House Divided

This is the book to read for those who want to understand better the evangelical fervor that has overtaken so much of the Church of England in recent years, and that now seems to be a major influence upon the statements Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, has decided to make, and the stands that he takes, in the current controversies about human sexuality and the literal meaning of the Bible.

Richard Turnbull is the controversial, aggressive, and defiant principal of Wycliffe Hall at Oxford, one of the leading theological colleges of the conservative evangelical tradition within the Church of England. His uncompromising stands on controversial issues have already brought complaints from the alumni, demands for his resignation, and other strong murmurs of support or disapproval from around the Anglican world.

Turnbull is a scholar and historian, but of a decidedly evangelical flavor, and not given to making polite overtures of peaceful coexistence with other points of view. For example, he is known to have said in a speech that 95 percent of Britons now face the prospect of hell because of their failure to follow the Christian faith (as he sees it).

In fairness to him, it must be acknowledged that he doesn’t quite say that in this book. Nor is Anglican and Evangelical? particularly scholarly, based upon extensive research in original sources. It is, rather, a book that intelligent laypeople can understand and even engage with their emotions as they read through its challenging pages. The evangelical point of view, its author points out, is held by probably some 70 percent of persons studying for ordination in the Church of England today.

Turnbull does not seem to know very much about the Episcopal Church, apart from the fact that he obviously doesn’t like it. There are the occasional sideswipes against the church, which he chides for drawing the veil over its Protestant heritage and for departing from traditional biblical faith in favor of liberal Protestantism in such matters as Trinitarian doctrine and Christology.

(The only example he gives is the current presiding bishop’s opening sermon of 2006 which made reference to “our mother Jesus giving birth to a new creation”–a phrase that might as well have come from St. Anselm or Dame Julian of Norwich.)

Also, surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to know much, or at least he does not tell us much, about the wider world of the global south and Anglican provinces such as Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda, which are now so heavily influenced by the evangelical movement in England and are correspondingly strident in opposition to what they perceive as liberal tendencies within the Episcopal Church.

Turnbull’s overall narrative could have been strengthened by more ample references and greater firsthand knowledge, but as an Episcopalian, I have to say that I was not offended by his occasional anti-American comments. I was also surprised that he was not more critical of more liberal views on human sexuality, which occupy very little space here.

Turnbull tells us at the outset that his purpose is to explain and describe what it means to be both Anglican and evangelical, and that for him “evangelical” will be the noun and “Anglican” will be the adjective. This is a fair perspective, given the viewpoint from which he writes, even though there were times when he seemed to be using the term “Anglican” itself to mean only “English”–as when he speaks of the Anglican canons and the Anglican Declaration of Assent, or in the excellent fourth chapter where he writes of English Anglican approaches to society and culture–whereas at other times he seemed to be using it without geographical reference at all.

He does admit that Anglicanism can be defined in confessional or doctrinal terms, but also in terms that are more sociological, more experiential, or more structural.

Having differentiated in these ways, he next proceeds, as any good historian would do, to sketch out the Celtic and Roman strands in early Anglican Christianity, factors that were described (not without bias) as early as the Venerable Bede in the seventh century. Turnbull then leaps forward, as only a dedicated child of the Reformation might do, straight ahead to John Wycliffe and the Lollards of the 14th century, if for no other reason, he says, than to show that “there was a popular Protestantism prior to the Reformation.”

The real beginnings of the evangelical movement he traces to John Wesley in 1738, but his attempts to distinguish its key terms and characteristics could have been better delineated. He does succeed in showing that there has been, and remains, much diversity in the evangelical movement, and he affirms that it is not above self-criticism, as in such examples as a loss of urgency in the mission of the gospel, a certain tendency to institutionalization, and an endemic cultural anti-Catholicism.

Towards the end, Turnbull gives what seems to be his own brief summary when he makes this assertion:

In traversing this volume’s wide-ranging pages, I did note a number of emphases and observations that one would find much more commonly held in the evangelical wing of the Church of England than in the Episcopal Church, differences that, when agitated, exert their influence on global-south Anglicanism in those four large African provinces, and can easily stir up more biblicistic feelings of suspicion against the Episcopal Church and some other parts of the Anglican world. (This is especially true if the archbishop of Canterbury himself is susceptible to these influences, and has not the time or skill to negotiate or contextualize them.)

Such evangelical emphases include a number of assertions: that the difference between a priest and a bishop is only one of function and not of order; that there are not necessarily three distinct orders of ordained ministry, although evangelicals “do embrace the episcopal form of church government”; that the Elizabethan Settlement did not represent a via media between Rome and Geneva; and that the original 39 Articles and the 1552 Prayer Book (not that of 1549 or 1662) represent the doctrinal standard of Anglicanism.

Then there is the assertion that the Enlightenment, with its liberalism, its doubting of revelation, and its emphasis on “the certainty of uncertainty,” distorted the truth of the Gospel; that the Oxford Movement of the 19th century represented a significant discontinuity in the historical understanding of the Church of England; that the triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason merely represents “a train able to stop at every station and always add one more carriage”; and that in much of Anglicanism the patristic period has been overemphasized and the Reformation devalued.

Turnbull also suggests that a greater priority in ecumenism should be given to “the truth of the gospel” than to visible or institutional or even sacramental unity; that agreed or common statements in ecumenism tend to obscure what is really important; that in Anglican ecumenism there has been too much emphasis upon unity with Rome and not enough upon “new, emerging and growing expressions of church life” such as Pentecostalism and black churches; that “the entire trajectory of biblical teaching in respect of homosexual practice is negative”; and that presidency at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper should not be restricted to ordained persons.

These characteristic emphases of Anglican evangelicals surface at various points in Anglican and Evangelical? and most of them, if accompanied by charity and a certain impartiality, can be understood as points of conflict that help explain the growing discontent of many global-south Anglicans with their more liberal, affluent sisters and brothers in North America. The global-south Anglicans are fueled with growing convictions from English Anglican evangelicals, such as Richard Turnbull, who helps us here to understand them–whether or not one agrees with them on all points.

J. Robert Wright, St. Mark’s Professor of Church History at the General Theological Seminary in New York, and historiographer of the Episcopal Church, is the author of the forthcoming Companion to the Venerable Bede.