About a year ago, one of my fellow parishioners asked a question about the Nicene Creed that launched me on a course of reading that I'm still following. The question itself was minor and simple, but I realized that I could know more about the Creed, and set about doing something. I was also increasingly irritated by those Anglicans who seemed to put more value on being "evangelical" or "Anglo-Catholic" than in forging a Christian response to the crises of our time.
The disorganized reading put out extensions, and pretty soon I had a tidy library of works from 20th Century Anglican teachers - Michael Ramsey, Austin Farrer, Henry Chadwick, and John Burnaby chief among them. The more I read, the more I wondered, "What happened?"
Ramsey, of course, was the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, ex York, ex Durham. Farrer is probably best know to Americans as a friend of C.S. Lewis, but he was an active teacher of Christianity at the popular level as well. Burnaby, comparatively little known now, was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in the post World War II period. He wrote a couple of books that had some popularity in their time, including The Belief of Christendom, about the Creed, and Christian Words and Christian Meanings. Chadwick, the youngest of the crowd, was the fabulously learned historian of the early Church, biographer and translator of St. Augustine.
What I have found in all is immense learning which each could communicate without intimidating the reader. Chadwick had an especial facility to show how the debates and arguments of antiquity live on. In Ramsey and Farrer especially their learning was joined to a warm spirituality that reminds the reader of the purpose of learning. They all demonstrate an ability to engage new questions from the foundations of solid Christian learning and life. In Ramsey's work I found some themes that are later revived by Tom Wright.
So what happened? The 60s and 70s, I suppose, and, in America, Integrity's coup. The American Church certainly had its scholars and teachers, but the emphasis here was maybe too much on doing things and not quite enough on why do them. I dunno. There are times that I wonder if TEC has been in any practical way an Anglican church for quite some time, despite outward appearance. There's a certain lack of clarity about what Anglican might mean, and lack of clarity that the EpiscoLeft has used to make it seem that "Anglican" can mean anything. There will be a great deal of work to clear away the dust and debris.
Addendum. Left off the concluding paragraph. That'll happen in a small house with a new baby. When she gets up in the middle of the night, we all get up. And Grandpa's brain gets mushy. Anyway, all this study has shown that not all that long ago, the best Anglican thought and teaching was deeply rooted in the Bible, in the early Fathers, and informed by a lively and warm spirituality. It was a relational orthodoxy, if you will. These guys could go toe-to-toe with anyone, at any level, and do it without condescension.