Anglicanism: A Gift in Christ
Anglican Communion Institute. Two 3-disc DVD sets. agiftinchrist.org.
What does it mean to be an Anglican Christian? If you put ten Anglicans in a room and ask each of them, you are likely to get 11 different answers. Part of the problem, argue the theologians of the Anglican Communion Institute, is simple forgetfulness.
While we Anglicans have been blessed with a rich and deep heritage, all too often we have allowed our spiritual treasures to molder away in history books. The prayer book, hymnody, Scriptural piety, evangelism and mission, classic Anglican divines like Cranmer, Hooker, and Charles Simeon — all of this is part of who we are, and the more we steep ourselves in our common tradition, the better we will understand both where we are now and where we are going; or, perhaps better put: the more we will begin to understand what God, in his providence, has been doing all along with the portion of his one, holy, and Catholic Church that is called Anglican.
To this end, the Anglican Communion Institute has produced a handsome DVD series, titled Anglicanism: A Gift in Christ.
Designed for adult education purposes, the set is composed of a series of talks given by renowned Anglican scholars and pastors. With Sunday morning or weeknight parish education sessions in mind, each lecture covers a key facet of Anglican faith and life: Bishop N.T. Wright on the New Testament, Dr. Jo Bailey Wells on the Old Testament, Dr. Edith Humphrey on Anglican hymnody, Dr. George Sumner on parish renewal, Dr. Ephraim Radner on mission, Dr. Philip Turner on Christian ethics, Bishop Anthony Burton on the prayer book, Bishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon of Nigeria on the church in the Muslim world, and former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey on the Anglican Communion, among others.
The talks manage to avoid the sin of navel-gazing: rather than focusing on Anglican peculiarities, the purpose of each is to see and to show how the Anglican tradition opens up onto a world much larger than itself, making them not just a good primer on Anglicanism but on Catholic Christianity as such.
The series begins with N.T. Wright, who with characteristic clarity and depth of learning gives not only an overview of the New Testament but also of how Anglicans have classically read and been formed by the Bible in their common life. Scripture, as reformers such as Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Cranmer held, is to be placed in the hands of the people and read in common, so as to knit together a people through deep immersion in the Scriptural story. This, Bishop Wright holds, is in fact at the heart of Anglican worship and life: the simple, daily, communal reading of the Bible, through which the Spirit forms us as a church and equips us for mission in the world.
George Sumner, principal of Wycliffe College in Toronto, helps give some perspective on the present moment by telling the story of Charles Simeon, one of the fathers of evangelical Anglicanism. The story of Simeon’s life and ministry, as Sumner tells it, is largely one of dynamic patience: although the church during his day had just as many troubles as in our own time (if not more, thanks to the popularity of Enlightenment Deism), Simeon stayed put in his Cambridge parish. His ministry there, through the impact he made on countless undergraduates and seminarians, as well as by way of the Church Missionary Society he helped found and the Simeon Trust, had a lasting influence that reverberated across time and around the globe.
Not surprisingly, Sumner sees helpful parallels between Simeon’s experience and our own, in the long-term change that can grow out of patient, faithful ministry, the nurture of promising young leaders, and the formation of churchwide societies like the CMS. Ephraim Radner, also of Wycliffe College, in his own lecture shows that this should not surprise us, since it is a fundamental part of the history of Anglicanism itself — that is, a patiently faithful kind of mission and witness, ordered toward the formation of a people grounded in the Scriptures, and dedicated to sticking with it for the long haul.
The lectures of Philip Turner, formerly dean at Yale’s Berkeley Divinity School, and Bishop Anthony Burton, formerly of Saskatchewan and presently rector of Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, intersect in helpful ways.
Dr. Turner, in his treatment of Christian ethics, allows that Anglican ethical perspectives (ranging from Hooker to Wesley to Joseph Fletcher) have historically been quite diverse. Nevertheless, Turner discerns a pattern grounded in the prayer book’s ordering of Anglican worship, wherein we are met time and again by God’s grace in the sacraments, joined together as a people by common prayer and worship, and formed daily by the Holy Scriptures. Ethics, seen this way, is not first of all about coming up with guiding “principles” or about solving difficult quandaries, but instead about how we are formed by God’s grace into a holy people through the worshiping practices of the Church.
Bishop Burton, in his lecture on the prayer book tradition, elaborates upon the transformative character of Anglican liturgical worship, wherein the broken memory, reason, and will of the human soul is met and transformed by God in repentance, faith, and charity. In an aside, Burton recalls the holiness and deep biblical wisdom he encountered in his ministry among otherwise poorly educated fishermen in eastern Canada, who had been steeped all their lives in the prayer book pattern of Scripture and worship. It is just this kind of formation, both Burton and Turner would agree, that Cranmer had long ago intended.
The entire series is full of such insights, and much more could be gleaned from its many lectures. It all comes back around, in the end, to the classical Anglican vision of a people formed by God though common worship, common prayer, and common reading of the Scriptures, growing together in wisdom, holiness, and love, and sent out into the world to witness to the gospel of Christ. Any parish seeking to deepen its roots in the Anglican tradition, in order to better reach out in mission to the Church and the world, would do well to study this fine series.
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