Article VI
“Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”
Article VII
“The Old Testament is not contrary to the New... Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.”
Romans 15:1-4
We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please his neighbour for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
John 10:34-36
Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken— what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?”
We can trust and delight the Old Testament because Jesus did.
It’s a real pleasure for me to be talking about the thirty-nine articles, and an informal title for this series is “to be an Anglican”. What it means to be an Anglican and not a Roman Catholic or a Baptist or a Presbyterian or whatever the other denominations are.
To kick things off I’d like you to think of a charitable cause that you’re passionate about. I expect we all probably have a charity that we think is very important. I can see Nicky there and Kate’s Home Nursing is very important to you.
I’m sure all of us will have a charity we’re very passionate about. But let’s say it’s the RSPCA just for sake of argument. You’re passionate about the RSPCA because you’re passionate about animal welfare. Now what would you do if the RSPCA was spending most of its time advocating for providing aid to war-torn countries? You’d probably think, well that’s a good thing; that is good but that’s not really what the RSPCA is about. I’m donating money to help animals and I’m donating money to other charities to help with war-torn countries.
And then what would you do if you got the reply? Nobody worries about that kind of stuff anymore. What are charities all about? We just give money wherever we feel like it. Today it’s war-torn countries, tomorrow it might be housing projects in the cities, whatever it is. All that stuff about sticking to what the charity was founded to do, nobody really bothers with that anymore. Hopefully you would feel the urgency of saying, no, we need to bring the RSPCA back to the reason for its existence.
You can probably see why I’m going with this.
Most of us will be Anglicans, as I said earlier, because we were born into it. We’ve always been part of the C of E. But like the RSPCA, the Anglican Church has some very clear founding purposes and tenets, some very clear fences, if you like, that fence off certain doctrines that we do and don’t believe, and these are expressed in the 39 Articles of Religion found at the back of the Book of Common Prayer. They come out of the ferment of the Reformation and they define in detail what the Anglican Church is all about.
Because many people today say, like we imagined about the RSPCA, “oh, nobody takes all that stuff seriously anymore. It was fine for way back when, but not now.”
For such people Anglicanism is like a children’s colouring book; there are some lines drawn in, but actually you can colour in the bits you want, or leave bits, or maybe just shove your crayon all over all of it and don’t worry about the lines at all.
But that’s exactly why I feel the urgency of bringing the Church of England back to its roots, especially at a time when young people do not want the “hey, whatever man” attitude towards religion. They long for a church which is well defined, historically rooted and knows what it believes. That’s why so many of them are flooding into the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches because they’re not afraid to say, “this is what we believe and this is what we don’t believe.”
And so as we turn to the first of the articles we’ve been looking at, which I read from earlier, they concern the Bible. “Holy Scripture containeth in all things necessary to salvation so that nothing that is not read therein or proved thereby should be thought necessary to salvation.”
And so here we see a decisive break from and rejection of Roman Catholic views of salvation from the offset.
The Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation (it has been a little bit muddied since Vatican II, but certainly up until Vatican II) it was very clear that in order to be saved and go to heaven, a person has to believe not only in the Trinity, in Jesus’ atoning death in their place, but also believe from their heart all the dogmas defined by the Roman Catholic Church, or they will go to hell.
That means believing things like the assumption of the Virgin Mary, believing the infallibility of the Pope. If you don’t believe in that, you’re going to hell.
The founders of the Church of England saw the massive problem here, for the Roman Church was claiming that the apostle Peter was wrong. When in answer to the question, “what must we do to be saved” that the crowd asked him after he had given a wonderful sermon. They were cut to the heart and they said, “Peter, what must we do to be saved?” He gave the answer, “repent and be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.”
The Roman Church has since corrected Peter, adding a third stipulation to be saved. You must also believe in all the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.
Our Anglican forebears saw that this was a twisting of the simple gospel message, that if you repent of your sins and trust in Jesus who died for your sins, you will be saved.
And this is a reminder that our Anglican Church is reformed. This means that it’s thoroughly Protestant. And not only that, but is unashamedly within the Calvinist tradition of Protestantism. Many people today take issue with this. To which my answer is sorry, but that’s just what Anglicanism is.
To go back to the RSPCA, we might say to the other people there, “look, giving aid to war-torn countries is great and there are many charities which do that, but that’s not the RSPCA.”
Similarly, if people don’t like Calvinism, there are many non-Calvinist churches out there. Methodism went down the Wesleyan route, disagreeing with the Calvinist route. That’s fine. But like it or not, Anglicanism is squarely within the reformed Calvinist tradition.
And then the Article goes on to say the Old Testament is not contrary to the New. This is so important because so often I hear people say, “oh, I like the New Testament God, but the Old Testament God is all nasty and grumpy and judgmental.
And again, people are free to believe that if they like, but it’s not Anglicanism. To be in Anglican is to explicitly deny such a division between the Old and New Testaments, going back, as it does, to a heresy of the early church called Marcionism.
In our reading from the book of Romans, St. Paul says everything that was written in the past, and for him that was the Old Testament, was written to teach us. He doesn’t say the nice bits were written to teach us. He says everything was written to teach us.
And in our Gospel reading, Jesus made a whole argument based on a single word of the Old Testament. One word. Imagine how many words there are in the Old Testament. Jesus could take one of them and say, because it’s all inspired by God, I can make an argument based on one of these words, adding that Scripture, which again, for him meant the Old Testament, cannot be broken, meaning it can’t be set aside or its validity and authority denied.
Yes, of course, there are difficult parts. That’s why we have our midweek Bible studies and small groups to pick apart what the difficulties are. But once we understand why they’re there and how the Old Testament does in fact point forward to Jesus, these difficult parts will become clearer to us.
The point is that Anglicanism agrees explicitly with Jesus and with St. Paul that the Old Testament is not contrary to the New.
And so both these points, that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, and that the Old and New Testaments are not contrary to each other, boil down to the great Protestant principle of “sola scriptura”, if you’ve heard that before, or “scripture alone.”
This is the doctrine that the Bible is the only God-breathed, infallible, authoritative source of information for the Christian. Other authorities, of course, have a claim on us, whether it’s the law of the land, which is also bound up with the law of the church, as you probably know, or the authority of the information given to us by our senses. It would be weird if we didn’t obey what our eyes and ears and noses were telling us.
But only the Bible comes with God’s 100% seal of approval, because these other authorities can get things wrong. But because it’s inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Bible can’t get things wrong.
In opposition to Roman Catholicism, for example, Anglicanism says the teaching of the church is an important authority, but it’s not God-breathed, and it’s not without error. In opposition to liberal, progressive Christianity, Anglicanism says your mistake is judging the Bible by a higher authority, be it reason or experience, and then objecting to the bits of the Bible which disagree with reason or experience. But the Christian faith has always maintained that the opposite is the case; we must judge our reason and our experience by the authority of the Bible.
So I’d like to end with a deep question. I’m sorry if it’s a bit too deep for this time in the morning, but anyway, I’m going to throw it out there. What do you think is your highest authority? What’s your final court of appeal when judging what’s right or wrong, what’s true or false?
I think for most of us, we kind of just absorb what the world around us does in that, which is kind of a feeling, perhaps, feels right. Perhaps some of us are a little bit more old-fashioned in thinking, well, it’s got to be logical in order to be true or false.
But the question that we all need to ask is how can one be sure that one’s feeling that something’s right or wrong, or one’s reasoning, is free from the deep biases of the heart? If it sends experience, it’s the old empiricist way of doing things, if it can’t be judged by what we can see in here and test, then we can’t know if it’s true or false or right or wrong. But how can one know that God exists apart from sense experience? Perhaps we all live by the old adage, “I’ll just try to do what’s right.” But have not many people said that in the past, and we look back and think it wasn’t right at all.
To our modern years, saying the Bible is our final authority sounds a bit wacky, sounds a bit fundamentalist. But not only does it make perfect sense in philosophical terms, not only is it what Jesus and St. Paul believed, but it’s also an essential part of what it means to be an Anglican.