Editor’s Note: This article appears as part of a symposium responding to a recent essay by Joe Colletti (“The Young Anglican”), in which he announced his departure from the ACNA to join The Episcopal Church as part of what he describes as an Anglican “reconquista.” Please check back in the coming weeks as we continue this important conversation.
Joe Colletti, curator of the Young Anglican account on YouTube (which has over ten thousand subscribers at present), recently announced that he intends to join The Episcopal Church. Given that the latter is at best deeply theologically corrupt, one might reasonably ask why he has made this decision. As he explains it, he has arrived at the conviction that if salvation is possible within an older, more established church, then one is obliged to be a member of that church rather than a newer church that has split off from the older one. However, Joe’s argument may take him somewhere he does not want to go.
On Joe’s account, the Reformed Protestant tradition has historically held that so long as a church “maintains some form of the fundamentals or essentials and can be recognized as Christian,” then “no positive separation [i.e., a refusal to recognize that church’s jurisdiction] is therefore legitimate.” Moreover, Joe continues, this belief has typically been “paired with a total rejection of the Roman Communion after the Council of Trent”:
The Reformed did not respect her jurisdiction and excommunicated her. In this sense the Roman “church” was consistently un-churched. Therefore two principles were established: a necessity of being a member of a true church, and that the Roman church was not a true church.
He then cites the Belgic Confession and the French Confession of the Huguenots in support, the latter of which declares that “all who…commune in that Church [of Rome], separate and cut themselves off from the body of Christ.” With regard to the Anglican tradition, Joe quotes Bishop Davenant as teaching that
We excommunicate the Romanists because they trade the place of Christ for the Pope. Where the Bible calls Christ the Head of the Church and the sole foundation and the root of the tree upon which we are all branches the Romanists give that role to the Pope. This therefore trades that first foundation, upon which all Communion is based with heresy and idolatry that surely damns all who do so.
Based on Davenant’s rationale, Joe posits that the government of Christ’s Church in England “was abrogated by the Roman Church in the Council of Trent and her subsequent councils.” In short, according to Joe’s logic, the Church of Rome is not a true church and therefore should not be communed with, whereas The Episcopal Church, for all its problems and failings, still “can be recognized as Christian,” meaning that faithful Anglicans should commune with it rather than one of the many splinter groups that have arisen in recent decades.
There are multiple substantive objections to this reasoning, but the one that will be addressed here has to do with Colletti’s supposition that the Church of Rome is not a true church. Although this view is indeed common among “the Reformed” and other Protestants, it is considerably less so within the Anglican tradition. This is probably due in large measure to the language of Article XIX, “Of the Church,” which states that “the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith.” In his commentary on this Article, Bishop Browne makes the following observation:
Some might expect the Article to have denounced the Church of Rome, not as a Church in error, but as the synagogue of Antichrist, an antichristian assembly, not an erring Church. No doubt, at times, such is the language of the reformers, who, in their strong opposition to Romanist errors, often use the most severe terms in denouncing them. But in their most sober and guarded language, not only our own, but Luther, Calvin, and other continental reformers, speak of the Church of Rome as a Church, though a fallen and corrupt Church.[1]
As Browne points out, the language of the Article is positively mild compared to the polemical language often found among the Protestant reformers, or even in documents such as the Westminster Confession, which refers to the pope as “that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God.”[2] It is therefore reasonable to infer that in saying the Church of Rome has merely “erred,” the intent is to acknowledge it as still being a true church:
That the clause before us is not intended to condemn the Roman Church as apostate is clear from the language used. For this the language employed must have been far stronger. The Roman Church is spoken of as a “Church,” though an erring one; and although painfully strong language has sometimes been used of that Communion by individuals within the English Church, identifying it with Antichrist and the Babylon of the Apocalypse, yet this has been only the language of individuals. The position formally taken up by the Church of England has never wavered. While lamenting the errors of the Church of Rome, she has never maintained that they amount to apostasy, or destroy her claim to be regarded as a branch of Christ’s Church.[3]
This temperate attitude toward the Church of Rome is also apparent in the 1604 canons, where it is written, “so farre was it from the purpose of the Church of England, to forsake and reject the Churches of Italy, France, Spaine, Germany, or any such like Churches in all things which they helde and practised,” etc.[4] It should not need to be said that such language would be utterly out of place if the Church of England considered Rome to be no church at all.
With these firm yet measured sentiments codified in the Anglican formularies, it is unsurprising that this perspective on the Church of Rome has been widely held within the Anglican tradition since the beginning of the English Reformation. The Institution of a Christian Man, published during the reign of Henry VIII, teaches that “the…church of Rome, with all the other particular churches in the world, compacted and united together, do make and constitute but one catholic church or body.”[5] In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker reproves his Puritan opponents for failing to recognize that the Church of Rome is “to be held and reputed a part of the House of God, a limb of the visible Church of Christ.”[6] Archbishop Laud writes,
No news it is, that I granted the Roman Church to be a true Church. For so much very learned Protestants have acknowledged before me, and the truth cannot deny it. For that Church which receives the Scripture as a rule of faith, though but as a partial and imperfect rule, and both the sacraments as instrumental causes and seals of grace, though they add more and misuse these, yet cannot but be a true Church in essence.[7]
In the same vein writes Archbishop Bramhall:
They [the English Reformers] did not, we do not, deny the being of any Church whatsoever, Roman or other, nor possibility of salvation in them, especially such as hold firmly the Apostles’ Creed, and the Faith of the four first general Councils; though their salvation be rendered much more difficult by human inventions and obstructions.[8]
Examples could be multiplied,[9] but the point has been amply made. Some Anglican divines, such as Davenant, have undoubtedly taken a harsher stance toward Rome,[10] but they may well be said to constitute a minority report. In any event, the moderate language of Article XIX remains authoritative in holding that the Church of Rome is a true yet erring church.
If, then, Joe is to adhere to his stated principle that “no positive separation [from a church] is…legitimate” provided the church in question “maintains some form of the fundamentals or essentials and can be recognized as Christian,” and if, as his own Anglican tradition teaches, the Church of Rome meets this criterion, it might appear he is obliged to remove himself to Rome rather than The Episcopal Church. Fortunately for Joe, who describes himself as a “firm Protestant,” there is an alternative: abandon the ill-begotten notion that one is obliged to commune with an older, more established church instead of a newer offshoot of said church, so long as the former is not completely apostate. Many of the same English divines who recognize Rome to be a true church simultaneously warn against communing with her. Hooker, who says that Rome is “of the family of Jesus Christ” insofar as they retain “those main parts of Christian truth,” nevertheless writes that “we dare not communicate concerning sundry her gross and grievous abominations.”[11] The reason for this is intuitive: “So long as she retains her errors, we cannot but stand aloof, lest we should be partakers of her sins.”[12] Here we find the conviction that, contra Joe, we are not compelled to commune with the oldest church that can claim to be a true church:
If we believe that any society retains the fundamentals of Christianity, we do from that conclude it to be a true church, to have a true baptism, and the members of it to be capable of salvation. But we are not upon that bound to associate ourselves to their communion: for if they have the addition of false doctrines, or any unlawful parts of worship among them, we are not bound to join in that which we are persuaded is error, idolatry, or superstition.[13]
In summary, while Joe attempts to avoid the obvious implications of his own logic by excluding Rome as a true church, this move goes against the grain of the Anglican tradition with which he identifies. It is my earnest wish, then, that rather than following this logic all the way to where it ought to take him, he will instead relinquish the faulty premise that would send him there in the first place.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Edward Harold Browne, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles: Historical and Doctrinal (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1874), 464. ↑
- Westminster Confession, ch. XXV, § 6, https://thewestminsterstandard.org/the-westminster-confession/#Chapter%20XXV. ↑
- Edgar C. S. Gibson, The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 1898), 508. See also A. P. Forbes, An Explanation of the Thirty-Nine Articles, 2nd ed. (Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1871), 271–72; G. F. Maclear and W. W. Williams, An Introduction to the Articles of the Church of England (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), 237; and B. J. Kidd, The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their History and Explanation (London: Rivington’s, 1899). ↑
- Church of England, Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall (London: 1604), Canon XXX. ↑
- Formularies of Faith Put Forth by Authority During the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Charles Lloyd (Clarendon Press, 1825), 55. See also Formularies of Faith, “A Necessary Doctrine,” 247. ↑
- The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, vol. II, ed. W. S. Dobson (London: 1825), “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” Bk. V, § 68, p. 22. ↑
- The Works of William Laud, vol. II, Conference with Fisher (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1849), 144. ↑
- The Works of Archbishop Bramhall, vol. I (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1842), “A Just Vindication of the Church of England from the Unjust Aspersions of Criminal Schism,” 197. ↑
- See, e.g., The Works of Joseph Hall, vol. IX, Polemical Works, ed. Josiah Pratt (London: C. Whittingham, 1808), “The Old Religion,” 301–306; The Miscellaneous Theological Works of Henry Hammond, vol. II, 3rd ed. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1849), “Of Schism,” 283; and William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants (London: George Bell & Sons, 1888), 491. ↑
- See William Palmer, A Treatise on the Church of Christ, vol. I, 3rd ed. (London: 1842), 217. ↑
- The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, vol. I, ed. W. S. Dobson (London: 1825), “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” Bk. III, § 1, p. 276. ↑
- Browne, Articles, 467. ↑
- Gilbert Burnet, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, ed. James R. Page (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1842), 245. ↑
