Sorry, hermeneutic key simply means something that enables us to interpret data, without which interpretation might be ambiguous or simply wrong. It’s a fancy term I only ever heard about in university, but it has become quite popular when it came to interpreting Anglicanorum coetibus from November 2009 until mid 2010.
Cough! Cough!
I have discussed the recent difference between positions in the Continuing Anglican Churches regarding the formularies and authoritative texts that guide our belief and life in communion in the Church. Here is an article from February 2010 in which these issues are discussed, explicitly naming Archbishop Haverland on one side and Archbishop Peter Robinson on the other.
The essential issue here is whether the Affirmation is simply a key to interpreting the older Reformation formularies like the Articles, Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer, or a new formulary that replaces and supersedes them and founds the jurisdiction and legitimacy of the Church body.
I’m not really one for nit-picking and using proof texts. It just isn’t my style, but I find two contrasting visions of the Anglican Church and what it means. One is essentially a Protestant notion open to a Catholic interpretation in the quest for a via media, and the other is essentially pre-Reformation. Archbishop Haverland expresses the notion of a “Henrican Settlement”, presumably meaning the status quo during the reign of Henry VIII after he had broken from Rome but before Cranmer got a free hand to import continental Protestantism, Calvinism in particular, into England. I have often read into this kind of narrative the idea of an “English Gallicanism”. Imagine if Henry VIII had been a little clever like Louis XIV of France and advised by a man of the calibre of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet!
I think Archbishop Haverland is thinking also in terms of creative anomalies and analogies rather than the unpleasant reality of a tyrant king who had the head chopped off from about everything that moved! Archbishop Robinson bewailed the idea of Anglicanism becoming a form of Old Catholicism (episcopal Gallicanism). He sees the Counter Reformation basis of European Old Catholicism, in liturgical and spiritual terms, in spite of its conciliar ecclesiology and refusal of papal absolutism. English Anglo-Catholicism, the big six and altar cards, fiddleback vestments and devotions for the laity… English Ritualism drew more upon the Counter-Reformation for its inspiration than it did upon the English Reformation and its distinctive Elizabethan Settlement.
We seem to be presented with a binary choice between baroque Catholicism and the Reformation – as if the pre-Reformation English Church had never existed. Nothing is mentioned of the Roman-Norman tradition of which the Use of Sarum is a part. Very few have even thought of it, yet it represents a third way between the baroque continental style of worship and the stripped bareness of pre-Tractarian Prayer Book worship. Obviously, the liturgical style is the first thing someone sees about a given church or parish, and that will indicate the inward state of mind.
Another assumption needs to be challenged – the authority of the Reformation formularies in the light of historical research and criticism. In the sixteenth century, for example, the Roman Canon was assumed to be of modern (medieval) and scholastic origin, and it was ignored that this anaphora of the Eucharist went back much further in the history of the Church. The great French theologian Louis Bouyer characterised Reformation liturgies as medieval lay devotions having been kept after the really ancient and patristic elements had been scrapped. That was something of an exaggeration, but Cranmer and the other Reformers were no more infallible than anyone else!
I have done some research into the liturgy during the Reformation era, and the authors I find most trustworthy tend to challenge the Reformed assumption that everything before was absolutely evil and corrupt and everything afterwards was “pure” Christianity. Manichaeism indeed! I tend to trust historians like Eamon Duffy, the author of The Stripping of the Altars. My guess is that fifteenth-century English parish Catholicism was little different from its northern French counterpart in the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries. There were weeping statues and credulous folk looking for miracles and healing – I am much less severe about folk Catholicism than I have been. If the Church cannot look after the simple, then they will go after real superstition! Anyway, we are drifting off topic.
I have argued for a long time about the Rouen-Sarum tradition as a third way and a get-around for this Reformation versus Trent dilemma.
These two approaches, while not utterly dissimilar or without any common ground, nevertheless present two fundamentally contrary and ultimately irreconcilable understandings of the Christian Faith — one being grounded in the developments and accretions of the medieval Latin church minus the Papal Claims, and the other looking to, and being guided by, the “consistent mind and voice of the most ancient Fathers,” as Queen Elizabeth I put it. The choice is ours to make.
This affirmation is extremely loaded for someone who has read Eamon Duffy’s books. I also question the identification of medieval liturgical usages with the (counter) reformed missal of Pius V and the Congregation of Rites. I also question whether the various versions of the Eucharistic rite in the different editions of the Prayer Book truly resemble rites of the early Church – any more than Bugnini’s second eucharistic prayer may be identified with the canon of Hippolytus. The fracture lines begin to be blurred and nuances creep into the picture.
I have also mentioned the possibility of retro-futurism in a frame of mind similar to nineteenth-century Romanticism and some sub-culture movements in our own time. Archbishop Haverland himself evokes a kind of Henrican Catholicism to denote a form of pre-Reformation Church without the worst abuses, presumably pecuniary-motivated, as were alleged to have happened under the jurisdiction of Rome. There is a kind of “creative anachronism” involved there. Unless we are to acculturate into the modernity and post-modernity of our own times and do away with Tradition altogether, or create some kind of “pristine primitive purity” that probably never existed, then some “creative anachronism” is necessary.
I don’t think this kind of “crisis” or dilemma is limited to marginal groups of Anglicans, but it is found also in Roman Catholicism between various kinds of traditionalists and the so-called revisionists. We find ourselves at the very limits of credibility, and perhaps even at the doors of the psychiatric ward, but something a little less than “authentic” has to be admitted to allow something to work and move forward.
Many of us have our own minds to clean up and sort out, let alone reforming churches!
The Blue Flower 
Fr. Anthony, Some most interesting thoughts. I have great difficulty understanding this Anglican angst because even when they try to be “specific” they remain rather opaque.
Take “the ever so fleeting ‘Henrican Settlement'”, which you then elaborate into, “Archbishop Haverland expresses the notion of a “Henrican Settlement”, presumably meaning the status quo during the reign of Henry VIII after he had broken from Rome but before Cranmer got a free hand to import continental Protestantism, Calvinism in particular, into England.”
Exactly what year(s) are being discussed? Henry in the 1520s? Probably not, but then him in the 1530s? 1540s? And which specific year in which specific decade? And exactly what specific thoughts or dogmatic statements are to be considered the final product and eventual outcome of this “settlement”? Henry could be so many different things to so many different groups, depending upon the date and need. Rome liked him in the 1520s, but then he seemed to move toward the Lutherans in the 1530s, before leaving them high and dry. And he was always looking at politics, power, and money, in addition to anything specifically religious.
The problem with statements of this sort and especially with the uses to which they are put is that they are divisive — and that is because they are designed to be divisive. I find myself to be very much put off by denominational statements of faith intended to distinguish one group as the one possessing truth and opposing it to all others. Frankly, whether they be composed by Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, or the Council of Trent, such exclusivist documents are very much the style of the Protestant Reformation which, in practice if not in theory, values division and rejection of others as a central good, and ones own logical extension of truth to its limit as authoritative. This is not the way of the Fathers and the Seven Councils, nor the way of the Scriptures. The truth is often (usually?) quite an elusive thing. When one affirms a truth, one is tempted to carry it logically to what one sees as its end point and then to deny whatever appears to be contrary to that conclusion. However, ones merely human logic will miss the truth of the apparently contradictory truth. Christianity is made up of such conflicting truths, such that to take one without the other is to fall into falsity. the oneness and threeness of God, the divinity and humanity of the Christ, the interaction of faith and works, predestination and freewill, bread and Body, and on and on and on. The decisions of the Councils are carefully crafted affirmations of the truth of both sides in such oppositions, anathematizing those who will take one side without the other.
This is why I think the debate between Haverland and Robinson is so unfortunate. Both are taking a particular formulation and elevating it into a test of faith so as to exclude the other formulation. I love the St. Louis Affirmations for what they affirm, but not if they are so taken as to distinguish me from Classic Anglican divines. I have enormous respect for the Articles for what they affirm, but reject any interpretation of them that would exclude AngloCatholics. I do very much like Missal worship, but not if it be taken as a correction or a disparaging of the plain Prayer Book. If this tension between viewpoints should lead to further division, or if it becomes necessary to declare the falsity of either ‘side’, then Anglicanism as a vital force will have ceased to be and will have been replaced by a bunch of sects.
Ed, Very well put. These sorts of divisive discourses are of, by, and for mainly bishops and theologians. What do they do to help the average man in the pew on any given Sunday? As Fr. Anthony put it, “My guess is that fifteenth-century English parish Catholicism was little different from its northern French counterpart in the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries. There were weeping statues and credulous folk looking for miracles and healing – I am much less severe about folk Catholicism than I have been. If the Church cannot look after the simple, then they will go after real superstition!” When bishops and theologians start bickering and arguing, they usually neglect “the simple”, their flocks and followers. (I would only add to Fr. Anthony that the same pretty much goes, that they are “looking for” their particular something, for folk Lutheranism, folk Anglicanism, and folk Reformed in the various centuries?)
Truth both unites and divides. Division has always been there. Many walked away from The Lord on his Eucharistic teaching, for example. Many church councils issued excommunications and anathemas to their “fellow Christians”. The list goes on. Why stop at 7 councils? Are they just the ones you happen to agree with? The non-Calcedonians would disagree. So would the Arians, if there were any left. At the end of time, we will all be divided into sheep and goats; the ultimate division of heaven and hell.
Sorry, Andrew, but I think you miss my point entirely. Truth indeed does divide, but this is very often a result of our narrowness of vision. If A is true, we then assume that because B looks different from A it must therefore be false. What if, however, A is only part of the truth and B is also part of the truth? In this case A + B = truth, and to deny either A or B is to deny a part of truth and therefore to fail to accept truth. This is precisely what happened with regard to the Trinity and with regard to the dual nature of Christ. Both seemingly opposite propositions needed to be affirmed to arrive at truth, and those failing to accept one or the other found themselves on the outside. These principles, I believe, apply to all denominational formularies, whether billed as Catholic or Protestant. Failure to accept all sides of truth puts one to some degree in a state of untruth. Truth does exist, but truth is not easily found by our human reasoning.
Forgive me, Mr. Pacht, if I am being dense here, but just to be clear, are you saying that those condemned by the “ecumenical councils” were condemned unjustly, and were in fact wholly in the right?
So, for example, Arius, had his truth that Nicea failed to recognize, and in your view, Homoiousios and Homoousios combined are the truth?
If that is the case, then we are indeed very far apart. I wonder however, how you can claim any sort of Christian orthodoxy? For that matter, how can the law of non-contradiction be upheld?
I agree with pretty well all ed and Michael say here. I would perhaps go even a little further in suggesting that truth might usefully be thought of as being a shade or two even more elusive: as Father Chadwick suggests in his other post about nutty acrcheology in the church, though there was a reality, a truth if you will, about the early Christian churches, it is in many respects quite beyond us now to fully know or appreciate, and in due time, the same will be said of our own epoch. Thus, truth is a shy maiden, dropping her veil an inch or two to enchant her admirers for a moment, only to raise it for modesty’s sake and grace. I do not think therefore that even when the sage heads of a Council manage to strike a formula that combines two or more contraries, it can be much more than a working hypothesis or “the best we can come up with so far”, or at least, it might be very salutary for us to so regard it, for the sake of avoiding the pitfalls of arrogance (and ignorance). If we really believe that God is truth with a capital “T”, then truth as an aspect or perspective on God will be as “through a glass darkly” as knowledge or perception of God.
I therefore am not quite so comfortable in leaving the questions that result in theological disputes to bishops or characterising some people as “simple folk”. I think that, where religion is concerned, however educated or otherwise we may be, we all look to religion in some way similarly to give us comfort, satisfaction and generally feel at times “bound” or even “burdened” by what we think are its strictures or demands. One person’s rosary, devotion before a statue, is another’s devotion to the ancient tomes of the Fathers, or one’s devotion to “doing practical missionary things”. Somewhere in the background is our collectively hazy and differentiated concept of God and what we think we have to or could beneficially do.
But this is not a truth, just what I think might be or how another angle on it might be considered.
Forgive me, Andrew, but I said nothing of the sort. if I feel that you are indeed being a little dense and not getting what I’m trying to say. Perhaps I’ve not been clear. No one who presents a part of the truth at the expense of other truth is ever ‘wholly in the right” and I went to considerable lengths to say that, apparently unsuccessfully.
Arius was wrong, desperately so, but not in his positive statements. In what he accepted as true, he had part of the truth, but not the whole. In affirming the humanity of Our Lord, and reacting, in part, to those who minimized that humanity in favor of His divinity (of whom there indeed were many), he did indeed defend a part of truth.. Where Arius went wrong was in denying the full divinity of Christ, carrying his true insight to its logical end and thus denying other truth. What he denied is what excluded him from fellowship. Certain of the Gnostics fervently declared Christ to be divine, but rejected His humanity, some going so far as to deny His death on the Cross. These, too, were excluded from fellowship. Those who affirmed BOTH His true humanity and His full divinity (‘homoousios’ being a word coined to express the latter) became known as the Orthodox or Catholics. Monophysites and Nestorians later erred in attempting to explain this mystery away in logical terms. The truth, however, is beyond logical explanation. He is divine, and He is human, and if both are not true, we are not saved. We can indeed eliminate any statement that does not include both realities, but we are too limited in our humanity to be able to comprehend how this can be.
and, ah yes, the law of contradiction . . . What does that mean when we enter the realm of mystery? Is it so that what appears contradictory to our limited view is contradictory in God’s eyes? Is it not hubris to claim to understand the nature of God or to comprehend His will? As with the unity of God and the manifest Trinity, as with the humanity and divinity of the Savior, as with faith and works, as with predestination and free will, as with God as author of evil and as not the author of evil (both being said in Scripiture), as with many other vital truths, we are faced with what appear to be contradictions, but are not, even though all attempted logical explanations fail.
ed, I absolutely agree. You have expressed these things very marvellously and much better than I could have. You have clearly pointed out the limitations of our human language and comprehension in the face of mystery. Thank you.