In the first chapter of Romans, the great Apostle Paul sounds the prologue to his “gospel” in which he spells out the theological argument of justification by faith. He says: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.…” But salvation through faith, by grace alone, is a muted concept in non-evangelical traditions in America. It is increasingly clouded in the doctrine and life of the Episcopal Church, as existential, Catholic theology more and more permeates the thinking of its teachers and clergy.
The week of October 29 through November 4 finds the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in annual session at New Orleans. And beginning November 3, the Fellowship of Witness—the American branch of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion—holds its national meeting at Pittsburgh. The agenda and content of these two meetings reveals the chasm between the liberal, existential catholicism that prevails in American Anglicanism and the biblical, evangelical commitment of those in the reformed Anglican tradition—a tradition that flourishes in the British commonwealth but has almost vanished in the United States.
That God does not chiefly manifest himself in the majesty of liturgical worship, nor make his presence known in sacramental rites alone, but does in fact communicate verbally and rationally to us in the revealed word of Scripture, is a muted doctrine in the life of the Episcopal Church. Especially is this so as the church continues to turn toward a multi-source authority base, and combines a catholic ecclesiology with an existentialist theology.
During the past decade many Episcopalians have come to know Christ in the New Testament sense through the outreach of a host of evangelical ministries outside their church. And for many of these persons, the Scriptures have become the polestar of knowledge of Christ, of the promises of God, and of personal discipleship. But the evangelical experience of personal conversion and a concomitant high view of Scripture, while at home in the evangelical wing of the Church of England—in the British Isles, in Australasia, and on the mission field—finds rough sledding within the life of the Episcopal Church.
This is true because the Church has increasingly accommodated additional factors as sources of revelation and of authority for life and doctrine. It has done this despite the insistence of the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-nine Articles that the Bible is the primary and only necessary authority base for theology. It is true that after Cranmer and the English reformers passed from the scene, the Anglican church came to accommodate a threefold authority base that includes not only Scripture but also reason and tradition. But even so, many thinkers in the church viewed the role of reason and tradition as ministerial and interpretative, rather than magisterial.
In current Anglican thinking, theologian John MacQuarrie’s “six formative factors” for Christian theology have further broadened and diluted the reformed principle of sola scriptura. MacQuarrie’s factors, which have been widely accepted in Episcopal seminaries and among the clergy, are: experience, revelation, Scripture, tradition, culture, and reason. No priorities for any given situation are stated, and the result is a “dealer’s choice” theology in which anything goes, even though that theology is garbed in the vestments of catholic churchmanship and wrapped in Catholic views of priesthood and sacrament.
Recently, twenty-six prominent priests in the Episcopal Church, in anticipation of the New Orleans meeting, published an open letter in which they reminded the bishops that “the calling of the church is to invite mankind toward its true center, Jesus Christ.” But the letter is profoundly weak because it makes no reference to Holy Scripture as the epistemological source of knowledge of Christ. Instead, the clerics premise their plea on a return to “the collective Christian memory” and the “witness of the past,” phrases that, though undefined, undoubtedly encompass something along the lines of MacQuarrie’s six formative factors.
In Pittsburgh, Anglicans from the British commonwealth head the list of speakers. Headliners are John R. W. Stott, rector of All Souls Church in London, and Philip E. Hughes, formerly editor of an evangelical theological quarterly in the British Isles (The Churchman) and now a professor at Westminster Seminary. That the Episcopal Church has few widely known evangelical scholars and pastors and that the Fellowship of Witness must in the main draw on the evangelical resources of the mother church, points up the evangelical plight.
Two strands of evangelistic enterprise have been felt in the Episcopal Church during the past decade, but neither has been rooted in the reformed, evangelical tradition of Anglican theology.
First, the small-group and lay witnessing movement, with such leaders as Keith Miller and Claxton Monroe, has taken organizational shape within the Episcopal Church in the growing ministry of Faith Alive, a spin-off of the interdenominational Faith-at-Work movement. Secondly, the charismatic movement has made inroads into the life of the church. Dennis Bennett of Seattle is the best-known personality in this.
But the reformed, evangelical Anglican scholarship of John Stott, Leon Morris, Philip Hughes, Geoffrey Bromiley, Marcus Loane, and others in England and Australia has been more widely respected, and their current works more widely read, by evangelicals outside the Episcopal Church, than by the church’s teachers and clergy. The result has been the absorption into the prevailing catholic existentialism of those Episcopalians converted through the small-group, lay-witnessing, or charismatic ministries.
In 1967, evangelicals of the Church of England met in a national conclave at Keele University, and in 1971 the Australian counterparts met at Melbourne. In both of these meetings, the truths of the evangelical Christian faith were affirmed, and the application of these truths to contemporary problems in the world and in the church was discussed with scholarly depth and missionary zeal.
Many of us who consider ourselves evangelical Christians want to call a similar national evangelical Episcopal congress in the United States. The mother Church of England throughout the British commonwealth nations would do well to send some “evangelical missionaries”—some of Anglicanism’s best-known biblical scholars and pastors—to such an American congress.
If such a meeting is called, the revival of evangelical truth and zeal within the Episcopal Church could be at least an open possibility.
George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”
