On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

If they sound a little mealy-mouthed and already old-fashioned, that is a measure of the speed with which the catastrophe of the English language has occurred, and of the strategy adopted to meet it, which made a virtue of avoiding elaboration. There is no point in bewailing the linguistic loss or in being ungrateful to the liturgists, who have, perhaps, given us the best that an inarticulate age is capable of using. But the traditional Anglican way of moderating its self-understanding has, on any account, ceased to operate. The prayer-book which still holds a normative place in Anglican constitutions is one which few use for prayer and fewer still recognize quotations from, and that is why unfamiliar instruments like ‘the Covenant’ have become indispensible. If we are to hand on to future generations something of what we have received, what is needed is a new and very deliberate return — at a catechetical and not only a scholarly level York bridal shop to the study of our Anglican sources.

      The Articles are only one small piece of this task. There is much that they cannot teach as well as much that they can. One thing, however, they might teach us at this juncture: how the church should proceed in a crisis of inner conflict. The matter is highlighted in Article 26 (27 in Cranmer’s sequence), one of two Articles which in 1985 I passed over in silence. (The other omission, more pardonable, was the catalogue of Homilies in Article 35.) Article 26 upholds the view common to the Western church since Augustine’s polemical campaign against the Donatists that sacraments may be valid and effective for salvation even when performed by unfit ministers. The implications of this doctrine are worked out with remarkable coolness of nerve by Thomas Aquinas, for whom even rank unbelief on the part of the priest cannot stop God honouring the sign that Christ has instituted. The reality of what takes place there can be annulled only by a determined and clear intention on the minister’s part not to celebrate the sacrament but to subvert it: ‘when one does not intend to confer the sacrament, but to perform a parody of it — especially when that is made obvious to everyone else’.

      The substance of the Article was lifted whole by Cranmer from an earlier composition of his own, the Thirteen Articles of agreement with Lutheran theologians in 1538, where it marked a convergence between Lutheran horror of Anabaptist sectarianism and the Anglican hope of accomplishing a reformation from within — by episcopal inquisition, as he added in 1553, and by the power of ecclesiastical appointments. To it he then attached a title, ‘The wickedness of the ministers doth not take away the effectual operation of God’s ordinances’, which, as Stephen Mark Holmes has realized, was drawn from an unlikely source, the arguments of the late thirteenth-century scholastic William Durandus in support of the effectiveness ex opere operato of the consecration of the eucharistic elements — a typical example of the Archbishop’s unbridled eclecticism.

      Parker made a change to the title in 1571, replacing Cranmer’s ‘wickedness’ with ‘unworthiness’, and it is reasonable to suppose that this was to emphasize that the clerical inadequacy which could not invalidate a sacrament did not stop with moral delinquency but included theological error. That is to say, he sharpened the focus of the Article to discourage popular initiative in passing judgment on the theological stance of particular priests, a practice which could quickly destroy the parochial and diocesan system, as it has begun to in our own day. In 1560 Parker had been presented with the Scots Confession of Faith, approved by the Scottish Parliament in the midst of dramatic political events and made possible by English military support. He must have been dismayed by its Article 22, ‘On the right administration of the sacraments’, which explains why ‘we flee the society of the Papistical kirk in participation of their sacraments’. The two grounds offered for this policy were, indeed, astonishing. Catholic priests, the Confession declared, were not properly ordained, for the double reason that they were not required to preach — what this might mean for Church of England clergy instructed to read the Homilies was alarming enough — and, ‘more horrible’ in the eyes of the Scots Reformers, that Catholic discipline permitted women to administer baptism in urgent need. The second ground for not participating in the Catholic Mass was that it was contaminated by unwarranted practices, like venerating the host, and by false understandings, like that of eucharistic sacrifice. These features of Catholic theory and practice had, of course, been condemned in the English Articles of Edward’s reign (29/28, 30/31), but without ever drawing the conclusion that Catholic priests were not ordained ministers, let alone that Catholic Eucharists were not valid sacraments of the Gospel. The Scots added pointedly that the sacrament demanded a correct understanding not merely on the part of the recipient but on the part of the minister, too: ‘the right use ceases ... if the teacher plainly teach false doctrine’. Those who spoke for the Scottish Reformation believed there was a ‘synagogue of Satan ... the church malignant’ set in opposition to the ‘immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ’ (Scots Confession Art. 18), and that is why the Reforming Parliament took the dramatic step of abolishing the mass. That no such action was undertaken by an English Parliament indicates how reluctant the leaders of the English Reformation were to invest ‘the Mass’ with any distinct ontological identity. There was no anti-sacrament, as there was no anti-church. The term ‘mass’ carried negative overtones, but if we take Cranmer’s own practice as a measure, it meant simply the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as overlaid by corruptions of practice and doctrine. The only question was how those corruptions were to be corrected. Thus the whole approach to Reformation was, as Secretary Cecil had warned the Scots leaders at the beginning, a different one. (That views of Reforming sympathizers in either country were not as homogeneous as the official texts should not, of course, be forgotten.)

      Today we are in a position to appreciate the implications of Article 27/6 as rarely before. Of my assumption in 1985 that all was all such plain sailing with this Article that nothing needed to be said, I can only remark that what was coming on the Anglican churches was hidden from me. In the autumn of 1988 I observed at first hand the damage inflicted on Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenical discussions by the Lambeth Conference’s inability to establish a coherent approach to the ordination of women to the episcopate. That was the moment at which the anxious shape of the new era of Anglicanism first made an appearance; the more high-profile crises which followed simply gave sharper definition to what had emerged then. The presenting issue was a variant of that very one on which John Knox and his associates had thought the Catholics so lax. The Church of England itself, to the surprise of its sister-churches, has suffered far more anxiety over the consecration of women as bishops than over the liturgical recognition of same-sex partnerships. Also surprisingto observers both Protestant and Catholic is how much worse the anxiety has been than that which surrounded the ordination of women as priests. It seems to many that once the principle of women’s ordained ministry is conceded, it must extend to all orders. Anglican experience has not followed that logic for two reasons. One is a good reason, appreciated especially by Eastern Orthodox partners: a reflective doctrine of three orders of ministry, bishop, priest and deacon, understands them as different, offering distinct services to the life of the body. A bishop is not simply a ‘senior cleric’ but one entrusted with a special ministry with its own requirements. The other is a bad reason: doubt over the consecration of women as bishops affects not only their own episcopal orders but the orders of priests and deacons whom they have ordained, or who are ordained in turn by men whom a woman has ordained. The Article might have warded off this vertiginous nightmare, which is induced by a failure to apply its principle to formal defects in orders — a curious inversion of the order of importance! This limitation effectively subverts the doctrine, making the validity of a sacrament depend upon its most accidental features.

      How, we are currently asking ourselves, can a House of Bishops containing both men and women function as a collegial body, and how can it even worship together when some male bishops do not believe that their female colleagues are bishops at all, or even priests? Perhaps, instructed by this Article, those bishops might reason like this: ‘I could never take part in the consecration of a woman, and I should not hide, in public or in private, my belief that a false step has been made. I cannot cease to pray that the Church will recognize its error and withdraw from it. Yet I can see that it was made in good faith, the Church believing (wrongly) that it exercised a power that the Spirit had granted it. The Church which consecrates women intends, in the scholastic phrase, “to do what the church does”, meaning them to be bishops in the sense that the church has always had bishops. So I can, and must, relate to this church as to the church of Jesus Christ - though fallen into error, which is no new