The ethos of Anglicanism

It has become the easiest of journalistic cliches to accuse leaders of the Anglican Communion of sitting on the fence, fudging issues and woolly thinking. It is worth distinguishing pusillanimous behaviour, which simply lacks the courage to face a difficulty or the honesty to admit that one exists, with a fully justified refusal to fall into a neatly-set journalistic trap. ‘We know you are a plain, honest-to-goodness, no nonsense kind of teacher,’ they said to Jesus once. ‘What about this tax, then; should we pay it or not?’ And the meaning of Jesus’s famous reply, ‘Pay to Caesar what is due to Caesar, and to God what is due to God’ — an archetypical sound-bite— has been disputed ever since he uttered it. The refusal to give neat, categorical instructions on each and every issue is by no means a necessary sign of religious decay.
Stephen Sykes¹

The word ‘Anglican’ begs a question at once. I have simply taken it as referring to the sort of Reformed Christian thinking that was done by those (in Britain at first, then far more widely) who were content to settle with a church order grounded in the historic ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and with the classical early Christian formulations of doctrine about God and Jesus Christ – the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. It is certainly Reformed thinking, and we should not let the deep and pervasive echoes of the Middle Ages mislead us: it assumes the governing authority of the Bible, made available in the vernacular, and repudiates the necessity of a central executive authority in the Church’s hierarchy. It is committed to a radical criticism of any theology that sanctions the hope that human activity can contribute to the winning of God’s favour, and so is suspicious of organized asceticism (as opposed to seeing the free activity of God sustaining and transforming certain human actions done in Christ’s name).
Rowan Williams²

The Anglican “Via Media”?

the… via media was not in [George] Herbert’s day a mere compromise, a golden mean. Rather, it was a balance and an integration, an affirmation of the best of both traditions. In the sense that it was Catholic – in its sacramentalism, its liturgical worship, and in its continuity with the past – it was very Catholic. In the sense that it was Reformed – in its focus on the grace of God, in its Biblicism, in its evangelical liberty – it was very Reformed.
Gene Edward Veith³

The Collect for Quinquagesima : The Anglican Collect

O Lord, who hast taught us
that all our doings without charity are nothing worth:
send thy Holy Ghost,
and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity,
the very bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee:
Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

1. Stephen Sykes, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’ in Unashamed Anglicanism, p. 222. [↩]
2. Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 2-3. [↩]
3. G.E. Veith Jr., ‘The Religious Wars in George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth Century Anglicanism’, George Herbert Journal, 11 (1988), p. 18. [↩]