Book Review: "Our Anglican Heritage, Second Edition"

Our Anglican Heritage, Second Edition

Can an Ancient Church be a Church of the Future?

By John W. Howe, Sam C. Pascoe

Cascade Books (2010)  ORDER A COPY

Book review by Joe Thoma

By definition, a "classic" should be timeless; by implication it should need no modernizing. So how do you update a classic of Church history such as "Our Anglican Heritage," by the Rt. Rev. John W. Howe?

The answer is that you refrain from changing the work's essential character while you expand, refine and elaborate on it, bringing a half-lifetime of further study and reflection. You choose a collaborator whose perspective complements your own. And you also make the book relevant to its times, while acknowledging that although the Church will always face challenges, the specifics of those tests will change.

The first edition, published in 1977, served as a guidebook and inspiration for a generation of Episcopal clergy and lay leaders. Many major figures in the current Episcopal Church cite the book as having led them to a deeper understanding of their calling.

In collaboration with the Rev. Sam C. Pascoe, who left the Episcopal Church in 2006 and is now a member of the Anglican Church in North America, Bishop Howe, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, has expanded the second edition of "Our Anglican Heritage" to more than 80,000 well-chosen words, from a shade under 40,000 words in the first edition.

Updates include a new structure as well as expansion of some original arguments.

The First Edition

The first edition begins with a chapter on "The Break with Rome," dismissing the old, popularly accepted canards that the Church of England was founded by Henry VIII and that he broke with Rome simply so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

The following two chapters, making up about a quarter of the book along with Chapter 1, continue discussing the historical record through the Counter-Reformation ("Bloody Mary's Return to Rome"), and the emergence of the "Bridge Church" under Elizabeth. This sets the stage for a discussion of the Thirty-nine Articles, followed by more geohistorical discourse on the worldwide Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church in Canada. (The Canadian chapter was written by Canon Harry Robinson of Little Trinity Church, Toronto.)

Chapters 8 through 12 deal with the Anglican perspective on the role of clergy, liturgy, rites and ceremonies, the Eucharist, and baptism and confirmation. 

The 1977 edition concludes with a chapter titled "The Sleeping Giant Stirs," broaching the subject of the "Two-Thirds World" outstripping the West in population and in numbers of Christians who consider themselves part o the Anglican Communion.

The Second Edition

Our Anglican Heritage, Second Edition is aptly subtitled, "Can an Ancient Church be a Church of the Future?"

With a foreword by George Carey, 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury, the second edition builds a case for the continuity of the Anglican Church from ancient times through the present. Archbishop Carey describes the continuity: "The phrase 'Catholic and Reformed' is central to the Anglican claim that the Church of England is not at all a new body but the same church, cleansed and in faithful continuity to the past and yet open to all that God wishes to reveal to us through the fundamental sources of faith, namely, the Scriptures."

And so the authors reorder the book’s structure to build the narrative forward not primarily from the Church's break with Rome but with a fuller discussion of Christianity’s earliest times on the British Isles. Certainly, by 325, "a vigorous Christianity had sprung up throughout southern Britain," the edition says. That "local" manifestation of the Church was not simply a representation of Rome's doctrines and policies, but was a “Celtic church” that developed a character of its own, removed from Rome as it was.

The second edition reviews the early history in a more leisurely and thorough way, compared with the first edition. Four separate chapters treat the historic Church, the beginnings of the Reformation, the break with the Roman Church and the Elizabethan Settlement.

Rome is examined in a kinder, gentler manner. The first edition roundly criticizes the Old Order: “By the 14^thCentury, Roman Catholicism had evolved into something very different from the ‘faith once delivered to the saints.’” And, discussing the Council of Trent (1545), the first edition says, “Roman Catholicism gives equal veneration to the Scriptures and the traditions of the church, written and unwritten,” ... but, “In the sharpest contrast, Anglicanism stands for ... the ultimate authority of Scripture alone.”

The second edition says, “Despite its reputation for labyrinthine bureaucracy, corrupt curates, and ineffective popes, the medieval church was not an evil church,” and, in fact, the adherence to order and ritual, “actually made possible the modern, Western civilization which we take for granted today.”

The newer edition overall relies more on the persuasiveness of a logically built argument than on strong “leading” words and phrases. Where the first edition discusses the invention of the printing press in terms of its facilitation of “propaganda,” the second edition puts mass printing in perspective by comparing it to our modern-day information age. Where the first edition mentions Richard Hooker’s defense of Anglicanism from the “threat” of “the excesses of Puritanism,” and calls those who would have done away with candles, vestments etc. “extremists,” the second edition says, “... Richard Hooker defended Anglicanism from a different challenge – the perceived excesses of Puritanism.” Further, “Some Puritan reformers would have done away with all music, candles, vestments...” (Emphasis added)

The authors then expand on the underpinnings of the Church's ecclesiological foundations, which are based on how and why Anglicans worship as they do, as well as the structure of the church’s clerical orders, rites and purposes.

More than in the first edition, the second edition relates those foundations to the individual’s experience as a believer, as well as the individual’s position in the corporate body of the Church. A section titled “Questions for Thought and Discussion” ends every chapter, with many questions along the lines of one after Chapter 2: “What are some of the ways you have found to facilitate daily Bible readings, both for yourself and others?” The first edition’s “Questions” sections hewed more closely to a review of the facts laid out in each chapter, with less prompting for individual reflection and interpretation.

The "Sacramental Church" is described in chapters on Baptism, Holy Communion and the Articles of Religion.

An outline of the Church’s spread in modern times, titled “The Great Missionary Expansion” successfully makes the case for the Biblical underpinnings of the geographical spread.

The second edition tackles the issue of the various breaks among parts of the Anglican Communion, from the American Revolution, John Wesley’s Methodism, the Civil War, the Oxford Movement and, more currently, women’s ordination and the blessing and ordination of people in same-sex relationships.

The newer edition notes that those breaks have resulted in entities that call themselves “Anglican,” but are not recognized as such by the See of Canterbury. Still, the book, notes, the Communion itself is changing, with the majority of the Anglican Communion questioning the innovations being made elsewhere in rules for ordination, traditional marriage and leadership.

The book hints that there may be room for three distinct, recognized Anglican provinces in North America: The Episcopal Church in the United States, the Anglican Church of Canada and the breakaway entity formed in 2009 calling itself the Anglican Church in North America.

The second edition concludes with appendices that would be extremely helpful to someone new to the Episcopal Church as well as the average “cradle Episcopalian,” who probably has an incomplete grasp of the significance of such things as clergy vestments, the historical, ecumenical councils of the Church, key people in the formation of Anglicanism, the Church’s timeline and terminology.

"Our Anglican Heritage, Second Edition," is an invaluable resource for readers who would deepen their walk within the Anglican Communion, as well as those who are puzzled by the turbulent times faced by the modern (and ancient) Church.

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