Why I'm (still) staying in the Church of England: The History

Part 3

History

By theological specialty, I’m a historian/historical theologian. A great deal of my mental space is given to living in ages long past, especially in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When faced with a theological or ecclesiological question, I’m naturally going to start trying to contextualise it historically, digging back into the church’s past for help and resources. There are a few historical events that colour my approach to the secession question. In this post (3) we shall look at events up to, and including, the Reformation. In the next (4), we shall pick up from the Reformation onwards.

Athanasius of Alexandria (298–373)
Many Christians have identified with the 4th-century Bishop of Alexandria when they have found themselves in the heat of theological controversy. What does the ‘Athanasius Option’ consist of? Athanasius wasn’t a bishop of the time of the Council of Nicea in 325, he was there to accompany Alexander, the incumbent bishop. But Athanasius quickly established himself at the forefront of the orthodox, pro-divinity-of-Christ party. The Council was a significant victory for the orthodox party; only two bishops voted against the resulting Nicene Creed.¹

Within three years, Athanasius had succeeded Alexander as Bishop of Alexandria, and the Nicene consensus was already falling apart. Despite largely having voted for it, the Arian bishops refused to abide by the consensus and were still teaching Arian views. Debates were reopened, and pro-Nicene bishops tried to find a way of softening the language to win a consensus that all could live with. Athanasius never budged on the Nicene formula, and for his trouble, he was exiled 5 times, for a total of 12 years. 25% of his tenure as Bishop of Alexandria was spent in exile, for teaching what the church catholic had agreed to in its first ecumenical council. He didn’t waver from the catholic teaching even when 4 separate emperors, most of the bishops, a sizeable number of clergy, and several episcopal councils took against that teaching — and anyone who taught it.

Athanasius got himself a bit of a reputation for being a fuss-pot, too hung up on precise wording at the expense of church unity.² Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the Roman Empire, even said—dismissively of Athanasius—“the difference between the Homoousion and the Homoiousion is almost invisible to the nicest theological eye.”³ Athanasius didn’t waver, he didn't succumb to the pressure to soften his stance, to ‘walk together’ with the Arians (we might say). The attempts to walk together found their expression in several successive councils and creeds, culminating in the ‘Dated Creed’ that came out of the fourth council of Sirmium in 359.⁴ The ‘Dated Creed’ ends by asserting:

But the term ‘essence’ has been taken up by the Fathers rather unwisely, and gives offence because it is not understood by the people. It is also not contained in the Scriptures. For these reasons we have decided to do away with it, and that no use at all shall be made of it for the future in connexion with God, because the divine Scriptures nowhere use it of the Father and the Son. But we say that the Son is like the Father in all things, as the holy Scriptures say and teach.⁵

Sound familiar? The way the wind was blowing saw the Arians and the ‘moderates’ come up with a compromise, something that would enable them to ‘walk together’, to stay within the same church. That compromise involved no longer saying that the Father and the Son were two Persons of the one God, but instead merely saying that the Son was ‘like’ the Father. That compromise was agreed upon and accepted as the new orthodoxy in both the Western and the Eastern branches of the Church catholic.⁶

Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil of Ancyra, Cyril of Jerusalem, and a few others, still held out though. They repeatedly denounced anything that wasn’t the orthodoxy agreed upon at Nicea, and they kept arguing in its favour.

Hilary and Athanasius… gradually converted the ‘moderates’ and the Nicene faith and formula were vindicated at the council of Constantinople, 381.⁷

The ‘Athanasius Option’ is to contend, and to keep contending, to not waver from the truth of the Scriptures as understood by the Church catholic. It is also to continue to contend within the Church Catholic –within her fold, within her structures. Athanasius did not live to see the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed the Nicene orthodoxy in 381, having died about 8 years before. But we rightly still remember him as among the foremost defenders of Christian orthodoxy in the 4th century.

We laud and want to follow Athanasius in contending for the truth, even at the cost of episcopal censure and exile. But we mustn’t miss something else from the history of Athanasius: he might have been exiled, but he never walked away. He might have been one of the very few bishops who still believed in the divinity of Christ, but he never broke away from his fellow bishops and tried to set up his own church. He kept coming back, kept contending, kept defending the truth — within the church that was even officially denying it by that point. He might have been exiled, but he was no schismatic.

The ecumenical councils
For the first thousand years or so of Church history, if we had a major theological disagreement the solution was to call an ecumenical council—made up of bishops and church representatives from across the Church catholic—to sort it out. The Roman Catholic Church has kept going with the idea, albeit somewhat less ecumenically now that both the Eastern Orthodox and Protestant branches of Christianity reject their claim to authority… Protestants haven’t held an ecumenical council since the Synod of Dort in 1620. Why aren’t there calls for one to settle the sexuality question that is tearing churches in the West apart? We have GAFCON, yes, which is great for bringing together Anglican bishops from across the world, especially the global south, but it’s not ecumenical enough. Could GAFCON call a council, inviting representatives from other denominations across the world, to settle the question? It would certainly be a catholic approach to the problem. If such a council were to reaffirm the historic, catholic teaching on Christianity, and to anathematise churches that have departed from it, that would be a different matter than everyone doing what is right in his own eyes, and departing when they, individually, have had enough.

It’s probably never going to happen. If it doesn’t, how then are we going to settle the question? Scripture’s teaching on marriage and sexuality is crystal clear, and the church was of one mind in understanding it until about 60 years ago. In that sense, we don’t need a council to tell us what we already know. But we didn’t need LLF to tell us what we already know, yet here we are—because many people don’t want to know it. Sooner or later we’re going to have to work out how we come to a settled position. How are we going to do that catholically?

The Great Schism (1054)
For a variety of reasons, relations between the Western Church (centred in Rome) and the Eastern (centred in Constantinople) had been deteriorating for centuries. Funnily enough, successive Bishops of Rome claiming ever-expanding dominion over the church catholic didn’t go down too well in some other parts of the church. The most important dividing issue between the two parties, however, came in the filioque controversy. Eastern theology holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds/derives being from, the Father. Western theology says that he proceeds from the Father and the Son. The big argument came in the eleventh century when—and no one really knows how—Rome officially inserted the words “and the Son” into the relevant clause of the Nicene Creed.⁸

Changing the Nicene Creed was a big deal, as it was the creed that came from the very first ecumenical council, that became the foundational test of Christian orthodoxy for generations to come. And Rome, in a power grab, unilaterally stuck it into the creed and expected the East to put up with it. Up with it they would not put. After a couple of years of strife, in 1054 Rome excommunicated Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople; Cerularius responded by excommunicating the papal ambassadors. West and East went their separate ways, and are very much still separate to this day.⁹

How is this relevant to the Church of England today? Well, the Great Schism was a great tragedy. It led to a scar, a divide in the Church catholic that hasn’t healed in nearly a thousand years. It’s impossible to sift through the complicated mix of factors and personalities to assess whether it could have been avoided. Had there been less stubborn leaders in Rome and Constantinople, perhaps it could have been. What we should see, however, is that the Schism was about a truth most fundamental to the faith: the very nature of the Trinity.

Yes, there was a lot else going on. But when it comes down to it, the final break happened because the Western Church tried to force the Eastern to adopt a contested theological position that the Church catholic had not come to a common mind on up until that point. We risk the same thing happening when it comes to marriage, gender, and sexuality. Some want to take the church’s catholic teaching in a certain (revised) direction. Some do not accept the revision and want to believe what we’ve always said we believe. How do we resolve that?

We could have another schism, where both sides anathematise each other and go their separate ways. That would be tragic, schism always is. But sometimes schism is unavoidable. Sometimes there are irreconcilable differences in the very foundation of theology that make unity impossible. If we end up in such a position, then we must be sure that it is on a matter sufficiently vital enough to justify the tragedy.

For what it’s worth, I think that this is a very important question. Unlike some, I do believe that we need to consider that this could touch on credal questions: what do we mean when we say we believe in the “forgiveness of sins”? I’m pretty sure that I have a different answer to that than the majority of revisionists I’ve heard from. Or the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church”? There are credal questions to be answered here.

But, as with so often in this series, I’m going to say that we need to answer such questions catholically. To leave the Church of England is an act of schism, to declare that those whom you are departing from are not part of the one true church, which is why you must depart from them in judgment. That’s a big declaration. It’s far too weighty a matter to be left to private, individual judgment.

The Great Schism happened because one part of the Church tried to force a particular theology on another part of the Church, and the latter felt compelled to distance themselves from the former. Relations across the Church are still scarred today. When it is a private individual separating from part of the Church catholic, the damage and the grief might be on a smaller scale, but it is no less serious. Are you willing to commit a schism over this issue?

Reformation
Speaking of monumental tears in the unity of the Church… I’m not saying that the Reformation was wrong. It was entirely necessary and has been used by God for the good and the preservation of his Church. But the impact it has had on relations among Christians is still felt, and still causes tensions today, 500 years later. There are some lessons I want to draw from the Reformation for the current subject:

• The formal issue was at the centre of theology: justification, the nature of salvation itself. Again, there were many issues and personalities that fed into it, but at its heart, it was about justification.

• The Reformers felt that separation was unavoidable. The early Reformers did not set out to separate from the Roman Church. When I’ve had people read Luther’s 95 Theses for the first time, they often remark on how, well, meek and conciliatory they are. Luther’s objective was to raise the issue of indulgences being abused, and was confident that if the Bishop of Rome just heard about what was going on in the provinces, the whole matter could be resolved. Even when the arguments widened and escalated, Luther technically never left the Church of Rome. He was excommunicated in 1520.¹⁰ The spread of the Reformation from then onwards was much more about churches, congregations and even whole nations, coming to believe and teach Protestant ideas—and generally being excommunicated by Rome for it. The idea of leaving one church to join another separate church is somewhat foreign to the early-modern era.

• The Reformers felt that they were not separating from the Church catholic, so much as returning to catholicity by separating from centuries of Roman errors that had occluded it. It was not a walking away from, but a returning to.

When one makes this sort of argument, the English Reformation is often brought up as an example of an active Reformation schism. Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and so committed schism to get what he wanted—or so the narrative goes. As Alec Ryrie argues, however, there’s really no such thing as “the English Reformation.” It’s a matter of how you interpret it.¹¹ Most of the English reformers saw themselves as Catholics, seeking to restore true catholicity to a church that had lost it under layers of Roman error. Archbishop Usher, writing in the Seventeenth Century, wrote the treatise: “A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Irish and British.” His argument there was that if one were to compare the religion anciently held in the British Isles with that held respectively by the Roman and the English Churches of the early modern era, one would be forced to conclude that it was the latter who held the true claim to antiquity. They saw themselves as not separating from a particular part of the church, but as returning to the catholicity of the Church.

I’ve had lots of long conversations with people who have left the Church of England in recent years, and with those who are contemplating leaving. To be honest, not a single one of them has cited catholicity as their reason. It’s always been about separation—from false teaching and false teachers. The preservation of individual conscience rather than the preservation of the catholic faith.¹²

Conclusion
As I said in both Parts 1 and 2, this is not the first time in the history of the church that we have been faced with doctrinal confusion and false teaching. It is fairly common. It’s the default experience of the church. False teaching is always wrong and should be disciplined and rebuked. But it’s always going to be present. We can learn from those who have gone before us, from how they dealt with the false teaching of their own day.

What I think we learn from the examples in this article is that we should take a bold stand for the truth, even if it costs us greatly. We should, however, be slow to walk away. Schism is not a light matter, division between Christians is not something to pursue readily. It should only happen when it is unavoidable and over issues of the most fundamental importance. And such a matter is too weighty to be handled by any private individual acting alone.

Notes

1. Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonus of Marmarica

2. See e.g. Michael Reeves, The Breeze of the Centuries: Introducing Great Theologians from the Apostolic Fathers to Aquinas. (Nottingham, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010), 58–62.

3. For an overview of the compromise creeds, see Henry Scowcroft Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University, 1963), 58–63.

4. Bettenson, Documents, 62.

5. It was even given the catholic seal of approval by the council that met in Constantinople in 360.

6. Bettenson, Documents, 62.

7. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.21, n.155.

8. For a helpful overview, see Nick Needham, The Middle Ages, Revised, vol. 2, of 2,000 Years of Christ’s Power(Fearn, U.K.: Christian Focus, 2016), 131–7.

9. Those excommunications were officially lifted by the relevant parties in 1965—over 900 years later—but the churches are yet to reunite.

10. Interestingly, the writ of excommunication doesn’t actually cite justification by faith alone as one of Luther’s heresies. Much more concerning was his denial of papal supremacy.

11. Alec Ryrie, The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (London, U.K.: SPCK, 2020), xiii.

12. I hope in an upcoming article to address the question of individual conscience separately.