Anglicanism: Does it Even Matter?

“There be two manner of things in this world. Things that be necessary, and must be done, because that God has commanded them. And these things no man is able to make indifferent… other things there be… things that be indifferent, and these may be done, and may be left (not done) without sin.”
From Robert Barnes’ Supplication to Henry VIII

“We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” 1 Corinthians 8:8

In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In All Things Charity

 

What makes the Anglican way of being a Christian different from others? This is a question I am inevitably asked with some frequency, and for that, I am actually quite thankful. What it means to be an Anglican is poorly understood by Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike, so I am grateful for any opportunity to clarify what distinguishes Anglicans from other traditions, and to discuss why those differences are meaningful and, more often than not, not particularly meaningful. One of the most underappreciated distinctions between our own tradition and other ways of following Christ is the Anglican approach to what are called “indifferent matters.”

What exactly is an “indifferent matter?” To put it simply, an indifferent matter is anything in the life and worship of the Church that is neither required nor forbidden by Holy Scripture. We could come up with a long list of such things, but the clearest biblical articulation of an indifferent matter is found in our New Testament lectionary reading for this Sunday from 1 Corinthians 8, where the Apostle Paul instructs Corinthian Christians in the proper ways to think about eating meat sacrificed to idols. Surprisingly, Paul does not say “yes,” or “no” either way, instead taking the surprising position that eating or not eating meat sacrificed to idols is not something Corinthian believers should concern themselves with. Christians are free to decide whether to eat or not eat such meat, with one caveat, that they consider the needs of others both inside and outside of the church when they make their decisions.

Christian freedom in matters that are neither in direct violation of Scripture or required by Scripture is, in a historical and theological sense, central to the Anglican way of being a Christian. As a Church whose formation took place during some of the most divisive times in World history, and is now the largest Protestant body in the world, the Anglican Church has always needed a robust appreciation of what distinguishes essentials of Christian faith from non-essentials. One example of this is provided in the quotation (above) from the lesser-known, but influential, English Reformer Robert Browne. In this letter to King Henry, Browne pleads with Henry to retain the liberty of a Christian in matters that are not clearly required or prohibited by Scripture. Richard Hooker, the first truly great theologian of post-Reformation Anglicanism, had this to say of indifferent matters (the wearing or not wearing of certain vestments in particular): “these are matters of such small importance and quality… that they become distasteful when they are disputed.” This logic is also apparent in the magnificently worded Preface to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: “It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it.” All of these statements regarding indifferent matters throughout Anglican history can be boiled down to this: keep the essentials as essentials, and the non-essentials as non-essentials.

How does this differ from other Christian traditions? I do not intend to pick on our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Roman Catholic Church, but their own approach to questions of Christian freedom is one of the primary reasons why I am never tempted to swim the Tiber. For Roman Catholicism, there cannot really be an indifferent matter, because when Holy Scripture is silent or ambiguous about something that Catholic Christians wish to have clarity on, the Vatican gives them clarity on it. Consequently, it is then treated as a matter of salvation. This lack of ambiguity is actually one of the features of Roman Catholicism that attracts many people to it. However, it is my firm position that if God has determined not to answer a question one way or another in Holy Scripture, it does not then become the responsibility of human beings to answer it with a clarity that God Himself deems inappropriate or unnecessary.

Broadly speaking, many Protestant traditions, ironically, take an approach that also denies a God-given freedom to Christians. These expressions of Christian faith have a historic tendency to forbid anything not explicitly permitted in Scripture for the life of the Church. The classic example of this is John Calvin’s Geneva congregation, which never sang hymns because hymns are not found in the Bible (they limited congregational singing to the chanting of the Psalms). This kind of position also denies the freedom of a Christian.

So it is that the architects of the Anglican tradition differed from most Christian traditions in their approach to indifferent matters. The Anglican way has been neither to exalt the ritualism of externals of medieval worship which often erred into the realm of superstition nor to diminish the quantity of them so that they disappeared altogether. It was to retain those rituals which were not overtly superstitious and to change how Christians relate to them. In other words, the Anglican approach to indifferent matters is to say, “stop caring so much,” which is precisely the error that rigid conservatives and iconoclasts share in common. They care too much about the wrong things.

None of this is to say that Anglicanism is perfect, that it is some kind of “middle way” between Rome and Protestantism, or that we get everything right. My goal in writing this is simply to draw our attention to the means of unity given to us in the wisdom of the Anglican tradition.

Fr. Matt