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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2015
The paper investigates the roots of a virtue-based ethics within Anglicanism starting with the Caroline tradition in the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century there was a rebirth of ‘Anglican Moral Theology’ with the work of Kenneth Kirk, Robert Mortimer and Lindsay Dewar. Issues of perfectibility are examined. The recovery of the Orthodox tradition of deification at the present time and the rebirth of virtue ethics through the work of Alasdair McIntyre are explored. Anglicanism is rooted in an approach where grace is already present in the natural order but which is enhanced by an integralist approach to theology bringing together doctrinal, ascetic and moral theology in one compass.
Delivered as part of the colloquium ‘Church, Communities and Society’ held to mark the tenth anniversary of the Lincoln Theological Institute, 25–26 October 2013, at the University of Manchester.
The Rt Revd Dr Stephen Platten is Assistant Bishop and Rector of St Michael Cornhill in the City of London and Chair of the Council of the Anglican Centre in Rome.
3. XXXV Sermons, III, quoted in Henry McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans Green, 1949), p. 10.
4. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, p. 16; cf. also A.J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially pp. 155–56.
5. As Kenneth Kirk, later on, would classically argue in the first part of the twentieth century, and as set out later in this paper); see Kirk, The Vision of God (abridged edn; The Bampton Lectures for 1928; London: Longmans Green, 1934).
6. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, p. 25.
7. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, p. 9.
8. For a clear exposition of this in the period immediately after that of the Caroline fathers, see W.M. Jacob, The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century: 1680–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), especially chs. 7 and 9 on leading worship and the clerical role within education of the young.
9. Joyce, Richard Hooker, especially p. 90 onwards.
10. Stephen Platten and Christopher Woods (eds.), Comfortable Words: Polity and Piety and the Book of Common Prayer (London: SCM Press, 2012) and especially Stephen Platten, ‘All Such Good Works: The Book of Common Prayer and the Fashioning of English Society’, pp. 1–19.
11. So καινή in Greek can mean new in the sense of contrast. Cf. here W.F. Arndt and F.W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (London: University of Chicago Press, 1957, 1973), p. 395, and also Tom Wright, Virtue Reborn (London: SPCK, 2010), especially p. 59 onwards.
12. See, for example, McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, p. 10, when he refers to the cleavage between moral and ascetic theology in Roman Catholic thought in the period before the Second Vatican Council.
13. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, p. 13.
14. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, p. 161.
15. Kirk, The Vision of God, p. 25 and Joyce, Richard Hooker, p. 238, indicate that Hooker too saw grace operating more widely, even in other religions: ‘certaine sparkes of the light of truth intermingled with the darkness of error’.
16. Kirk, The Vision of God, p. 46.
17. Cf. here Wright, Virtue Reborn, p. 90 onwards. Although it is quite possible that the Beatitudes originally stood alone, perhaps from a rather different part of the oral tradition collected before the four gospels reached their present written form, this point is not argued for by Wright. The assumption seems to be that this is part of one continuous piece of tradition. There are good reasons for this being otherwise.
18. For example, Wright, Virtue Reborn, p. 90.
19. Wright, Virtue Reborn, p. 87.
20. Kirk, The Vision of God, p. 46.
21. See here the introduction to A.M. Ramsey, Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), pp. 1–7.
22. Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (London: SCM Press, 2006), p. 60 and see also p. 61.
23. John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth, 1970), p. 326.
24. Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1960), p. 227.
25. John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, p. 119.
26. The Perfectibility of Man, p. 121.
27. Still in the covenant process between the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain, issues of perfectibility in the Methodist tradition have been discussed as the two churches have sought to arrive at unity in faith.
28. John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1765), section 27.
29. Cf. Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Khamlamov, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
30. Joyce, Richard Hooker, p. 174 quoting Hooker, Lawes, I.10.2; I.97.1-3 (all Hooker quotations from Folger Edition).
31. Joyce, Richard Hooker, p. 184, quoting Hooker, Lawes, I.11.4; I.115.2-16.
32. Joyce, Richard Hooker, p. 185.
33. Anthony D. Baker, Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (London: SCM Press, 2011), p. 300.
34. In his very good analysis of F.D. Maurice’s work, Jeremy Morris notes: ‘For Maurice, taking his cue from the universality of the reconciliation effected by the Incarnation, such a view [i.e. doctrine of salvation by baptism as in Pusey] was tantamount to a denial of the goodness of creation. Maurice’s alternative ecclesiology aimed to derive the Church’s instrumentality in mediating salvation to human beings in history from the kingdom already initiated in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It was a fundamental axiom of Maurice that God had created human beings for communion with each other and with himself’; see F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 63.
35. Cf. again F.D. Maurice and baptism.
36. Cf. Paul Avis (ed.), The Journey of Christian Initiation: Theological and Pastoral Perspective (London: Church House Publishing, 2011), and especially Stephen Platten, ‘The Rites of Christian Initiation – a Bishop’s Theological Reflection on Liturgical Practice’, pp. 106–25.
37. Within Catholic Anglicanism there has been a tradition of assuming that marriage is a primary sacrament of the Church, following the Roman Catholic understanding of a vinculum formed in heaven. Even so, legally all Anglican clergy are ‘registrars’ and must follow the natural sacramental response to marriage in church.
38. For a particular account of this argument see Wesley Carr, Brief Encounters (London: SPCK, 1985).
39. Cf. here W.H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977).
40. Platten and Woods, Comfortable Words.
41. J.K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), p. 137.
42. Cf. Richard Harries and Stephen Platten (eds.), Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics: God and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); see especially Platten, ‘Niebuhr, Liturgy and Public Theology’, pp. 102–15; and see also Edward Foley, ‘Engaging the Liturgy and the World: Worship and Public Theology’, Studia Liturgica, 38.1 (2008), p. 35.
43. Joyce, Richard Hooker, p. 91. Quoting Hooker, she notes his reflection on ‘laws politique’: ‘…that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted: unless they do this they are not perfect’; Lawes, I.10.1; I:96.24-32.
44. Cf. for example in Helen Oppenheimer, Making Good (London: SCM Press, 2001), p. 27.
45. Helen Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness (London: SCM Press, 1983), p. 92.
46. Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness, p. 93.
47. Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness, pp. 93–94.
48. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense.
49. This was the title of the Lincoln Institute Colloquium in Manchester.