Continuity and Fragmentation in Anglican Tradition
The church that Elizabeth I inherited was in total disarray. Her father was fond of great change when it gave him authority, and very incremental change when it did not seem in his personal interest. His son saw upheaval as necessary for the good of the church as well and went to great lengths to see it reform implemented. His sister then undid most of the changes of her brother and tried to roll back some of her fathers’.
It was in the reign of Elizabeth that England and England’s church were most firmly established. Her mission statement, which became her legacy, was found in her motto, Semper Eadem, always the same. The irony was that England’s church had never been the same with itself (with many different uses across the nation) much less politically so.
Yet that motto was an interpretive grid which revealed her faith in underlying unity through conformity tested by Providential continuity, that would set the stage for English life, law, and rhetoric for the next five centuries. How she and her cousin-successor created an English Church out of chaos is instructive for us living on the other side of a churchly revolution in the United States that leaves us with numerous uses, divided allegiances, low social trust, and more than a few martyrs.
The Elizabethan and Restoration churches of the 1560s and the 1660s are the two canonized foundings of Anglicanism, and they provide, along with the prayerbooks, canons, rubrics, and synthetic church-state polity of those eras a coherent rule of interpretation for grounding the mission of the ACNA today. In this essay we will explore the late 16th and 17th century English church’s approach to worship through the English Use, the Canons of 1604, the rubrics, and episcopal polity, and consider Elizabeth’s motto as a rule of interpretation for grounding our common prayer and order in the ACNA today.
Elizabeth I and Charles II were in much the same spot, being forced to remake the church with its immediately preceding form being quite hostile to their governance. But both followed the substantially same pattern: ignoring the immediate continuity, which in each case would have been to embrace and ensconce revolution (Marian Humanistic Romanism and Cromwellian Republicanism), and appealing to a slightly more distant and less evidently strong precedent (Edwardine and Caroline Protestant Monarchy), adapting that precedent very slightly to allow for the conformity of the most conservative of those participating in the previous revolution, while firmly reprimanding the leaders of the respective revolutions.
Elizabeth thus adopted the 1552 Book of Common Prayer with slightly Lutheran adaptations, and Charles II thus adopted the 1559 Book with slight statist adaptations. Curiously, both those movements were later rebuffed, with the Lutherans rejecting any union to English Protestantism, and Charles’ sacralization of monarchy being chastened in the Glorious Revolution. In both cases the archaism strengthened its authority.
Having a single prayerbook, henceforth the English Use, was itself a modernization. In the time before print and centralized national authority, mandating and enforcing uniformity in worship was itself a pipe dream, and would have been seen as almost impossible. Only once the entire church fell under a single monarch could worship have been uniformly enforced.
Elizabeth initially relied upon the bishops under her care to enforce the 1559 prayerbook’s uniform use, complete with implementation of the ornaments rubric as meaning surplice, preaching scarf, and academic hood, or with cope for cathedral worship. The lack of clarity in the original rubric meant that further clarifications were produced to this end. Charles II did the same, reproducing a clearer, further simplified ornament rubric to the same end.
Charles had the advantage of simply reaffirming many canons and processes produced after Elizabeth’s time during the reign of James I. Most notable among these were the Canons of 1604, which though not approved by Parliament, were considered ecclesiastical law and enforced. Those Canons stayed the enforceable law until 1969, and further standardized, in perpetuity, the ideal practices of the church in the nation of England worshipping according to the English Use.
The Canons of 1604 were a tremendous lurch forward in the standardization of the Church of England, for they provided fairly comprehensive directives about the life, duties, and expectations of the clergy, and the order of the church. They emerged from the Elizabethan settlement’s foundation of what it meant to be English, an English Christian, and an English Church, but further defined each of those terms. The Canons would continue to set the standard and give a strong enough institutional backing for Charles II to return to them.
Two things in particular stand out in the Canons: one is that they assume clergy are not like all other men. Each station of man has their own duties and responsibilities, and that each class of men must uphold their station with due dignity and rank. It is almost certainly a more clear and dignified position than what a regular parish cleric in the pre-Reformation church would have been held to. The sense of national duty gives dignity and weight that provincial clerical authority simply did not. The second element is that they were set apart primarily as holy agents of the state (Canon LXXV). At the end of a controversy surrounding the ornaments rubric and then the Canons of 1604, it became clear that clergy were not being set apart as sacerdotal priests, but rather as agents of good order in a harmonious commonwealth (Canon LV). Their inability to return to regular civilian life (Canon LXVII), is not due to a change in their substance, but because they have been entrusted with a particular station. The folio cover of the Great Bible, with Henry handing down the Scriptures to the clergy and the various peoples of the land, proved an apt image for the Canons too, for all the commonwealth was to be ordered in the Canons according to that monarchical order.
The last thing of note in the Canons and the rubrics is that they are primarily about outward conformity. The hesitations, preferences, and personal expression of a man’s soul are not consulted. Unity is to be achieved not necessarily by being of one mind, but by being of one act. This is a change from the medieval English uses, wherein the underlying theological agreement was ostensibly primary, but the ordering of the use could vary greatly depending on region and chain of authority.
So, what is the impact on these documents for us today? The ACNA is in a similar spot to the church in the days of Elizabeth or Charles II. There is a social reestablishment happening in Trump’s presidential administration, which is catching up to the revolution against social progressivism that global orthodox Anglicanism has been waging for over three decades. This administration’s legacy will undoubtedly have a profound effect upon how American orthodox Anglicanism is expressed in the coming decades.
While we Americans prefer to ignore the convergence of political and ecclesiastical identities, Anglicanism’s history can allow no such willful ignorance. The change in American political fortunes cannot be understated. If Trump’s administration holds, replacing the Department of Human Rights with the Department of Natural Rights, the Department of Defense with the Department of War, replacing a heavy international social spending program to promote social causes with a narrower set of hard economic and political interests set in the western hemisphere, especially allying with those nations who promote their Christian identity, the fragmenting and bureaucratic identities of global Anglicanism are up for review. Though the civil authorities will not directly interfere with the ACNA’s governance per American tradition, the ACNA can and should ride the coattails of the political revolution as its only means of unity through conformity.
This moment of great man politics gives a major natural advantage to bishops. If there’s no bishop, there’s no king, and vice versa, as James noted at Hampton Court (the origin of the Canons of 1604). Testament to this, Scottish and American Episcopalianism floundered once they lost the favor of the executive in their nation, even as the Church of England has under Charles III.
Our challenge for ACNA is that we lack a shared founding trauma, a common ethnic identity, or a strong regional base. American Anglicanism has always functioned as a public, national church, and if the ACNA is to develop a unified American Use or contextualized Canons, it must recover that national dimension. Indeed, the Canons of 1604, the notion of conformity, and the very system of episcopacy, to have any semblance of coherence in an American context, must be tied to a national identity which recognizes hierarchy, nature, and the both the fragility and imperative of social order.
Elizabeth’s prudential hermeneutic of Semper Eadem offers us a path. Not slavish similitude to past grandeur, but rather a selective conforming to traditions as a way to create lasting unity. The lesson of the Canons of 1604 is that tranquility can be maintained through shared outward practice and reverence for national order under God’s authority.
In the ACNA context, that would mean recommitting to the rubrics of the 1662 prayerbook as normative and binding upon parishes. There must be a decisive move towards a single American Use in Communion that reflects the historic practice of Elizabeth and Charles II. Return the 1662 ordering for communion (thus rejecting the revolutionary reordering agreed upon by late 20th century bureaucrats), reconsider a one-year lectionary, limit the seasonal variations, and hang the materials for Confirmation in the front of the church. In the spirit of the Canons, have services of prayer on major civic holidays.
Meanwhile, invest episcopal and seminary leadership with manly authority and encourage them to embrace Anglicanism’s role as a contributor and sanctifier of American civic life. Bishops in particular must see themselves not merely as administrators or conflict-manager-in-chief, but as custodians of a spiritual order who set boundaries within which the clergy and commonwealth can flourish. There will be less mission drift and anxiety with each other if bishops outwardly conform to the same national standard. Priests must retain the duties set apart for them, namely preaching and administering the sacraments, and have assisting clergy do administrative and other ministerial tasks. A proper re-clericalizing of the church would force the church to focus on recruiting and training the next generation of clergy, and would provide a level of uniformity impossible if most of the service is led by unlicensed laity.
If ACNA is to overcome its divisions, it must relearn Semper Eadem as a measuring rod for its formularies: recover the past selectively, apply it prudently, and firmly insist on outward conformity as the ground of unity. This would not only stabilize our church internally but also offer a coherent public witness, refreshing our staggering country with those peculiar gifts of Anglicanism, namely its depth of tradition, its deeply held order, and its vision of the church as an agent of social harmony under God.
