Abstract
Theology From an Anglican Perspective
Anyone who imagines Anglicanism is a haven of sweet reasonableness in religion, undogmatic and with fuzzy boundaries, let alone a deliberate via media resting on a three-legged stool of scripture, tradition and reason, would be well advised to read Mark Chapman’s book. It would thoroughly disabuse them of such notions.
Chapman declares that ‘conflict is the normal state of Anglican theology throughout history’. He illustrates this from the time of the Henrican reformation to the present day. He provides a history of Anglican theology and employs the complementary skills of the historian and the theologian exceptionally well.
Developments in Anglican theology are dealt with chronologically following an introductory chapter about the nineteenth century. Chapman succeeds in showing how contemporary and disputed understandings of Anglicanism owe much to Victorian reinterpretation of Anglican history. Such revisionism was prompted partly because a reformed Parliament in the 1830s could no longer be regarded as a lay Synod of the Church of England.
The leaders of the Oxford Movement reinterpreted the Elizabethan settlement in their quest to re-catholicise the Church of England. They had remarkable success in reshaping Anglican self-understanding though they did not have it all their own way. Chapman describes how the Parker Society republished the writings of the English Reformers in the service of a more Protestant and evangelical understanding of Anglican identity. By contrast the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology focussed chiefly on seventeenth century Anglican writers, recruiting the Caroline divines to their cause. If the Church of England’s self-understanding changed in the mid-nineteenth century, what it changed into was itself disputed and continues to be so to this day. It happened just when Anglican missionary endeavour led to the growth of a world-wide communion to which these divisions were exported.
Chapman could be accused of a much too anglocentric approach, given the world-wide nature of the Anglican Communion and the provincial autonomy of its constituent churches. He concedes this but argues for his historical approach in the light of the ahistorical bias of much recent work on Anglicanism within the Communion itself. Classical Anglican texts from the sixteenth or seventeenth century scarcely rate a mention in many explorations of The Anglican Way. Perhaps the most influential defining characteristic of modern Anglicanism is found in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. In it, the scriptures, creeds and the gospel sacraments provide the first three foundations of Anglicanism (shared with many Christian traditions) with the fourth being the historic episcopate. For a tradition which believed that episcopal ordering of the Church was not part of its esse, it may be regarded as surprising that the historic episcopate has become such a non-negotiable dimension of Anglicanism. Chapman’s book explains why. It also helps the reader to understand why so many contemporary Anglican discontents are centred on bishops. It is a fascinating story, very well told. Chapman describes Anglicanism’s complexity as both infuriating and exciting. So it is.