1. Origins of each
Each major Church or denomination normally has a Confession of Faith wherein what it officially believes, teaches and confesses is presented. Of these the most used in recent times is The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is a major book in terms of its size. Further, it can only be describes as being traditional in its teaching and attractive in its format.
The Catechism printed in the ECUSA Prayer Book of 1979 (pp.844ff.) and known as “An Outline of the Faith” was created in an exceptionally novel way. The committee given the task of producing it were told to follow the principle of “the rule of praying is the rule of believing” [ lex orandi lex credendi], which was then a popular slogan, and to examine carefully the Texts in the 1979 Prayer Book, which address God as “You” and are usually called “the Rite Two” texts, in order to find in them what is the Faith of the Episcopal Church. Texts taken over with editing from the 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer and placed in the 1979 Book, and which address God as “Thou,” were not to be used.
The ECUSA wished to have a truly modern confession of Faith based on the creative work of their liturgists. Earlier it had rejected the draft of a Catechism on traditional Anglican lines produced by an official committee, chaired by Bishop Stanley Atkins of Eau Claire.
Thus “An Outline of the Faith” is unique as an Anglican Confession of Faith for it is not that Faith which is believed, taught and confessed on the basis of the content of the Bible and the interpretation of the Bible in the Church. Rather, it is based on the presumption that modern American liturgists, who create new forms of liturgy in a hurry and in the atmosphere of the 1960s, place within these Services the truth of the Christian Faith (even when it is different from the official teaching of the past in both the American Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion). This approach to creating a Confession of Faith presupposes a strong doctrine of authority of the General Convention and autonomy by the ECUSA in approving first the Liturgy and then the Confession, and a weak doctrine of relations with the other Provinces of the Anglican Family of Churches and with Anglican and Catholic tradition.
In the various editions (e.g., 1662, 1928) of the classic Book of Common Prayer [BCP], there is printed along with the BCP itself, the Ordinal (Ordination Services) and the Articles of Religion. These Three have always been the Formularies and Standards of the Anglican Way. Also within the BCP itself there is a short Catechism, based on the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and associated with Confirmation.
The Articles of Religion were first officially approved in 1571 in the Church of England, after the BCP had been in use for twenty years or so. However, they were first written at the time when the BCP itself was also being created. They were certainly not based on the principle of “the law of praying is the law of believing” but on that of confessing and stating what the Christian Faith, based on the Bible, is all about, and how a National Church is to confess that Faith.
When the Articles were adopted by the Protestant Episcopal Church [PECUSA] in 1801 they were edited so that their content was not related to a monarchy but to a new republic. However, their teaching on the content of the Faith and what is essential and what is secondary in a National Church or Province remained fully in place. These Articles remained as the Confession of Faith of the PECUSA and then ECUSA until 1979 when they were relegated to the status of a historical document without any doctrinal authority at all.
Since the longish 1979 Catechism is deliberately unlike the short original Catechism of the BCP, and since it effectively serves the same place now as the Articles of Religion once did in terms of being a Formulary of the Episcopal Church, our contrast will be -- in subsequent short essays -- between the 1979 Catechism and the 1571 (England) and 1801 (USA) Articles. We shall discover that they present two very different accounts of the Christian Religion and Christian Church. (And we need to hold in mind that the ECUSA has actually continued its progressive journey since 1979 and that its next “Outline” due by 2010 will probably be much more radical than that of 1979!) A final comment -- If we were to contrast the longish 1979 Catechism with the shortish & 1928BCP Catechism we would come to the same results, but with less detail of major points.
The Revd Dr Peter Toon October 10, 2005
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