This summer, noted systematic and historical theologian Dr. Matthew Barrett publicly announced his exit from the Southern Baptist Convention and his reception into the Anglican Church in North America. His exit elicited a firestorm of accusations as well as sympathetic well-wishes, revealing a rift within American Evangelicalism over the significance of history, liturgy, and authority in the American Church. Now, Dr. Barrett agreed to go on record with The North American Anglican about his work and legacy, some of the current challenges facing Evangelicalism and Global South Anglicanism, as well as his hopes for the future. He repeatedly, in the interview and afterwards, stated his desire to keep short accounts and not cause further provocation to any who might feel aggrieved, much to the chagrin (and sanctification) of the interviewer and author, yours truly.
—Jackson Waters.
Jackson Waters: Well, Dr. Barrett, thank you so much for being here with me today. Would you mind telling us how you first encountered robust systematic theology and historical theology, and which came first?
Matthew Barrett: Well, it’s quite difficult to separate them. In fact, to separate them could lead to a failure to do systematic theology. I told this story in my book, None Greater, about how when I was 19 years old, the woman who is now my wife, though I had just met her, started to ask all kinds of theological questions that I did not know the answer to.
She had only been a Christian for a few years, and even though I had been a Christian my whole life, I never really had the opportunity to study theology, let alone read the Great Tradition, and in that moment, it showed. I could quote you Bible verses, but a larger theological awareness was missing. So that summer she gave me a copy of Augustine’s Confessions.
JW: Your wife started you on the journey?
MB: Yes, absolutely. It was just this little paperback from a used bookstore, and she gave it to me. She was asking me hard questions about theology, on the problem of evil.
JW: Sounds like she was disappointed in your theological knowledge at the time
MB: Ha, I don’t remember. I mean, she still married me in the end, so I couldn’t have been that terrible! In one sense, you could call that historical theology, but if you open to the beginning his Confessions, he’s showing you how to do theology.
I remember reading one of those opening pages where he is contemplating the perfections of God in a beautiful way that still preserves great mystery and immediately I had mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was frustrated. I thought, why have I not been taught this before? Yet at the same time, I was overwhelmed with joy, because I knew, I want to devote the rest of my life to this.
I had just come off a terrible basketball injury in college, and was on crutches for six months, and just trying to figure out, what am I doing? What is my life for? And had no answers. As Augustine would have put it, I was restless. Augustine’s opening paragraph deeply resonated with me where he says, “our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” The Lord used that long period on crutches so that when I finally picked up Augustine, I was ready.
JW: You were prepared. Fascinating. In Confessions, St. Augustine has a very prayerful way of writing theology, especially in the Confessions and later saints imitate that. Is there a place for that kind of theology writing in the modern academy?
MB: There should be. I don’t know if there are in a lot of places though, and maybe the key phrase there is modern academy. For all kinds of reasons, we don’t have to go into…
JW: I want you to burn some more bridges right now.
MB: Modernism…we’re still living in the aftermath of it, and feeling many of its consequences. And you’re putting your finger on one of them. You’re feeling that disconnect. In the systematic theology I’m writing right now, I talk about this in the opening chapter. Why is there this disconnect so that it’s even possible to approach theology apart from it being a spiritual exercise? So, Gilles Emery, one of the great theologians today, in his book on the Trinity, says Trinitarian theology is a spiritual exercise. But really, we could say that all of theology is a spiritual exercise. It’s first and foremost contemplative.
You think of David’s words in the Psalm 27:4 where he desires to—this is his single greatest passion—gaze at the beauty of the Lord. So, there it is. There’s theology. There’s contemplation.
Theology is first and foremost about contemplating God, but it is like a tree that produces the fruit of the Spirit, love above all else. Aquinas says that contemplation reaches its pinnacle when we not only see truth but love truth. So if you approach theology as you would any other subject, that’s a mistake, right? Because though theology is a science, it’s a science that is far superior and of greater worth than any other science because it depends on something external, which is divine revelation, a revelation meant to lead us to God himself, even be united to him.
And so, as soon as supernatural revelation comes into play, well, that’s to be received by faith. So, right away, that sets things up in a completely different trajectory than other sciences. This is why theology is marked by such great certainty in comparison with other sciences. We have the Word of the Lord! And we have been invited to participate in the knowledge of our Lord. What a privilege.
Let’s say you’re hiking through the jungle and you’re climbing a mountain in the Andes, and you get to the top and there’s a breathtaking waterfall. The first thing you probably do is you stand there with your jaw open, just in awe. So, you are contemplating the beauty of something that really can’t be put into words. Naturally, you don’t just stay there. You want to, you have to, you must participate. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, it’s not enough to see beauty; you must share in this beauty. And so, what do you do? You stick your head up, trying to catch some of the mist on your face. You stretch out our hand. You want to touch its water and might even jump in.
As I explain in my systematic theology, none of that happens when you’re mowing your lawn. No one looks at the lawnmower and says, if only I could be united with this lawnmower. But this is sometimes how theology, God, is treated in our own modern day, like a lawnmower. Something to be examined, scrutinized, judged, rather than something to be received from God as breathtaking, contemplation of an incomprehensible mystery that moves you to participation.
JW: That’s a stinging rebuke to modern theology. But let me turn the tables: how has modern theology positively affected how you work? For some reason, God let the Germans take over the academy in the 1700s, and we’re not just going back. We’re several hundred years into the modern world. How are you a child of modern theology?
MB: The phrase modern theology is a really big one because there are so many different individuals and movements that come under that umbrella. If we’re talking about modernism, then I would see that as quite a negative thing. If we’re talking about just any number of modern figures in the modern era, well, it depends.
On the one hand, I can appreciate someone like Karl Barth for his critique of the liberalism from which he came out of, as evident in his commentary on Romans and his Church Dogmatics where he’s seriously concerned about the disappearance of divine transcendence, for instance. At the same time, though, I’d want to deliver a critique of Barth himself.
I’m not sure Barth entirely escapes that modernist instinct to collapse theology into the economy with everything having to be defined by Christology. That leaves little room, if any, for natural theology. But that’s a whole other story for another time.
JW: Let’s move on to more recent happenings. You stayed in the Southern Baptist Convention for a long time. What kept you there?
MB: Convictions. Convictions that I thought were biblical on issues such as believers-only baptism and congregational church government. Some of those doctrinal convictions kept me there for a while.
JW: Which has been harder to accept as an Anglican? Episcopacy or paedo-baptism?
MB: I know everybody’s pilgrimage into Anglicanism can look different, but for me, I would say the two occurred in my mind almost simultaneously in my own experience. I explained some of this in the article I wrote about leaving the SBC and becoming Anglican, but much more could be said.
I had been a pastor in Southern Baptist churches.
JW: I didn’t realize that.
MB: Yes, and so I’ve seen firsthand how there can be—and I explain all this in my article—how there is a lack of external accountability in a congregational setting, either with the congregation or with the elders or both.
That became painfully obvious because as I was looking at my Anglican brothers and sisters in Christ, it was impossible not to notice that they do have external accountability, one that has an impressive historical pedigree or catholicity. Ultimately, that whole experience drove me back to the Scriptures to ask, okay, have I accounted for everything that the Scriptures say, especially the apostolic tradition in the book of Acts?
JW: That’s very Baptist of you.
MB: I’d like to think it’s more Anglican because it requires a biblical reasoning mindful of how the apostolic tradition takes form in the patristic age. For me, the Jerusalem Council in the books of Acts was just impossible to get around. There’s a healthy external authority there with a council.
Looking at early church history, especially the ecumenical councils, I had to ask, why is it that the fathers believe that an Episcopal form of polity is simply being faithful to the apostolic tradition? For good reason, episcopal authority is just their natural instinct. It was a matter of catholicity, rooting them in that apostolic soil.
It’s essential to have conciliar accountability so that as a minister, you’re not simply deciding things for yourself or—worst case scenario—if someone in leadership persists in unrepentant sin there’s an external authority in bishops to keep them accountable, especially if the congregation is kept at bay.
JW: Well, uh, don’t look too closely at some of the stuff happening right now.
MB: Obviously, in the history of Episcopal polity, it doesn’t mean that it’s always been done perfectly. We live in a fallen world and we are pilgrims in need of sanctification on our way to glory. But that’s not the question. The question is in terms of the ideal, which of these polities is the most faithful to God’s word and the way God’s word was then handed down to our church fathers? And the Lord opened my eyes. I think it took a lot for the Lord to do that because, you know, when you’re confined to a certain paradigm, you only interpret the Scriptures or reality at large through that paradigm.
And it’s very hard to think outside of it, especially when it might cost you everything. So the Lord had to shake me quite a bit to open my eyes to see, this paradigm I am in doesn’t work. There’s a far more biblical and historical way, a way that is far healthier, to go about external accountability, especially with bishops.
By the way, those bishops aren’t just popping up out of nowhere. There is a beautiful catholicity going all the way back to the church fathers in which bishops and councils are absolutely key to both protecting the church from heresy and nurturing the church with sound doctrine from within. Councils and their bishops gave us the creeds, creeds that to this day define and keep proper boundaries around Christianity. When those go, in my experience, orthodoxy becomes anybody’s game. And it becomes quite subjective who’s going to be orthodox and who’s not. Needless to say, it becomes quite political at that point.
JW: Interesting. You mentioned a few key figures that helped you join the ACNA in your substack. Were there any particular major groundbreaking conversations that really were pivotal for you?
MB: Now that’s a good question. There were so many and I list some of them in my article. It’s really hard to pick one or two. There were so many supportive people that took time to say, you’re not the first to see these things or to experience these things. We are praying the Lord gives you courage to take this step.
I will just say this: it was quite helpful for me and my family to have someone close to home, Father Michael Flowers at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church, that could walk our family through the transition. The Lord used his persistent kindness. I’m amazed by how we can focus so much on right beliefs (and they’re crucial, I’m devoting my life to that), but not take the next step to live with compassion as Jesus did. I saw the kindness of Christ portrayed vividly at St. Aidan’s, which was a sign to me that the Holy Spirit is at work here.
JW: Who was the biggest figure in keeping you Baptist for so long? Was there someone who was close to you, someone you respect, who really gave you the counter arguments? Anyone to grapple with from history?
MB: Yes. Dan Cogan, who was my baptist pastor. Dan was gentle and lowly like Jesus. He actively took time to care for me and my family. But I also must thank Craig Carter who is a close friend.
JW: I was wondering if you’d mention him. He’s a giant in Baptist “catholicity” so to speak.
MB: Yes, Craig proved to be a friend and a great example of maturity. We had many profound conversations. He is not the type to be defensive. He’s secure enough in who he is, and so that freed him up in many memorable ways to say, absolutely, let’s talk through all of this, and let’s work through it whether we agree or disagree.
As for history, I’m constantly engaging theologians from the past, so I had to work through theologians from the past that were Baptist. I’ve had a great affinity and respect for someone like John Gill.
JW: Ah yes, all the Reformed Baptists I know love John Gill.
MB: He’s their guy, and for good reason. But for all my love for John Gill, Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker won out.
Richard Hooker proved to be my model of how to be a theologian, specifically an Anglican theologian. I found him so compelling. The way he is interacting with and dependent on the Great Tradition (including Aquinas); how he interprets scripture theologically, goes about polemics with such conviction, the way he understands the primacy of orthodoxy, and then how he can be at peace letting other things remain secondary or tertiary. I just think he’s an inspirational model for how to be a theologian and I pray he rubs off on me now that I am Anglican.
JW: What did you hope to achieve while you were a Baptist professor, and do you think you succeeded?
MB: Well, during my whole time as a Baptist, my aim was always fidelity. Faithfulness to sound doctrine, but more specifically to a renewal of catholicity–and with it, orthodoxy–in our own day But as I explain in my article, when the executive committee of the SBC chose not to include the Nicene Creed in the Baptist Faith and Message, I realized I could no longer continue. Nevertheless, the Lord produced so much fruit when I was teaching as a baptist. So many of my students are proof. I am grateful God used me to serve them, helping them find jobs at churches, classical schools, colleges, and seminaries, fighting for them to get their dissertations published. Many of them are doing all that because once upon a time they first encountered classical theology in the classroom.
And it’s really more than the classroom, isn’t it? My family opened our home and so many of them came over to our house, met my wife and kids, and then we studied the Fathers together.
Nonetheless, I got to the point where I realized Anglicanism is the most consistent and the most beautiful, in terms of its faithfulness to classical Christianity. And when God opened my eyes to that, I realized I was inconsistent to stay a Baptist at that point. I couldn’t stay Baptist and consistently embrace catholicity.
You know, it’s a dangerous thing to be a theologian because if you’re going to be a theologian and actually have integrity doing it, you have to follow truth wherever it leads you (Greg Peters, an Anglican priest, recently pointed this out to me in a Credo podcast). Of course, Jesus talks this way, doesn’t he? Whatever the cost. If you’re not ready to suffer and sacrifice, you should not be a theologian. You must put to death your image.
I had to ask myself, am I going to be true to these vows, so to speak, that I made to follow Christ, or am I going to allow any number of other things to sway me otherwise?
JW: How do you think your move into the ACNA will affect your theological reception in the Southern Baptist Convention and I’ll say evangelicalism more broadly?
MB: So people that know me will tell you what I just said. I really am genuine when I say I’m first and foremost concerned about following the truth—where it leads and being faithful to the Lord in that regard. So, in one sense, it doesn’t matter because our call is to be faithful no matter what.
JW: Spoken just like David Platt.
MB: I’m old enough now to know that to worry about perception, or to center your life around image, is the death of theology. One of the first things I tell new students is that in an age of social media, they will be tempted to let it dictate what they will and will not believe. And that’s a dangerous thing, especially to catholicity.
Of course, I see my turn to become Anglican as a deeper commitment to be Protestant, not less of one. And I think I could go further than that and say it’s a deeper commitment to classical Christian orthodoxy, and a truly consistent one.
If anyone falls in love with classical Christian orthodoxy and is committed to making that primary, then we have so much in common, whether they are Anglican or not. So in that regard the books I’m writing, the conferences I speak at, the podcasts I host, nothing changes. It was remarkable: many Baptist friends reached out to me personally, lamented that they too see the problems I experienced first hand, and long for a recovery of orthodoxy moving forward. They are in my prayers.
JW: So you’re going to keep doing all the things you did while teaching previously? I was going to ask if you had to change anything in your systematic theology.
MB: My projects remain broadly the same, but in terms of my systematic theology, yes and no. I haven’t had to change too much because it’s still very much a work in progress. I haven’t written those later chapters on ecclesiology yet. Still, so much of my research at this point was already indebted to different Anglican divines.
Two different Anglican distinctives, participation in God and reading scripture sacramentally—these were already building, but I think in becoming Anglican, there will be a freedom to ask what does a systematic theology look if we take a sacramental theology and apply it through to all areas and not just the chapter on ecclesiology? That’s a DNA change, something that I hope is in the bloodstream, no matter what chapter you’re reading.
JW: Let’s talk the Wild West of 21st century Anglicanism. You built a lot of your legacy on the Great Tradition and Catholicity. Anglicans welcome that language, but the devil is in the details. There’s an emergent movement in the ACNA saying it’s time to move away from the language and very notion of Sola Scriptura, even as some Evangelicals have defended the doctrine as it appears in the Jerusalem Declaration. You wrote a whole book on Sola Scriptura a few years ago. Do you still stand by the reformation construction of it as you articulated in that book?
MB: Oh yes, absolutely. I do hope I can one day take time to publish a second with additional voices from the English Reformation, looking at the very sophisticated, but accessible ways that they put forward the authority of scripture in tandem with their retrieval of the Great Tradition. But I do some of that with John Jewel in my book, The Reformation as Renewal. So, my Protestant convictions are as strong as they ever have been.
At the same time, those who read those books will notice that I’m very fierce in warning against a biblicism that was present in the Radical Reformers, which was very much rejected by the magisterial Reformers. I think that is very relevant today—we’re still encountering it. And it’s quite toxic.
The Reformers, unlike the Radicals, did not see competition between scripture and tradition. Heiko Oberman has done a lot of work here to demonstrate that inserting a conflict between the two is a wrong reading of the Reformation.
The magisterial Reformers argued for Sola Scriptura in this sense: scripture alone is breathed out by God, and therefore our final court of appeal. From inspiration follows all the other perfections and attributes of scripture such as clarity, trustworthiness, sufficiency, and so on. At the same time, that did not mean, as it did for many of the Radicals, a disposal of the Great Tradition. As if scripture is alone.
In fact, the Reformers would have been beside themselves to be compared to the radicals, because they were often being accused of being innovative by their Roman opponents. But they’re actually quite dependent on the tradition. Brian Hollon, president of Trinity, wrote an article recently on his Substack where he makes this point. He says:
“It’s the same apostolic tradition that gave us the New Testament that also gave us the Nicene Creed. They are not competing authorities, but complementary expressions of the one apostolic faith.”
So tradition is ministerial; scripture is magisterial. And yet, they both come out of this same apostolic heritage. It really doesn’t make sense to set them against each other.
JW: A related point of contention in the ACNA, perhaps more online than in reality, concerns the later church councils, such as Nicaea II. How might you draw a distinction between the ongoing witness of Scripture continued in the Nicene Creed of 381 A.D. compared to the anathemas of 787 A.D. regarding iconography?
MB: I think what I can say is that there is a complementary relationship between the canon and conciliar tradition. When you arrive at something like Nicaea or Chalcedon, why is it that bishops at these councils are still binding on us today? It’s not because their creeds are Scripture. Rather, they are coming out of and faithful to that same apostolic heritage. Unless we think the Holy Spirit took a nap—which I don’t—then we must acknowledge that He works in Scripture inspirationally, but He also continues to work through the church and in the church to which he gave these scriptures, illuminating the church to interpret the scriptures.
In this case, He worked through bishops and councils to give us creeds that provide the proper framework for interpreting scripture and defending scripture. Again, Hollon makes this point:
“To accept the biblical canon while rejecting the conciliar tradition that helped establish it is inconsistent. It’s like cutting off the limb upon which we are perched. The authority that Southern Baptists grant to the 27 books of the New Testament rests on precisely the same kind of ecclesial discernment they reject when it comes to the Nicene Creed.”
That captures the proper relationship between the two.
JW: In 30 seconds, what is the greatest strength of the Reformation’s doctrine?
MB: The great strength still goes back to Luther—his bold study of scripture and tradition to the point where he walked away certain the ungodly are justified on the basis of Christ alone and therefore by grace alone. Like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, the burden fell off and Luther became a free man, free to serve God. Romans is quite instrumental that way for the Reformation, so that the church could recover the imputed righteousness of Christ.
JW: What is the greatest weakness of the Reformation’s doctrine?
MB: I don’t know that it is a weakness of the Reformation doctrine itself as much as its application. The disunity we see in the countless denominations that have splintered from each other is undeniable. Sometimes division is necessary, especially on matters of orthodoxy. It’s important to say that. And yet…when it’s not, it’s sad—because Christ put so much emphasis on the unity of his body. As Protestants, we need to be careful here, humble and teachable, and acknowledge that this is something that has damaged our credibility. So, how can we renew the church to be more unified?
JW: I’m going to give you a false dichotomy: Would you rather have dinner with Charles Spurgeon or John Henry Newman?
MB: Gosh, that’s really tough.
JW: Ha! You’re going to say Newman, aren’t you?
MB: Well, I’m going to answer that question in a way that fulfills my vocational calling. I love Spurgeon. I think that God gifted him in preaching in ways that were unique. I’d love to sit down and have a cigar with that man. However, as a theologian, I mean—Newman’s a theologian—and I would want to, would love to, sit down with him and simultaneously hear his wisdom on so many things and yet also push back on him leaving Anglicanism in the end.
JW: I have to follow this up by asking: do you believe that to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant? You seem to be fine using that label—Protestant—still. You’re not saying “I’m a Reformed Catholic” and avoiding the P word altogether.
MB: No—if I did, I wouldn’t be Protestant. I’m fine using that label. I think “reformed catholicity,” rightly understood, actually preserves Protestantism. Those who claim it are trying to return to the true meaning of Protestantism, as understood by both the English reformers and the Protestant scholastics.
JW: How do you expect your work in theology to aid the ACNA in the near future?
MB: I don’t want to be arrogant and think my work is somehow meant to be the work of the ACNA. I want to learn from so many impressive Anglicans out there. But I do want to serve as a fellow Anglican. The ways I think I can do that best are by continuing to retrieve classical Christian theology and, if we can stand on that solid rock, eventually turn to address the pressing questions of our secular age: What it means to be human, whether we can get back to virtue (as Peter Kreeft says), and so on. If theology is about God and all things in relation to God, then that second step is where I’d like to go next. These are some of the questions plaguing Christianity in our own day.
JW: Will you continue teaching doctoral students?
MB: Trinity has some great aspirations and plans ahead.
JW: Excellent. Thank you for your time, Dr. Barrett. I’ll close us in prayer:
O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light rises up in darkness for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what you would have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in your light we may see light, and in your straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Matthew Barrett is Research Professor of Theology at Trinity Anglican Seminary. He is the host of the Credo Podcast and each year leads the Credo conference. He is also director of The Center for Classical Theology. He is the author of books such as Simply Trinity and The Reformation as Renewal. He is currently writing a Systematic Theology. He is theologian-in-residence at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church.
Image Credit: Unsplash.
