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, Jesus is the sacrament of God.4 Jesus reveals the nature of God. Those who acknowledge Jesus are then brought into a new or deeper relationship with God. What Jesus reveals he effects. In following Jesus, Christians become the people of God. As such they form the church, which is the sacrament of Christ in the world.
Altogether, Christian faith is a practical piety that is corporate, incarnate, and sacramental. These three characteristics of practical piety are integrally related. Practical piety as a way of life is what is meant by discipleship. This way of life is never individual. To be formed in God is to love one another. Such a faith is never individualistic but always corporate. Corporate Christian faith is incarnate; God is in the very fabric of things. To relate to the pattern in this life there must be something to reveal the pattern. For Christians, Jesus is this revelation. As such he is the sacrament of God, drawing us into the practical piety of faith. As a way of life, Christians in turn become the sacrament of Christ to the world.
Faith as a Way of Life
In English Christianity, faith as a way of life always has an intimate quality to it. The church was experienced and understood as tied to the village or neighborhood. Religion was not an austere authority from afar, as Rome and the pope came to be for many Catholics as well as Protestants. Nor was the church viewed as realized more fully in the “religious,” in the male and female monastic communities set aside from the world for a life of prayer. Instead, Anglicanism came to see Christian faith from the perspective of fairly small communities whose life was gathered up, celebrated, and formed through common worship. The circumstances of England and of the English Reformation made this possible.
The break with Rome closed the monasteries in 1536, but a Benedictine spirituality remained integral to Anglicanism. Benedictine communities had been central to religion in England.5 There in these communities daily life had been formed around what were called the disciplines of prayer, study, and work. Each day was structured around a lectio divina, a set of offices of worship centered in the reading of scripture, saying the Psalms, and offering common prayer. Gathering together seven times a day, the monks would begin with matins or morning prayer before sunrise and end with compline at the end or completion of the day. Worship punctuated the day with a rhythm so that prayer, study, and work formed a harmonic chord.
Prayer was not separate from daily life but the celebration and offering of all of life in God. In turn, study was not academic but medita-tive. Specifically, the study of scripture was a matter of standing before scripture in order to listen and experience how God has been present in the changing times of life, in the whole cycle of events from birth to death, in joy and in sorrow. Work as well was a form of prayer and study. Whether in the work of the garden or in managing community matters, work was life in God, without which prayer and study were together like a soul without a body, form without content.
Much of Benedictine spirituality was itself claimed in the Protestant vision of Christian faith as given in the daily life of a people shaped in the worship of God. The central hallmark of Protestantism was an open Bible. Scripture is the Word of God where the revelation and power effecting grace in our lives is given. This experience of God’s presence given through scripture was focused in the understanding of “justification by grace through faith.” These words may be most simply defined as being made just or right in relationship to God, not by our works but as simply given, as grace. This we know by faith, that is to say, in a trust in such grace that comes in hearing the Christian story. Given this fundamental conviction, the Bible was to be read in the language of the people and made available to all for study and worship. In turn, worship was common worship, a regular gathering of the people of God to hear God’s Word, to acknowledge God’s grace, and to offer their daily lives in God. In this larger context the Protestant protest against clericalism and emphasis on the laity and lay vocation makes sense. The presence of God’s redeeming life is not in religious life separate from daily life but in our common life.
These Protestant convictions shared the deepest understanding of the forms of worship that had shaped Benedictine monastic communities. Instead of rejecting wholesale the Roman Catholic forms of worship, Thomas Cranmer created a Book of Common Prayer that appropriated Roman Catholic forms of worship reformed by sources from the early church and from the Protestant Reformation.6 Like the monastic communities, the English Book of Common Prayer structured worship in terms of a daily office of worship. Instead of seven offices there were two, Morning and Evening Prayer. In turn, the reading of scripture was organized around a lectionary, so that with daily reading the Old Testament would be basically read once a year while the New Testament would be read every four months, the Psalms every month.7 Here, as with the Benedictine communities, worship was a daily affair of listening to scripture and the
