A response to J. Robert Wright's "Is Tradition the Enemy of Innovation?"

I want to say at the outset that it is a particular honor for me to have the opportunity to comment upon the presentation of Professor J. Robert Wright of The General Theological Seminary. I greatly admire his work and his amazing productivity both in the fields of history and ecumenism. I always learn something when I hear him speak. I will go away from this gathering, for example, knowing the name of Trilleck of Hereford, a fourteenth-century English bishop with whose name I was previously unacquainted.

The Primitive Church as a Guide

I will begin my comments with the Reformation, perhaps not a surprising choice for a historian from the Virginia Theological Seminary. Professor Wright has rightly noted the absence in the Book of Common Prayer of any defense by Thomas Cranmer of his work as a reversion to an earlier, biblical tradition. Others, of whom Professor Wright is well aware, did make such an appeal, however.

Bishop John Jewel made perhaps the clearest statement of this appeal in his An Apology of the Church of England (1562). He suggested that the key to the English Reformation was a return to the forms of the early Church.

We are come, as near as we possibly could, to the church of the apostles and the old catholic bishops and fathers, which church we know hath hitherunto been sound and perfect and, as Tertullian termeth it, a pure virgin, spotted as yet with no idolatry nor with any foul or shameful fault; and have directed according to their customs and ordinances not only our doctrine but also the sacraments and the forms of common prayer.

And, as we know both Christ himself and all good men heretofore have done, we have called home again to the original and first foundation that religion which hath been foully neglected and utterly corrupted .... For we thought it meet thence to take the pattern of reforming religion from whence the ground of religion was first taken, because this one reason, as saith the most ancient father Tertullian, hath great force against all heresies: "Look whatsoever was first, that is true; and whatsoever is latter, that is corrupt."1

It was a bold claim based on the humanistic vision of reform by returning ad fontes, back to the pristine sources of the Church, which had been obscured by later corruption.

Jewel was not specific about the precise bounds of this pristine early Church, though one could infer from the examples that he used in his Apology that it ended about the time of Augustine of Hippo. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes made this understanding explicit early in the following century, when he provided a numerical rule of thumb for identifying tradition:

One canon in Scripture revealed to us by God, two testaments, three creeds, the four first councils, and five centuries with the fathers through them (three hundred years before Constantine and two hundred years after), fix the rule of religion for us.2

Andrewes claimed that one canon, two testaments, three creeds, four councils, and five centuries provide the rule for the Church of England.

The vision of Jewel and Andrewes has been a pervasive and persistent one in Anglicanism in subsequent centuries. It was reiterated in some form or other by such authors as John Pearson (1613-1686), George Bull (1634-1710), William Beveridge (1637-1708), William Cave (1637-1713), John Henry Hopkins (1792-1868), and practically any Anglican who has written a book with the title The Primitive Church. More recently the argument was revived by Standing Liturgical Commission of the 1960s and 1970s. Reform, according to this view, comes through a faithful reclaiming of a pattern used in the golden age of the Church.

Professor Wright's Critique

Professor Wright has done something in his lecture parallel to what Professors Ellen Davis and Cynthia Kittredge did in their earlier presentation this afternoon. They suggested that there is more to reading tradition in the Bible than might be evident at first glance. Professor Wright has argued this afternoon that matters may be far more complicated than the writing of Jewel and Andrewes suggest. In particular he has noted that:

* There are often competing precedents, multiple examples from the early Church from which to choose as a guide to current action.

* The precedents upon which Anglicans base their actions spread beyond the fifth century to the sixth (the use of the Nicene Creed in public worship), tenth (Church-wide designation of saints), or even the nineteenth century (the use of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral as a summary of tradition). One is reminded of the statement credited by Charles P. Price to the aged Bishop William Lawrence (1850-1941) of Massachusetts: "There are practices in the Episcopal Church today whose introduction I remember that are now generally attributed to the twelve apostles."

* More important, perhaps, is Professor Wright's careful warning that the match between past example and present innovation is always inexact. There are always some points of friction, elements of the past models that we are simply unwilling to accept or elements of innovation for which we can find no meaningful parallel. To draw on language that Professor Kittredge used in her presentation, there are elements of tradition that we resist and other elements that resist us.