roots of the church very much so. So we have more of a balance in the English reformation between the idea of maintaining our strong connection with the historic church. And also with what's brought from the continental reformation, justification by faith, the emphasis on Scripture, these kind of participation of the people, this has very much become. So we end up because of that, maybe starting out with Henry's conservatism. And about a genuine reformation, we end up with sort of a unique place in the reformation. Interesting. Let's talk about the unique place. So what were the reforms in the English-- in the English reformation that became really central and crucial? Well, we did completely adopt theologic of the emphasis on the Scripture as being our solar scripture. Mind you, read by the church and the tradition in the sense of the undivided, the faith of the councils, the faith of the creeds, and emphasizing justification by faith. But also one thing that was the idea of the priesthood of all believers, the active involvement of, for example, our emphasis on liturgy in the language, we say, "A language understanding of the people." That's the actual word I love that. We should worship in English and make things as easy for people to participate. So the book of common prayer is a matter of taking all things that used to be multiple different books. It's putting them all together in a very usable form, a very accessible form. In England, making sure a Bible, when books were very expensive, a Bible in every church in England. In English. They had chain, they'd have to chain them because of their value so that anyone could consult. So these are, you know, the idea of the divine office, again, the morning evening prayers. We talked about another episode. Had become something you had to be professionally religious, the Latin and the complications of a simple form that everybody really could and does use. We were very proud of that in our tradition, the morning evening prayer, part of our regular life of regular everyday Anglicans, not something even in the Roman church they've tried in the Second Vatican Council to restore that. But essentially it's rare as a Roman Catholic, other who's not religious in a sense of a priest or a nun or a brother who reads the divine office, they call it the "anglicanism." It's part of our common, it's sort of restored as the prayer of the church in the Board of Sands. Yeah. Well, so explain one last thing to me before we go. So we come out of the Reformation with no longer recognizing, no longer being "papists," I guess you'd say. That's always the word for it. But there's probably some nuances there. But, you know, we in the Anglican church don't have a, we don't have a pope. And so can you explain the distinction there? Well, something we share with the Eastern Church. Yes, that's true. You know, the sense of, the real question is what is the place of the Church of Rome and the Bishop of Rome? And maybe a way to look at this, I think we've talked about Ignatius of Antioch. I think we might have mentioned the fact that in the early church, one of the, the Church Mr. Rome was with him. is very, very highly regarded and consulted. But the primary reason we see it, we've talked about Irenaeus and the like, is that Peter and Paul were both there. And so when people are looking for examples of, you know, what do we have example of really good practice? Is, but the idea of the special role of Peter as the keys of the kingdom being given to him is not really what we're talking about here as it's the Church of Peter and Paul. - Yeah. - But the idea that there was a unique authority of this church over other churches is certainly was something that was never recognized. You know, special role the spokesman perhaps, you know, organized, but the idea that they would have a ruling role over the other churches is simply was never accepted by the Eastern churches. That's sort of something that is developed over the centuries and it's become more and more pronounced. Remember the doctrine of people and fallibility is something that dates to the only to the 19th century. - Right. - And it's a formal enunciation this way. - Sure. So again, you know, the Henry and the Englishers have never disclaimed the village, they would say the Bishop of Rome is exactly that, the Bishop of Rome, of a very noble sea of the church, but the idea that he had any direct authority in England. Another thing, for example, is that we put us together with the Orthodox. Would be the idea of direct universal jurisdiction. Is we essentially believe all bishops share inequality. - In the Roman Catholic church, is the Pope has this unique authority. He can directly intervene anywhere. It's not just like an appellate court. And the Orthodox world or in the Anglican world, the idea, no, every bishop, you know, bishops work together. We meet together synods or councils and things, but there is no one who is the real boss who can go in, that we don't have that role. So we look upon that as an ongoing, a development in Rome. - And our archbishop would be simply kind of, like a first among equals. - First among equals, a gatherer. Symbolic, someone who can call things together, but he has no authority. There is no structurally, he doesn't set doctrine. - Sure. - That's where we have Lambeth conferences, came from, in Anglican churches, when an issue did come up in South Africa over some practice in doctrine, is we got all the bishops together. - Yeah, yeah. - But the idea of this unique role, for example, in, with the question of the assumption of Mary, which is a doctrine, which is only from the 1950s, is the Pope sent a letter to the bishops around the world seeing if they had objections. He was going to announce this as a infallible. And that's the kind of place we would be born to us. We don't see anyone having that kind of role. We have a deposit of faith, the bishops, each in their own diocese share equal jurisdiction. And when there's a problem that affects what happens and something goes wrong, the church gets together, all the bishops get together, deal with the common family problem. - Okay. - Yeah. - And why someone might be like, we have the Archbishop of Canterbury, someone might be used to bring us together, is they have no, they aren't the settlers. We're not just advising that person who makes a decision. - Okay, yeah. - In Rome, that's really true. I mean, Pope essentially has the power to make any decision. - Yeah. - Even a council advises him, but he could overture, you know, for us, you could call, but no one has that power. - Right, right, okay. And so this wouldn't have been regarded as, you know, as sort of throwing off something that's always been around, but rather that we would be returning to something more like how the early church functioned and how the Eastern church has always functioned. - Well, I would also say that what we look at the papacy today is very different even from the papacy of the time. Remember, we just came out of the great sism. The idea that there was no formal doctrine of a fallibility and think, I think it's a mistake historically to project back today's papacy with those doctrines, even the 16th century. - Yeah, so the papacy itself looked different. - Look very different. - Okay. - It was a very important source of authority, but it certainly was not the infallible papacy of today. It's interesting that the term that actually was used by Henry VIII, I told you by he was very Catholic, was he refused to surrender the term Catholic to Roman Catholics. - Yeah, he called them Pope Catholics. (laughing) So it's taking another great, but to understand that he very much saw himself as weird as Catholic as anywhere else were the Catholic church in England. - Yeah. - Like the Gallic in church was the Catholic church in France, and it's incarnation in France was the Gallic in church. - Okay, yeah. - Well great, well thanks Father Steven. That's all the time we have left for this episode. Again, we'll be talking more about Anglicanism about our own tradition as well. - I should be so surprised if we didn't receive it. (laughing) - What are two letters? - Hey, bring 'em on. Send 'em to word table [email protected]. We're happy to receive all letters. And leave us a review. Leave us a little feedback if you have time on iTunes. And we will see you guys next week on Word in Table for more on liturgy sacrament and the great tradition of Christian worship. Thanks for listening. ♪ That all we make ♪ ♪ We watch with Christ ♪ ♪ And I'll sleep rest in peace ♪