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Nondefinition. Redefinition, when and if it is done, will have to come out of what some puzzled outsiders regard as nondefinition. Anglicans proudly regard their faith as a middle way between the rigidities of Rome and the Reformation, a unique and vital bridge between Protestantism and historical Catholicism. But Lutheran Theologian Einar Molland describes Anglicanism as "the most elastic church in Christendom"—and with some justice. The essential Lutheran faith is contained in the Augsburg Confession of 1530; the Church of England's 39 Articles, far from being an authorized confession of the faith, are mentally rejected in whole or part by nearly every Anglican cleric who "assents" to them when he assumes church office. The Anglican faith encompasses Evangelical missionaries as fundamentalist as any Southern Baptist and such subtle, sophisticated minds as San Francisco's Bishop James A. Pike, who questions the virgin birth and speaks of "demythologizing" the Resurrection.
The late Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev. Henley Henson, once acknowledged that "under the description of 'the Anglican Communion,' there are gathered two mutually contradictory conceptions of Christianity." The Anglican Benedictine monks of Nashdom Abbey use the Roman missal and monastic breviary rather than the Book of Common Prayer, and countless Roman Catholic tourists have queued up before the confessionals in Manhattan's St. Mary the Virgin Church only to discover belatedly that they were not in one of Cardinal Spellman's parishes. The ceremony-conscious Anglo-Catholics seem oddly yoked in brotherhood with low-church "Anglo-Baptists," who frown on stained glass and statuary as Biblically forbidden graven images and celebrate austere Communions on plain wooden tables free of candles or crucifix.
Heritage from History. That the Anglican Communion can be both high Catholic and low Protestant is its heritage from history. Despite the break with Rome under Henry VIII, Anglicanism preserved the ecclesiastical government of bishops in the apostolic succession and the central place of corporate liturgical worship. But the Church of England, with the Continental Reformation, accepted the Bible as the final authority for faith, and recognized only two Christ-instituted sacraments, baptism and Holy Eucharist. Yet if churchmen find it hard to describe a specifically Anglican theology, there is no doubting the reality of a modern Anglican theological manner: not the brain-numbing abstractionism of Germany's sages but an urbane lucidity spiced—à la C. S. Lewis—with literate Oxbridge wit.
Two bonds help keep this family of churches together. One is a superb order of worship: the Book of Common Prayer, used in different versions by different Anglican churches but always echoing the symmetry of ritual and the stately, pure English prose of the reformed liturgies composed by Thomas Cranmer for King Edward VI. Cranmer's 1549 Prayer Book has had almost as great an influence on English prose as the King James Bible, and its stately collects remain one of man's finest efforts to address his Creator reverently. Last Sunday's collect, for example: