LITMIR.BIZ

      I was born into the Episcopal Church. My earliest memories were at ages four and five. My parents lived in a one-bedroom apartment, a fortunate find at the end of World War II when housing was limited. Two small boys meant no automobile. We walked the mile plus to the English Victorian-style church with dark wood pews and beams. The stained glass diffused what light there was. But from the light outside and the candles inside, the vaulted space was ethereal. We kneeled, sat, and stood in line — parents, sons, and my very English paternal grandmother. The world was filled with the spirit or spirits of God. God simply was in the fabric of things — just there, like my grandmother in her silent prayers.

      We moved, my grandmother died, and there were different churches, some with, some without the colored glass and the vaulted space. But week-in and week-out, with some periods of exception, we went to church and listened to the stories of the Bible (however disconnected they were from week to week), sometimes retold in the sermon. And we regularly celebrated the Lord’s Supper, receiving bread and wine as the apostles did in remembrance of Jesus’ last supper, death, and resurrection. I became Christian as I grew up in the church, though this was no more a natural process then is the learning of a language. I actually became Christian as the stories I heard became my story, as they made sense of life as I knew it and as I lived it — the command of the prophets to do justice, the lament of the psalms, the call to forgive, the promise of forgiveness and new life. The themes that construed my life were themselves always framed more broadly by the story of Jesus — his life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

      My Christian faith was quite simply a way of life formed in a community of faith. This faith born from the church has matured in the church as well, for 20 years now in the daily worship and life of a seminary community. This has meant quiet meditation, listening to scripture, common prayer, and often Eucharist together. My family joined me regularly, often followed by a community meal. Worship thus framed our life together. To the outside observer, this may have seemed self-contained. This life, however, always reached out beyond ourselves. We were members of communities: schools, work, towns and cities, professional associations, civic organizations, recreation groups. Visitors were welcomed. And always people were going out to live and serve in the world beyond the seminary.

      I share these autobiographical reflections because they indicate something of my own situation, of how I am situated in particular communities within the Episcopal Church as part of the larger Anglican Communion. My experience has been shaped by this history so that I experience and understand Christian faith indelibly as an Anglican Christian. This means that I wear bifocal glasses as I come to write this account of the Christian moral life. As with all Christian ethics, this ethic is informed by a larger look at the Christian tradition that has formed me. This longer look begins with scripture and continues with the witness of Christians, from the witness of early Christian communities to that of specific thinkers, especially those who have formed the Catholic and Protestant traditions in the West. The shorter look is Anglican, moving in the other direction from my own experience in the Episcopal Church outward to Anglican thinkers who have developed their own accounts of Christian faith and life.

      These two focal points, the one near and the other farther from my experience, provide contrast in my vision. My Anglican perspective informs my seeing what is true in Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. In turn, the central claims of these two major traditions of Western Christianity inform my understanding of what is the faith I have received from within the Anglican tradition. The hope is that the more particular experiences and understandings of faith and the more universal claims about the nature of faith will be brought together so that they illumine one another.

      The conclusions of the last chapter were fivefold. Christian faith is monotheistic and covenantal. Sin is idolatry. The covenant with God is revealed and effected in Jesus Christ. This relationship is begun and deepened in scripture and worship. Anglicans share these convictions. However, in contrast to Roman Catholic and Protestant thought, what is most distinctive about Anglicanism is that the English Church sought to allow for greater differences in understanding of these convictions than either Protestant churches or the Roman Catholic Church.

      Given the adversarial relationship with Roman Catholicism, Protestant traditions were initially confessional. For example, Lutherans defined their faith in the Augsburg Confession; the Calvinists defined theirs in the Westminster Confession. These confessions offered definitions of faith in opposition to the particular beliefs or dogma required by the Roman Catholic Church. As a nation of Catholics and Protestants, England instead developed a distinctive tradition in which faith was identified more with faithful worship that bound a people together in a holy life than with the confession of beliefs.¹ In this sense, Anglicanism has more clearly identified Christian faith as a matter of practical piety.

      As a matter of practical piety, Christian convictions are expressed in Anglicanism more in terms of relationships than as matters of belief about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit — especially the authority of scripture and of the church in matters of right belief. First, Anglicans understand Christian faith as incarnational. Grounded in convictions of monotheism, faith is experienced in all the relations of our lives and not apart from them. In this sense, God is incarnational, literally enfleshed in the world in which we live. God is not “spirit” apart from the world. Instead, God is the meaning and power that creates and redeems life itself. Anglican theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple expressed this incarnational understanding by saying that Christianity is the most materialist of the world religions and, at the same time, that the incarnation is not some form of crude materialism.² To say that God is incarnate is to say that the meaning and power that is the source of life is given in this world but is not reducible to the material world or to the human body with its passions and pleasures.

      Second, the covenantal character of Christian faith is reflected in an Anglican understanding of piety as corporate. The relationship or bond that gives wholeness to life brings the individual into relationship with all of life. The life formed in faith is never individual. It is always a life formed in community in order to become a holy people. This second conviction may be called the corporateness of faith. Faith as piety is corporate, to be a people — what Christians call the people of God.

      Third, an Anglican understanding of Christian piety is sacramental. Incarnate, the covenant with God is revealed and deepened through what are variously called signs, symbols, and sacraments. Thirteenth-century Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas defined sacrament as that which effects what it signifies.³ For example, a kiss or an embrace points to love and shares in the deepening creation of that love. A kiss signifies love and, in turn, creates as it deepens that love. For Christians, knowledge and relationship with God are given fully and sufficiently in scripture and worship. As sacrament, the authority of Word and sacrament is not in revealing or stating right belief but in drawing the Christian more deeply into relationship with God. More specifically,

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