The Panther and the Hind

I just finished re-reading Aidan Nichols' The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism, and have ordered it from Amazon for my personal library.  I want to especially recommend this book up front for every reader of mine who is currently investigating Anglicanism, because it is written by a former Anglican, now a Roman Catholic living in the Blackfriars Dominican community at Cambridge, whose knowledge of our history and faith is magisterial.   Here is a brief bio.

Nichols wrote this book primarily for Roman Catholics seeking to understand Anglicanism, and also to highlight the fact that Roman Catholic ecumenical engagement with the Anglican Communion is bound to be futile, given the latter’s current trajectory.  Readers new to or investigating will find an excellent summary of Anglican theological history since the Reformation, despite the author's less-than-sanguine assessment of Anglicanism's future.

The bulk of the book is concerned with his historical and theological analysis, which discerns 9 movements in Anglican history: 1) the English Reformation; 2) Hooker and the via media; 3) the Caroline Divines and their successors; 4) the Latitudinarian tradition; 5) the Evangelical revival; 6) the Oxford movement and its aftermath; 7) Liberal Catholicism; 8) Anglican modernism; and 9) contemporary Anglican theological radicalism. Nichols concludes this work by positing three disparate tendencies or parties within modern Anglicanism: Low Church, High Church and Broad Church.  Though there are some important nuances not to be overlooked, generally speaking in Nichols' schema 1 and 5 would today be grouped under the Low Church category; 2, 3 and 6 High Church; and 4, 7, 8 and 9 Broad Church.  (Nichols acknowledges that in reality it's somewhat more complicated than this. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of the High Church Evangelical.)

The Panther and the Hind is a compelling case for the belief that the Anglican Communion is likely doomed, but also in that connection why Anglo-Catholicism is fated to be a rump church existing in small pockets scattered throughout the Continuum and what's left of the Communion -- when it isn't morphing into Liberal Catholicism, a topic he takes up in Chapter 7 (the implication being that Roman Catholics shouldn't waste much time and energy on ecumenical endeavors with the Communion, but simply wait for the inevitable river crossings to Rome.)

The following are some salient excerpts from Chapter 7 on Liberal Catholicism (a successor to Tractarianism and the Yin to traditionalist Anglo-Catholicism’s Yang) and the Conclusion.  (Bolded emphases mine):

                                           From Chapter 7, “Liberal Catholicism”

Unfortunately, while one line of (Anglo-Catholic) development passes from Gore to the biblically and patristically controlled and credally obedient theology of the classical Anglo-Catholics of the mid-twentieth century, a second shoot of the genealogy-of-ideas tree points in the direction of a watery landscape, a more fluid world of theological discourse. It all depends whether greater stress is placed on the substantive, 'Catholicism', or the qualifier 'Liberal'.  Gore's confidence in the compatibility of credal orthodoxy and critical scholarship made the question of the relative priority of faith or reason, to his mind, entirely hypothetical. For a later generation of liberal Catholics, however, should inconsistency be detected between the 'assured results of modern criticism' and a somewhat minimised version of the essentials of the Catholic faith, it was faith which had to give way." On the other hand, those have never been lacking whose reaction was, rather, to wonder whether the critical methodologists might at times be using the 'wrong tool'. The Anglo-Catholic movement today is thus divided between its traditional or classical and 'affirming' or accommodationist wings.

In general, the twentieth century history of Anglo-Catholicism has been marked by early climax, a holding operation, and subsequently since the Second Vatican Council, steady decline. Anglo-Catholics enjoyed their greatest success in the Church of England around the time of the First World War. Though the Crown was on the whole suspicious of them and the bishops mainly cautious, Anglo-Catholics succeeded in taking over a considerable part of the parochial system, especially in London and south-east England, thanks to both lay patrons and the founding of missions later erected as parishes. Like the Evangelicals they also operated through Church societies, whether missionary, like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, or for internal consolidation, like the Church Union. Since the 1960s however their confidence has been deeply sapped, partly through the confusion as to Catholic identity engendered by the Vatican II revolution in Roman Catholicism, partly through the continued and growing institutional domination of con temporary Anglicanism by the Broad Church wing." Now largely existing in embattled enclaves, they are faced with difficult questions about their future in a Church with an episcopate open to Latitudinarianism on such issues as the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, and his Virginal Conception, and proceeding towards the ordination of women priests, and, doubtless, bishops. Four groups can be discerned: those who look to salvation from Eastern Orthodoxy, and hope for a `Western Orthodox' Anglican mini-church;" those who look to Rome for a Uniate scheme of some kind; those who propose to fall back on a 'continuing' Anglican splinter-church (as already found in North America and elsewhere), and those who under the leadership of the bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, are now preparing to make their peace with the Broad Church tradition over a wide range of issues, in return for the preservation of their liturgical and spiritual particularities." So far as one can tell from the somewhat vague yet clamant style of theological utterance which seems to be a mark of 'Affirming Catholicism', its chief doctrinal characteristic is a denial of the historical boundedness of the apostolic revelation in favour of a theory of continuous revelation through discernment of the 'signs of the times':

Our God does new things, does them for the first time, reveals truths hidden from previous generations and made known only unto us in these last days.

Admitting that no 'criteriology' for reading the signs of the times is yet forthcoming, and that therefore what God is leading us towards, or saying to us, by these media is undetermined, it can only be concluded that

The Christian way is as wondrously and as adventurously inexact as life itself.

The drawbacks to an emancipation of theological culture from a clearly identified doctrinal authority, at once preservative yet homogenously developmental, are only too apparent in our next topic, Anglican Modernism.

                                              From the Conclusion

The notion that the three schools somehow complement one another in a richly 'comprehensive' Church requires a lot of swallowing. As Eric Mascall has written

The fundamental incoherence of the three school theory can be seen from the obvious fact that the existence of each one of the schools can be justified only on the assumption that its characteristic theological assertions are true. But in that case all the three schools must be mutually compatible. And in that case there is no reason why we should not accept them all and a great many reasons why we should. But then what will have happened to the three schools? It is quite ridiculous to envisage the Church as a tricorporate society, each of whose parts is committed to holding one third of the truth. Regrettable as this no doubt is, it is because each school has not been convinced that everything that the others were holding was part of the truth that the schools have remained recognisably distinct.

And Mascall accepts Stephen Sykes' suggestion that the `comprehensiveness' argument must be traced back to the (somewhat unplaceable) mid-Victorian divine F. D. Maurice whereupon it becomes explicable, for Maurice's commitment to a romantic idealist view of [English] national character and destiny' predisposed him to the key-notions of complementarily and compromise. As Sykes wrote:

Coined at a time when internal party strife was at its most acute, it apparently offered a non-partisan refuge for that large body of central Anglicans who properly speaking belonged to no party, either evangelical, nor high-church, nor yet in any committed sense to the more radical of the liberals. Theologically speaking, however, the effect of the proposal has been disastrous. It must be stated bluntly that it has served as an open invitation to intellectual laziness and self-deception. Maurice's opposition to system-building has proved a marvellous excuse to those who believe they can afford to be condescending about the outstanding theological contribution of theologians from other communions and smugly tolerant of second rate theological competence in our own; and the failure to be frank about the issues between the parties in the Church of England has led to an ultimately illusory self-projection as a Church without any specific doctrinal or confessional position.

Bishop Sykes' critic D. Wiebe, by countering that comprehensiveness is but an 'appropriate response to the recognition of the in tractable character of the issues involved', and stigmatising as immoral any requirement from the theologian of some 'absolute commitment to particular theological claims' simply on the basis of his or her membership of the Church as such, only confirmed the accuracy of the analysis.' As Dr Paul Avis has written:

The notion of a tacit consensus residing in a common ethos is a post factum accommodation to the demise of doctrinal accord within the Church.