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The Spirit of Anglicanism
By the Rev. Mark W. Speeks, Chaplain 2002-03
In an essay, Anglicanism and Its Spirit, William Wolf seeks to
describe today’s Anglicanism as a church that seeks to be comprehensive,
which, he writes, is “not a sophisticated word for syncretism. Rather it
implies that the apprehension of truth is a growing thing.” Wolf’s
contention is that the inclusion of both Protestant and Catholic elements,
mediated through reason and experience, have not simply been placed
side-by-side in Anglicanism but have acted on each other to enable “authentic
complementarity” within an agreed basic theological framework of creeds,
episcopacy and liturgy. As such, Wolf finds that Anglicanism manages to fit
all five of Richard Niebuhr’s typologies in Christ and Culture, and
apparently makes it “an ecumenical prototype of the coming great church.”
Similarly, in an article in which he discussed his assertion of the
primacy of lex orandi, lex credendi within Anglicanism, W. Taylor
Stevenson identified an Anglican ethos, which he defined as the “underlying
assumptions and feelings”. He wrote that there is “an assumption that
consensus, comprehensiveness and contract is the normative mode for
establishing and maintaining the order of society”. Furthermore, he
identified “a certain pragmatism and a lack of speculative interest.”
Not surprisingly given Anglican theological method, therefore, at the
beginning of his essay Anglican Morality, Paul Elmen writes that “there is no uniform Anglican morality in theory, much less in
practice.” Later, he concedes that there are “a few common
threads.” He notes that “the hallmark of Anglican morality has been
the aurea mediocritas, the Golden Mean, the measure of nothing too
much.” In a middle ground between authority and individual liberty, there
has been an Anglican insistence on the priority of praxis.
For his part, H.R. McAdoo concurs and writes that “Anglicanism is
not a theological system ... but a method.”
What we do, therefore, is seek to always ask questions without expecting
answers. The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner described God as “the
primordial ground and abyss of all reality” and as “ineffable
darkness.” He concluded that with the insight that “revelation [..]
is really the presence of God as question, not as answer.”
Anglicanism concerns itself with the presence of God as a question.
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