In Search of Authority

Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment

Paul Avis

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780567567185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this new three-part book series, Avis tackles a series of issues relevant to Anglicanism in the current day. The first book, In Search of Authority, seeks to examine Anglican Theology in relation to questions of authority. Anglican theology has been a hotbed of debate about the issue of authority since the Reformation. What do we really appeal to when attempting to decide matters of doctrine, worship, ministry or ethics? The debate is very much alive today, between Evangelical, Liberal and Catholic Anglicans around the world. This book focuses on the understanding of authority in Anglican theology.

1

Authority in the theology of the Reformation: I. Polemics and the Bible

Few questions come closer to the heart of the Reformation and the identity of those traditions, including Anglicanism, that have been shaped by it, than the question of authority. Authority issues in theology and the Church fall into three categories: dynamics, structures and sources. The Reformation was concerned with all three. (1) The Reformers challenged the way that authority was exercised in the Church (dynamics): they believed – even if they did not always practise what they preached – that it should be pastoral and fraternal, not dictatorial and oppressive. Therefore, bishops should be teachers of true doctrine and dispensers of the sacraments, not princely, imperial prelates.¹ (2) The Reformers also made changes (not always intended) to the structures that mediated authority in the Church. Notably they rejected the jurisdiction of the pope, at least until the papacy should be reformed, and in some cases they conceded oversight of the Church to civil rulers (the Prince or Magistrate), at least temporarily, as in Luther’s concept of the Notbischof (emergency bishop).² Although the Reformers generally took episcopal oversight for granted (and sometimes – in England and Sweden especially – the Reformers were bishops), they regarded episcopacy as dispensable if that was the only way of preserving the gospel. (3) More far-reachingly, the Reformers reconstructed the sources of authority – Scripture, tradition, learning, reason – in order to give uncompromising doctrinal priority to Scripture, to critique traditions in the light of Scripture, and to bring the new scholarly methods of Renaissance humanism to bear on both Scripture and traditions.³

Our concern in this chapter and the following one is with Reformation attitudes to the sources of authority in theological teaching, and Church policy and our focus is on the so-called Magisterial Reformers (i.e. those who accepted the intimate connection between church and state, and the role of the ‘godly prince’ in the governance of the Church and the work of reform) on the Continent of Europe and in England. In this period, it is historically and theologically correct to include Anglican theology within the category of Protestantism without qualification.

To acknowledge that the English Church of the second half of the sixteenth century belonged firmly within the Protestant family of churches with its centre of gravity in continental Europe does not, of course, imply that the faith and order, theology and practice, of the Anglican Reformers and their continental predecessors and counterparts was not also catholic in many important respects – and moreover, was authentically catholic or at least aspired to be so. For a position to be regarded as catholic, I suggest it must demonstrably be consonant with the essential faith and practice of the early Church and of the universal Church through the ages and continuous in certain respects (though perhaps discontinuous in others) with the mainstream of Christian theology, internally variegated though that theological tradition undoubtedly is. It also goes without saying that to claim catholicity for one’s tradition is to make an ideological and polemical claim and, with regard to the Reformation, it is not one that we have the space to fully evaluate here.⁴

In the centuries following the Reformation, questions concerning the authority of the Bible, of tradition, of the teaching Church, of reason, and of conscience continued to be the major issues at stake in both Roman Catholic–Protestant and intra-Protestant controversy. All the sixteenth-century Reformers were fighting on two fronts: first against the claims of the Roman Church that sought to prohibit their initiatives for reform and to re-impose papal authority, and secondly against more radical forms of Protestantism that wanted to push the Reformation further, in the direction of ‘the best reformed churches’, particularly the Geneva of Calvin and Beza. Against Rome, the Reformers appealed to Scripture and the primitive Church; against incipient Puritanism, they added an appeal to reason and to the practice established by the magistrate (the civil ruler) to their prior appeal to Scripture and primitive tradition.

The Protestant conscience

Authority was the key issue at stake in Martin Luther’s bid for reform of medieval abuses and doctrinal errors. Summoned to the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther protested that he would not recant, unless convinced by Scripture and sound argument; the mere assertion of the authority of the Church hierarchy, with the weight of medieval tradition behind it, was not enough. His conscience was his guide. ‘Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves)’, Luther testified, ‘I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.’⁵ Whether he added the famous words, ‘Here I stand; I can do no other; so help me God,’ is somewhat doubtful. But what is clear is that at this crucial juncture in the unfolding of Luther’s witness to the gospel, he stated crisply the issues that would be endlessly debated in the sixteenth and the following centuries, right up to the present day: the binding authority of Scripture, the claims of reason, the authority of the teaching Church, the weight of tradition (and therefore how we understand and value history), the dictates of conscience, and the scope of assurance of the truth. The same issues of authority – albeit overshadowed by the supreme political authority of the sovereign – lay behind the English Reformation through all its ups and downs, twists and turns for well over a century – England’s long Reformation, as it has been called by some.⁶ In his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, John Jewel insisted that the reformed English Church had taken upon itself ‘to profess the Gospel of Christ’ and therefore had ‘returned to the apostles and old catholic fathers’.⁷ Here we have in a nutshell the crucial Reformation appeal to authority: it was to the authentic gospel, inscribed in the Scriptures and expounded in the primitive Church.

As Luther’s stand at Worms suggests, the conscience of ‘reforming’ Christians was a pivotal factor in the Reformation; it underpins the whole sixteenth-century debate about the authority of Scripture over ecclesiastical traditions and pervades Protestant polemic against oppressive ceremonies and obligations imposed by the medieval Western Church. Luther went well beyond the medieval schoolmen generally, Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent and Robert Bellarmine, in holding that the conscience could testify to assurance of forgiveness and acceptance (justification) before God, that doubts about our standing with God are not our inevitable portion in this life, part of our probation or testing, but are to be wrestled with and overcome. Such assurance, however, rests not in our perception of our state of grace (or not), which was the issue at stake in medieval debates, but in dependent obedience to God’s word of promise, spoken personally to the believer.⁸ (The question of assurance of salvation is not exactly the same as the question of certainty about the truth of Christian theology, which will become a major theme, in terms of probability, later in our account; it is to some extent the difference between subjective and objective forms of certainty and the grounds for it.) So I dwell on the role of conscience in the Reformation for a moment before moving on to consider the sources of theological authority in Scripture, tradition and reason. Luther’s stance at the Diet of Worms provides a natural link.

At that historic confrontation, John Eck retorted to Luther: ‘Lay aside your conscience, Martin . . . it is in error.’⁹ But that was one thing that Luther could not do; not then, not ever. It is certainly too much to claim, as one scholar did, that Luther was ‘the discoverer of conscience’; the clergy and the religious in the late Middle Ages dealt with the troubled conscience of their penitents with great skill. But conscience was the sensitive nerve at the heart of Luther’s theology. Karl Holl was right to say that Luther’s was a ‘religion of conscience’. For Luther, the conscience was the seat of the strongest human emotions and struggles. It was in the forum of conscience that one felt the condemnation of the law, and in the forum of conscience that one experienced the liberating power of the gospel. What Luther says about conscience is an aspect of his theologia crucis, where God’s word, act and grace are veiled under their opposite. The word of God speaks to the conscience. The conscience is receptive of the word in faith. It relies wholly on grace and cannot be assured by good works. Assurance of faith is testified in the conscience. Faith and conscience are correlative. God wants to be present in the conscience and to inform it by his word. But in Luther, the conscience is not autonomous – it is not the Kantian conscience with its impersonal categorical imperative – but relational and interpersonal; it stands before God, coram Deo, seeking acceptance, and before one’s neighbour, seeking to serve, to minister. ‘The conscience is that which either puts us to shame or honors us before God,’ as Luther puts it in the final paragraphs of his 1515 Lectures on Romans. He adds that there is no one whose conscience does not sometimes accuse him/her – otherwise Christ would have died in vain – but one should cherish a clear conscience, not violate or injure it; then ‘what is left over’ is covered and forgiven through Christ.¹⁰ Neither was Luther’s conscience politically motivated; it was not driven by rebellion against authority as he experienced it. It was only eventually that Luther’s obedience to an ethical imperative led him to challenge the ecclesiastical authority that underpinned church practices that he believed were harming the conscience of Christian folk. Ironically, later in his career, Luther was not prepared to concede the liberty of conscience that he had claimed for himself to the ‘fanatics’ and Anabaptists: their conscience was not rightly informed by the word.¹¹

One of the Luther’s most moving accounts of conscience occurs in his late Lectures on Genesis.¹² Speaking autobiographically, Luther remarks that those with a suffering, oppressed conscience believe that God is angry with them. Luther felt the force of the Psalmist’s words, ‘My flesh trembleth for fear of thee; and I am afraid of thy judgements’ (Ps. 119.120, KJB). But a Brother of his monastery (presumably Staupitz, Luther’s confessor and mentor at that time) used to say, ‘God is not angry with you, but rather you are angry with God.’¹³ Only the word of the gospel, spoken to the soul, can salve this bruised conscience. ‘[W]hen it finally lies prostrate, the whole world does not suffice to raise it up. For it is the death of the soul, and to raise up and arouse conscience is nothing else than raising the dead.’ Conscience is ‘greater than heaven and earth’. It is killed by sin and quickened by the word of God. Then a joyful, untroubled conscience triumphs over sin, death and the devil.

Similarly, when we turn to John Calvin, we find that the authority of Scripture, interpreted with the help of the early Fathers and the skills of Renaissance learning and informed by a conscience sensitive (or hypersensitive, we might say) to divine judgement, was the crucial factor in his monumental theological achievement, both in his Institutes of the Christian Religion and in his biblical commentaries. In his apologia for t...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Authority in the theology of the Reformation: I. Polemics and the Bible
• 2 Authority in the theology of the Reformation: II. History and tradition
• 3 Richard Hooker’s theological method
• 4 Classical Anglican theology: I. Method, Scripture and tradition
• 5 Classical Anglicanism: II. The authority of reason and the validity of tradition
• 6 Classical Anglicanism: Doubt, risk and probability
• 7 Aspects of the Anglican Enlightenment
• 8 Founders of the Enlightenment attitude
• 9 Exponents of the Anglican Enlightenment
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Copyright