Editor’s Note: This article is the first half of a two-part series. You can read the second part of this post here.

Sometimes God decides that the time is right for a particular topic, and by the power of the Holy Spirit it starts to bubble up everywhere you look. For several months now, I have been thinking about how Anglo-Catholics and Reformed Episcopalians can begin to dismantle the demilitarized zone that for too long has kept us peering at each other suspiciously from a distance. Over at The Hour, Tony Hunt has been writing about the same question. In this condensation of what was a longer lecture at the Society of Catholic Priests conference this year, I’d like to discuss why contemporary Episcopalians of Catholic and Reformed sensibilities are called to stand together, in witness to the world and to our own Church, as people who are not ashamed of the Gospel.

There is a qualitative difference between receiving our differences in theological emphasis and liturgical style as gift and eliminating all difference to create a via media of the lowest common denominator. The latter is in no one’s interest, even though it may be all too common in our church. The former, I believe, is a Gospel imperative.

The differences are real. We can have interesting and important conversations about nature and grace, word and sacrament, or natural theology. We can disagree about Eucharistic adoration or the fitness of Morning Prayer on Sundays. Indeed, we can even argue about whether or not the music of Hillsong is good. Unfortunately, too much time and energy continues to be spent on what can only be described as matters of aesthetic preference. Liturgy matters. The details of the liturgy and the theology that those details communicate matter. The beauty of holiness matters, but it is a pernicious trap to confect a love of liturgy into a belief that the heart of catholicity is found in bells, smells, or vestments. The heart of catholicity is Jesus Christ.

This piece will not present a laundry list of complaints about the contemporary church. Instead, it will present two historical examples that might help to illumine our present. One is Charles Kingsley, the Victorian Darwinist clergyman who was one of the key figures in the “muscular Christianity” tendency of the 19th century that was a key opposing party to the Oxford Movement. The other is Karl Reiland, an Episcopal priest who found himself at the center of both the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century and the American eugenics movement.

The cases of Kingsley and Reiland illustrate what happens when Christians, and Anglicans in particular, replace the particularity of Scripture and Christian theological grammar with something else. Since the 19th century, that "something else" has often fallen under the category of scientifically-informed reason, and it has been portrayed as the necessary and inevitable next step in an inexorable trajectory of religious and social progress. That "something else" has often endorsed a utopian political agenda that aspires to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth through human effort. Tragically, it has also baptized what historian Jenny Reardon names as a key feature of modernity: the “entanglement of rules that govern what can count as knowledge with rules that determine which human lives can be lived,” and which are treated as collateral damage on the way to a better world. (1)

Theologically, a few things tend to get muddled in the process of this turn to the "something else." I believe that the foundation of our call to witness together is to be confidently, winsomely, joyfully, un-muddled about a few very basic questions. Who needs to be saved, and from what? Who saves, by what means, and when? The most important question of all, the question about which we are called to remain absolutely clear, is Jesus’s question to Peter: Who do you say that I am?

Charles Kingsley: A Universal Law of Living Things

Why did the Oxford Movement happen? I would like to suggest along with John Shelton Reed that at least in part, it happened as a generational movement. (2) Young Anglicans rebelled against the ways that they saw the church of their elders going astray, excluding their sensibilities from the life of the Church and making easy accommodations to prevailing sentiment and to power. The 19th century was the age of empire, and Anglo-Catholics reacted against a state-subservient Church that had made its bed with Empire. The ‘national apostasy’ Keble preached against in 1833 wasn’t in the first instance a matter of candles on the altar, or vestments, or the role of Mary, or of Eucharistic adoration. It was a matter of the Church being made subservient to the state in its own affairs, by a Whig government, marching under the banner of progress. Anglo-Catholicism was denounced in part because it was un-English, foreign, and suspect. Crucially, it was also denounced because it was seen as unmanly (see Figure 1, below).