Anglican Spirituality
An Introduction
By Greg Peters
Cascade Books, 108 pages, $32
On the cover of Introduction to Anglican Spirituality, the publishers have reproduced a late medieval illumination of the adoration of the sacrament, shown on an altar in a monstrance. It is a lovely and interesting image, but its relation to Anglican spirituality is not obvious, nor is any explanation of its relevance forthcoming. As such, it provides a fitting cover for this short book, which touches on a very great deal that is interesting and intriguing but whose connection with Anglican spirituality is also not obvious.
Greg Peters’s account is based on the conception of an “Anglican synthesis” between Catholic and Reformed, which he defines chiefly in terms of sacramentalism and biblicism. It is a model that seems to offer a way for evangelicals to embrace the sacramental aspects of the Catholic tradition without letting go of the Bible’s teaching, but it is questionably adequate as a rationale for the liturgical and spirituality of classical Anglicanism. As his anxious homily about the need for balance between competing emphases (subjective/objective; corporate/individual; transcendent/immanent) suggests, this is not so much a synthesis as a balancing act.
Peters explores this putative synthesis in spirituality through the threefold Benedictine structure, posited by Martin Thornton as the “Anglican Rule,” of Office, Eucharist, and private Devotion, which triad supplies a general structure for the chapters of the book. So far so good; but the exposition of these themes is perplexing.
On the one hand, there is his use of non-Anglican authors to explore aspects of Anglican spirituality. Thus the Jesuit liturgist Robert Taft and the Lutheran neo-orthodox pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer are quoted on the “spirituality of the office”—but no Anglican authors, or even the prayer book liturgy. On ascesis, he relies heavily on Pierre Hadot, the Roman Catholic scholar of ancient philosophy, and Kallistos Ware, the Eastern Orthodox popularizing prelate; on works of mercy, Thomas Aquinas, and so on. What these authors have to say is of interest, but does not shed much light on Anglican spirituality.
Peters does have an obvious affection for Cranmerian texts—the collect for the Second Sunday in Advent and the Prayer of Humble Access are closely parsed—and he has even ventured into Cranmer’s treatise on the Eucharist and the Book of Homilies. In addition, he provides close readings of one poem each by Donne and Herbert, though (bar one passing reference to Hooker) there is almost no interaction with any other Anglican divine before Pusey.
But what is odd about his reading of Cranmer and others is that it is made in light of the 19th-century “Anglican synthesis” rather than in the reformational teaching of classical Anglicanism. As a result, his synthesis of biblicism and sacramentalism is missing the robust Christological center of the classical divines. (There is one passing reference to justification by faith only, as a “Protestant” doctrine, though it is the explicit teaching of the Articles, one nervous allusion to controversy over the Eucharist.)
The work of Torrance Kirby and Robert Crouse, among others, has illumined the Chalcedonian distinctions that supply the deep structure of classical Anglican piety—the distinctions of law and gospel, justification and sanctification, faith and works, outward sign and inward grace, sacrifice for sin and sacrifice of praise, of Augustinian immediacy and Dionysian mediation. The absence of these distinctions renders Anglican spirituality opaque.
This book is evidence of the attractive power of Anglican piety to evangelicals who want the riches of sacramental and Catholic Christianity without losing the Bible’s teaching, but the synthesis he seeks will not be found in the unstable balancing act of late Anglicanism, but only in the Christological center of the Anglican Reformation.
The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector of St. John’s, Savannah, Georgia.
