The Old and Ever New Dangers of Latitudinarianism

LATITUDINARIANISM. A term opprobriously applied in the 17th century to the outlook of a group of Anglican divines who, while continuing to conform with the Church of England, attached relatively little importance to matters of dogmatic truth, ecclesiastical organization, and liturgical practice. It found characteristic representatives in the 'Cambridge Platonists'. In general the sympathies of Latitudinarian divines lay with the Arminian theology. Their views did much to prepare the way for the religious temper of England in the 18th century (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).

In response to the development of multi-jurisdictional Anglicanism now underway in the USA as a result of the final death rattle of the The Episcopal Church, I offer a few thoughts at the beginning of this new year about what I perceive to be a real threat to the integrity and identity of orthodox Anglican catholicity. Full-blown Anglican Catholicism may indeed be the 'minority report' in the history of Anglicanism, at least since since the sixteenth century, but I would venture, in all honesty, to say we have the post-reformation Anglican formularies, the BCP liturgy and the great classic writers of Anglican pastoralia, theology, spirituality and asceticism on our side. History, I submit, will judge that we were right. When it comes to the fullest expression of that to which Anglicanism has always inherently tended, when it comes to what Anglicanism has always inclined towards liturgically and theologically, well, Anglican Catholicism, Prayer Book 'Mass and Office' Catholicism, is it. Take heart! - Anglican Catholicism is alive and well and will by God's grace continue to flourish where it is practised and taught.

A latitudinarian, a broad churchman, is one who believes that Anglicanism is an umbrella, a large copious institution which is capable of holding together dramatically different theologies and expressions of worship and belief so long as the lowest common denominator of discernible visible characteristics is maintained. What follows is my personal understanding of what broad churchmanship really is. It may be that I have completely misunderstood or mistranslated the broad position. But what I do summarise herein poses a terrible danger to us if it is allowed to take hold and to govern our policies. What I attempt to describe would no doubt be characterised by some as a straw man, a caricature. That may be, but this is how I see it as an Anglican Catholic. It is very hard for me to see it in any other light.

In the broad church milieu, so long as one simply maintains life in the Anglican flotilla, then one is as Anglican as one can get and no fuller expression of genuine catholicity is either necessary or desirable. Within this gaping spectrum any number of different, competing or even contradictory interpretations of Anglicanism are permissible and even encouraged. In its worst form, broad churchmanship is political opportunism and expediency. In its best, it is a generous application of the quintessential Anglican virtues of irenicism and civility and politeness. This is the classic broad church perspective, which is essentially atheological and institutional in nature. The danger involved: it is structure and symbolism over substance, organisation over organism, polity over faith and tradition, and it was the predominant political device in Church of England history from the 18th century forward. Broadness, unfortunately, has a long and influential history in Anglican affairs. 'Tepid centrist churchmanship,' to borrow a phrase, doesn't terribly mind Catholicism, the fullness of Apostolic and Patristic faith and practice, as long as it remains a harmless minority and stays out of the way and doesn't interfere with the machinery of church life and perceived temporal successes. But once Catholicism emerges as a theological and spiritual force, latitudinarianism is quick to persecute it as 'strange' 'eccentric' and most especially 'divisive,' 'a turn-off to prospective converts and members.' Our forebears in the Catholic Revival knew these epithets well and disproved them at every turn. From the broad point of view, the purpose of Anglicanism is to house the most diverse number of people possible within the most comprehensive body possible with as few tests of religious orthodoxy or orthopraxy as possible; issues of dogma and its corollary, liturgical expression, become adiaphora, things indifferent, when compared to the greater need to accommodate the widest section of people regardless of theology or faith. Accommodation is the supreme virtue of the latitudinarian cultus.

I believe this stream of Anglicanism can be Anglicanism at its weakest, its most insipid and lifeless and empty. Worse yet, Broad churchmanship is the Establishment mother of her insidious offspring, liberalism. Its antidote, its cure, is the fullness of the Catholic Faith as expressed in the Anglican law of prayer: lex orandi, lex credendi. We must begin to believe and practise the Faith precisely as we pray it. Otherwise, all we have done is to dress up and play Catholic, and that would be an exercise in sacrilege. As Gibbons once remarked, 'I see the vestments of a priest but hear the voice of a parson.' The outward and visible must begin to correspond and connect with the inward and spiritual or else we shall wind up a vacuous shell of orthodoxy at best or a gnostic sect at worst. In its reductio ad absurdum, the worst kind of broad churchmanship results in modernism, revisionism, the religion of the naturalist, the humanist and the secularist. Latitudinarianism, translated from a philosophical idea to a church-governing policy, resulted in the death of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion; those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Will we learn before it is too late?

The ultimate fruit of broad churchmanship is seen at this very moment in TEC and the Canterbury Communion: the elevation of reason (so-called) and personal experience, private judgement and interpretation of the Christian Faith, above the received and God-given authority of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition in Holy Church. 'No prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God' (II Peter 1.20-21).

In short, one can say that the latitudinarian approach to matters Anglican is Rodney King theology: 'why can't we all just get along?' Such a religion is usually described by its partisans with a special buzz-word, the creedal formula above all creeds, comprehensiveness. As such, Anglican broad churchmanship seeks more to preserve a certain culture, a certain ethos of form, architecture, manners, a certain style, than to affirm or proclaim or witness or manifest a divinely revealed dogmatic esse and system of grace and truth given by Christ and the Apostles enshrined in the outward and visible signs of the Church's ordinances. We must learn to be true to our genuine selves. Prayer Book & Missal orthodoxy or Anglican Catholicism is also broad and comprehensive in the best possible sense, in that it allows a great deal of intellectual and spiritual freedom to explore the mysteries of the Gospel while maintaining the bond of communion with the Catholic Tradition via the Book of Common Prayer and the liturgical and spiritual patrimony inherited from the Church of England and especially located in the BCP, the Articles and the other Anglican formularies. The difference of Anglican Catholicism from latitudinarianism is that we allow the Church Fathers and the Tradition of the Undivided Church to interpret the standard formularies and liturgy of the English Church, whereas broad churchmanship uses the liturgy in its given form but has no definitive interpretation or theology at all. Anglican Catholics allow the Patristic Tradition to move and guide our teaching and worship to conform with the ancient and undivided Church, continually to restore and preserve for us the position of the Church of the First Millennium. For us, the Holy Fathers interpret the formularies and the formularies do not interpret the Fathers.

The Elizabethan Settlement as it once was, whether we like or not, is over, broken, and humpty-dumpty cannot be put back together again - if anyone questions this observation, all one need do is examine what is powerfully demonstrated by the ongoing disintegration of the Anglican Communion. I believe the challenge before us is simply this: we must either follow the natural and intended course of Anglicanism to the fullness of orthodox Catholic faith and practice or relinquish it to fall into the abyss. Archbishop Michael Ramsey writes that Anglicanism's vocation is ultimately to locate itself within the Great Church and the Great Tradition, even if that location means Anglicanism's distinctives must eventually disappear. I could not agree more. Old-style low church Episcopalians, a breed now mostly defunct, were liturgically-minded protestants, and they too had a kind of theology, a tradition, by which they interpreted the church's way of praying and living. Today, the new modern mega-church style evangelical Anglicans do the same with amazing vigour and commitment. The vacuum opened up by the rejection of the classical Caroline Tractarian Catholic Anglican position in the 1970's has now been filled, in the Global South at least, with a robust Calvinist-leaning evangelical protestantism. The lesson of the Global South - nature, and Church, abhor a vacuum; it is better to have a fully defined theology and praxis than to have none at all save a cultural relic.

Let us remain steadfast and resolute in our commitment to the Faith of our Fathers!