The Catholicity of the Prayer Book Part V

The Anglicanism that emerged out of the 16th century unquestionably involved a drastic overhaul of church’s government, doctrine and worship, a reform which catholic traditionalists think went too far – just as advanced protestants think it did not go far enough. Though it was not the first time the catholic tradition underwent reforms, yet it was more drastic than most. On what basis can we claim those reforms as consistent with the catholic tradition?

It is generally recognized that the reformation was built on the basis of the “return to sources” pioneered by catholic humanists like Erasmus. The humanists looked back beyond the selective use by medieval theologians of anthologized quotations from the Church Fathers and the Bible, to recover the Scriptures and Church Fathers in their original languages and full form. It was on the basis of this recovery of catholic antiquity that the reformers critiqued what was to them catholic modernity. As is well known, for instance, the Reformers were much influenced by the teaching about sin and grace developed by the 5th century church father Augustine in controversy with the Pelagians; and on that basis the reformers sharply criticized the Pelagian tendencies in the late medieval church’s teaching and practice on good works. Over the tendency to salvation by works, they asserted that good works are the effect of saving grace, not its cause.

But that’s not the only element of ancient catholic doctrine that drove the reform. Of even greater importance, perhaps, was their rethinking of the ancient catholic theology of grace on the basis of the ancient catholic theology of Christ (as established by the ancient catholic councils, from Nicea to Chalcedon.) Late medieval teaching on grace tended to individualism, focusing on the relation of the individual soul to God. This turned salvation into a kind of chutes and ladders game, of merits earned and lost through good works or bad. In their teaching on salvation the reformers reasserted not only the priority of grace but also the centrality of Christ’s person and the sufficiency of Christ’s work as the sole Mediator of God and men. It is by sharing in the righteousness of Christ that we attain to God. Thus the catholic tradition on grace was rethought in and through the catholic doctrine of Christ.

At the heart of the catholic doctrine of Christ is what it said about his nature (‘what’ he is), and about his person (‘who’ he is). It affirmed the unconfused distinction of the two natures of Christ, divine and human, and their inseparable unity in his person. In thinking about how we participate in the righteousness of Christ, this principle of distinction without separation applies. On this basis the reformers insisted on the distinction between justifying grace (by faith only) and sanctifying grace (in good works) while at the same time affirming their inseparable unity. (Faith unfruitful in good works does not justify.) The same distinction without separation carries over in the doctrine of the sacraments, in which the reformers distinguished the outward and visible sign from the inward and spiritual grace; while affirming the sign as the means whereby we receive the grace it signifies. In accord with the Christological paradigm, therefore, the sacrament has both natural and supernatural aspects; and though the natural elements of bread and wine acquire (by the operation of the Word and Spirit) the supernatural efficacy of Christ’s body and blood, they retain the integrity of their nature as bread and wine. To declare their natural substance abolished, as did the medieval teaching of transubstantiation, “overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament”. It departs from the Christological paradigm.

And his will is that we should love one another as he has loved us; and to serve one another with the gifts he has given us for that purpose, “as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10). When we talk about “stewardship”, therefore, we are talking not just about the church’s financial needs, but our own status and identity in the family of God. That’s why the offering of alms and oblations is an act of worship: it is a thankful response to fatherly love of God, not just in feeling but in action.