Bruce Kaye’s new book, Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment (Pickwick Publications, 2009) is, at best, very strange.  It is built upon historical error and sloppy logic.  Kaye’s basic argument is that the Anglican Communion needs to abandon its aspirations towards a coherent unity that includes its 38 historical provinces, and replace this instead with a “vision [that] would involve reducing the demand for institutional affiliation” (170).  Kaye refers to this as a “looser-limbed version of catholicity” (171) that is “more consistent with the heritage of Anglican faith and practice of which the current generation is both the heir and steward” (171 – 2).  Readers who know of the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which placed the Church of England under royal control and fully separated it from the papacy, will likely find Kaye’s claim strange.  Kaye, however, does not; his understanding of the Anglican tradition is grounded upon a twofold assertion that Anglicanism has been in existence for a “millennium” – rather than just under 500 years – and that the Royal Supremacy was merely an “aberration” within Anglican history (168).

In the review that follows, I will briefly touch upon three aspects of Kaye’s argument: his assumptions about the local, particularly as it pertains to the universal in the Church; his persistent misreading of the history of English monarchy, both before and after the English Reformation; and, lastly, his rejection the Instruments of Communion.  Kaye uses each of these, in various ways, to validate his vision for a minimalist catholicity.  But, can a firm ecclesiology really be based upon a persistent misreading of the past?  How can any institution, ecclesiastical or otherwise, hope to survive if its own institutional self-understanding is wrong?  Kaye’s understanding of the “Anglican experiment” is not a vision for, but a retreat from, the demands of Christian charity, because charity rejoices in the truth, not in error (I Cor. 13:6).  Critique and correction are therefore necessary.

The primary assumption behind Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith is that “at the very heart of the apostolic mission is a principle of diversity in relation to the one true gospel” (22).  Kaye believes that this perspective is exemplified by Paul’s hymn on love in First Corinthians 13, where the Apostle – in Kaye’s words – “does not settle a question of disorder or division with a form of order or an organizational structure.  Rather he underlines the diversity of contribution by naming it as a gift from the risen Christ” (16).  It is hard to square Kaye’s gloss with the Apostle’s own words; praising diversity as such is hardly coterminous with praising ecstatic gifts such as prophecy.  It is noteworthy that Kaye sets order and organizational structure over and against diversity, because allowing for the latter, he claims, is “a stunning assertion of confidence in the creative ordering of divine presence” (17).  This sort of theological antinomianism, which was central to the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century (and which claimed to ground it in Luther’s dichotomy between grace and works), was rejected not just by the Lutheran and Swiss movements, but by the Anglican movement as well.  Archbishop Cranmer’s rejection of Anabaptism en toto, like Richard Hooker’s criticism of it several decades later in the Lawes, points to a long-standing rejection of a theological antinomianism within Anglicanism.  Why, then, revive it, and how does such a revival advance Anglicanism – let alone Christianity in any of its other forms?

The answer lies, perhaps, in Kaye’s rather curious reading of Anglicanism as a tradition that is more than one thousand years old.  At no point in the book does he attempt to validate this claim, whether through original argument or through an appeal to scholarly work.  Rather, he simple writes Anglicanism as a distinct entity can be traced all the way back to Bede’s justly famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which Kaye believes was intended “to establish a basis for maintaining a local Christendom in England” (33).  One cannot help but wonder if Kaye has actually read Bede, because the latter’s Ecclesiastical History is one of the most stridently pro-Roman books of the early medieval period.  One need only recall Bede’s account of a showdown between the British and Roman bishops, in which the former, unlike the latter, were incapable of performing miracles, thus justifying – in Bede’s mind, at least – the validity of Roman practices.  When it came to the British bishops, Bede writes, “no healing or benefit was obtained from their ministry” (EH, II.2).  Any attempt to use Bede as a justification for local tradition is nothing but an act of self-subversion.

Kaye’s appeal to Bede, however, is not based upon Bede’s own text, but upon a lengthy quotation from Peter Brown’s encyclopedic The Rise of Western Christendom, in which Brown talks about the regionalized nature of the Western Church in the early medieval period.  Yet here Kaye also stands on shaky ground.  Brown’s description of the regionalization of Christianity into “micro-Christendoms” is not an argument for the viability of their autonomy, but the precise opposite.  Brown mentions local churches in order to both highlight the profound power vacuum that first gave rise to regionalization in the late-sixth thru early-eighth centuries, and to show that in these “micro-Christendoms” a tremendous level of ignorance about other Christians was quite widespread.  The importance of ecclesiastical mission, therefore, is that it strengthened local churches by unifying them with a common set of practices, just as it brought knowledge of other Christian practices to new locales – although, as in the case of Bede, it did not necessarily result in tolerance or acceptance.  The high medieval papacy developed as it did because there was a profound lack of authority in the early medieval world.  Autonomous local churches existed in Western Europe not because of a theological commitment to a minimalist catholicity, but because the violence perpetrated by Germanic tribes destroyed trans-local lines of communication.  People were justifiably afraid of travel.  Thus, and yet again, Kaye’s attempt to validate an Anglican tradition of local autonomy simply founders.

This raises, therefore, a question.  If Kaye believes that King Henry VIII’s act of Royal Supremacy was really an “aberration” (168), why does he consistently appeal to local traditions as a map for the Church’s long-term well being?  And, why does he claim –to the contrary of the prior statement – that Henry VIII’s separation from the papacy was nothing new (34)?  The answer lies in Kaye’s misreading of the history of English monarchy.  Monarchy is now a largely defunct institution that has been superseded – and almost always violently so – by forms of populist democracy.  Thus, it is easy to forget that the English monarchy was once the focus of popular devotion, because the kings and queens of England were widely reputed, beginning with St. Edward the Confessor, to be miracle workers.  The so-called “Royal Touch” was used continuously from the late tenth century until the end of the reign of James II (1685), and was briefly revived by Queen Anne (1702 – 1714).  Pious English believed that the monarch was capable of healing the disease of scrofula through prayer, signing the cross, and touching the infection.  This further expressed itself with the belief that the monarch was endowed with the power to bless material objects, notably coins (called “Angels”) and rings, as other means of warding off disease. 

This was an important element in the Cult of Queen Elizabeth I.  It was no less important for the Cult of King Charles the Martyr, which practically sprung up the day after his regicide on January 30, 1649.  Charles’s relics were reputed to heal in his stead, and one of the first acts of Parliament at the time of the Restoration in 1660 was the commemoration of King Charles I as King Charles the Martyr, the first Anglican saint.  The service of his remembrance was appended to the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, and was a national holy day – it was, importantly, a day of fasting and not a feast day – for nearly 200 years.  I bring all of this up not merely as curious details of historical interest, but to argue – against Kaye – that a) any division between the charismatic/miraculous and the institutional is without a basis in Anglican history, and that b) any appeal to the importance of local traditions as a guiding light for the toil of catholicity must take seriously both the well developed theologies and the popular devotional perceptions of monarchy that animated the Anglican imagination at all levels for centuries.

The monarch, under Henry VIII and Edward VI, was the “supreme head” of the Church of England – a claim that was bound up with a much older idea that the kingdom was a “mystical body” united to the headship of the king.  However, from Elizabeth I onward, the monarch was the Church of England’s “supreme governor,” and like Elizabeth the kings that came after her exercised this authority with the greatest level of seriousness and devotion.  The rise of hard-line Calvinism in England and the European continent after John Calvin’s death was kept at bay first by Elizabeth I, and then by James I and Charles I.  Although each of these monarchs had different valuations of the worth of Calvinism, the latter two were unwilling to make the theology of the Synod of Dort binding up the English church, just as Queen Elizabeth I was unwilling to make the various strands of proto-Dort Calvinist theology a part of Anglican orthodoxy.  The centrality of the monarch was also behind article 21 of the Articles of Religion: “General councils may not be called together without the commandment and will of princes.”  In sum, the Royal Supremacy was a crucial development that came out of a much longer series of developments within England, all of which determined the scope of Anglican theology for centuries to come.  The Anglican tradition does not enjoin a tradition of lay control (115), because the king was never a mere lay person, Kaye’s assertion to the contrary notwithstanding (103).  Kaye’s misreading of monarchy, however unintentional, is of no small consequence.

If Kaye really wants to argue for the necessity of local traditions, then he ought to follow this claim through.  Instead, he writes that “dispersed authority” is “quite fundamental to Anglicanism” (105).  Kaye repeatedly articulates concern about imperialism, but here too he relies upon historical error.  The Restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660 offered toleration to Trinitarian non-Anglicans – denoted by Anglicans with the catch-all term “Dissenters” – and this tolerance became a striking feature of the English political landscape, because it far exceeded the forms of toleration on continental Europe.  Kaye, however, is under the impression that the Restoration brought a “compulsory and unified regime” (45) that all English were required to declare their assent to.  This is simply untrue.  It is also untrue that the Restoration was disliked by the majority of English, and that the eighteenth century saw a growing marginalization of the Church of England amidst various other Christian sects.  The Restoration was welcomed and well received by the majority of English.  Kaye’s misread allows him to attack the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and to claim that the Act of Uniformity, which pertained only to those who wishes to be members of the Church of England, was a “pyrrhic victory” (47) for a non-traditional Anglican imperialism.  The value judgment is, perhaps, debatable, but the history that it is constructed upon is not.

Against the Restoration, Kaye argues that we should turn instead to “the spirit of democracy” (105).  He argues that this is related to conciliarism, and that the intertwinement of these has its origins in the United States of America.  He bases this on the claim that when it came to the constitution of both the United States of America and the Protestant Episcopal Church, “there was a considerable overlap of the people involved in the creation of each” (106).  Kaye gives no sources for this, and the consecration of James Madison as the first bishop of Virginia notwithstanding, I myself am unaware of any such “considerable overlap.”  Nonetheless, and regardless as to the accuracy of this claim, it is interesting that Kaye wishes to use an American democratic model for the entire Anglican Communion.  Yet, this democratic model only came into existence through a tremendous amount of violence against Anglican ministers before the American Revolution.  They were beaten and imprisoned by mobs of “Patriots”; their homes and churches were attacked, sometimes burned, and sometimes used as armaments after they were abandoned by terrified clergy and laity.  It was not unheard of, during this same time, for “Patriots” to enter Anglican churches in the middle of the Divine Service, with their guns loaded and aimed at the priest during the prayers for the King.  Democracy was often nothing but a pretense for illegal acts of vandalism and assault in colonial America.  Far from valuing local tradition as such, it seems that Kaye wishes to take one local tradition, despite its historically contested viability, and use it as a map for the entire Anglican Communion.  This is really just American ecclesiological imperialism – another attempt to use the language of democracy to justify violence again longer-standing norms.

Given my criticisms and comments above, some may wonder whether or not I think the solution to our present dilemmas is the creation of something like the English monarchy.  I do not.  I also do not believe that we need anything like a pope.  However, and in light of Kaye’s emphasis upon power vacuums and locality, it seems to me that our own ecclesial structures should have the same force and power that the monarch once wielded.  Should not the Instruments of Communion have the power to determine what orthodoxy and orthopraxy are or aren’t, insofar as the Instruments are faithful to the primary theological sources of our tradition?  This, then, points to the final idiosyncratic contour of Kaye’s argument.  He has no respect for the Instruments of Communion; he writes that their reality is “so-called” rather than actual (90), and that their primacy is nothing but “a recent innovation” (167).  Kaye does not consider that the history of their primacy may be just as old as their existence, and that their current importance was intended by their creation.  When the Lambeth Conference of 1930 defined the Anglican Communion as consisting of “those duly constituted dioceses, provinces or regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury,” it was indeed setting forth a “new” idea.  The primacy of Canterbury is not a local tradition per se, but it is central to Anglican functioning, and has been since at least 1867, when the Archbishop of Canterbury – and he alone! – issued invitations to the first Lambeth Conference, at the suggestion of Canadian bishops.  Kaye’s rejection of the reality of the Instruments of Communion makes too much of Anglican history incomprehensible.

All of this points to Kaye’s ultimate concern: provincial autonomy.  But, if Anglicanism doesn’t have a tradition of valuing the local at the expense of the universal, does Anglicanism really have a tradition that values provincial autonomy?  I propose that it does not, and that the early history of the Episcopal Church (USA) points to just as much.  In the aftermath of the American Revolution, as the shattered remains of the Anglican church were slowly pieced back together, a number of radical changes to historic Anglican liturgy and doctrine were proposed.  These included proposals for removing references to the Trinity, and deleting both the Athanasian Creed and all references to Christ’s descent into hell.  The Church of England refused to accept these changes, and refused to consecrate any American bishops until the first and the last of these, at the very least, were abandoned.  Thus, if one wishes to argue for provincial autonomy within the history of Anglicanism, one must overlook the very founding of the American church itself.  Kaye’s upset over the lack of respect for the polity of the Episcopal Church (USA) is without the force of righteous indignation that he so longs for (125).  Polity justifies nothing, as the early history of relations between the Church of England the Episcopal Church (USA) demonstrates.  The present moment is not the first time that the Episcopal Church (USA) has suffered due to the large presence of heterodoxy among its own members, just as this is not the first time that Canterbury has brought correction to American Anglicans.  Canterbury’s rejection of recent American innovations is fully in keeping with a crucial earlier episode in Anglican history – an episode that defined the very first American Book of Common Prayer.

In conclusion, I suppose that no one can call Kaye’s work unimaginative.  That, however, is precisely the problem.  Kaye’s historically fantastic narrative, which serves as a foundation upon which he constructs an argument for a minimalist catholicity in the Anglican Communion, gives readers nothing to care about.  It is uninspired and uninspiring, and readers who trust Kaye to teach them about Anglican history will be entirely let down.  However, because the thesis of Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment is argued by way of historical misunderstanding, we may learn from its mistakes.  Tremendous power is contained in the narration of history, because how we interpret the past is inseparable from how we apply it to the present.  Kaye’s claims about history confuse and occlude the past, with the practical pay out that the Anglican Communion will be even further fragmented.  Anglicans are therefore better served to consult substantive works of historical scholarship if they both wish to learn about their past, and wish to apply their past in a creative and critically constructive fashion to their present.  Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment cannot and does not advance such a cause.

Bibliographical Addendum

Readers interested in the history of English monarchy do well to read Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch, and Andrew Lacey’s The Cult of King Charles the Martyr.  Helpful insights on monarchical involvement in shaping early Anglican orthodoxy can be gleaned from Nicholas Tyacke’s Anti-Calvinists and Peter White’s Predestination, Policy and Polemic.  Debates about orthodoxy in the early Episcopal Church (USA) are discussed in Robert Prichard’s The Nature of Salvation and Marion J. Hatchett’s The Making of the First American Book of Common Prayer, and are set in a much wider historical context in J. C. D. Clark’s The Language of Liberty, 1660 – 1832.  Those who are curious about the place of anti-Anglican sentiment in the American Revolution will learn about this from Clark’s book, as well as from James Bell’s A War of Religion: Anglicans, Dissenters, and the American Revolution.
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