Anglican Identity

Orthodox Anglican Identity

Mark Tooley on November 13, 2020

Tooley: This is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy here in Washington, DC today with the pleasure of speaking to Anglican pastor Charles Erlandson, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, on his new book on Orthodox Anglican Identity. Reverend Erlandson is a pastor of a Reformed Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas. So, Charles, thank you so much for joining this conversation.

Erlandson: Thank you for having me.

Tooley: And if you would just hold up a copy of your book for a moment, please.

Erlandson: Sure, here you go.

Tooley: Orthodox Anglican Identity. And explain to us what is the main theme of Orthodox Anglican Identity and its relevance today for Anglicans and for other Christians.

Erlandson: The main theme is to try to basically to tread where angels fear to tread. That is to try to give a definition for Anglicanism. There’s a lot of confusion today about what it means to be an Anglican. So I tried to clarify that by having what I think is a very kind of robust and nuanced definition that I think is about as good as we can manage. So that helps us as Anglicans to understand who we are, why it’s worth considering being an Anglican. And, hopefully, to help us find a way forward. And I’m especially interested in the book, the first word is orthodox, because within the Anglican world, as in most churches today, there’s a growing divide between those who still hold to the traditional faith and those who are more progressive or liberal. So I was trying to figure out where do orthodox Anglicans go from today as they try to continue to reassert the faith once given to the saints. What do they have in common? Is it enough to still have a kind of coherent identity? So that’s the gist of the book. And the relevance, of course, is just to help us understand better who we are and to find a way for those of us who still hold to the Scriptures. But it’s also — I tried to write it in such a way that for anyone who’s really a student of religious studies and anybody who’s in a Christian tradition and is trying to understand themselves better — I provide a lens for understanding religious identities and why they’re kind of complicated and sometimes difficult to understand, because everyone’s having the same problems in the postmodern world today. All of our communities and identities are kind of breaking down and it’s becoming very problematic for churches, for example, to say who they are and who they are not.

Tooley: Well, and that’s a very important point. And as you know, nondenominational or post-denominational Christianity is the most popular brand in America today. And many Christians are left wondering why do these denominational traditions have any relevance for Christianity today. But your book is in essence an answer to that question.

Erlandson. Yeah, I mean it’s done from particularly Anglican point of view, but the there’s a chapter just on describing my model for religious identity.  And basically there are four. What I have discovered I think are four components to any religious identity, especially a Christian one.

There’s one that I call the ecclesial identity, that is there’s a church character to it. That is, there’s a body, and that’s one that is increasingly important today as we have a lot of Christians, including non-denominational Christians and especially in this season of covert thinking, well, can I just be a Christian without the church. And of course the biblical answer is no, that we are members of the body of Christ, the one body of Christ. And that relationship we have with Christ is especially through the church, which is the body and bride of Christ. So the first one is an ecclesial definition.

There are also what I call normative definitions of religion. That is every religion and even every denominational church within Christianity has certain norms or standards that mark them out as being a little bit different. So for Roman Catholics, for example, you’ve got the Pope and the Magisterium. For Anglicans, we have the prayer book and the Thirty-Nine Articles [of Religion]. For other churches it works a little differently. But everyone has certain norms that helped to interpret scripture.

The third is more practical definitions. That is: how do we worship, how do we actually practice the faith? They’re usually distinctive things about each religious tradition.

The fourth definition, that kind of ties them all together, is sort of the historical definition. How have different church traditions developed over time and what changes that they made over time, while still maintaining some kind of essential identity? And that’s something that is useful thing to all Christians. And in fact, my book originally was my PhD thesis, one of the professors to sit in on my oral defense was actually a Muslim scholar. And she said you know everything you’ve written on Western religious identity, that would help us as Muslims to understand the Islamic faith as well because we have kind of the same dimension. So I think it’s a good way of understanding how religions work and that that also helps it to a space and here’s why: It can be a little more complicated. If you study it, then sometimes people can just natively simply understand what the faith is about. But it ends up being a little more complicated. And this I help to simplify that for people.

Tooley:  How is being Anglican different from being Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist or Lutheran, etc? What are the key distinctions?

Erlandson:  Well, of course it would depend upon which other church tradition we’re talking about.  But when I tried to get my head around what constitutes Anglicanism and how to define it for other people, the simplest definition, I think that’s helpful, is it’s a reformed Catholicism. That is that we are trying hard to hold on to the faith once delivered from the saints, trying to inherit what the early church passed on to us. But because the Western tradition in the Middle Ages got off-track it was also necessary to reform the Western tradition. So in many ways, surprisingly, we end up being a lot like Roman Catholics. We keep a lot of the same things. We have a very high view of the sacraments, if not the same understanding. We have the threefold order of bishops and priests and deacons, but without having a Pope. We have the ancient liturgy. So we’ve got a lot in common with Roman Catholicism. But of course the Reformation was a tragic necessity, as one historian put it, because there were a lot of ways in which the Western church got off track. So we’d have things in common with Rome. But on the other hand, we’d have Reformed aspects in common with especially Lutherans and to a lesser degree Presbyterians. Lutherans, for example, the Luther’s Reformation was a little more conservative than some.  So he kept some aspects of ancient liturgy and so on. So we would be having a lot in common with Lutheranism, a little less with Presbyterianism and then less still in common with some of our other Protestant brethren groups. So that’s what makes us a little bit unique in some ways that we have both Protestant and Catholic aspects. So we’re like other churches without exactly being like them.

Tooley: So if you’re there in Texas encountering a neighbor, who’s attending a non-denominational megachurch, and his worship has very little overlap with Anglican liturgy, how would you explain to them the attraction of Anglicanism?

Erlandson: Well, I do have a couple of ways. That comes up a lot, and we see that as people come into Good Shepherd, my parish. And we often have to explain ourselves to people because of these differences, most people in Texas either being Baptist or nondenominational. So when people come into the church frequently, they’re coming from other churches. So I explained it in terms of, I try to give a biblical justification for our particular practices. I look at the early church. And I say, well, here’s what the church seems to be doing from the very beginning as early as we have records in an unbroken way until the time of the Reformation and some of the more radical aspects. So I give them a short history. So I give them kind of a historical perspective about where this came from and show that it’s very ancient and only later did some of these things were given up. I give them a Biblical perspective and I will show here’s where this seems to make sense from the Scriptures. And one of the things I challenge them to do is (since we all hopefully love the Word of God and want to abide by its principles) the real question often becomes not so much do we love and trust the Bible but whom do we trust to interpret it? Is it just me and my private interpretation? Or should I look for something older and deeper and that’s what I drive people to. If we can determine what the early church taught and believed, and if that was more or less universally taught and believed early on for a long time (with few exceptions until the Reformation or later) that’s probably what the Apostles and early church intended. So that’s a lens that I’ve developed to helps me understand how the scriptures have been lived out by the church and maybe what’s the best authentic interpretation.

And then there’s other things too. I try to explain to them, you know, aspects of the liturgy, why is our worship so different. And again, I have looked at certain parts of the Bible, where you can see the seeds of liturgical worship, and again, looking at the early church and seems like there’s very similar practices pretty early on, not identical but similar. In fact, that’s one of the ways that a lot of people have come in to Anglicanism by studying church history. And when they look at the early church’s views of the sacraments, the church, liturgy and so on. They wake up and find, you know, it sounds kind of more like either Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Or Anglicanism, maybe Lutheranism, than it does the church I grew up with. So I kind of have those different possible things at my disposal, and some of it just depends on where they’re coming from. People sometimes are coming more theologically, biblicly, sometimes more aesthetically, sometimes just emotionally. So I kind of tried to address it individually as well. What is it that you find challenging about Anglicanism? What does you have questions about I just tried to begin a dialogue.

Tooley: Americans when they think of Anglicanism in America, they think of the divisions between the old Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America over sexuality, but obviously over other issues as well. Someone who’s in the old Episcopal Church who has a liberal view on sexuality but professes to be otherwise orthodox, by your view are they meaningfully Anglican? Can you be liberal on sexuality and still be within the tradition? How would you respond?

Erlandson: Yeah, in fact, that’s why you know the title of the book is Orthodox Anglican Identity because to me to be an Anglican in some ways is to be in an Anglican church. But there are ways of being faithful Anglicans and ways of being less faithful. So every church tradition is going through the same thing where — you wouldn’t say for example in the Methodist Church or Presbyterian, Lutheran churches which also have had splits over the same issues that someone’s not within the Lutheran or Presbyterian or Methodist tradition, just because they have liberal views — you might say, this is a deficient Christianity and it’s counter to Word of God and what God desires.

So in some sense, the divisions that are more fundamental level and what we find often is that a lot of us who are on the traditional, biblical side of biblical morality and the understanding of the authority of the scriptures, we find that we have more in common sometimes with fellow conservative Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, than we do with people who might worship similar to us and be in a similar church but have very different views of how to interpret scripture and especially biblical ethics. So I would say, yeah, they may be authentically Anglican, but then I would say you’re a liberal Anglican and that’s a very different kind of thing even though there’s much in common, historical associations with the Church of England of course, maybe worshiping similarly, in terms of liturgy. But very different views of how to read scripture, which ends up being really important for all the similarities that ends up being kind of a decisive difference.

Tooley:  Now Anglicanism is perhaps somewhat unique, although this could also be true of Baptist as well, in that you can be Calvinists or non-Calvinists within the Anglican tradition, right?

Erlandson: One of the things that I suppose is both a blessing and a curse within Anglicanism is this diversity. A curse in the sense that, you know, if you have too much diversity on what God clearly says then not only are we going against the Word of God. But you threaten all meaningful identity. But the blessing is that because it tried to be a comprehensive church in the 16th century, trying to incorporate as many possible believers as possible with only a few extremes kind of left out. We have tried to find common ground. Because we have a lot of different influences in our history, there are differences that are permissible. So some are more on the Calvinistic side, they emphasize more of the 16th century Reformation. Others vehemently deny that and say, no, I’d rather look more at the Patristic early church which tend to be less Calvinistic but we can still be in the same church. Sometimes it’s a very uneasy fit and sometimes people want to downplay one aspect of it, but it is true that there are those within the Anglican tradition that are on the Calvinist side, not the majority, but there are some. So that’s been there since at least the 16th century.

Tooley: And then finally this maybe somewhere outside the parameters of your book, but having just concluded a divisive election here in the United States it seems to me that the Anglican tradition has within it a great care and love for the nation, wherever they find themselves. Anglicans by definition are not separatist or sectarian or Anabaptist. They are engaged in society and often in leadership within society. So how should Anglicans today develop a positive Christian political theology that will help them navigate American politics?

Erlandson:  Yeah, that’s a great question. So a couple of answers. Of course, coming out of the Church of England (and this would have been true for everyone except pretty much the Anabaptists) there’s a close association of church and state. Not so in America. So we don’t have that closeness of church and state that was historically true in Europe. But on the other hand, in our prayer book every day in morning and evening prayer we pray for the President and our political leaders and we pray the same prayer, regardless of who’s in charge. Even though we may have our personal preferences, we are supposed to pray in keeping with scripture, where we’re commanded to pray for the governing authorities, we pray for the governing authorities — and that’s the most important thing, I think, of all is to keep praying the God’s will be done through the governing authorities.

As far as political theory that’s a much more complicated thing. Anglicans are all over the map there, even those of us who are on the same page in terms of biblical ethics, fine. We may have great divergences in terms of how to play out the biblical theology in terms of politics. So there’s a lot of diversity there. There’s not unanimity, so I think that it’s important for us to kind of revisit our principles and say, okay, on what basis should we vote for a particular man or a particular party.

Maybe, most important of all, when you think about politics and the way we engage as Christians, especially Anglicans, you can think in terms of both what I think it was the content and then the form. The content would be, are we in favor of abortion or not? Are we in favor of redistribution of wealth? Is climate change a big deal? Are we concerned about that? What should we do with taxation, immigration? So we should discuss that. But just as important I feel is the form that is the manner in which we discuss this. Are we open to listening to the other side, because everyone Left and Right seems to be in their own kind of echo chamber not listening to the other side, at least the reasonable voices on both sides?

I would say that would be good and healthy, first of all, to listen. And then secondly when discussing with others, speak charitably. There is a lot of false information out there. There’s a lot of fake news, but when someone — and you’re not talking just online but I mean in person — you’re talking with a real person, treat that person as worthy of respect, even if you really detest their ideas, listen to them. Make sure you understanding what they’re saying. That would go a long way, I think, towards healing some of the divisions. Not the divisions based on content, but some of the false divisions where everyone’s just ready at the drop of a pin to unfriend somebody who has a different opinion.

So much of our work, I think, should be to be careful and do our homework, listen to both sides, but then the way we present it: present in a winsome way. We’re trying to have a loving relationship with our neighbors. I think that we have not been doing a very good job of that on either side. So I would exercise especial caution that we may have differences of opinion on the content. But the manner in which we discuss things, both with Christians and non-Christians, it ought to be above reproach.

Tooley:  Charles Erlandson, author of Orthodox Anglican Identity, thank you very much for an informative conversation.

Erlandson: Thanks very much, Mark.

Download audio of this interview accessible here on SoundCloud:

The IRD · Charles Erlandson and Orthodox Anglican Identity
  1. Comment by Vince Cesarani on November 14, 2020 at 8:36 am

    These people left the EC before the turn of the century. You can call yourself a duck but not be a duck. We changed our prayer book in 1928 or so way after they left., Then in ‘79. Try talking to ACC if you want to know an Anglican that was EC before the latest split. This is like talking to Old Catholics.

  2. Comment by Ted Edwards + on November 15, 2020 at 9:50 am

    I had a lot of trouble reading the transcription, and when I later listened to the interview while following the text I realized that many words were missing. It made the text, but not the audio, seem to ramble because of unfinished thoughts that were merely missed words if text and especially at the end of sentences.

    The interview was especially helpful, and I will buy the book. I enjoy analysis that is driven by defined factors, and in this case it was the four schemes for identifying religious identity.

    Being a retired Navy Chaplain, I have had to work cooperatively with a full range of American religious professionals — and it was a pleasure. That scheme of four factors of religious identity has helped me to make more sense of that experience, and I wish I had heard this a few decades ago.

    Good wishes, Mark!

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