William Witt: Evangelical or Catholic?
What a fun post to read from William Witt, professor of systematic theology at Trinity Seminary. It's a robust defense of Anglicanism as both Reformed and Catholic -- a recovery of patristic Catholicism and a reform of the late mediaeval errors in the church. Make sure you read his own "theological bio" -- the first part of the post -- as well, which is interesting.
This topic has -- indirectly -- been a topic of discussion for years at various blogs where Anglican topics are discussed, as different churches mix it up on whether Anglicanism is inherently unworthy, unfit, and doomed to failure by nature of its being Protestant -- [or just Anglican, if the critics are themselves Protestants, of course] -- or simply going through a bad patch of church history. Naturally, I take the latter view. You can find some recent discussions that touch on this issue [often blurred and vague, but with the intrinsic badness of Anglicanism as the underlying theme] at scads of blogs, including SF. For a look at a recent thread that is touching on this very thing, you can check out the conversation at this SF thread or this one.
The weak part, it appears to me, of the post, is the bit that attempts to describe the "enclave" definitions of Anglicanism in evangelicalism or AngloCatholicism. He postulates some general and intriguing criteria that seem principled and potentially fruitful. But then he appears to be throwing all the bits of the beliefs of various Anglicans of which he does not approve into the giant categories [vats] of "enclave" Anglicanism -- you know, those who are political conservatives, oppose WO and think it a salvific matter, and do not grant the validity of various aspects of "critical biblical scholarship" are "enclave" evangelicals or "enclave" AngloCatholics -- in other words, not real Anglicans. Along with that, and closely related to the "enclave" hash, he's taken to referring to StandFirm [not by name] as a certain "neoCalvinist" blog that is "ostensibly" Anglican -- or "Anglican" with a question mark after it . . . you know, rather like the revisionist activists in TEC who refer to members of ACNA or anyone who holds beliefs that they don't like as "ostensibly" Anglican. I suppose StandFirm is a "neoCalvinist" blog because two of our bloggers are Calvinists and Matt and Dr. Witt have crossed swords over "critical biblical scholarship" and Reformed belief. And we are all "ostensibly" Anglican because . . . well . . . we may not have voted for Obama, and are politically conservative; hard to say on that one, except that the three of us who are in TEC are Rather Obviously "ostensibly" Anglican, and then, the five of us post about the things in which we are interested and active, and that's not always about Anglican matters. This grows more ironic, since the most prolific Calvinist blogger at StandFirm is a member of ACNA and thus a part of the same church as Dr. Witt.
It's possible, though, that I'm reading this third part of the post wrong -- and it only appears that the-things-Dr-Witt-doesn't-approve-of get thrown into the "enclave Anglicanism" vats. But if he's decided to toss those random bits into the "enclave Anglicanism" category, I'll attribute it to his simply being in a mysteriously bad mood for the past two years. And being in a bad mood and tossing Bad Anglicans into the "enclave ostensibly-Anglican neo-Calvinist" category is too trivial a thing [after all, what Anglican isn't used to being deemed "not a real Anglican" by this point?] to be concerned about, when taken in light of this majestically intriguing post and his broader themes.
You can also find Dr. Witt responding in fine fettle to just the sort of attempt that he describes in the master post to which I'm linking, over at Kendall's site in the comments of this post. There are only a few Anglicans out there [one of our commenters, MichaelA, is one of those] who are willing to hold up their heads and eloquently articulate that Anglicanism itself is not at all intrinsically unworthy, and to robustly reject the caws and bleats that it is so intrinsically unworthy from those who seem permanently and personally embittered with Anglicanism -- and I greatly appreciate those few.
Make certain you hie thee hence and enjoy the whole thing:
This topic has -- indirectly -- been a topic of discussion for years at various blogs where Anglican topics are discussed, as different churches mix it up on whether Anglicanism is inherently unworthy, unfit, and doomed to failure by nature of its being Protestant -- [or just Anglican, if the critics are themselves Protestants, of course] -- or simply going through a bad patch of church history. Naturally, I take the latter view. You can find some recent discussions that touch on this issue [often blurred and vague, but with the intrinsic badness of Anglicanism as the underlying theme] at scads of blogs, including SF. For a look at a recent thread that is touching on this very thing, you can check out the conversation at this SF thread or this one.
The weak part, it appears to me, of the post, is the bit that attempts to describe the "enclave" definitions of Anglicanism in evangelicalism or AngloCatholicism. He postulates some general and intriguing criteria that seem principled and potentially fruitful. But then he appears to be throwing all the bits of the beliefs of various Anglicans of which he does not approve into the giant categories [vats] of "enclave" Anglicanism -- you know, those who are political conservatives, oppose WO and think it a salvific matter, and do not grant the validity of various aspects of "critical biblical scholarship" are "enclave" evangelicals or "enclave" AngloCatholics -- in other words, not real Anglicans. Along with that, and closely related to the "enclave" hash, he's taken to referring to StandFirm [not by name] as a certain "neoCalvinist" blog that is "ostensibly" Anglican -- or "Anglican" with a question mark after it . . . you know, rather like the revisionist activists in TEC who refer to members of ACNA or anyone who holds beliefs that they don't like as "ostensibly" Anglican. I suppose StandFirm is a "neoCalvinist" blog because two of our bloggers are Calvinists and Matt and Dr. Witt have crossed swords over "critical biblical scholarship" and Reformed belief. And we are all "ostensibly" Anglican because . . . well . . . we may not have voted for Obama, and are politically conservative; hard to say on that one, except that the three of us who are in TEC are Rather Obviously "ostensibly" Anglican, and then, the five of us post about the things in which we are interested and active, and that's not always about Anglican matters. This grows more ironic, since the most prolific Calvinist blogger at StandFirm is a member of ACNA and thus a part of the same church as Dr. Witt.
It's possible, though, that I'm reading this third part of the post wrong -- and it only appears that the-things-Dr-Witt-doesn't-approve-of get thrown into the "enclave Anglicanism" vats. But if he's decided to toss those random bits into the "enclave Anglicanism" category, I'll attribute it to his simply being in a mysteriously bad mood for the past two years. And being in a bad mood and tossing Bad Anglicans into the "enclave ostensibly-Anglican neo-Calvinist" category is too trivial a thing [after all, what Anglican isn't used to being deemed "not a real Anglican" by this point?] to be concerned about, when taken in light of this majestically intriguing post and his broader themes.
You can also find Dr. Witt responding in fine fettle to just the sort of attempt that he describes in the master post to which I'm linking, over at Kendall's site in the comments of this post. There are only a few Anglicans out there [one of our commenters, MichaelA, is one of those] who are willing to hold up their heads and eloquently articulate that Anglicanism itself is not at all intrinsically unworthy, and to robustly reject the caws and bleats that it is so intrinsically unworthy from those who seem permanently and personally embittered with Anglicanism -- and I greatly appreciate those few.
Make certain you hie thee hence and enjoy the whole thing:
However, I had not attended any church regularly since I had left the Baptists after I graduated from college, and, if I did not become a Roman Catholic, I did need to become a member of some church. I ended up becoming an Episcopalian on theological grounds. I did not think that Anglicanism was the “one true church,” but I did conclude that Anglicanism came closest to have gotten the Reformation right. Anglicanism had recovered the fourfold marks of the church that had distinguished the second century Catholic Church from Gnosticism during the crucial time in which the church established its identity: 1) Canon (expressed in Anglicanism as sufficiency and primacy of Scripture); 2) Rule of Faith (expressed in Anglicanism in Creedal worship and embracing of the Nicene Creed and Chalcedon); 3) apostolic succession (episcopacy but not papacy); 4) worship in word and sacrament (liturgical worship expressed in the Book of Common Prayer). At the same time, Anglicanism embraced the genuine insights of the Protestant Reformation: sola scriptura and justification by faith alone.
My own understanding of Anglicanism was also informed by the new Reformation historiography. The Reformation was not simply a break from the Medieval Church, and that was not how the Anglican Reformers themselves understood their task. If one reads the writings of Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, and Richard Hooker, one finds that they understood the Reformation in a way that was distinct from much of continental Protestantism. Where Luther’s and Calvin’s anti-Roman polemics often made a point of repudiating much church tradition as a departure from the gospel, the Anglican Reformers consciously chose the different strategy of insisting that the Church of England had returned to the catholic tradition of the patristic church from which the late Medieval church had departed. The Anglican Reformers affirmed the primacy and sufficiency of Scripture, but as read through the hermeneutic lenses of the church fathers: catholic church tradition as a faithful reading of Scripture, not Scripture over against tradition. The Anglican Reformers endorsed catholic liturgy, but in the language of the common people and purified of later Medieval errors. The Anglican Reformers preserved episcopal polity, but without the aberration of papal primacy. Reformation Anglicanism thus saw itself as in continuity with the Catholic Church, and a reforming movement in the Catholic Church, but certainly not as rejection of genuine Catholicism.
At the same time, Anglicanism is not a movement whose pristine purity is established in, and ends with, the Reformation. If Cranmer and Jewel and Hooker are fundamental to Anglican identity, it is the Caroline Divines who establish regular Anglican practice and give it its definitive form. If you want to understand Anglican theology, read Cranmer, Jewel, or Hooker. If you want to see what Anglicanism looks like when people live it out, read George Herbert, John Donne, Thomas Traherne or Lancelot Andrewes. Finally, Anglicanism is a Reforming movement that continued to reform itself. There is no Anglicanism without Evangelicals like William Wilberforce, John Newton, and Charles Simeon (but also emphatically John and Charles Wesley), but neither is there Anglicanism without Anglo-Catholics like John Keble and Edward Pusey. I would also say that neither Evangelicalism nor Anglo-Catholicism are completed as early nineteenth century movements. They reach their maturity with the embrace of critical orthodoxy in later figures like B. F. Westcott, F. J. A. Hort, C. F. D. Moule, Anthony Thiselton, and N.T. Wright (Evangelicals), Charles Gore and the Lux Mundi movement, Edwin Hoskyns, Michael Ramsey, E. L. Mascall and Austin Farrer (Anglo-Catholics).
Again, because Anglicanism is a reforming movement in the Western Catholic church, it also finds itself in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church: the Celtic Church, the early English Church of Bede the Venerable, the Medieval scholasticism of Anselm, the Medieval spirituality of Julian of Norwich, The Cloud of Unknowing, and Walter Hilton, but also non-English Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism: Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas.
Finally, Anglicanism has been at the forefront of the modern ecumenical movement. My own theology has been formed as much by figures like Bernard Lonergan, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Hans urs von Balthasar, as it has by Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Wolfhart Pannenberg. I also have been influenced by earlier ecumenical figures like the Reformed leaders of the Mercersburg Theology, Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin, and more contemporary figures like Leslie Newbigin, T.F. Torrance and George Hunsinger. Anglican bishop Stephen Sykes has written somewhere that Anglicanism has no need to choose between the Reformation and the Catholic tradition. Anglicans can learn from both Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth.
That is, of course, to skip ahead. After graduating from seminary, I did doctoral work at the University of Notre Dame, where I studied under people like Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and David Burrell. At that time, Notre Dame had an ecumenical faculty of Protestants like Hauerwas (who called himself a “High Church Mennonite”) and Catholics like Burrell (who called himself a “Barthian Thomist”). Hauerwas and Burrell were proponents of the “Yale School” of theology associated with Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Brevard Childs. Contemporary advocates of this approach would be the Yale graduates now at Wycliffe College, Toronto (Chrisopher Seitz, Ephraim Radner, George Sumner), non-Anglicans like Lutheran David Yeago, and (now) Roman Catholics Bruce Marshall, and Rusty Reno. It was this “Yale School,” ecumenical, Protestant-and-Catholic-theology-in-dialogue that helped form my thinking at Notre Dame. It never occurred to me at that time that, as an Anglican, I had to choose between the Reformation and Catholicism.
A more contemporary example of this ecumenical “reforming catholic” approach would be that associated with the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology founded by Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten (both of whom I also like), and their journal Pro Ecclesia.
I realize that I have covered quite a lot of ground in telling my story, but I am hoping that the above account shows something of those who influence my own theology, and my own understanding of Anglicanism. I hope that my theology is catholic, evangelical, critical, and orthodox. To the extent that I am an Anglican, it is because I understand Anglicanism to be a Reformation (that is, reforming) movement in the Western Catholic church.
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