39 Articles - Intro

Forty days of Lent (Sundays don't count) seems like a good opportunity to post daily on a theme. This year's theme is The Articles of Religion. During days of occasional requirement to be present at a Book of Common Prayer service, and being graced ever so occasionally with a less-than-imposing preacher, I found myself reading the Articles in the back of the Prayer Book. They are not for the faint-hearted. That said they are interesting, mainly because, for me, they are assented to each time I take up a new post.

A word, first of all, about that 'assented to'. It is less stringent than that. I declared, at my last licensing, my '...belief in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness...'. There is no sense in which I am tied to those 'historic formularies' which is what the Articles are. I am tied to the faith to which they bore witness. It is the Christian faith that is unchanging; witnesses, formularies, biblical and creedal interpretations and expressions of worship change a lot.

Yet the Articles seem obsolete in parts, often disregarded and tough to follow. They have a sixteenth century context when we had different issues and, as we will discover, different enemies. Simple evidence of this is provided to the reader who attempts to read the Articles in the English of their time, nearer to Chaucer than to today, and who encounters the 'Father, the Sonne and the holie Ghost'. Then it gets harder.

I shall be accompanied on my journey by two fine writers. Oliver O'Donovan and Martyn Percy. O'Donovan interviewed Tudor Christianity in an imaginative work. Percy, more recently, surveyed the landscape of Anglican faith and produced thirty nine new articles.

I am not an academic theologian but, if anything, a populist one. My attempt will be to unravel some of the mysteries of each Article for the ordinary reader and church-goer. I will link each post to Twitter and Facebook so any comments or questions are welcome here or in those two places.

The length of time over which I will post may not correspond precisely to Lent as I will start early (I have a week's holiday booked) but by Good Friday there will be 40 posts to read.