Shifting sands of Anglican theology and practice

Occasionally here at ADU we argue about whether Calvinism is or is not part of Anglicanism. The following citation from an Eamon Duffy review of "Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures edited by Peter McCullough Oxford, 491 pp, £90.00, November 2005, ISBN 0 19 818774 2" in the London Review of Books (August 2006) is instructive. The great theologian and bishop Lancelot Andrewes both imbibed and preached Calvinism, somewhat standard fare in Elizabethan Anglicanism, and later moved on from it. In making this citation I am not arguing for or against Calvinism as having a proper place in Anglicanism but offering the observation that Anglicanism is capable of both supporting and distancing itself from specific systematic theologies such as Calvinism. Read on ...

"Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape in the godly Protestantism of mercantile London and Puritan Cambridge. From 1571 he was a scholar of Pembroke Hall, along with the young Edmund Spenser, under its Puritan master William Fulke, and he effortlessly took on the colouring of his Cambridge environment. He was a valued member of a formidably learned biblical seminar conducted by the leading university Puritans, and the godly of Cambridge flocked to his afternoon catechetical lectures on the Decalogue. 

Though these youthful works included many hints of some of his later theological and ritual concerns, such as the need for external reverence in prayer, they also insisted on such flagship Protestant causes as the impermissibility of images, and the strict observance of the Sabbath. 

Circulating in dozens of manuscript transcripts for three generations, the catechetical lectures were eventually printed by a Puritan bookseller at the start of the English Civil War, with a pointed dedication to the Long Parliament in which the editor recalled Andrewes’s popularity among the Elizabethan godly: 
      ‘He was scarce reputed a pretender to learning and piety then in Cambridge, who made not himselfe a disciple of Mr Andrewes.’ 

In 1586 he became chaplain to Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, the ‘Puritan Earl’ who, as president of the Council of the North, was commander-in-chief in England’s northern Catholic badlands, in the battle between popery and a beleaguered and pugilistic Elizabethan Protestantism. 

Andrewes’s duties under Huntingdon included the attempted (and apparently often successful) conversion of stubborn recusants. His surviving sermons from this period assume the framework of the conventional predestinarian Calvinism which was the theological default position of most convinced Elizabethan Protestants.

By the 1590s, however, Andrewes’s opinions were on the move. 

Steeped in the ancient languages of the Bible and, perhaps more significantly, in the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, he had come to feel the aridity of a religion which seemed at times to consist of nothing more than preaching: 
   ‘All our holiday holinesse, yea, and our working day too, both are come to this, to heare (nay, I dare not say that, I cannot prove it) but, to be at a Sermon.’ 

His own sermons fell silent about predestination, and emphasised instead the need for perseverance in faith and good works. Increasingly he insisted on reverence for hierarchy and order, and a high sacramentalism, which included the value and even necessity of priestly absolution. 

In contrast to most of his contemporaries, including the other great father figure of the Anglican via media, Richard Hooker, he preached the objective presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements of bread and wine independent of the faith of the recipient, he taught the sacrificial character of the eucharist, and, like Continental Lutherans but unlike most English theologians, insisted on the power of the material elements to forgive the sins of the communicant. 

Scorning Protestant irreverence and lack of ceremony in church, he insisted on kneeling for prayer and at the sacrament (God, he declared, ‘will not have us worship him like elephants, as if we had no joints in our knees’). He practised a heightened ritualism: incense was used in his episcopal chapels."

As best I understand Andrewes influence on the C of E he was a 'father' to Laud and thus a 'grandfather' to the 19th century Anglo-Catholics.

But evangelicals are grateful for Andrewes' role in the publication of the King James' Bible!