Book Review: “An Explanation of the Thirty-Nine Articles”

An Explanation of the Thirty-Nine Articles. By Alexander Penrose Forbes, with a new Foreword by C. P. Collister. Nashotah, WI: Nashotah House Press, 2024. 874 pp. $32.11 (paper).

When Anglican seminarians ask me how to study theology, I tell them to pick one of the great theologians and burrow into his corpus. But make sure he was also a saint, I advise. Alexander Penrose Forbes (1817‒75) was not one of the ten top theologians of the last two millennia, but he was one of the best Anglican minds of the nineteenth century. And he was a holy man. TNAA readers will be interested to know that he was the first Tractarian bishop in the United Kingdom, and one of the youngest bishops in Anglican history. After a stint in the Indian civil service in Madras, Forbes went up to Oxford where he was captured by the vision of Newman, Keble, and Pusey. The last two became lifelong friends and mentors.

In 1847, at the age of 30, Forbes was consecrated bishop of Brechin in Scotland. Forbes broke episcopal precedent by choosing to live not in comfortable Brechin but in the heart of industrial Dundee. For the rest of his life he became a familiar and beloved figure in the slums, ministering from 7 in the morning to 11 at night amidst filth and smells and raging epidemics of cholera and smallpox. His pockets bulging with medicine and wine bottles and a prayer book, he visited the sick, impoverished, and prisoners. Forbes spent the next decades until his death trying to improve the lives of the working poor—helping found a hospital, orphanage, asylum, convalescent home, free library, and free classes at his church school.

Forbes was also distinguished for his catholic scholarship and leadership. He was convinced that worship and not only preaching—thus the altar and not just a pulpit—should be the focus of Anglican life and churches. He argued in many books and articles that this was the view of both Scripture and tradition.

But while Forbes was influenced by the Oxford Movement and counted two of its leaders as his mentors, he felt some in the movement went too far when they seemed to approve all the developments of the Middle Ages. Forbes was adamant that Anglicans should look to the Fathers and the undivided Church of the first millennium for guidance rather than the medieval Church. This is what made Forbes what we would call reformed catholic rather than Anglo-Catholic.

Ironically, it was this reformed catholic vision of Anglicanism that caused him to be charged with heresy in 1860. Ironic because while the charge could have been leveled justly against some in the medieval Church, Forbes denounced these same errors.

Forbes’ accusers (three bishops noted for their paucity of learning) claimed he taught that the Eucharist was “offering up Christ” in every communion service—and that this contradicted Anglicanism’s principal rule, the Thirty-Nine Articles. Forbes denied the charge and insisted he was merely teaching the presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist—as the Fathers and Anglican formularies taught.

The controversy spanned several years and caused Forbes deep anguish. But his parish and diocese grew in the years following, and shortly after the trial Forbes was sent a public statement from more than five thousand workers in Dundee of all denominations expressing hope that he would be “victorious over your adversaries.”

In 1855 Forbes opened for worship the Gothic-style St. Paul’s Cathedral on a hill overlooking Dundee. It was consecrated in 1865 when the debt was paid off. The cathedral seated 800 and was usually full.

This new edition

Because Forbes has so much to teach us Anglicans, we should be grateful that Clinton Collister has brought out in one volume what had been two: Forbes’ An Explanation of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1867 and 1868). In his helpful Foreword, Collister explains what led Forbes to write these volumes. The Catholic revival of the previous decades had persuaded many that a systematic theology is “the only sure guarantee for orthodoxy of faith.” The faith of the Church “on the subjects that were left as open questions, has shriveled and withered away.” So Forbes wrote A Short Explanation of the Nicene Creed (1852) and this commentary on the Articles.

Collister suggests that Forbes’ two commentaries—on the Creed and the Articles—constitute a systematic theology for what he calls Evangelical Catholics. It is “Evangelical” because it regards Scripture as the touchstone containing all things necessary for salvation, and “Catholic” because it believes God guides the whole Church into all truth.

Using the coordinate emphasis on truth and unity in Ephesians 4, Collister explains that for Forbes, only ecumenical councils in the undivided Church of the first millennium are authoritative, and therefore Forbes lays down a rule for Anglicans: no decision of an Anglican Church should be binding if it violates one of these four sources of authority: Scripture, the “concurrent voice of catholic antiquity” (ecumenical councils), the Book of Common Prayer, and the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Collister places emphasis on Forbes’ disagreement with Newman over the development of doctrine. I think he gets the conflict right, and will discuss this more below.

I have a few very minor criticisms of this new edition: its footnotes provide faulty page numbers and the Foreword has no page numbers. The binding breaks easily. These peccadilloes will surely be fixed in a second edition.

The purpose and nature of the Articles

It is clear to a reader with knowledge of Forbes’ biography that these two volumes not only make up a major part of an Evangelical Catholic systematic theology, as Collister notes, but they also constitute the Brechin bishop’s book-length defense against his ecclesial accusers. They had alleged that Forbes was contradicting the Articles; Forbes shows that while the Articles were intended to include a range of Anglican views, the catholic approach is demonstratively and perhaps preeminently represented there.

In his “Epistle Dedicatory to the Rev. E.B. Pusey,” Forbes explains both the purpose and nature of the Articles. They were never intended to be the “sole rule of faith” for Anglicans, but everywhere assume both the three classic creeds and “the implicit structure of the old catholicity.” They are “rather statements about truths, than the truths themselves” (vi‒vii).

Unlike Lutheranism and Calvinism which are systematically built around a central doctrine (justification and divine sovereignty, respectively), Anglicanism is the English version of the old catholic faith. This is why the Articles have a “loose and unsystematic structure.” They are polemical and timebound, addressed to “certain errors” rife in the sixteenth century. Thus “an undue proportion [in them] has been given to the negative side of theology, and this is to be regretted.” Forbes’ aim is “not so much to dwell on the condemnations of errors, as to elucidate and evolve the positive doctrines, the excesses and perversions of which doctrines are the subjects of the censure of the Articles.” Hence “almost all the errors touched on in the Articles are perversions or exaggerations of Gospel truths,” and it was his aim to illustrate those Gospel truths without the exaggerations. For example, Article XXII on the “Romish doctrine of pardons” condemns a “perversion” of the penitential discipline of the Church. Forbes will go on to show what this penitential discipline was. Because “the soul cannot live on negations,” Forbes’ exposition is “constructive, not destructive” (v‒vi).

The Church

Forbes argues that Rome is too narrow in its catholicity, and that its late medieval errors needed reform. So Forbes is catholic but not Roman Catholic; his approach is what I have called reformed catholic.

This can be seen first in his understanding of the Church. It is “in its universality [Christ’s] visible form, His permanent ever renovated Humanity, His eternal revelation” (278). Scripture has final authority but the Church is its guardian and expounder (98). Therefore there are

two authorities mutually corroborative of each other, and, so far as individual interpretation of each, mutually corrective of each other: the inspired Word and the inspired Church. The inspired Word, receiving its canonicity, its interpretation from the inspired Church; and the inspired Church, tested in its development by the inspired Word. (95)

When Forbes thinks of Church authority to interpret Scripture, he means the undivided Church of the first millennium, best represented by the Fathers and best exemplified by Gregory the Great, whom Forbes regards as “the founder of the existing Church of England” (xxix). Gregory asserted the “efficacy of the Eucharistic Sacrifice” without transubstantiation and papal primacy without medieval papalism or Ultramontanism, made little mention of Mary’s prerogatives, prohibited image worship, and said not a word about indulgences or the treasury of merits (xxix‒xxx).

Queen Elizabeth I made sure to secure the apostolic succession through Archbishop Parker so that “organically…the Church before and after the Reformation was one” (xxvi). The Scottish and continental reformers, on the other hand, threw out the old hierarchies and started over. But under Elizabeth “the organic identity was carefully preserved” (xxvi).

The sacraments

Forbes points to the plain language of Article XXV (“effectual signs of grace…by the which He doth work invisibly in us”) to argue for a catholic view of a sacrament: “It not only typifies, it conveys.” Sacraments in general are the principal means by which “God works invisibly in us,” conveying grace. “All grace flows from the Humanity of Jesus Christ, and the Sacraments are main channels whereby that grace flows into the soul” (439, my emph.).

The Eucharist is the Real Presence of not only the divinity of Christ but also his humanity, his Body and Blood. Article XXVIII does not say “that we are partakers of Christ, or of a grace from Christ, but the Bread which we break, i.e. the Bread which has been blessed and consecrated by our Lord’s words, ‘This is My Body,’ through the operation of the Holy Ghost, is the communion or participation of the Body of Christ; and the Cup of Blessing, i.e. the Cup blessed by the words, ‘This is My Blood,’ is the partaking of or communion of the Blood of Christ” (501‒02). For Forbes, then, the Eucharist conveys not an amorphous “Christ” or “grace” which even Baptists can affirm, but the Body and Blood without qualification. When the Article says the “Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten…after a Heavenly and Spiritual manner,” the words “heavenly and Spiritual” mean “in a way that transcends the senses, in the order of grace and not in the order of nature” (562).

Forbes says we should not be surprised that Article XXV says the other five sacraments “are not to be counted sacraments of the Gospel” and “have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism and the Lord’s Supper” with “an outward sign ordained by God.” Chrysostom, Augustine, and Isaac the Great made the same distinction between the two and the five and on similar grounds. Furthermore, the Homilies, which are among the Anglican formularies, refer to both marriage and Orders as sacraments but on a different level from the two Gospel sacraments (448‒49).

Some evangelical Anglicans have recently claimed that Article XXIX (“Of the Wicked which eat not the Body of Christ in the Use of the Lord’s Supper”) disproves the presence of the Body and Blood in the elements. Forbes was familiar with a nineteenth-century argument to this effect, and explains that the Convocation of 1571 not only gave us the Thirty-Nine Articles but imposed upon the clergy (in Canon 6) “as their guide in the doctrinal interpretation of Scripture, the authority of the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops.” It can be easily demonstrated, Forbes went on, that the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops taught “that in some sense the unworthy communicants do receive the Body and Blood of Christ to their condemnation,” which is what St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11: “Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the Body eats and drinks krima [condemnation] on himself” (v. 29, my trans.). Forbes asks, “How could the Lord’s Body be discerned, if It was not there?” (575) Besides, the quote said by the Article to be from Augustine is not found in any extant treatise by Augustine but is an interpolation from Bede who taught that “the Holy Body and Precious Blood were offered up” in “sacrifice” on the altar (581).

All in all, the meaning of Article XXIX is that the wicked receive the res sacramenti but not the virtus sacramenti and “the formularies of the Church rightly understood support” this view (577, 580). For in the Exhortation before Communion in the 1662 BCP we read that worthy recipients “spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his Blood…. So is the danger great, if we receive THE SAME unworthily” (Forbes’ emphasis). Hence “that which is received by the good, the Same is received by the wicked and unworthy” (577). The Lord’s Supper conveys the Real Presence of the Body and Blood in and with the consecrated bread and wine on the altar, but the wicked do not receive the saving efficacy of the Body and Blood, which means they are deprived of “any share of Christ Himself” (588).

Development of doctrine

Forbes was deeply influenced by John Henry Newman, the founding father of the Oxford movement. But Forbes came to disagree with Newman’s theory of development, especially after Newman swam the Tiber. His principal problem with Newman’s theory was that it lacked an ecclesial criterion. In contrast, Forbes argued, historic Anglicans have looked to the undivided Church in its Fathers and ecumenical councils for guidance in the interpretation of Scripture.

Forbes did not doubt that doctrine develops. The Apocrypha, for example, “exhibit the gradual development of truth, a very marked increase of the knowledge of God being traceable between the Books of Moses and the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus” (110, my emph.). All the great doctrines of Christ and the apostles are “found in embryo in the Law and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms.” They develop in “life, and strength, and fulness, in the Gospel” (116). And in the first centuries of the Church, doctrine clearly developed by guidance from the “Holy Ghost.” For example, the Church accepted the term “‘consubstantial,’ rejecting it in the wrong sense, accepting it in the right” (279). It did the same “in regard to the sacred doctrines of the Natures and Persons of our Lord” (279).

But the doctrine of development has been abused by Rome in two ways. First, it has “been used as the master-key to explain all existing phenomena,” even those where it differs from Eastern Orthodox and Anglican churches which are also catholic. Second, it fails to realize that since the Great Schism between East and West in 1054, the Church can no longer apply Vincent of Lerins’ rule for infallible doctrine as that which “the Church has received and taught in every age, in every country, and concurrently by all” (279). But when “for the sins of Christendom, God permitted the great schism between the East and the West, the teaching office of the Church was, for the most part, limited to…truths already infallibly defined [by]…that test of infallibility, the reception by the whole Church of Christ” (282). In the last millennium, Rome has taught as infallible truths that have differed with Constantinople and Canterbury and therefore cannot be infallible. Forbes was horrified when, two years after the publication of these two volumes, Rome declared the infallibility of the pope, and gave up hope for near-term union of the Churches.

The Anglican difference

We have just seen that Forbes regarded Roman doctrines developed since the Great Schism as a series of innovations impossible to justify as infallible. No surprise, he concluded, that the Roman communion developed such excesses in the Middle Ages after the end of the undivided Church. As we saw above in his praise for Gregory the Great, Forbes rejected later Roman doctrines concerning indulgences, transubstantiation, images, and Mariology. In his exposition of Article XV (Of Christ alone without sin) he argues that the immaculate conception had little support in antiquity or among the medieval schoolmen and that Bernard opposed it as a novelty (228). In his exposition of Article XXII (Of Purgatory), he excoriates the “Romish” doctrine that would “invalidate the power of the Passion of Christ,” suggest both that our Lord’s death takes away temporal as well as eternal punishment for sin, and that paid-for masses make repentance unnecessary. This is a doctrine that created “a perfect traffic in masses for souls” on the false supposition that suffering works apart from the merit of Christ (301‒10). At the same time, Forbes defends the notion of prayer for the dead, citing Paul’s prayer for the dead Onesiphorus in 2 Tim. 1:15‒18, and the universal practice of early liturgies to pray for the completion of sanctification (not satisfaction) in the intermediate period (311‒51).

Forbes also demonstrates that the Articles, while influenced by the Reformed tradition, break from significant staples of that tradition. He challenges, for example, the “I” in TULIP for “irresistible grace,” the notion that the grace God sends a person to see and accept Christ is impossible to resist. Forbes points to Article X that speaks of “the grace of God…working with us” to produce a “good will,” suggesting that “in every good action, there are two factors—a divine and a human,” and that while the relation between the two is “mysterious,” “God respects human freedom.” As he puts it, “Man may resist grace” (154‒55).

Scripture, Forbes contends, is replete with evidence of what the Articles suggest. “O inhabitants of Jerusalem, What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? I waited for grapes, but it produced wild grapes” (Is 5:3‒4); “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not!” (Matt 23:37); “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people” (Rom 10:21; Isai 65:2); “We appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain” (2 Cor 6:1). Over and over, Forbes teaches, Scripture portrays God offering saving grace that is rejected and resisted.

Another tenet of classical Calvinism is the perseverance of the saints, which maintains that one cannot fall away after being truly saved. Yet Forbes shows that Article XVI on sin after baptism suggests the opposite: “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin.” Of course it goes on to say that “by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives”—which is simply the ancient catholic doctrine that one can fall out of grace but return again with repentance. Forbes adds that the Homilies, another Anglican formulary, also teach that the truly saved can lose their salvation: Homily 8 in the First Book of Homilies is “Of Falling from God” (694). It warns, “For whereas God hath showed to all them that truly believe his gospel his face of mercy in Jesus Christ…if they after do neglect the same…he will take away from them his kingdom…because they bring not forth the fruit thereof that he looketh for.”^[1]

A third mainstay of Reformed doctrine is sin’s ubiquitous stain on every human action, even the good works of saints. Forbes says Article XII (Of Good Works) implicitly opposes this notion by asserting that good works, the “fruit of faith,” are “pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith,” and it is by these good works that “a lively faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit.” Forbes notes that the Reformers justify their belief by the “filthy rags” in Isaiah 64:6. But the Anglican bishop contends that the Reformation application of this Isaiah verse to every good work after faith “is opposed to Scripture, to tradition, to right reason” (192).

In the Word of God, the works of the just are called “good” (Matt. 5:16); “works of light” (Eph 5:8-9); “sacrifices acceptable and well-pleasing to God” (Phil 4:18); “clean robes” (Rev 7:13); “fine linen” (Rev 19:8); and they who here have lived holily are said to have done “works of righteousness, and kept their garments undefiled” (Rev 2:4; 3:4); also, to those who walk aright is promised a great reward, “both in this world, and in that which is to come” (1 Tim 4:8); and St. James says, “In many things we all offend” (Jas 3:2), therefore not in all things. (192)

If the Articles depart from significant Reformed doctrines, they do the same from Lutheran tradition. Forbes contends that the episcopal authors of the Articles differed with Luther on free will. We have already seen that Article X makes room for a degree of human freedom in the mystery of the divine-human relation. But, as Forbes remarks, Luther famously declared for the bondage of the will, that man is as the pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was turned, like a stick or stone which is lifeless—driven by either God or the devil (155).

More telling, the Articles “give no countenance to the crucial doctrine of Luther, justification by mere imputation, or by that faith which believes itself justified” (x). Article XII states that good works “do spring necessarily of a true and lively faith,” which implies that justification by faith that does not issue in good works cannot give assurance.

Another break with Luther and the Lutheran tradition is Article VII on the Old Testament. Luther wrote in his sermon on Christians and Moses that “the Ten Commandments do not pertain to us.”^[2] Forbes notes that Melanchthon agreed in his Loci Communes, “The law is abrogated…and may not condemn even when it is not fulfilled” (122).^[3] But the Article insists that “[a]lthough the law given from God by Moses, as touching ceremonies and rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the civil precepts…no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.” Forbes explains, “[I]t is in so many words a re-assertion of the doctrine of the Schoolmen [that Moses’ moral law is still binding on Christians] against the options of Luther and Melanchthon” (121).

On the literal sense

Forbes points to the final authority of Scripture as stated or implied in Articles VI, VIII, XIV, XV, XVIII, XXI, XXII, XXIV, XXVIII, XXXIV, and XXXVII. But as the wide diversity of Christian interpretation of the Bible proves, the critical question is not whether Scripture has final authority but how to interpret Scripture. Forbes opts for the Reformation hermeneutic which privileges the “plain” or “literal” sense, and commends the principles proposed by John of Ragusa at the Council of Basle. Among them are, first, that the principal literal sense is not always on the surface “but what God the Holy Ghost intends,” as in the parables. Second, it is only the literal sense, properly understood, that is “an infallible and most sufficient rule of faith” (100).

Third, in one and the same text there may be more literal senses than one. Think of “Don’t muzzle the ox when treading out the grain.” Fourth, in the same sentence words are sometimes literal, sometimes mystical—such as in “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?” Fifth, because difficulties are intended by God to call out the diligence and humility of students, the best expositors must be chosen, especially those with preference for the ancients. Sixth, Scripture must be interpreted by the authority of the received consensus of the undivided Church. Forbes concludes, “There is no sanction here for the right of private judgment. Such a notion never entered into the minds of the compilers of the Articles” (100‒01).^[4]

“Modern Evangelicalism”

Elimination of private judgment is one sign that Forbes distinguishes the faith of the Articles from not only the Reformed and Lutheran traditions but also “modern Evangelicalism,” as he puts it. Another sign is his discussion of Article XI on “the Justification of Man” where Anglicans are told to go to the “Homily of Justification” to clarify the Article’s definition of “justified by faith only.” Both Forbes and modern editors of the Homilies like Gerald Bray tell us that this is the sermon on “The Salvation of Mankind” in the first Book of Homilies. There we read that infant baptism “wash[es] from their [infants’] sins,” and that good works are “necessary to be done afterward” for justification by faith to be valid.^[5] Both of these ideas are repugnant to most evangelicals, as is the sermon’s reliance for confirmation of its doctrine on the authority of “Hilary, Basil and Ambrose, Origen, Saint Chrysostom, Saint Cyprian, Saint Augustine, Prosper, Oecumenius, Photius, Bernard, Anselm, and many other authors, Greek and Latin.”^[6]

Forbes observes that the Articles “are silent on, if not contradictory to, many of the Shibboleths of modern Evangelicalism.”

The name or idea of sensible conversion does not occur from beginning to end, neither is there mention of renouncing of our own merits as the formal cause of our justification, or of assurance, as the end to be sought for in the spiritual life. The Articles give no countenance to the idea, that if a man dies happy, (as the saying is), he is safe. (x)

Forbes adds that the common evangelical understanding of justification by faith—that all that matters is believing in my head that Jesus died for my sins—is “dangerous, in that it was made to usurp the place of the Sacraments, that it swallowed up all the other factors in the life of the soul, and was substituted as the ground of man’s assurance” (172).

Mistakes on Lutheranism and Israel

Like every first-class theologian, Forbes gets some things wrong. Luther and Melanchthon did not “reduce the Sacraments to tokens” that merely “pledge of the truth of the divine promises” so that “the objective character of the means of grace was lost” (437). Lutherans were, and are, adamant that in, with, and under the consecrated bread and wine is the Real Presence, as they put it, of not only the divinity of the Son of God but also his humanity.

Forbes also wrongly refers to the Church as “the Israel of God” (450), and “We Churchmen” as “the true Israelites” (120). Forbes of course quotes Irenaeus on this notion of the Church as the New Israel, but I wonder if he would be saying this today. Since the Holocaust much of the Great Tradition has been reexamining its supersessionist presumptions. More and more scholars have been seeing that the New Testament never says the Church is the New Israel and that by “the Israel of God” (Gal 6:16) Paul meant the remnant of Israel that was recognizing Jesus as Messiah. Forbes would take seriously the words of the great NT scholar at Cambridge, C.F.D. Moule, “These three chapters [Rom 9‒11] emphatically forbid us to speak of the Church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.”^[7]

Browne and Forbes

Forbes’ two volumes on the Articles appeared fourteen and fifteen years after the second volume of Bishop Edward Harold Browne’s Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Historical and Doctrinal (1853). Like Forbes, Browne thought Luther and Calvin were guilty of excesses, saw little good in the Puritans who “persecuted as badly as Rome,” and appreciated the Tracts of the Times until its authors appeared to desire a return to the Middle Ages rather than the Fathers. Browne regarded Richard Hooker as the premier Anglican theologian of the Reformation: “His work must always be first on the list of English Divines.”^[8]

Browne’s writing is always lively, engaging, and clear. But when compared to the younger bishop who wrote on the Articles, it is Forbes whose commentary is deeper and richer. This is due in part to Pusey’s patristic input as Forbes was writing.

Browne is decidedly Protestant in his approach, while Forbes is reformed catholic. This can be seen when comparing their respective treatment of many Articles, but because of space I will limit myself to versions of the Prayer Book and the Eucharist.

Browne sees the 1552 BCP, which he concedes “was far more extensively reformed” than its 1549 predecessor, as “the same as that we now possess” (the 1662), with “few…very important” exceptions”^[9] (Browne’s Introduction, 8, my emph.) This claim was no doubt astonishing to Forbes who appreciated the catholic changes made by the bishops who finalized the 1662 BCP.

In his treatment of Article XXXI (Of the One Oblation of Christ on the Cross) Browne concludes his review of the Fathers on the Eucharist by saying they treated it as “a commemorative sacrifice,” a “remembrance (anamnesis)” of the great sacrifice on the cross. Joseph Mede (d. 1635), he suggests, got it right when he wrote that the Eucharist is “an oblation of prayer and praise, of bread and wine…and a commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.” Browne commends Bishop Bull’s description of the bread and wine “as figures or images” of the Body and Blood.^[10]

For Forbes, on the other hand, one must simply say that the bread and wine after consecration mysteriously are the Body and Blood. The elements do not merely represent but convey. We receive not just the divinity of the Son of God—which even Zwingli believed is received in a Supper with faith—but also his humanity. And the ontological joining of the Eucharist with the ongoing celestial offering of the Son’s sacrifice to the Father—which is totally absent in Browne—is presented with depth and elegance in Forbes. Article XXXI “is directed against the vulgar and heretical doctrine of the reiteration of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist” (603‒04). The truth is far different:

For, in the Eucharist, as a Sacrament, “we eat our ransom,” as St. Augustine says,—we receive spiritually “the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for us,”;…in the same Eucharist as a Sacrifice, we, in representation, plead the one great Sacrifice which our Great High Priest continually presenteth for us in heaven…ever before the Father, in person, Himself—mediating with the Father as our intercessor…. For although once for all offered, that Sacrifice, be it remembered, is ever LIVING AND CONTINUOUS, made to be continuous by the resurrection of our Lord. (605‒06, Forbes’ emph.)

All Anglicans should be grateful to Clinton Collister for bringing out this new edition of Forbes’ superb commentary. It is a learned gateway to the riches of not only the Articles but the two-thousand-year-old Anglican faith.

NOtes

1. “How Dangerous a Thing it is to Fall from God,” in Gerald Bray, ed., The Book of Homilies: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2015), 68; emph. added. ↑
2. Luther, “How Christians Should Regard Moses,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Works, 3rd edn., eds. Timothy Lull and William R. Russell (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 109. ↑
3. In Melanchthon’s later Apology for the Augsburg Confession, however, the reformer said the Decalog is binding on Christians. See no. 22 at https://reformed.org/historic-confessions/apology-of-the-augsburg-confession-by-philip-melanchthon/ ↑
4. Both Jewel and Hooker warned against the use of private judgment: John Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England (Moscow, ID: Davenant, 2020), 22: Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 5.10.1; 7. 25.5. ↑
5. “A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind by Only Christ Our Saviour, From Sin and Death Everlasting,” in Bray, ed., The Book of Homilies, 22, 24. Forbes does not say that works are part of what justifies, but that good works prove that justification took place and remains. ↑
6. Ibid., 25. ↑
7. C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical And Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 2, International Critical Commentary, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1979), 448. For more on supersessionism, see McDermott, Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2017). ↑
8. George William Kitchin, Edward Harold Browne, D.D., Lord Bishop of Winchester and Prelate of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London: John Murray, 1907), 52. ↑
9. Edward Harold Browne, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Historical and Doctrinal, vol. I (London: John W Parker, 1850), 8. ↑
10. Browne, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Historical and Doctrinal, vol. II (London: John W Parker, 1853), 522‒23, 527, 529, 531‒32, my emph. ↑