The expression via media has often been used to describe the Anglican position with regards to Catholicism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other. It is a positive expression that evokes Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean, the path of virtue from which if you veer off in either direction you fall into one of two ditches of opposing vices. It is misleading, however, in that it suggests that the Anglican position is neither Catholic nor Protestant but something in between. The classical position of the reformed Ecclesia Anglicana – the English Church, planted early in the first millennium, as reformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – however, is not a neither/nor but a both/and. If we are to continue to use the expression, therefore, it needs to be with the explanation that it means our Church is both Catholic and Protestant and not that it is neither one nor the other.
Obviously
for the Anglican Church to be Catholic, Catholic cannot be defined by communion
with or submission to the Patriarch of Rome commonly called the Pope. St. Vincent of Lérins in the fifth
century defined the faith of the Catholic Church as that “which has been believed everywhere, always, by all”,
that is, what the Church as a whole has taught and believed since the Apostles,
excluding that which has been unique to one location or to one time
period. In accordance with this
principle, the English Reformers looked to the undivided Church of the early
centuries as normative when carrying out their reforms.
Similarly for the Anglican Church to be Protestant,
Protestant cannot mean what it often means in online “Catholic versus
Protestant” debates, that is, North American evangelical. Since North American evangelicalism tends to
take as normative the doctrines of dissenting separatist groups that grew out
of the Puritan movement that was discontent with the conservatism of the
English Reformation and demanded more radical reforms to conform the Church to
the model of Calvin’s Geneva it would make little sense to define Anglican
Protestantism this way. We should also
be cautious about using the Five Solas to define Anglican Protestantism. The Five Solas are a twentieth century
formulation, drawn up by Calvinists who wanted a five-point summary of the
doctrines of the Reformation to correspond to the five-point summary of their
doctrine of predestination. The Anglican
Church in the Reformation agreed with the Lutherans and Calvinists that the
Bible is the supreme authority to which the Church must conform her doctrine
and that the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ is received by faith and not
earned by works or merit. In her
Articles of Religion, however, she does not use the type of language found in
the fifth article of the Belgic Confession of Faith when expressing the supremacy
of Scriptural authority but speaks rather of the sufficiency of Scriptures (1). In the English version of the eleventh
article (the original text of the Articles of Religion was in Latin), sola is rendered as “only” rather than
“alone”, which, with the exception of one marginal note, is also how Archbishop
Cranmer consistently referred to the doctrine in the homily to which the
article points (2). The distinction,
while small, is not insignificant. “Only”
usually excludes others from a class or category while “alone” usually
indicates their absence. Therefore, to
convey in English that faith is the sole means whereby we receive the gift of
saving grace (3) without suggesting that it exists in a vacuum apart from
repentance, love, works and the like in the human heart, the “only” of the
Anglican formularies is to be preferred over the “alone” that is usual with
other Protestants.
The Anglican Church to which the both Catholic and
Protestant via media belongs, it
needs to be pointed out, is the orthodox portion of the Anglican Church and not
the part that has succumbed to the revisionist theology that is usually called
liberalism. Liberalism, despite naming
itself after the virtue of generosity implying a kind of broadmindedness, is
neither/nor with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than
both/and. Moreover, it is not
neither/nor in the sense the literal meaning of via media implies, the
occupation of middle territory between, but neither/nor in the sense that it
rejects much that is common to both Catholicism and Protestantism in their
classical senses.
I have recently read three books which all affirm the “both
Catholic and Protestant” understanding of the Anglican tradition. The first of these is a short monograph
entitled The Anglican Way: Evangelical
and Catholic which was written by the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon and was first
published by Morehouse - Barlow in 1983.
The edition I have is the 2010 edition put out by WIPF & STOCK of Eugene,
Oregon. The second is entitled Reformed Catholic Anglicanism which has
multiple contributors and which was edited by Charles F. Camlin, Charles D.
Erlandson, and Joshua L. Harper. It was
published by the Anglican Way Institute which is an outreach of the Church of
the Holy Communion Cathedral (Reformed Episcopal Church) in Dallas, Texas in
2024. The third is The Gospel and the Catholic Church by the Most Reverend A. Michael
Ramsay, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury. This book was written early in Ramsay’s
ministry, long before he became the Anglican Primate, and was first published
in 1936 by Longmans and Company. I read
the 2010 edition put out by Hendrickson Publishers of Peabody, Massachusetts. In the cases of the last two books, it is the
e-book editions for Kindle that I have and which I read.
I will defer further discussion of the second and third books to
future essays and focus on Toon’s for the remainder of this one. The author of this book was an Anglican
priest and theology professor originally from the Diocese of Liverpool who
ministered in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life, where
he led the American version of the Prayer Book Society. Other books of his that I have read in the
last two years are his Knowing God
Through Liturgy which is a sort of devotional guide to the Book of Common Prayer and his Neither Archaic nor Obsolete: The Language
of Common Prayer and Public Worship co-written with Louis R. Tarsitano
which defends the ongoing use of the Elizabethan language of the Prayer Book
against the recent trend for “updated” liturgy (I found his argument for
retaining the singular pronoun for addressing God as more theologically proper
than using the numerically generic “you” quite compelling). I have also
recently read the 2012 Gedenkschrift (4) that Roberta Bayer edited entitled Reformed and Catholic: Essays in Honor
(sic) of Peter Toon. Just how important the theme of the book
under consideration here was to Toon is indicated by the fact that the title of
this memorial collection was chosen to evoke its subtitle.
The book is not a long one.
Its ninety-four pages are divided into a preface and two introductory
chapters, followed by Part One: The Evangel, which has two chapters, Part Two:
Catholicity, which has two chapters, and Epilogue which in its listing in the
Table of Contents confusingly looks like a third chapter to Part Two, and two
Appendices.
In the first chapter in the introductory section entitled
“God’s Call” Toon expresses the both/and approach to Anglicanism in terms of
the Church’s call:
In other words, the
call of God to the Episcopal Church in these times, when the one Church of God
is sadly divided, is that it should be simultaneously evangelical and
catholic. This does not mean that she is
to be evangelical in her preaching and catholic in her liturgy. It is not a matter of being sometimes
evangelical and sometimes catholic. The
Church is called to be catholic and evangelical all the time in all that she is
and does. (p. 11)
For the remainder of the chapter Toon elaborates on this by
talking about how an evangelicalism that neglects “the wholeness of the one
Church in space and time. The beauty of Liturgy, the symbolic power of
sacraments, the depth of spirituality, and the episcopate as a sign of unity”
(p. 12) and a Catholicity in which “the treasure of the Gospel is lost
somewhere in thick layers of tradition which reach back into the dim past”
(ibid) both fall short. “There must always be the primacy of Jesus Christ, who
is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (p. 13) he reminds us, for “Without
him there is no Gospel and without him there is no Catholicity” (ibid). “What we have to guard against” he writes “is
the rejection of either the achievement of Christ in creating the Gospel or the
continuing achievement of Christ in ruling and directing the Church throughout
history” (p. 14).
The two chapters in the first part, “The Evangel”, are
entitled “By Grace Alone” and “By Faith Alone.”
Clearly, the sixteenth century Reformation takes precedence over the
North American revival experience in defining the word “Evangelical” for Toon.
(5) He begins the first chapter by
asking “Have you been accosted by an enthusiast who asks you, ‘Are you saved?’”
(p. 29) and says:
If you are a baptized
Christian then you ought to say: ‘In Christ Jesus my salvation is completed and
complete; because of the indwelling Spirit in my heart I am in the process of
being saved; and, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and will return from
heaven at the end of the age to raise the dead, I look forward to salvation at
the end of the age.’
From this staring point, in which the fullness of Gospel
salvation is contrasted with the North American evangelical tendency to think
of salvation as a single event within the experience of the individual
Christian, Toon proceeds to contrast North American evangelicalism’s
individualistic understanding of salvation with the way “The Kingdom of God, a
phrase much on the lips of Jesus, can be seen and presented only in this-worldly
terms: the bringing of justice into human affairs” (p. 30) that is
characteristic of liberal “Christianity”.
Toon notes, however, that the reduction of the Christian message to a
certain type of political and social activism that is so evident on the part of
the World Council of Churches, is matched by the way American evangelicals tend
to identify the opposite kind of political and social activism with their
understanding of Christianity. Both, he
says, need a deeper understanding of the basic human problem of which the full
salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is the solution, “a weakness, a fundamental
gone-wrong-ness which in both the individual and in society” (p. 32) which in
classical theological language is called “Original Sin.” Toon writes:
The human race was
created by God to enjoy spiritual union and communion with himself. Where this does not exist then there is a
fundamental problem. For the human being
is made to enjoy a relationship both with his Creator and with the creatures
whom God has made. Only with right
relationships with God, with human beings and with creation can a person find
wholeness or salvation.
These relationships are broken by the problem with the human
condition that is Original Sin or gone-wrongness or, as Toon also suggests, the
classical concept of hubris understood in a corporate sense as affecting the
entire race.
Having identified what we need saving from, Toon then goes
on to talk about the right language with which the Church needs to present the
Gospel of salvation. I opened this essay
by talking about how the Anglican via
media needs to be understood as both/and with regards to Catholicism and
Protestantism rather than neither/nor and this is the topic of Toon’s book as a
whole. (6) Here, Toon draws another such distinction without noting the
parallel. I found it to be a
particularly excellent way of explaining the distinction between the way the
Gospel should be proclaimed and the mistaken way in which it often is so I provide
a lengthy quotation of it:
This mistake can best
be illustrated by considering two types of sentences. The first type we may call an ‘if…then’
statement. Here are several examples. Speaking to a child at table we say, ‘If you
eat your meat and potatoes, then you can have some ice cream’. To a child at school we say, ‘If you pass
your examinations, then we will buy you a bike’. To a young person starting work we say, ‘If
you do your work well then we will see that you get promotion’. Finally, we all are familiar with the
politician who says, ‘If you vote for me then I will do for you what you want
me to do’.
This form of
statement, with the understanding it encapsulates is necessary for human
society. But we make a major mistake if
we present or understand the Gospel of God on this basis. In other words, if we make ‘believe’ or
‘repent and believe’ into a condition which we ourselves must fulfil by
ourselves in order to get the rewards of God’s salvation, then we pervert the
Gospel! It is far better to think of the promise of salvation from God, as it
is described in the New Testament as being of the structure,
‘because…therefore’. Here are a couple
of examples, ‘Because there is a free national health service, go into hospital
for your operation’; and ‘because the day is warm and the sand is clean go and
bathe in the sea’. So the message of
salvation is something like this: ‘Because Jesus Christ died for your sins and
rose for your acceptance with God, therefore you are saved’. And, ‘Because God has provided salvation for
you in Jesus Christ, therefore you are to believe and to receive this
salvation’. And, “Because God loves you and will love you, therefore you are to
accept his love’.
You can see the
difference between the ‘if…then’ and the ‘because…therefore’ approach. The first encourages us to think that we can
do something to contribute to our salvation, while the second reminds us that
salvation is, from beginning to end, the gift of God; and the gift is not
earned but rather gratefully received and accepted. We do not ourselves offer to God our
religion, our good works, our pious thoughts, and our good endeavours so that
he will accept us. Rather we gratefully
receive. We believe God and his promises
concerning salvation, and then, out of sheer amazement and gratitude to him for
his wonderful salvation, we live a life of love towards him and our neighbour.
(pp. 32-33)
Toon is absolutely correct that this is the way in which the
Gospel ought to be presented and what he has captured here is really what the
Reformation was all about. He follows
this up by applying it to repentance in which he provides a helpful
illustration of the true purpose of repentance – telling people that they are
forgiven will not be understood and appreciated if they do not recognize and
accept that they have done something wrong for which they need forgiveness. (7)
In the first chapter, “The Anglican Experience” of the
second part of the book, Toon gives his account of Catholicity. He begins by objecting to the Roman Catholic
Church “calling itself ‘the Catholic
Church’”, i.e., sans Roman, because
“Catholicity is not confined to that community” (p. 63). He then provides a “brief word study” of the
words “ekklesia” (literally
“assembly”, it became the name of the Christian society and therefore “Church”
in English) and “catholic” (Gr. katholikos),
correctly noting that “catholic” is first applied to ekklesia by St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century and
that as applied to the Church it came to have the primary connotations of universality
(“the world-wide Church in contrast to the local congregation”) and orthodoxy
(the faith of the world-wide Church as opposed to the heresies of separatist
sects). (p. 63-64). “To receive and
accept the Church as it has existed, and as it has believed, taught, confessed,
and worshipped, is the beginnings of true Catholicity” he writes.
In subsequent sections he fleshes this out. He reminds us “that it was the catholic
Church, with its imperfections, that gave recognition to what we now call the
canon of the New Testament” (p. 66) and while his claims for the Church in this
regards are far more modest than those of the Latin and Greek Churches, he
adds:
Parallel developments
in the Church in this same general period of time included the general recognition
of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter (=priest) and deacon, the
centrality of the Eucharist as the main act of worship on the Lord’s Day, the
creation of creeds (e.g. the Apostles’ and Nicene) and the recognition of
apostolic tradition (having reference to both the succession of sound teaching
and to the historical, personal, succession of bishops). (ibid).
He warns against claiming too much from history, pointing to
the example of Roman Catholicism as doing this by seeing in the historical
development of the See of Rome into the papacy ruling the entire episcopate and
the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption of Mary
proof of divine approbation of the same and argues for the Church’s
indefectibility rather than infallibility. (pp. 67-68) Then, in discussing how the Church of
England’s Catholicity is reformed, i.e., from “deviant and exaggerated
developments and expressions” (p. 68) that had entered the Church in the period
prior to the Reformation, he lists twelve examples of elements of the Catholic
tradition that the English Reformers made a point of retaining, in some cases
even when their Continental counterparts did not. The list can be found on pages 68-69, I won’t
reproduce it here, but will merely note that it is basically an expansion of
everything mentioned in the previous block quote.
In the second chapter of this section entitled “Pertinent
Examples” he provides extended discussion of the topics of “Bishops”, “the
Liturgy of the Eucharist” and “Visible Unity”.
I disagree with his saying under the first heading that “A careful
reading of the New Testament reveals that it does not describe or prescribe a
single pattern of ordained ministry in the apostolic churches” (p. 76) as it
seems quite clear to me that the three-fold ministry is present in the New
Testament where it is originally Apostles, presbyters, and deacons, with St.
Timothy and St. Titus later assuming the governing role of the Apostles in the
office to which the title of bishop (overseer) would very shortly after become
attached. (8) Toon argues for the plene esse view of the episcopate that
bishops are necessary for the fullness of the Church, but their absence doesn’t
necessarily de-church a body (pp. 77-79) to which I have no objection. (9) Under the second heading, he begins by
observing that the basic structure of the Eucharistic liturgy goes back to the
earliest days of Church history and by providing a list of its basic elements
(p. 80). He then draws out the
significance of it all – that it is as the very name Eucharist indicates “a
great thanksgiving to the Father for all he has done and is doing”, an anamnesis, “the living and effective
sign of the sacrifice of Christ, accomplished once for all on the Cross of
Calvary”, which includes “an invocation of the Holy Spirit”, and is “the
communion of the faithful” (p. 81). He
notes how “the doctrine of Christ presented in the Nicene Creed” is fundamental
“to the structure, content and ethos of the developed Eucharist celebrated in the
Church over the centuries” (p, 82) and observes that the significance of the Sursum Corda (the vesicles and responses
that introduce the Sacramental portion of the liturgy) and shortly thereafter
the introduction to the Sanctus is
that “we are invited to share in Christ’s heavenly worship through our union
with, and in, him” (p. 82). He reminds
us that worship is not supposed to be something we do privately in our pews but
is a corporate act (p. 83).
Overall it is an excellent introduction to the evangelicalism
and Catholicity of the (orthodox) Anglican tradition.
(2) Cranmer’s original version of the article just names the doctrine and refers to the homily, the Elizabethan revision provides an account of the doctrine. In both versions the homily is called “The Homily of Justification”. The homily referred to is the third in the first (1547) Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, more commonly called Book of Homilies, and its actual title is “A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind by Only Christ Our Saviour from Sin and Death Everlasting.”
(3) This does not contradict the idea of Sacraments as means of grace. Sacraments are means by which grace is given, faith is the means by which it is received. Dr. Luther likened faith to the empty hand which receives a gift. Sacraments, in this analogy, are hands of the Giver not the recipient. Sacraments share the role of the Word, of which St. Augustine of Hippo said they were a visual form, not the role of faith.
(4) The same thing as a Festschrift (a collection of essays in honour of somebody) but published posthumously.
(5) Toon’s background, prior to his entering the Church of England and her ministry was Methodist. He began his ministry in the Diocese of Liverpool, the first bishop of which was the very Calvinistic evangelical J. C. Ryle about whom Toon co-wrote a biography.
(6) Toon saw the both/and approach as different from the via media rather than a different interpretation of it.
(7) Repentance has far too often been preached in a way that blasphemes the character of God. Have you ever heard a sermon in which sinners were encouraged to soften the heart of God with their tears or heard of such a sermon? That this misrepresents the character of God can be seen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. While the title character when he determines to return home devises a speech “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants” he is forgiven by his father before he utters a word of it “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him”. The son’s contrition did not produce the mercy and forgiveness in his father’s heart – it was already there. What it did do was move him to seek his father where forgiveness was already awaiting him. The error that attributes more to repentance than this goes back very early but this does not make it less of an error. As early as the Apostolic Fathers the question of whether serious sins after baptism can be forgiven arose. One answer was that they could, but only once. That this would mean that the Jesus Who commanded His disciples to forgive up to 70 times 7 (and He did not mean that they were free to not forgive the 491st time as the Puritan preacher in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights thought) was less forgiving than He required His sinful disciples to be did not seem to occur to such as the author of the Shephard of Hermas. A more common answer was that they could be forgiven, but that only after a lifetime of repentance and that the forgiveness was less certain than that offered in initial baptism. This was based on a misreading of the tenth chapter of Hebrews. The antiquity of these views does not make them Catholic – remember, there are two other tests. The second of these wrong answers produced bad fruit such as the deferral of baptism until the deathbed (Emperor Constantine is a notable example of this) and ultimately the Catholic tradition rejected these bad ideas and a better understanding of grace prevailed. Satisfaction for sins after baptism is not made by us in our always far from what it should be repentance. It was made once for all by the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. This Sacrifice is the source of the grace conveyed in the one-time Sacrament of baptism. It is also the source of the grace conveyed in the repeated Eucharist. Since it is the same once-for-all Sacrifice the believer confessing his sins in accordance with John 1:9 can be as sure of forgiveness of his post-baptismal sins as of that of his pre-baptismal sins. Scottish Barthian theologian T. F. Torrance in his doctoral dissertation The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers was quite critical of the Fathers of the second and third centuries for the weakness of their understanding of grace However, the words from Edmund Burke about accumulated wisdom and the self-correcting power of tradition that Russell Kirk liked to quote seem appropriate here “the individual is foolish…but the species is wise” and just as orthodox Trinitarianism triumphed over Arianism by the end of the fourth century so grace ultimately prevailed around the same time as well.
(8) The thing, the three-fold ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to the three-fold ministry of the Old Testament Church (High Priest/Priest/Levite), is present in the New Testament. The only reason there is any dispute about this is due to the words that name the three orders and even there presbyter and deacon when used for offices in the ministry (the words can just mean “elder” and “servant” in a general sense) refer to the same offices to which they have traditionally been applied. What is disputed is whether episkopos (literally overseer) or bishop is used of the office of the presiding presbyter who shares in the Apostolic governance as in the later tradition (SS Timothy and Titus as examples) or of all presbyters (as its usage in the epistles to SS Timothy and Titus would suggest). Either way, however, the governing office itself is present in the New Testament and if the word that would become its title was not yet restricted to it in the New Testament this in no way invalidates the later usage of the term since it had to be called something and “overseer” certainly describes the role.
(9) The alternate views are that the episcopate is esse (no Church without it) and bene esse (it is better if the Church has it but a Church can be a Church even in the fullest sense without it). Plene esse is how most High Churchmen understood it prior to the Oxford Movement. The only caveat I would offer is that for a Church to be a Church but in a less than full sense because it lacks the Apostolic episcopate it must have an organic connection to the Church of Jerusalem. While bishops in Apostolic Succession are one form of organic connection and so every Church with them has an organic connection they are not the only such connection. A Church planted as an extension of an older Church (and so on back to the Church of Jerusalem) does not lose this organic connection although it sustains an injury if it loses its bishops such as occurred with the (German) Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Reformation.
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