Via Media Inter Vias Medias

 The Anglican form of the Christian faith has often been described as a via media or “middle road.”   This is usually taken to be a compliment, a positive evaluation, one which evokes Aristotle’s idea of virtue as the path that lies between two extremes of vice.   In the case of the Anglican faith, its middle way is customarily said to fall between Catholicism and Protestantism.   

 

The roots of this way of explaining the Anglican faith can be found in the English Reformation.   In its fullest sense, the English Reformation is a period of history that can be said to have begun prior to Luther when the Christian version of Renaissance humanism spread to England and gave rise to scholastic criticism of ecclesiastical abuses and stretched all the way to the Restoration in which Charles II was brought back to his throne and the episcopal order was brought back to the Church of England.    The traditional and historical formularies of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion – the Coverdale Psalter, Cranmer’s English liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, etc. – all came out of the long English Reformation. 

 

There are two important events which intersect this period.   The first is the reign of Mary (1553-1558) which saw the Church of England temporarily brought back under papal rule.   The second is the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in which the papacy and its adherents responded to the continental Reformation.   Note that the years of the first event are contained entirely within those of the second.   Both events had a tremendous impact on the course of the English Reformation.   Apart from them it is unlikely that the trajectory of the English Reformation would ever have been thought of in terms of a middle way and instead the English Reformation would have been simply regarded as being the slowest moving, most cautious and conservative, part of the same Protestant Reformation that was occurring in continental Europe.

 

In the Council of Trent, however, Rome had launched the Counter Reformation, in which she reformed herself with regards to many of the most grievous examples of complaints against her that were of the nature of moral corruption, but doubled down on the doctrines to which the Reformers had objected, working out a comprehensive theological defence of such doctrines (1) and beginning an aggressive campaign aimed at bringing the Protestants back under the papal yoke.  Meanwhile the persecutions of the reign of Mary had radicalized a certain kind of English Protestant, both by hardening him against the oppression of Rome and by driving him into exile in Geneva where he came under the influence of republican Calvinists.   Thus the Puritan was born.  When the Church of England reintroduced the earlier reforms in the reign of Elizabeth I, it was therefore assaulted on two sides, from the new Roman Catholic apologists armed with Tridentine ammunition and from the Puritans.   This forced her to clarify her own position, which naturally took the form of a via media between these two extremes.   Officially, this position was defined by the Elizabethan Settlement, but the post-Mary, post-Trent period also saw the most skilled apologists that the Church of England has ever known work out the theological case for her stance.   The foremost example of these was Richard Hooker whose extensive articulation and defence of the basic principles of the Church was written against Puritanism’s extreme claims.   Following shortly after Hooker, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes defended the same against Tridentine theology and its Jesuit apologists such as Cardinal Bellarmine, in the reign of James I.

 

While there is much to commend the via media method of explaining the Anglican faith it has one major drawback.   The expression itself, taken in its most literal sense, suggests that Anglicanism is neither Catholic nor Protestant.   The middle space between any two locations lies neither in the one nor the other.   Yet this is close to being the opposite of what many – probably most - people who use the expression via media mean by it.    What they would mean by the via media is that the Anglican faith reject the either/or dichotomy between Catholicism and Protestantism that came out of the continental Protestant Reformation and choses instead to be both Catholic and Protestant.   While the image of middle territory is sometimes used in a both/and sense, in ordinary usage this does not escape the sense of neither/nor, for it means being partially on the one side, partially on the other, like the overlapping region in a Venn Diagram.  This is hardly a satisfying image for those traditional Anglicans who would insist that our faith and Church are both fully Catholic and fully Protestant.  (2)

 

I would suggest, therefore, that it would be helpful when referring to traditional, orthodox, Anglicanism as the via media between Catholicism and Protestantism that we add the explanation that we are using this expression in a special sense that means fully both/and rather than partially both/and or neither/nor.    Furthermore I would suggest that we also add that our faith’s full Catholicism and full Protestantism are viae mediae themselves.   Which finally brings us to what the title of this essay asserts – that as a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglicanism is a via media between two other viae mediae.

 

To explain what I mean by this, I would first note that the Right Reverend Peter Robinson, the presiding bishop of a continuing Anglican communion, the United Episcopal Church of North America, has often said that if Anglicanism is a via media, it is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, that is to say, between Lutheranism and Calvinism.   In his article from eight years ago, entitled The Reformed Face of Anglicanism, he discussed how Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s own theological journey left its mark on the Church of England.   When Cranmer initially embraced the doctrines of the continental Protestant Reformation it was in the form of Lutheranism, but, according to Robinson, he later moved in the direction of a moderate Calvinism.    The Anglican liturgy, he says, reflects Cranmer’s early Lutheranism, but the Articles of Religion reflect his later, moderate Calvinism.   

 

At that point, Bishop Robinson’s concept of Anglicanism as a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism seemed to amount to being Lutheran in practice and mild Calvinist in doctrine.   That the Church of England, as it emerged from the English Reformation, was officially, albeit moderately, Calvinist in theology is the point of his essay.   His arguments that Anglican theology was moderately Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, at least insofar as the official Articles are concerned, are not particularly convincing in that the points he mentions are mostly ones on which Calvinism and Lutheranism are agreed (“centrality of Scripture”, “monergistic position on Justification”), and on the one mentioned point where there is a disagreement between Lutheranism and Calvinism,  “predestination and election”,  the official Articles are clearly closer to Lutheranism than Calvinism.   The essential difference between Lutheranism (3) and Calvinism on this doctrine is that Lutheranism rejects reprobation, and there is no mention of reprobation anywhere in the Seventeenth Article.   Interestingly, Bishop Robinson, by mentioning that the Lambeth Articles, which contained the concept of double predestination but were not made official, having been rejected by the Queen, provides indirect testimony that the official theology of Anglicanism is closer to Lutheranism than Calvinism on this issue.  

 

His essay of three years later entitled “The Middle Way” is much better in this regards.   Here, he stresses the relationship between the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Augsburg, making the Articles therefore basically Lutheran in theology but which “can and do strike off on their own occasionally, such as in Articles 28 and 29 concerning the Eucharist, which are clearly Reformed.”   This is a much more accurate account of the theology of the Articles.   Interestingly, John Calvin’s own theology was – and, I would argue, consciously so on Calvin’s part – itself a via media between Lutheranism and Zwinglianism.  (4)  This is worth noting here particularly because many would consider the most obvious example of this to be the very subject on which Bishop Robinson identifies the doctrine of the Articles as being Reformed.  (5)

 

If Bishop Robinson is right, and I think he is, that the Anglican Church’s Protestantism is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, then as a special sort of  fully both/and via media between Catholicism and Protestantism it is a via media inter vias medias, because Anglicanism’s Catholicism is obviously itself a via media between Rome and Constantinople.

 

In the English Reformation, the Anglican Church in many ways reverted to the Catholicism of the early centuries of Church history that predated the Romanism against which the Reformers protested.  (6)  This meant returning to many doctrines, practices, and structures which in the Eastern Orthodox Church had persisted from the earlier Catholicism all along.  

 

The rejection of papal supremacy is only the most obvious example of this.   By retaining the three-fold clerical order clearly established by the Apostles in the New Testament, (7) but rejecting the claims of the Patriarch of Rome to supremacy over the entire Church, the Anglican Church returned to what the old Catholicism had asserted against prelates interfering in the jurisdiction of others in the canons of the ecumenical Councils, and which had remained the position of the Eastern Church all along, most notably reiterated in the East/West Schism of 1054 AD.   In the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury is, like the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in the Eastern Church, considered primus inter pares, which is the honour the early Church had awarded to the Patriarch of Rome before he elevated himself above all other bishops, declared himself infallible, and transformed his office into the papacy.

 

Other examples in which Anglican reforms returned to early Church practices that had been retained in Eastern Orthodoxy all along include allowing the clergy to marry and distributing the Eucharist in both kinds to the laity.

 

In other areas, however, Anglicanism continued to follow the Latin interpretation of the Catholic tradition.   The most obvious example of this can be found in Cranmer’s translation of the Nicene Creed which asserts of the Holy Ghost that He “proceedeth from the Father and the Son”, thus including the filioque which played such an important role in the Great Schism.   The use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist is another example.   A further example, can be found in what we have seen of Anglicanism’s Protestantism.  If Anglican Protestantism is a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism it is a via media between two forms of Augustinianism.   St. Augustine of Hippo had a much larger influence over the theology of the Western Church than of the Eastern Church and, indeed, the Eastern theologians frequently identify St. Augustine as the source of all that they consider to be the errors of the Western tradition.

 

So we see that as a special kind of via media between Catholicism and Protestantism that is fully both at the same time, Anglicanism is a via media between two other viae mediae in the more literal sense – a Catholicism that falls between that of the Western and Eastern traditions and a Protestantism that is somewhere between Lutheranism and Calvinism.

 

(1) (1)   This aspect of the Council of Trent had an effect on Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.    The reason for this should be evident.   It created the need for Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist theologians to develop a theological response, not just to what the first generation Reformers had perceived as Rome’s doctrinal errors, but to the more elaborate Tridentine theological framework.    In Lutheranism and Calvinism, this response became what is known as Protestant scholasticism.   In the same period, Anglicanism worked out its own theological answer to Trent, examples of which can be seen in Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini (1610) and Archbishop William Laud’s A Relation of the Conference Between William Laud, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit, By the Command of King James (1639).   Doctrinally, Andrewes’ and Laud’s responses are similar to those of the Protestant scholastics, but methodologically they are quite different.   Like the writings of earlier Anglican apologists such as Bishop Jewell and Richard Hooker, these are saturated with Patristic citations.   For Andrewes and Laud, a sufficient defence of Anglican Protestantism against the claims of Rome and Tridentine theology required demonstrating that the Church Fathers were on their side.

(2)   (2) A more fitting image is the one that Dr. Ron Dart has used to contrast the Anglican approach with that of the more schismatic versions of Protestantism.   The image is of a garden – the Catholic tradition – which has weeds in it – the errors and abuses of fifteenth-sixteenth century Rome.   You can either destroy the garden altogether because of the weeds – the approach of schismatic Protestantism – or you can weed the garden – the approach of the English Reformers.   You can hear Ron Dart explain this in his short video “Is the Anglican Way Protestant? Via Media” here, but I would also recommend reading his self-published 2017 book Erasmus: Wild Bird.   The third and fourth chapters which discuss the relationship between Erasmus and English Christianity are particularly relevant.

(3)   (3) The Lutheran tradition as a whole rejects the idea of double predestination, which includes the idea of reprobation, i.e., a predestination to damnation.   Calvinists maintain that on this point Luther himself was a Calvinist rather than a Lutheran.   They may be correct about this.   My own reading of Luther and Calvin and the traditions that bear their names, suggests that the Calvinist tradition, especially the English Calvinist tradition, deviated earlier and further from Calvin, than the Lutheran tradition ever deviated from Luther.   Calvin reads like a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist on far more issues – assurance of salvation and the extent of the atonement being two that immediately come to mind – than Luther reads like a Calvinist, but of course that can hardly be said to constitute evidence that the reverse is never the case.

(4)   (4) The Lutheran and Reformed traditions diverged due to differences of interpretation between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, the first major leader of the Swiss Reformation and the first theologian of the Reformed tradition.   John Calvin, the French lawyer who was recruited by William Farel to lead the Reformation in Geneva, became the most influential leader of the Swiss Reformation and lent his name to the entire Reformed tradition.   In saying that his theology was a via media between Luther and Zwingli, I mean that with regards to several of the points of contention between Zwingli and Luther he took what was basically Zwingli’s position but modified in a way that moved it closer to the views of Luther and Melanchthon.  

(5)   (5) That Calvin’s view of the Eucharist is mediatory to Luther’s and Zwingli’s does not necessarily depend upon the identification of Zwingli’s understanding of the Eucharist with memorialism.   Memorialism is the view that denies the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and asserts that the Lord’s Supper is only a symbolic memorial of Christ’s sacrifice.   Although Zwingli is widely thought to have taught this, this has not been incontrovertibly established to be the case.   Memorialism has only ever been the official doctrine of the sects that separated from the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation.   The latter all affirm the Real Presence.   All of Protestantism concurred in rejecting the Romanist doctrine of transubstantiation – that when the celebrant pronounces the words of institution the substance of the bread and wine is replaced with that of the Body and Blood of Christ producing a “real absence” of the bread and wine in all but appearance.   In rejecting the Roman error, however, the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions all steered clear of falling into the opposite error of memorialism, and affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.   The understanding of what the Real Presence meant differed from tradition to tradition. Lutheranism declared that while the Body and Blood did not magically replace the bread and wine, they were nevertheless literally present and were received by the participants in the same way that the bread and wine were themselves received.   The Reformed leaders rejected the Lutheran interpretation and maintained that the Real Presence is “spiritual” “mystical” or “heavenly.”   This, of course, invited the Lutheran response of saying that the distinction between this and the memorialist outright rejection of the Real Presence was mere semantics.   This was arguably accurate with regards to Zwingli, for whom the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist seemed hardly distinguishable from His presence among the faithful on non-sacramental occasions, but there was no consensus among the Reformed leaders as to what these terms themselves signified.   Calvin took a slight but significant step away from Zwingli towards Luther in asserting that the Sacrament itself was the instrumental means whereby the “spiritual” Real Presence was communicated to the faithful.   Bishop Robinson is, of course, correct to say that the Thirty Nine Articles take the Reformed position – “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the means whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.”    Note, however, that the phrase “an heavenly and spiritual manner” can be understood either as an answer to the question of “how” Christ is present in the Sacrament or an assertion that God has not given us the answer to this question and that it would be impious on our part to try and answer it.    The latter is how Archbishop Laud explained the Anglican position in his response to the Jesuit Fisher, referred to above in note one.   The Roman and Lutheran positions, different as they are, he maintained, both make the same mistake of trying to provide a detailed explanation of what God has left a mystery.   Ironically, the Puritans, who regarded themselves as followers of Calvin, accused him of trying to smuggle Romanism back into the Anglican Church by teaching the Real Presence.   The Anglican view of the Real Presence as he defended it to Fisher, however, was indistinguishable from Calvin’s own.

(6)  (6) The Church of England, like the Churches of the continental Magisterial Reformation, but unlike the separatist sects, rejected Rome’s equation of Roman with Catholic.   To illustrate the distinction between the two in terms of doctrine, the Apostles and Nicene Creeds are Catholic, the doctrines of papal supremacy and infallibility are Roman.   In the Reformation and post-Reformation Anglican Church the key to understanding what is Catholic has been the Vincentian Canon, i.e., St. Vincent of Lerin’s remark in his Commonitorium (434) that the Catholic faith is that which – obviously, within the context of the Church rather than the world – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, creditum est” or “has been believed everwhere, always, and by all.”   Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ remark “One canon reduced to writing by God Himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries, that is, before Constantine, and the two after, determine the boundary of our faith” can be taken as traditional Anglicanism’s footnote commentary on the Vincentian Canon.

(7)  (7) The Apostles themselves were the first and highest order, established by Christ Himself.  They established the other two, of the presbyters (elders) and deacons.   While the followers of Calvin introduced confusion regarding this matter by pointing to the fact that the Scriptures use the term which in subsequent eras of the Church was applied to the highest order, bishops (episcopoi in Greek, literally “overseers” or “administrators”), interchangeably with presbyters, there very epistles in which this interchangeable usage occurs rebuts the Calvinist interpretation.   Those are the epistles written to Timothy and Titus, in which St. Paul gave these individuals instructions regarding the ordination of presbyters/bishops and deacons.   This demonstrates that Timothy and Titus themselves belonged to an order above the presbyters/bishops and deacons which had the power of ordaining the lower orders.   This was the order of the Apostles themselves, to which Timothy and Titus had been elevated.   Timothy and Titus are not addressed by the title – Apostle – which was used for all previous members of this order, which is perhaps the first indication that it had been decided that while the order would continue the title would be reserved for the individuals who had been directly commissioned by Christ.   This decision is what created the need for another title, and it was quickly decided – before the first century was even over – that rather than coin another one, the alternate title for presbyters would from then on be reserved for the order that had begun as the Apostles.   Anyone who thinks that because the term was used to refer to one thing in the New Testament but to a different thing in subsequent generations, the latter usage is therefore somehow “wrong” should read I Samuel 9:9.   If the same thing can be called by one name in one period and a different one in a later, as the Scriptures there assert without passing any moral judgement on the change in usage, then it stands to reason that there can be no Scriptural objection to a single word meaning one thing in one period and another in a later.