Articles
Perfection in the Christian Life [Commentary on Browne: Article XIV]
The doctrine of supererogation is bound up with the Roman system of indulgences, so a few words should be said about the latter first. According to the apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina, issued by Pope Paul VI, “An indulgence is the remission before God of the temporal punishment due sins already forgiven as far as their…
Book Review: “Thou Shalt be Buried”
Thou Shalt be Buried. By Bishop Thomas Gordon. Exemplar Media, 2022. 110 pp. $10.00 (paper). While cremation has become increasingly common in the United States, its acceptance in Christian circles is often still controversial. In this short book, the Most Reverend Thomas Gordon, presiding bishop of the Orthodox Anglican Church and Metropolitan Archbishop of the…
Kinism and Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism
When my review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism was published, Fr. Ben Jefferies—a former member of the Liturgy Task Force of the Anglican Church in North America, and a once frequent contributor to The North American Anglican who cut ties after my review was not retracted—posted a comment calling both the book…
Flaming Tongues: On the Need for Creeds
There is a tendency among our evangelical brethren to see the creeds as distractions from true, Biblical Christianity; a human addition that is non-essential at best and a “vain philosophy” at worst. I will grant that the concern is noble. They fear going beyond the scriptures, and they are right to do so. This voice…
The Meaning of Merit De Congruo [Commentary on Browne: Article XIII]
While the Articles only mention the concept of merit de congruo by name in Article XIII, Browne explains the term earlier in his commentary on Article X: [The school-authors] thought…that some degree of goodness was attributable to unassisted efforts on the part of man towards the attainment of holiness; and, though they did not hold…
An Anglican Way for the Healing of the Asian Generations
As a son of Chinese immigrants in America, I read with interest an article by David Choi at Mere Orthodoxy, “Becoming an Asian-American Church.” Anglicanism is an international family of autocephalous national churches, and our post-Reformation experience of adaptation to local, non-English cultures goes as far back as the 17th century, with successes and failures….
The Purpose of Good Works [Commentary on Browne: Article XII]
The necessity of good works for Christians is clearly established in Article XII: good works “do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith,” we are told, “insomuch that by them a lively faith may be as evidently known, as a tree discerned by the fruit.” The necessity spoken of here is a logical…
Anglican Catholicism and its Critics
Every time an Anglican converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, from lowly American deacons to English bishops, a story is told by way of explanation: Anglicanism, once a proud bastion of purely Protestant doctrines and practices, was hijacked by sacerdotal pretenders beginning in the Oxford Movement, and now, downstream from sham midcentury liturgical reforms, Anglicans have…
Spark
Glow, gentle canticle, in the endless ether— ring radiant across the radius of curse, flow faster than lashes, ride with rigid grasp. The hollows gape and holler as you flash in the shallows, a holy sheen holding steady— they didn’t know about you and the new brine we breathe.
The 1928 and Cranmer’s Shape
As I have noted previously, Cranmer’s Eucharistic liturgy of 1552 had a distinctive shape – Law-Gospel-Repentance-Supper-Thanksgiving – which was retained for most Anglican rites down to the middle of the twentieth century. The main, and for almost two hundred years the only, exception was that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which was a hybrid of…
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