Why a Confession Matters

As noted on our “What We Believe” page, Anglican Church of the Reformation holds to the Thirty-Nine Articles as our confession of faith. Not every Anglican church does. Here we show from the history of the Church of England why the Articles are a true confession, binding on all who teach, and why we cannot accept the way the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America have treated them as something less.

What the Oaths of Subscription Show

The clearest evidence of what the Articles are is the way the Church has required her ministers to receive them in order that her people may unequivocally know what it is they believe the Scriptures teach as Anglicans. As Mark Thompson shows in his history of subscription to the Articles, the clergy were never asked merely to respect them as a record of the past. They were required to assent to them and to sign them. In Thompson’s judgment the Articles “constitute one of the great Reformation confessions.” The wording of the oaths themselves makes this plain:

• The Act of 1571 (13 Elizabeth c. 12) required every minister to “declare his assent, and subscribe to all the articles of religion, which only concern the confession of the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments.” Parliament itself described their content as the confession of the true Christian faith.

• Canon 36 of 1604 required every man ordained or licensed to subscribe “willingly and ex animo” (from the heart) that he “acknowledgeth all and every the Articles therein contained, being in number nine and thirty, besides the Ratification, to be agreeable to the Word of God.” Canon 5 declared excommunicate anyone who affirmed any of the Articles to be “in any part superstitious or erroneous.”

• The Royal Declaration of 1628, printed with the Articles on our “What We Believe” page, requires that the Articles be taken “in the literal and grammatical sense” and prohibits “the least difference” from them.

• The Clerical Subscription Act of 1865 shortened the form but kept its substance: “I assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and to the Book of Common Prayer and of the Ordering of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. I believe the doctrine of the Church of England, as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the Word of God.”

No one swears ex animo assent from the heart to a historical commentary. One subscribes ex animo to a confession. A document that every minister must sign as agreeable to the Word of God, and that may not be contradicted on pain of excommunication, is by definition the Church’s doctrinal standard. Gerald Bray says as much: since Charles I gave the Articles official status in 1628, “they have been the accepted doctrinal standards of the Church of England.” Philip Schaff, the great historian of the creeds, likewise placed them among the Protestant confessions, judging them “Reformed or moderately Calvinistic in the two doctrines of Predestination and the Lord’s Supper,” and noting that Continental historians “rank the Church of England among the Reformed Churches as distinct from the Lutheran.”

Witnesses from Our Own Tradition

The bishops of the classic Church of England understood the Articles in exactly this way.

“The Church of England in whose Motherhood we have all just cause to pride ourselves, hath, in much wisdom and piety, delivered her judgment concerning all necessary points of religion, in so complete a Body of Divinity, as all hearts may rest in. These we read: these we write under: as professing, not their truth only, but their sufficiency also. The voice of God our Father, in His Scriptures; and, out of these, the voice of the Church our Mother, in her [Thirty-nine] Articles; is that, which must both guide and settle our resolutions. Whatsoever is besides these, is but either private, or unnecessary and uncertain… These, these are they, that distract the Church, violate our peace, scandalize the weak, advantage our enemies. Fire upon the hearth warms the body; but, if it be misplaced, burns the house.”

Bishop Joseph Hall (1574–1656), Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, The Old Religion (Works, pp. 225–226)

“The Doctrine of the Church of England is contained therein [in the Thirty-nine Articles]; and whatever the opinions of private persons may be, this is the standard by which the sense of our Church is to be taken.”

Bishop Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), Bishop of Worcester

Hall speaks of writing under the Articles, that is, subscribing them, as professing not only their truth but their sufficiency. Stillingfleet calls them the standard by which the Church’s meaning is to be judged. Neither treats them as a historical response or a collection of principles. Both treat them as the Church’s confession.

Not Merely “Historical Documents”

The Episcopal Church adopted the Articles in 1801, yet its 1979 Prayer Book moved them to a section at the back titled “Historical Documents of the Church,” and its ordination vows make no mention of them. As Thompson traces, this was the end of a long decline in subscription. The effect is to treat the Church’s confession as an artifact, something to read about rather than to believe. Bray observes that most Anglicans today are scarcely aware the Articles exist. That neglect is no argument against their authority; it is the symptom of churches that have drifted from their confession. A confession does not cease to bind because it has been moved to an appendix.

The ACNA’s Fundamental Declaration

The Anglican Church in North America has rightly brought the Articles back out of the appendix, but its Fundamental Declaration still stops short of receiving them as a confession. Its seventh declaration borrows King Charles’s phrase about the literal and grammatical sense, but then describes the Articles “as expressing the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time,” adding only that they also express fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief. However well meant, this language fudges what the Articles are, in three ways:

• It ties the Articles to a past moment. To call them a response to the controversies of that time makes them a period document, as if the sufficiency of Scripture, justification by faith alone, and the one finished sacrifice of Christ were sixteenth-century debates rather than permanent truths of the gospel. The Articles claim no such limit. Every oath of subscription affirms them to be agreeable to the Word of God, and agreement with God’s Word is not a temporary condition.

• It replaces doctrine with “principles.” To say the Articles express fundamental principles leaves open which of their statements actually bind and which merely illustrate a principle. A minister may then affirm the principle while rejecting what the Article says. That is precisely what the Royal Declaration forbids when it charges that no man “shall put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article.”

• It ranks the Articles below the Prayer Book. In its sixth declaration the ACNA receives the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline; the Articles are given no such title. Historically the order runs the other way: the Articles are the Church’s confession, and the Prayer Book is read in their light.

The phrase “literal and grammatical sense” sounds confessional, but wrapped in these qualifications it allows the Articles to be honored without being believed. Our church rejects this view. We do not receive the Articles as one historical Anglican response among others, or as a store of principles open to reinterpretation, but as the confession of faith of the Anglican Church, agreeable to the Word of God and binding on all who teach among us.

Discipline: The Neglected Mark of the Church

As we said on our “What We Believe” page, a church needs a clear, public standard so that its people can hold their ministers accountable: for what they teach the Bible says, for how they order the church, and for how they lead her worship. But a standard that is never enforced is no standard at all. A confession that may be signed and then ignored protects no one.

The English Reformers understood this. Bishop Nicholas Ridley, who was burned at Oxford in 1555 alongside Hugh Latimer for the gospel set out in these Articles, named discipline among the marks by which the true church can be recognized:

“The marks whereby this [holy catholic or universal] church is known unto me in this dark world, and in the midst of this crooked and froward generation, are these: The sincere preaching of God’s Word, the due administration of the sacraments, charity, and faithful observing of ecclesiastical discipline according to the Word of God.”

Bishop Nicholas Ridley (c. 1500–1555), Bishop of London and Westminster, martyr, The Works of Nicholas Ridley (Parker Society, 1841), p. 122f.

Ridley’s first two marks are those of Article XIX: the pure Word of God preached and the sacraments duly ministered. But he also names the faithful observing of discipline according to the Word of God, and the Articles themselves provide for it. Article XXVI teaches that “it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers,” and that those “found guilty, by just judgement be deposed.” In the Ordinal every bishop is asked at his consecration whether he is ready “with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word.”

Here lies the root of the confusion in modern Anglicanism, and it is not merely confusing; it is a gospel issue. We are sent to proclaim “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). But “if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (1 Corinthians 14:8). A church that lets its ministers teach and practice contradictory things speaks with many voices, and sinners do not hear the one gospel that saves. Worse still, the Apostle warns that any other gospel is no gospel at all (Galatians 1:6–9).

It is also why Anglicanism is so often mocked, and with good reason, as a “wax nose” church, one that can be twisted into any shape its ministers please. The Episcopal Church’s slide into liberalism and apostasy, the bewildering variety of teaching and practice among Anglicans today, and the present practice of allowing different so-called “streams” of Anglicanism to teach and worship in contradictory ways under one roof all share a common cause: the failure of bishops to exercise discipline. When bishops do not hold clergy, and one another, to the teaching and practice of the formularies, but allow non-conformity to run unchecked, the result is what we see on every side: one minister teaches one thing, and the minister down the road teaches the opposite, and the people are left to sort it out for themselves. Where this mark of the church is neglected, the other marks soon suffer with it.

Restoring Conformity to the Formularies

For this reason, we are thankful that our own diocese, the Anglican Diocese of the Rocky Mountains, is one of two dioceses in North America seeking to restore conformity to the formularies. Its canons require all its clergy to subscribe in writing at ordination, upon reception or licensure, and again regularly at the Diocesan Synod. In that subscription each minister declares, in part:

“I subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today; I uphold The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, as setting out the theological, liturgical, and ministry principles that are the standard for Anglican doctrine and worship.”

Constitution and Canons of the Diocese of the Rocky Mountains, Canon II.2.4

This is the language of the historic oaths, not of the Fundamental Declaration. The Articles are not described as a response to the controversies of a past age, or as a store of principles, but as “the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word.” And the declaration is personal. It begins, “I believe and confess,” and it is made ex animo, from the heart, as a confession of faith and not as a courtesy to history.

This gives the people of God what they have every right to expect: presbyters whose word can be trusted. Our Lord said, “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (Matthew 5:37), and James repeats the command: “let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation” (James 5:12). When a minister has subscribed the Articles from the heart, his people (and bishops) must hold him to his word, and if he departs from it, the church has a clear standard by which to call him back.