A Brief Introduction to Anglican Interpretation of the Bible

Abstract

From one perspective, there is nothing distinctive about Anglican biblical hermeneutics; Anglicans parse verbs and compare language usage, ascertain context, and discern intention in the same ways as do other readers of the Bible. Another perspective, though, looks for lines of continuity and regulative practices that would insure congruity between the interpreters from the early years of the Church of England to the interpreters in the Anglican Communion today. Of course, the early Anglicans disagreed, but in retrospect coloured by today’s bitter controversies, it can seem as though they disagreed agreeably. This introduction argues contrariwise, that the early years of the Church of England experienced divisions and hostilities over biblical interpretation just as fierce as today’s. The appearance of harmonious dissent arises more from shared points of reference now lost as the Communion has expanded and granted autonomy to its members.

Introduction

From several perspectives, there should be no need for a brief introduction to Anglican biblical hermeneutics. The academic literature is sufficiently supplied with Rowan Greer’s Anglican Approaches to Scripture ¹ and Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986; ² one might wish for updates and refinements, but these provide a reputable starting point. Furthermore, Anglicans perform the technical tasks of exegesis in essentially the same way that all other readers do. That is the strength of exegesis: although scholars differ concerning how they weight various bits of evidence and axioms for reasoning, Anglicans and Baptists and Orthodox and Lutherans and diffident unbelievers all parse verbs, analyse sentence structure, and read contemporary Judaic and Hellenistic and Ancient Near Eastern literature in roughly the same ways. Even Anglicans’ self-definition (to the extent that there be anything like a shared sense of identity) militates against the notion that there would be something especially Anglican about our reading of the Bible, in keeping with Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher’s assertion that “We have no doctrine of our own – we only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church, enshrined in the Catholic Creeds; and those creeds we hold without addition or diminution. We stand firm on that rock.” ³

On the other hand, there are definitely characteristics of Anglican biblical interpretation which one can recognise as particularly apt or typical expressions of the historic spirit of Anglicanism. These arise, however, not from interpretive method, but from the patterns of evaluating and weighting the sorts of evidence that exegesis turns up. To the extent that this is true, then, we will acquaint ourselves with Anglican biblical hermeneutics most aptly by examining the forces that impinge on Anglican interpreters such that they expound the Bible in recognisably Anglican ways.

In order to gain purchase on a truthful account of Anglican biblical interpretation, though, one will first have to relinquish partisan pleading and bring to the fore characteristics that Anglicans tend to share across the boundaries that disagreements articulate. It would not be true, for instance, to submit that the Reformation Church of England maintained unbroken continuity with the interpretive practices cultivated in monastic schools, nor that the new-born Church of England adopted (as a whole) rigorously Reformed principles on the inerrant sole authority of Scripture; one should look for assumptions, practices, and disapprobations shared across Reformed/Catholic, Low/High Church, conforming/Puritan, and of course the ponderous (shifting) weight of the Broad centre. At the same time, one will have to repudiate the nostalgic haze that envelopes early Anglicanism with a diffuse glow of common sense, prescient wisdom, and congenial authority. ⁴

Turning our attention away from particular mandates that justify our favoured correct doctrines and disciplines, then, I will propose several characteristics that fund critical readers from across historic ecclesiastical movements. Biblical interpretation in the Church of England in the period between the Reformation and the onset of an accelerating erosion of the sense of unicity in the early nineteenth century should principally be characterised as political, exoteric, and rhetorical; and in consequence of these, Anglican biblical interpretation is typically culturally specific, liturgical, and vernacular. These claims may initially please readers who support the premise of Anglican unity founded on Tudor and Stuart theology, but it will displease them to the extent that the Anglican Communion in the twenty-first century refracts these characteristics very differently from the Church of England in the seventeenth century. By the same token, an argument here that identifiably Anglican biblical interpretation bears the impress of English political and cultural institutions may vex modern readers who embrace happily the adaptation of ‘Anglican’ interpretation to their own local, contemporary, cultural particulars.

Anglican Biblical Interpretation as Political

One might assume there to be a very obvious, specifically political, characteristic of biblical interpretation in the setting of an established church, in which the monarch bore and exercised the authority of “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church.” ⁵ Nonetheless, the spread of Anglican congregations across nations and continents that hold no vivid engagement with the English (or, subsequently, ‘British’) monarchy, together with the relative lack of civic influence of many local expressions of Anglican identity (and the cultural quiescence of the Church of England even in within its own borders), all combine to occlude to our retrospective gaze the extent to which everything about the Church of England has – for better or worse – been inescapably political from its inception.

Contemporary distance in time and geography from the classical period of the Church of England tends further to minimise the scale of the civic and religious conflicts that characterised these years. Under Henry VIII, the Church of England was born from the abrupt separation of England from the western Catholic Church. It turned towards Genevan Protestantism under Edward IV, and was then wrenched back to Roman observance under Queen Mary, and wrenched back again to autonomy under Queen Elizabeth. The Elizabethan Settlement provides classical Anglicanism with the veneer of harmonious colouration, though we should note that even under Elizabeth’s guidance, conflicts over liturgy, doctrine, and (as we shall see) biblical interpretation persisted. The Church then drifted in a high-church direction under the first Stuarts, against strong resistance from more Reformed churchmen. Then followed the Puritan years of rebellion, regicide, and revolution, culminating in the Commonwealth and – after eleven years – ultimately the Restoration of the monarchy. The Catholic Stuarts, in turn, gave way to securely Protestant monarchs by way of the Glorious Revolution. Over these two hundred-fifty years of golden-age Anglicanism, the throne and cathedral were violently reoriented seven or more times (depending on how one counts), including a cataclysmic civil war. These were not idyllic years of consensual civil or ecclesial governance; roughly 190,000 casualties as a result of the war, ⁶ and hundreds of martyrdoms for deviation from the ruling ecclesiastical authorities’ definition of truth, testify to a blood-drenched interval of hostility and fatality, in which conflicts over biblical interpretation could make the difference between life and death. ⁷

The force of this point lies not in some effort to indict ‘religion’ (or ‘the Bible’) of the crime of engendering violence, nor to exculpate it. ⁸ Rather, I simply point out that the interpretation of the Bible during what I treat as the classical period of Anglican hermeneutics constitutes an integral element of public discourse, and thus inescapably bears political significance, whether obvious or implicit, at every point. Less vitally, but more vividly (and to this day, visibly), the public communication manifest in ecclesiastical art (stained glass, sculpture, wood carving, painting, mosaic) displays the destruction, and the threat of physical violence, attendant on opposition to the government’s approved theology. During the formative years of a distinctively Anglican practice of biblical interpretation, any such interpretive expression – be it a treatise, a passing quotation, a sermon, a poem, or an address to Parliament – always involved political considerations; indeed, even an emphasis on the importance of the study of Scripture could trigger suspicion. ⁹

If it thus be granted that Anglican biblical interpretation was begotten, birthed, and nurtured in an environment saturated with partisan social determinants, we may also allow that the political unit within which these controversies grew to adolescence and adulthood was disproportionately small relative to the influence it exerted. England is one smallish geographical entity, and for much of its history even its nearest neighbours – Wales, Ireland, and Scotland – have consistently been snubbed and disparaged by the thought leaders of English culture. Even the north of England itself figures much less vividly in the history of Anglican biblical interpretation than does London with its attendant Home Counties. The effective history of England in biblical interpretation thus focuses primarily on only a portion of the nation itself. As England extended the range of its political authority beyond the North Atlantic to the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia, it did so in the firm confidence in its righteous imperial and missionary dominance. Again, these moments of Anglican biblical interpretation project the power of Westminster, the Crown, and Lambeth Palace, into a vast world filled with people who understood no obvious non-military reason they should bend the knee to their remote occupiers. ¹⁰

Anglican Biblical Interpretation as Exoteric and Rhetorical

Recent years have seen an upwelling of interest in bringing to bear an Anglican allegiance to the ‘plain sense’ of Scripture. ¹¹ Renewed attention to the historic role of ‘the plain sense’ arose in some part due to heightened dissatisfaction with the cultural and ecclesiastical dominance of academic historical-critical study of the Bible, to the perceived exclusion of theological interpretations of Scripture. Another consideration involved the usefulness of plain-sense readings in controversies that roiled, and roil, the Anglican Communion from the late twentieth century to this day. Today’s plain-sense advocates did not invent this approach ex nihilo to salve contemporary interpretive headaches; the affliction of unwelcome interpretive conclusions has bedevilled the Church of England from early days. While this draws us away from the text of the Bible for a moment, one can usefully illustrate the conundrum with a brief reference to the controversies between the Reformed party (sailing under the colours of the Synod of Dort) and the “Arminians, Laudians, ‘avant-garde conformists,’ call them what you will” ¹² interpretation of the Articles of Religion in the early seventeenth century.

As the heirs of the Tudor Reformation pushed from a pre-Calvinist Reformed identity ¹³ grounded in the careful work of Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Jan Łaski (in Cambridge, Oxford, and London, respectively) towards the more rigorous Calvinism of Dort, they met resistance not only from ‘avant-garde conformists’ ¹⁴ such as Andrewes, Laud, and Hooker, ¹⁵ but also from a broader range of moderate Reformed churchmen for whom the trajectory towards Puritanism seemed to be going too far, too fast. ¹⁶ England’s ecclesiastical atmosphere displayed a polarisation that would rival any contemporary parallel, with anti-Catholicism rife in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, drawing crossfire from Roman Catholics in Douai (The Gag for the New Gospel ¹⁷ ), moderate Reformed conformity (A New Gagg for an Old Goose ¹⁸ ), and Dort-compliant Reformed theology (The perpetuity of a regenerate man’s estate ¹⁹ ). Under the circumstances, Archbishop Laud ²⁰ persuaded Charles I to append a declaration to the Thirty-Nine Articles, reading,

[T]herefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, we will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense. ²¹

A moment’s consideration will reveal the futility of such an admonition, but the specifics point towards the Anglican aspiration to a thoroughly exoteric interpretation of authoritative texts: here focusing on the Articles of Religion, but certainly implying above all the Holy Scriptures, not drawing the text aside, but submitting to its plain and full meaning, taking it in the literal and grammatical sense.

The weakness of the Declaration, and of the contemporary argument for plain-sense interpretation, lies in two distinct insurmountable difficulties. In the first, the plain, literal, grammatical, non-drawn-aside sense of an expression never escapes the reader’s own perspective. If the reader thought that another reading were plainer, they would presumably adopt it; hardly anyone enters an interpretive argument claiming that theirs is a twisted, fantastical, ungrammatical reading. Thus, the advocate of a plain interpretation argues (though usually not in so many words), “This interpretation best reflects my own perspective, starting-point, ideology” – fair enough if acknowledged – but posits this as though the plainness were, or should be, visible to others who do not share the perspective. In the second, the rhetoric of plainness locates the source of meaning inside (as it were) the expression as a property of the expression itself. ²² Since we can never crack open the expression to examine its contents in the way we can split atoms or excavate archaeological sites, our ascriptions of plain, literal grammatical meaning are condemned always to remain exterior to the alleged interiority of the expression. The problems of the reader’s interested perspective and that of textual impenetrability both militate against ever achieving the plainness to which the discourse of literal, grammatical meaning aspires.

If, on the other hand, we take the aspiration itself as the sign of typical Anglican biblical interpretation, we can advance our cause by proposing the axiom that, of two or more proposed interpretations, the Anglican audience will reflect a strong proclivity to adopt the one that seems most concordant with the readers’ assessment of the plain, literal, grammatical sense. The fewer convolutions an interpretation involves and the least arcane evidence beyond everyday grammar and semantics that one applies in a reading, the greater that reading’s appeal to Anglican readers. This holds even as Anglicans are not immune to the temptations of itchy ears and novelty-seeking against which II Timothy warns us; a more novel interpretive fad may attract readers for a while, but over time and across borders, Anglican institutions and readers will tend to favour the humbler, plainer interpretation. ²³ By characterising this tendency as exoteric rather than plain, I emphasise the interpreter’s role in proposing and justifying an interpretation, as opposed to identifying putative aspects of plain textual meaning intrinsic to a particular expression.

The exoteric aspect in Anglican interpretation fails to tell the complete story if not complemented by thoughtful appreciation of the efflorescence of the humanistic study of rhetoric in England’s schools and universities. Although it may seem contrary to the preceding point, the Anglican interpretive tradition also favours rhetorical interpretation, a point that becomes particularly clear in this context when one remembers that ‘the plain style’ has been adopted as a mode of rhetorical expression since the days of Cicero. Thus, ‘rhetorical’ here has not the modern sense of an ostentatiously florid but otherwise vacuous style; rather, it refers to the sense that the emergence of specifically Anglican interpretation coincides with the nascent prominence in English schools and universities of ‘rhetoric’ as the medium of thought and expression. ²⁴ Over the long run, the English pedagogical investment in rhetoric would generate the extraordinary literary heritage for which English culture is justly proud and would also buffer the effects of philosophical and historiographic criticism.

The understanding of rhetoric as a mode of thinking and knowing with a view to communication constituted a hallmark of the early modern reinvigoration of rhetoric. Brian Vickers identifies practicality as the distinctive characteristic of rhetoric’s resurgence, ²⁵ and one need look no further than the Book of Homilies, for example, to see gifted rhetoricians applying their grasp of how language can be used with an exoteric sensibility to exploit resonances in Scriptural texts, the theological treasury of the patristic tradition, and the resources of everyday language to appeal to the congregations’ affect.

This academic study of rhetoric didn’t simply appear in England by magic; its resurgence resulted from careful work in grammar schools across the country, from a foundation laid beginning in the fifteenth century by John Anwykyll of Oxford’s Magdalen School ²⁶ to eventually supplying grammatical and rhetorical teaching through much of the land (and providing intellectual formation to many of the most recognisable names in English literature, along with ecclesiastical writers). ²⁷ By the second half of the sixteenth century, the study of rhetoric had become common among the grammar schools and had become amply established in Oxford and Cambridge.

The mention of Oxford and Cambridge in this context highlights another basis for the appearance of unity in early Anglican biblical interpretation. At a time when universities were proliferating on continental Europe, England distinctively permitted only these, its two first universities: ²⁸

Edward III made a declaration of intent that there should be no other universities in the kingdom but Oxford and Cambridge. To make doubly sure, until 1827 Oxford persisted in exacting an oath from all its Masters of Arts that they would neither study nor lecture at Stamford. (The “Stamford Oath,” of which Cambridge had its own, abbreviated form). ²⁹

In the years after 1334 (when the abortive founding of the University of Stamford was suppressed and the oath imposed), universities were mooted for Salisbury, Northampton, Carlisle, London, Ripon, Shrewsbury, and Durham; none were successfully founded. ³⁰ The intelligentsia of England were educated primarily at Oxford or Cambridge and were at least notionally prevented from giving university lectures anywhere else in England.

The study of rhetoric required of its acolytes enhanced skill in reading (or listening), imagining a network of connections and disconnections which the text afforded, and then composing a response that fit into that network, perhaps enhancing it or circumventing it, amplifying or curtailing its scope. The effects of the humanists’ revival of rhetoric in the English schools and universities are revealed in the recent introductory compendium All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition; ³¹ the evidence of rhetorical, figurative appreciation and interpretation of Scripture – particularly in the subtle interaction of exoteric, plain reading with rhetorical animation and intensification of Scripture – displays just the sort of Anglican interpretive sensibility that belongs not to one party or another, but to a shared sense of how one goes about reasoning from the Bible. Hans Frei aptly captures the convergence of exoteric interpretive conventions with the vivid literary imagination in an emphatic passage from The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative:

England and Germany were the two countries in which discussion of the biblical narratives was most intense in the eighteenth century. In England, where a serious body of realistic narrative literature and a certain amount of criticism of that literature was building up, there arose no corresponding cumulative tradition of criticism of the biblical writings, and that included no narrative interpretation of them. In Germany, on the other hand, where a body of critical analysis as well as general hermeneutics of the biblical writings built up rapidly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was no simultaneous development of realistic prose narrative and its critical appraisal. ³²

Of these two intensely generative intellectual cultures, England developed the realistic novel and exoteric interpretation, whereas Germany developed historical criticism and wissenschaftlich interpretation.

Anglican Biblical Interpretation as Liturgically and Politically Constrained

The appearance of unity in Scriptural interpretation derives from one other aspect of the Church of England’s early years. England’s political and ecclesial institutions practised a vigorous two-front policy of implementing boundaries of legitimate interpretation, one very direct and the other indirect but possibly more forceful. The explicit programme aimed to establish a single, authoritative translation of the Bible. The implicit programme rested on uniform use of the Book of Common Prayer, which provided a theological framework, exemplary paradigms, and a spiritual vademecum for the prayers of a nation. ³³ As Alan Jacobs puts it, “The Book of Common Prayer came into being as an instrument of social and political control,” ³⁴ controverted and resisted alike by traditionalist Catholic-leaning clergy and worshippers as also by supporters of the ideal of a purified Reformed English church. But in less than a hundred years, affection for the Prayerbook had established such deep roots that the prospect of abolishing the BCP evoked effusive ardour from at least one county:

Our pious, laudable, and ancient forme of Divine Service, composed by the holy Martyrs, and worthy instruments of Reformation established by the prudent Sages of State (your religious Predecessors) honored by the approbation of many learned forraigne Divines, subscribed by the Ministery of the whole Kingdome, and with such generall content received by all the Laity, that scarce any family or person that can read, but are furnished with the Bookes of Common Prayer: In the conscionable use whereof many Christian hearts have found unspeakeable joy and comfort, wherein the famous Church of England our deare Mother hath just cause to glory . . . ³⁵

The pivotal aspect of both the promulgation and the suppression of the Prayerbook (first by Mary, then by the Commonwealth) was the successive Acts of Uniformity issued in tandem with each edition of the BCP: 1548, for Edward’s first Prayerbook; 1552, for the second; 1558, for Elizabeth’s Prayerbook of 1559; and 1662, for the restoration of Charles II and his Prayerbook. These acts mandated the exclusive use of the Book of Common Prayer and required attendance at services of the Church of England (with various concessions and exclusions in different circumstances). While not everyone will have complied with these Acts, and not every congregation will have observed them, and while the scope of toleration of Catholics and Dissenters would gradually grow, the dominant (one might say ‘hegemonic’) weight of English culture rested squarely and exclusively on the Book of Common Prayer.

One often sees references to the Book of Common Prayer as if it were a single liturgical resource, but (to state the well-known) it passed through three versions between 1549 and 1557: the first Prayerbook, with conciliatory traditional aspects; the second Prayerbook, revised to reflect the consistent Reformed theology of the Edwardian Church leadership; and the Elizabethan version of 1559, restoring the 1552 version with small but important concessions to Elizabeth’s own traditional sentiments. ³⁶ Ultimately, after undergoing minor revisions in 1604, then being outlawed in 1641, the Prayerbook was reinstated in 1662 in the form that would endure to the present day.

Despite the array of editions of the Book of Common Prayer, it constituted the Prayerbook (particularly in its final version), of which Diarmaid MacCulloch aptly observed, “Its liturgy was not a denominational artefact; it was the literary text most thoroughly known by most people in this country, and one should include the Bible among its lesser rivals.” ³⁷ At any given moment, one version of the Book of Common Prayer was legally mandated for use in England and Wales. Even the rubrical variations and editorial alterations of the versions affected only a small proportion of the text of the whole, such as might easily escape the notice of a casual worshipper. MacCulloch describes the alterations to the 1662 Book:

one or two small concessions, and otherwise a book which sorted out a few angularities in Cranmer’s old text, added some useful afterthoughts to deal with new pastoral situations, such as the existence of a much enlarged Royal Navy, and then delicately tiptoed slightly further from the Reformed European mainstream. ³⁸

At any given point in English cultural history from 1549 into the eighteenth century, the Book of Common Prayer will have constituted an oblique, but uniquely influential, guide to the interpretation of the Bible.

As with the Prayerbook, so with the Bible: Above we noted Jacobs’s clear, firm observation that the BCP was produced as a means of control; a similar assessment may fairly be applied to sequence of efforts that led to the King James version ³⁹ of the Bible. While the translation and recomposition of liturgical texts effected a strong indirect influence on Anglican biblical interpretation, the production of a single Bible authorised for the use of the whole nation would constitute a direct influence on the interpretative tradition already deeply committed to exoteric, vernacular interpretation. Although the principal authorities would have relished the successful realisation of such a textual monopoly, the situation with biblical translations was less clear-cut than with the Book of Common Prayer in its successive editions. First, none of the governments imposed an Act of Uniformity with respect to a translation of the Bible. ⁴⁰ Second, prior theological investments dictated then (as still today) strong commitments to particular translations; as long as different translations were available for purchase or access, no single translation could command the pre-eminence that the Book of Common Prayer held in worship. Moreover, older translations – familiar, comforting, and already at-hand – elicited affective loyalty that institutional authority would overcome only with difficulty and the passage of decades (or centuries, or not at all).

In the preface to the Great Bible, the first English Bible authorised by royal approval, ⁴¹ Cranmer acknowledged that even then

it is not much above one hundred years ago, since scripture hath not been accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue within this realm, and many hundred years before that, it was translated and read in the Saxons’ tongue, which at that time was our mother tongue. Whereof there remaineth yet diverse copies found lately in old abbeys, of such antique manners of writing and speaking, that few men now be able to read and understand them. And when this language waxed old and out of common usage, because folk should not lack the fruit of reading, it was again translated into the newer language. Whereof yet also many copies remain and be daily found. ⁴²

While the production of English Bible translations was forbidden by Arundel’s Constitutions in 1409, there is ample reason to suppose that the possession of a vernacular Bible (or psalter or gospelbook) by a reader whose politics did not give rise to suspicion was not a dangerous offence. As Richard Marsden notes, “Ownership (apparently unlicensed) of the Wycliffite Bible, or works containing translations from it, continued to be widespread and unproblematic and the owners were often unquestionably orthodox.” ⁴³ Appealing as the stories of pious Bible-smugglers risking their lives to bring the vernacular Word into a locked-down England may be, prolonged careful analysis suggests that the danger attendant on possessing an English Bible before the publication of royally, ecclesiastically sponsored translations has been grossly exaggerated.

With the publication of the sixth edition of the Great Bible, biblical translation formally entered ideological terrain comparable to (though weaker than) that of the Prayerbook’s Acts of Uniformity. This sixth edition bore the inscription, “authorised and appointed by the commaundemente of oure moost redoubted Prynce, and soueraygne Lord Kynge Henrye the.viii. supreme heade of this his churche and realme of Englande; to be frequented and used in euery churche within this his sayd realme . . .,” the first time an edition of the English Bible was declared authorised. ⁴⁴ Although its role as the single Bible provided for churches made it prominent, its short print life (Norton notes that all Bible printing stopped with the accession of Mary in 1553) diminished the duration of its impact. ⁴⁵ In relatively short order, Elizabeth’s Parliament ordered another translation (the Bishops’ Bible), which Norton deems “generally poor work” in the Old Testament, though he cites Westcott’s judgement that the New Testament translation “shows considerable vigour and freshness.” ⁴⁶

While the necessity of supplying England’s parish churches with pulpit Bibles kept the Bishops’ Bible in print, stress over the divergence between the Church’s use of the Bishops’ Bible and the popularity of the Geneva Bible provided the ostensible rationale for producing still another new translation. The monarchy’s longstanding dissatisfaction with the cast of the notes to the Geneva Bible underlay the political energy to produce and adopt a translation that improved on the Bishops’ Bible, but without the former’s scurrilous annotations. ⁴⁷ The Geneva Bible (for instance) makes free use of the word ‘tyrant’ in its translation; that word does not appear at all in the KJB. Bagley likewise refers to “the well-known facts of the commissioning of the KJB as a strategy to diffuse Puritan calls for reform at the Hampton Court Conference,” ⁴⁸ a strategy that did not account for the persistent potential for revolutionary readings of even the KJB by seventeenth-century radicals, as attested by Christopher Hill’s studies of the Levellers, the Ranters, the Diggers, and the Fifth Monarchy Men. ⁴⁹

It would be a facile error to note the institutional production, promotion, and enforcement of the exclusive primacy of the KJB and BCP and to conclude thereby that this constituted a de facto as well as de jure monopoly on biblical and liturgical expression in England. The BCP notably underwent various editions inclining in different directions as monarchs and Parliaments changed, and was not as generally admired over its first century as it has become over subsequent years. By the same token, the successive translations of the Bible from Wycliffe to the Great Bible to the Bishops’ Bible to the King James Bible (with the Geneva Bible contesting the high ground of authority from one side, and the Douay-Rheims Bible from another, and numerous less well-known rivals skirmishing in the margins) differed from one another significantly enough that these differences became a polemical point from the Roman Catholic quarter, ⁵⁰ although the differences among all these translations often amounted to minor departures from ecumenically shared sources. ⁵¹ At the end of the day, the trajectory of the translation tradition that runs from Tyndale to the King James Bible favours a strong preponderance of continuity. ⁵²

Anglican Biblical Interpretation as an Asymptote of Unity

While the first 150 years of the Church of England brim over with violent conflict, it is important to remember that these were conflicts that developed within and affected one kingdom in a much larger continent – and within that kingdom, the focus falls on England, especially the province of Canterbury, with (sometimes staggeringly toxic) spillover effects on Scotland and Ireland. The geographic and cultural scope of relevant debate, and the range of impact, thus remains relatively modest through the seventeenth century. The singularity of that one kingdom, and its central role in the imperial enterprise that distributed the Church of England, its Prayerbook, and its Bible throughout the world, constitutes a significant part of the impression of unity.

The singularity of the educational culture likewise supports the impression of unity. Most of the prominent English interpreters of the Bible about whom we know were taught the curriculum of classical literature and rhetoric at Oxford or Cambridge. Those who did not study there typically inhabited that curriculum at second hand through schoolmasters with Oxbridge training.

The legally mandated reliance on the Book of Common Prayer, and the authority of the King James translation of the Bible, provide a vernacular thesaurus of idioms, illustrations, tropes, and catch-phrases that likewise reinforce the sense of interpretive unity – as well, of course, as the poetic, prosaic, and dramatic re-uses of phrases from the King James Bible (and Coverdale psalter).

Thus, we can see in what we may call the classical period of interpretation in the Church of England the basis, on one hand, for a set of bounds within which interpretive disagreement can be worked out. Such a bounded field certainly counts as one sort of unity, and from the perspective of the twenty-first century, those boundaries seem narrow and coherent indeed. On the other hand, the roiling conflicts even within the bounds of the Church of England foreshadow the possibly explosive consequences should any of the interlocked limiting factors give way. If the governing authority that backed one particular church establishment were to give way to various different configurations of church and state, or if the single authority were to relax its suppression of religious dissent; if the hermeneutical infrastructure of interpretation were to shift from the rhetorical model taught at the only two universities were to give way to a model taught in an increasing number of universities, and that relied primarily on wissenschaftlich technical factuality and logical inference; if the culture within which exoteric, vernacular interpretation of Scripture gave way to internal divisions, or if a globe-spanning variety of cultural formations were to appropriate and indigenise the sense of how ‘plain’ or ‘literal’ interpretation works; or if the centripetal force of a unifying Prayerbook and Bible dissipated into dozens of local Prayerbooks and Bible translations; if any of these were to destabilise the interlocked infrastructural elements of the Tudor, Stuart, and early Hanoverian Church of England, the apparent coherence of biblical interpretation would be shaken, if not utterly demolished.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, all four of these changes were on the horizon.

Anglican Biblical Interpretation in the Aftermath

The characteristics of Anglican biblical interpretation that I have proposed here, that conduce to the impression of an identifiably common thread in interpretation, begin rapidly to unravel as the Church of England approached and then entered the nineteenth century. A variety of changes disrupted the (relative, and retrospective) homeostasis that settled in after the Restoration and Glorious Revolution. Each of these might have deflected Anglican biblical interpretation from the trajectory it had settled into; cumulatively, they brought about the state of affairs that frustrates contemporary efforts to recapture the spirit of ‘gracious compromise’ that might restore harmony to the Communion’s dissonant deliberations.

First, during the birth pangs of the Church of England, no one was permitted to adopt or express other manifestations of Christian faith. The Church of England was the only theological game in town, so anyone interested in participating had a choice between the Church of England and intolerance of varying degrees. By the late 1600s, most prominent sorts of Protestant nonconformity were permitted, though dissenters still could not hold public offices or attend one of the universities. Eventually, even these restrictions were relaxed, and in the nineteenth century these legal impediments to the practice of non-Anglican religion were removed, one by one, until in 1871 all religious tests were removed from extant colleges at Cambridge (which had required conformity to the Church of England before graduation) and Oxford (which had required conformity before matriculation). Where once the field of academic and ecclesiastical biblical interpretation would have been restricted to sacrament-taking, church-attending members of the Church of England, the nineteenth century saw the expansion of legitimated biblical interpretation to include any scholar or any ecclesiastic authorised by their communities. The diversity that had once been limited to Anglicans now exploded to include Baptists, Jews, atheists, and even Roman Catholics. While this may to some extent have relieved pressure within the Church of England to adhere to conventional interpretive norms, it will also have made the exchange of interpretive practices subject to greater fluidity within the Church of England.

As strictures against nonconformity relaxed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the demand for higher education for students who professed Catholic or nonconforming faith likewise increased. Dissenting academies were founded to accommodate Protestants who did not want to travel to Scotland or Europe for their degrees. In the nineteenth century, University College London and others were founded, open to nonconformists (the University of Durham and King’s College London were founded by Anglicans to counteract the new nonconformist institutions). ⁵³ Roman Catholic higher education at first concentrated on teacher training colleges, which – as toleration took root and expanded – ultimately grew into universities. In higher education too, then, the cultural unity artificially sustained by Oxford and Cambridge’s duopoly as degree-granting institutions was undermined by the expansion of opportunities for higher education outwith England’s two universities. As the number of colleges and universities grew, the extent of curricular homogeneity declined; classical languages and rhetoric (and Faculties of Divinity) became less central as scholars of increasingly specialised fields jostled for position and importance in Faculties of Arts, and as the sciences expanded and claimed increasing prestige in an era for which names such as Lyell, Anning, and Darwin may stand as milestones. At the same time, German ‘radical’ biblical criticism began filtering into English biblical pedagogy, gradually displacing the rhetorical (and ‘narrative’) emphasis in interpretive culture in favour of the more critical, historical analysis of biblical texts. Diversity in the substance of education, as well as diversity in the student bodies and the ecclesiastical identity of new and expanding universities (where there was any such ecclesiastical connection), thus diminished any sense of unanimity in higher education.

Finally, the English experience of empire began to shift away from the coloniser’s eye-view to a perspective that acknowledged more of the indigenous peoples’ histories and cultures. One may offer the Colenso Controversy ⁵⁴ here as a metonym for the many incidents in which emissaries of English establishment encountered their subaltern neighbours with respectful attention and mediated indigenous peoples’ concerns back to an English establishment and populace that were often scandalised by the fruit of taking other cultures seriously as participants in Anglican projects of translation, exposition, and the indigenisation of liturgy. Once, there was only one Prayerbook and one Authorised Version of the Bible; but with the urgency of preparing Bibles in the languages of Britain’s colonies, and the consistent application of Article XXIV’s admonition that “[i]t is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have public Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understanded by the people,” Bibles and Prayerbooks proliferated. These translations necessarily also invoked vernacular expressions and actions that departed from what would have seemed intelligible in Canterbury or York. Even Scripture and the worship of the Church could no longer function simply as vehicles of unity.

We could hardly do better to illustrate the impasse that confronts those who seek to identify the Anglican approach to Scripture than to point to the admirably-imagined Bible in the Life of the Church project. ⁵⁵ At the project’s inception in 2009, the Anglican Consultative Council defined two of its chief aims as to “explore how we, as Anglicans, actually use the Bible by sharing experiences of using the Bible to explore two major contemporary issues” and, especially significantly, to “distil and develop from these explorations the working principles of Anglican hermeneutics.” ⁵⁶ The project, global in ambition, scale, and execution, elicited ardent enthusiasm from its leaders and from participants – from Archbishop Justin Welby’s endorsement “I see this project as utterly foundational for our life together: I can hardly stress that enough” to a participant’s “The Bible in the Life of the Church Project is earth-shaking.” ⁵⁷

A flurry of responses followed the publication of the project’s report, but a dozen years after the release of the report and its appendixes, one would be hard-pressed to detect any enduring effects of the project on the life of the Anglican Communion. Individuals will undoubtedly have been impressed by their experience of learning more about the ways their sisters and brothers in the Communion interpret Scripture, but the conflicts that beset Anglicans in 2011 still burden Anglicans in 2026. Some observers anticipated this result from the midst of their involvement; Ellen Aitken describes her disappointment with the “dominant paradigm of instrumentality” whose presence, inbuilt into the process of deliberation, overshadowed her participation in the project. ⁵⁸ Moreover, as Andrew McGowan pointed out, “the difficulty of mapping use of the Bible given the geographic and cultural scope and diversity of the Communion, let alone doing justice to the conflicts arising” thwarts most efforts to find a persisting set of “Anglican” interpretive traits. ⁵⁹ Finally, I would note that the project set itself both a descriptive task (“how we actually use the Bible”) and an inevitably regulative task (“distil . . . the working principles of Anglican hermeneutics”). With an approach overdetermined by “instrumentality,” with the scale of diversities within the Anglican Communion, and with the incompatibility of descriptive and regulative tasks, the Bible in the Life of the Church devoted vast energy to a project that would have been nigh impossible to achieve no matter how earnestly, lovingly, and thoughtfully the Anglican Communion Office pursued it. ⁶⁰ The job that the project set for itself serves most forcefully to illustrate the argument I have advanced here.

Conclusion

Is it possible for someone to enter a second time into their mother’s womb and be born?

The felt urgency for recapturing a harmonious spirit for Anglican biblical interpretation appeals greatly at a moment when the centripetal power of Canterbury has ebbed to the point that new ‘continuing’ or ‘really Anglican’ ecclesial bodies emerge into the light every few months. Something ought to bear regulative authority, and since longstanding tradition locates that authority in Scripture, and since selective memory ascribes to the founding centuries of the institutional Church of England a legacy of courtesy in interpretive debate, the prospect of building out afresh on a foundation of Scripture attracts hearts that long for a truly, deeply, united church. Sadly, Nicodemus’s question aptly invokes the impossibility of such a renewed harmonious interpretive discourse.

Such harmony as could be retrieved from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rested to a great extent on a common cultural inheritance based in a small area of a small nation, ruled by a single government, with two universities that taught interpretive practice in a shared mode, worshipping with a shared prayerbook and a single dominant tradition of biblical translation. Of course, when one puts it that way, all the many qualifications and differences rush to our awareness; no ideal interpretive Jerusalem was then built on England’s green and pleasant land. But even as that picture oversimplifies the interpretive practice in the first century of the Church of England, all the more today’s Anglican churches represent divergent models of government, liturgy, translation, education, and cultural understanding.

If one could by fiat impose a single liturgical model (a Book of truly Common Prayer), a binding interlinguistic paradigm of translation of the Bible, a unitary system for educating laity and ordained leadership, with an acknowledged mechanism of governance, one might at least have the preconditions for arriving at the degree of harmony that characterised the childhood home of the Church of England. Even then, the fissures and complications that show up under closer examination would surely emerge again, multiplied by the vastly greater scope of today’s Anglicanism. On the whole, a more productive exercise towards interpretive harmony could begin by granting the manifold differences among Anglicans and studying their histories and rationales. That accomplishment might not engender Edenic interpretive agreement, but could at least displace some polemical vituperation in favour of advancing the cause of mutual understanding and respect, which is in its own way a richly Anglican goal.