All Saints Episcopal Church, Hilton Head Island, SC
June 1, 2006
I have just finished the book by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, entitled Anglican Identities. In it he asserts that the identity of Anglicanism has been and continues to be shaped by divergent approaches, and by divergent individuals, in response to our understanding of tradition, scripture, and reason. He invites us to consider perhaps the greatest Anglican apologist the church has ever known, Richard Hooker.
Richard Hooker set the tone for a distinctly Anglican understanding of the Christian faith in the sixteenth century. His ideas about the way in which we embrace our understanding of Christ, and the Christian response to life and the world, is remarkably relevant in the twenty-first century. The archbishop points out that Hooker “was the first European theologian to assume that history, corporate and individual, matters for theology, and he is one of the inventors of that distinctive Anglican mood that embraces a fair degree of clarity about the final goal of human beings and the theological conditions for getting there, but allows room for a good deal of reticence as to how this ought to work itself out and skepticism as to claims that have found comprehensive formulations.”
Vol. XXI No. 6
Hooker was skeptical of those who would claim the “truth,” when he believed “theological truthfulness is not fully at our disposal because holiness is not fully at our disposal; thus theological truthfulness, while genuinely, even painfully desirable, cannot be deployed as a condition that can confidently be managed so as to determine the limits of the true church.”
This is not to say that Richard Hooker lacked theological convictions, and one can readily see in his writings a clear, vibrant understanding of the Christian faith, one that the Anglican Church today would call orthodox. He was theologically sound, yet there was in his faith and in his thinking room to err and room to learn. For Hooker, divine action was of the utmost importance. Divine action led the human desire to seek truth and depth of faith; always divinely inspired, always divinely led to new places of the heart and soul.
It is difficult in this day and age, as perhaps in any age, not to be tipped to and fro as we grapple with the complexities of life and faith. Hooker, among others, has given our communion a distinctive attitude and purpose in the ordering of our lives. He may not have given us concrete boundaries, but the Anglican tradition has given us the tools and framework to profess our faith and to hold up possibilities that God continues to act through us in faithful ways.
Maybe it is not so much “boundaries” as it is markers along the way that are connected to the past, aware of the present and open to unknown territories that relate God to our lives.
Let me begin to share what I believe to be Anglican markers of faith. This is by no means exhaustive or complete but a beginning through which we may rediscover those boundaries or foundation or markers of our distinctively Christian faith. Two such places to begin are aptly found in our Book of Common Prayer. The first is the Nicene Creed, and for others familiar with Morning Prayer, the Apostles Creed. Both begin to articulate the foundation of Christian beliefs, in particular our understanding of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But beyond the Trinity the creeds offer our personal insight and connections with the actions of our God.
Both creeds open with a profession of faith about creation: “one God…maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” It is indeed, as Hooker would state, a theological truth with a host of ways of interpreting this essential truth. In understanding and believing the first phrase of the Nicene Creed, it is not essential that we agree to the process that brought about the world. It is essential, though, to believe that it was God’s divine initiative that created from nothing heaven and earth. There is room to err in our interpretations and to learn, while the theological truth remains sacred. That is just the first phrase of the Nicene Creed. The church offers us a strong framework by which our faith is expressed, and we are the ones who truly give meaning to the specific words.
Our Anglican identity is shaped and given expression by the words of the Lord’s Prayer and by our individual response to this human/divine story. What do you mean when you recite or say these words by memory? I see and feel a particular framework that creates a real story between a living God and a very human Christian. It’s not that the Lord’s Prayer is particularly Anglican; it’s not in fact. But our Anglican heritage speaks between the words of this prayer. Moment by moment we place a great deal of meaning by these words, in large part by what they mean to us, here and now, with perhaps somewhat different meanings tomorrow.
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