“Respect” for tradition is not enough when cultural hurricanes threaten to blow Anglicans off the narrow pilgrim way. Just as “respect” for God is a far cry from the “trembling at My word” that God seeks (Isa. 66:2), and just as the Ethiopian eunuch asked how he could understand Isaiah without someone guiding his interpretation (Acts 8:31), so too global Anglicans must take the wisdom of tradition more seriously if they are to avoid becoming another progressive Protestant denomination.

For the last fifty years the Anglican Communion has been divided over the doctrine of marriage. That came to an end in April 2023 when Global South Anglicans declared they’d had enough. Anglican bishops representing 85 percent of the Anglican Communion decided that Canterbury’s same-sex blessings were attempts to sanctify “sin” and determined to “reset the Communion on its biblical foundations.”

Protestants have always declared the Bible to be their final authority, but they have divided into thirty thousand denominations that differ on how to interpret it. The same problem of interpretation is now dividing global Anglicanism.

Unlike many evangelicals, Anglicans have always said that tradition should play a role in their interpretation of the Bible. But the nature of that role is now dividing global Anglicans in ways that, ironically, threaten to return otherwise orthodox Anglicans to the liberal Protestant camp they have sought to escape.

In their battles with liberal Anglicans over the last half-century, orthodox Anglicans have continually decried liberal departures from biblical teaching about marriage and sexuality. These efforts culminated in the passage of Resolution 1.10 at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which rejected “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture” and proclaimed “marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union” to be “the teaching of Scripture.”

When the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) was created in 2008, its Jerusalem Statement reaffirmed the doctrine of Resolution 1.10. It also articulated its understanding of how to relate tradition to Scripture: The Bible is to be “taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” (emphasis added).

While Global South Anglicans said they should respect tradition, there was none of that language in their April 2023 declaration of independence from Canterbury. Instead, the Bible alone was declared “the rule of our lives” and the “final authority in the church.” What happened to the Church’s “historic and consensual reading”?

Several clues came later that year when Rev. Dr. Ashley Null gave a public lecture on the relation between tradition and Scripture at the leading seminary of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), which is formally allied with GAFCON. Null’s lecture was significant because he helped write the Jerusalem Statement and is a principal theological advisor to GAFCON. Oddly, he is also a priest and canon theologian in The Episcopal Church (TEC).

Null hinted at the “respect” accorded tradition in Lambeth 1.10 when he declared that Scripture “is to be read in community and continuity with the writings of Christians who have gone before, in particular, the Creeds, the first four general councils, and the Thirty-Nine Articles [of the Church of England in 1571].” He went on to say that English Reformers William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley “indisputably held that no matter how much Tradition could help illuminate the Bible’s meaning, ultimately it was its own final interpreter.”

Like the magisterial Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, these English Reformers often used the term “sola scriptura” (the Bible alone) for the authority of the Bible over against late medieval teachings that seemed to violate the historic Church’s biblical teaching found in the councils and creeds and Church Fathers such as Augustine and Chrysostom. In practice, then, for the English Reformers sola scriptura meant the primacy of Scripture when read within the Church’s great traditions, which has been aptly called prima scriptura.

They recognized that the real battle was not over the authority of Scripture but how to interpret it. This struggle over the Bible’s interpretation started early in the history of Christianity. One of the first great heresies afflicting the Church came from the teachings of Arius, a learned presbyter in ancient Alexandria who taught the final authority of the Bible without the help of tradition—nuda scriptura, if you will. Arius used Scripture verses (such as Jesus’s statement, “The Father is greater than I”) to support his contention that Jesus was more than an ordinary man but less than fully God.

Athanasius responded in an epistle to the African bishops that we need Church tradition to interpret the Bible properly. Only “the sound Faith which Christ gave us, the Apostles preached, and the Fathers, who met at Nicaea from all this world of ours, have handed down,” can enable us to interpret Scripture properly (emphasis added). The Fathers at Nicaea taught that Christ is homoousios—of the same nature as the Father. Athanasius pointed out that while this Greek word is not in the Bible, its concept is, and we need the Church’s tradition to know this.

Hilary of Poitiers, who has been called the Athanasius of the West, fought similar theological battles in the same era over the nature of Christ and used the same method in his treatise On the Trinity, appealing to “the faith of the Church, inspired by the teaching of the Apostles.”

The Anglican Reformers of the sixteenth century taught a similar theological method. In the same year that Anglican bishops produced the Thirty-Nine Articles, they imposed a rule (Canon 6) on Anglican priests that they were to “teach nothing in the way of a sermon . . . save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old or New Testament; and what the catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from” the Scriptures.

Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Bancroft, commending the works of Bishop John Jewel, another Anglican Reformer, wrote in 1609: “This is and hath been the open profession of the Church of England, to defend and mainteine no other Church, Faith, and Religion, than that which is truly Catholike and Apostolike, and for such warranted, not only by the written word of God, but also by the testimonie and consent of the ancient and godly Fathers.”

The Anglican pattern of the sixteenth century, then, was not to think that the Bible can interpret itself without guidance from the ancient Fathers of the Church. In fact, they wrote, it is to the undivided Church of the first millennium and its Fathers that we must turn for proper understanding of the Bible. They eschewed the notion of a Bible whose interpretation could be disconnected from the Church that produced it. They recognized that the human interpreter of the Bible must think within the Church’s historic consensus if he is to interpret the Bible properly.

Null cites the late American Bishop John Rodgers for support. Rodgers, who proposed a new Anglican Communion in 2008 because of Canterbury’s looming heresies, agreed that the Reformation’s sola scriptura slogan never meant a Bible isolated from tradition, but that “all aspects of tradition are to be tested by what is taught in Scripture.” This means, in Null’s words, “letting the Bible interpret itself.”

These Anglicans remind their liberal comrades that the Bible is not a human response to religious experience, as liberal theology has taught since the Enlightenment, but is the written Word of God to which we must submit.

Read More