Anglican Spirituality
An Introduction
By Greg Peters
Cascade Books, 108 pages, $32
On the duvet of Introduction to Anglican Spirituality, the publishers have reproduced a late medieval illumination of the adoration of the sacrament, proven on an altar in a monstrance. It’s a beautiful and fascinating picture, however its relation to Anglican spirituality will not be apparent, neither is any rationalization of its relevance forthcoming. As such, it gives a becoming cowl for this brief e book, which touches on a really nice deal that’s fascinating and intriguing however whose reference to Anglican spirituality can be not apparent.
Greg Peters’s account is predicated on the conception of an “Anglican synthesis” between Catholic and Reformed, which he defines mainly when it comes to sacramentalism and biblicism. It’s a mannequin that appears to supply a means for evangelicals to embrace the sacramental points of the Catholic custom with out letting go of the Bible’s instructing, however it’s questionably satisfactory as a rationale for the liturgical and spirituality of classical Anglicanism. As his anxious homily concerning the want for stability between competing emphases (subjective/goal; company/particular person; transcendent/immanent) suggests, this isn’t a lot a synthesis as a balancing act.
Peters explores this putative synthesis in spirituality by means of the threefold Benedictine construction, posited by Martin Thornton because the “Anglican Rule,” of Workplace, Eucharist, and personal Devotion, which triad provides a common construction for the chapters of the e book. To date so good; however the exposition of those themes is perplexing.
On the one hand, there may be his use of non-Anglican authors to discover points of Anglican spirituality. Thus the Jesuit liturgist Robert Taft and the Lutheran neo-orthodox pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer are quoted on the “spirituality of the workplace”—however no Anglican authors, and even the prayer e book liturgy. On ascesis, he depends closely on Pierre Hadot, the Roman Catholic scholar of historic philosophy, and Kallistos Ware, the Japanese Orthodox popularizing prelate; on works of mercy, Thomas Aquinas, and so forth. What these authors should say is of curiosity, however doesn’t shed a lot gentle on Anglican spirituality.
Peters does have an apparent affection for Cranmerian texts—the acquire for the Second Sunday in Creation and the Prayer of Humble Entry are intently parsed—and he has even ventured into Cranmer’s treatise on the Eucharist and the E book of Homilies. As well as, he gives shut readings of 1 poem every by Donne and Herbert, although (bar one passing reference to Hooker) there may be nearly no interplay with every other Anglican divine earlier than Pusey.
However what’s odd about his studying of Cranmer and others is that it’s made in gentle of the Nineteenth-century “Anglican synthesis” fairly than within the reformational instructing of classical Anglicanism. Because of this, his synthesis of biblicism and sacramentalism is lacking the strong Christological middle of the classical divines. (There may be one passing reference to justification by religion solely, as a “Protestant” doctrine, although it’s the specific instructing of the Articles, one nervous allusion to controversy over the Eucharist.)
The work of Torrance Kirby and Robert Crouse, amongst others, has illumined the Chalcedonian distinctions that provide the deep construction of classical Anglican piety—the distinctions of regulation and gospel, justification and sanctification, religion and works, outward signal and inward grace, sacrifice for sin and sacrifice of reward, of Augustinian immediacy and Dionysian mediation. The absence of those distinctions renders Anglican spirituality opaque.
This e book is proof of the engaging energy of Anglican piety to evangelicals who need the riches of sacramental and Catholic Christianity with out dropping the Bible’s instructing, however the synthesis he seeks is not going to be discovered within the unstable balancing act of late Anglicanism, however solely within the Christological middle of the Anglican Reformation.
The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector of St. John’s, Savannah, Georgia.
