The faith once received

One of the subtle burdens of modern Christian life is the sense that each of us must discover Christianity for ourselves. We may not say it that way, and most of us would probably reject the idea if it were put so directly. Nevertheless, many Christians are formed by an atmosphere in which the faith seems to arrive as a set of competing options: doctrines to evaluate, practices to sample, churches to compare, authorities to distrust, traditions to admire or reject. In that setting, even sincere faith can become exhausting. We are asked, in effect, to become the architects of our own orthodoxy.

There is a kind of seriousness in that impulse. Christians ought to care whether what we believe is true. We ought to test what we have been taught, attend carefully to Scripture, and avoid confusing habit, preference, family history, or denominational loyalty with the gospel itself. Yet if the Christian faith is something I must assemble for myself, then my faith will almost inevitably become either too narrow or too convenient. It will be limited by the range of my reading, the accidents of my temperament, the wounds or gifts of my own formation, and the social pressures I happen to find most persuasive.

This is one reason the language of reception matters. Jude exhorts his readers to contend for “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3). The phrasing is worth lingering over. The faith is not presented as a private discovery, a theological mood, or a local possession. It is entrusted. It is received before it is explained, guarded before it is adapted, and handed on before it is improved. To receive the faith in this way is not to become passive or incurious. It is to begin from gratitude rather than suspicion, from humility rather than invention.

This, at its best, is what Anglicanism offers: not a newly discovered Christianity, nor a denominationally branded improvement on the faith of the Church, but a disciplined way of receiving and practicing the apostolic and catholic faith. Its characteristic habits — common prayer, episcopal order, sacramental worship, reverence for Scripture, and an instinct for continuity — are not ends in themselves. They are ways of being formed by what has been entrusted to us: the Scriptures read in the Church, the Creeds confessed with the Church, the sacraments received as gifts of Christ to his Church, and the common prayer by which the Church is taught to worship, repent, believe, and hope.

This way of speaking requires some care. Anglicans have no special immunity from error, confusion, institutional failure, or spiritual pride, and we should not pretend that other Christian traditions have failed to receive and hand on the catholic faith. The claim is more modest, though still important: classical Anglicanism seeks to be one reliable, ordered, scriptural, and sacramental way of inhabiting the faith once received.

Wesley Hill puts this well in his essay, “Is there an ‘Anglican understanding’ of the New Testament?”. Anglicanism’s glory is not that it offers a unique “take” on Christianity, but that it seeks to present and embody the faith of the Church catholic in a recognizably Anglican form. Citing Oliver O’Donovan, Hill notes that it has not been the Church of England’s particular genius to grow its own theological nourishment, but to prepare what has been given elsewhere and set it “decently upon the table”. Anglicanism is not at its strongest when it advertises itself as novel. It is at its strongest when it receives the riches of Scripture, the Fathers, the great councils, the medieval doctors, and the Reformation, and then orders them for the worship, teaching, and common life of the Church.

Richard Hooker gives classical Anglican expression to this instinct. In Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, he does not treat the Church as free to invent its faith, nor does he reduce Christian obedience to private judgment alone. Scripture has first authority: what Scripture plainly delivers receives “the first place both of credit and obedience”. Yet Hooker also insists that “the voice of the Church succeedeth”, especially in those matters of worship, discipline, and common life where Scripture does not prescribe every detail. This is not a license for novelty, but a school of faithful reception: the Church receives the faith from Scripture, reasons within the created and redeemed order of God, attends to the wisdom of the Church’s long practice, and orders its life so that doctrine may be confessed, prayed, and handed on.

Anglicanism is therefore distinctive precisely where it is least anxious to be distinctive. Its best instinct is not to ask, “What can we say that no one else has said?” but rather, “How can we faithfully receive what has been given, test it by Scripture, pray it in common, and hand it on to the next generation?” This does not make Anglicanism vague or contentless. Reception requires form: words, practices, boundaries, and habits by which the Church’s teaching is guarded and embodied.

In Anglican life, this form is found especially in Scripture, the Creeds, the dominical sacraments, the episcopal ordering of the Church, the Prayer Book tradition, and the doctrinal formularies that guard the Church’s teaching. These are not pieces of ecclesiastical furniture. Scripture is God’s Word written, read, and proclaimed in the assembly of God’s people. The Creeds are the Church’s summary confession of the triune God and of the saving work of Jesus Christ. Baptism and the Eucharist are Christ-given means by which the Church receives and enacts the grace of the gospel. Common prayer is a school of repentance, praise, doctrine, desire, and hope. Ordered ministry is a sign and service of continuity in the Church’s teaching, sacramental life, and pastoral care.

None of this removes the need for discernment. The language of “received tradition” can be misused, and often has been. Some traditions deserve to be reformed. Some inherited practices should be named as distortions rather than gifts. The Church must always be recalled to Scripture, and Anglicanism’s own formularies insist that nothing may be required as necessary to salvation unless it may be proved by Holy Scripture. Reception is therefore not the same as unfiltered acceptance.

But the opposite danger is also real. If unfiltered acceptance treats every inheritance as authoritative, cafeteria-style faith treats every inheritance as optional. It assumes that the individual Christian, the congregation, or the present age may select from the Church’s teaching and practice only what already appears plausible, useful, or attractive. Anglicanism, properly understood, stands uneasily against both errors. It asks us to receive before we revise, but also to test what we receive; to trust that the Holy Spirit has not abandoned the Church, but also to remember that the Church is always in need of repentance and reform. It asks us to pray words we did not compose, confess a faith we did not invent, eat and drink at a table we did not set, and belong to a body whose life is not reducible to our preferences.

There is real freedom in this. To receive the faith once entrusted to the saints is to be relieved of the impossible task of manufacturing Christianity from the resources of the self. We are not asked to begin with nothing. We are given Scripture, prayer, sacrament, doctrine, saints, councils, pastors, teachers, parishes, and the long memory of the Church. These gifts do not answer every question in advance, nor do they make faith easy. But they locate us. They teach us that Christian faith is not a solitary act of religious self-expression, but a life into which we are baptized, corrected, nourished, and sent.

This is also why the received faith cannot become mere nostalgia. To receive is not only to preserve. It is to inhabit faithfully enough that we may hand on what has been entrusted to us. St Paul’s language is instructive here: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Reception and mission belong together. What is received must be given, not as an artifact from a more faithful past, but as the living faith of the Church for the life of the world.

This may be one of Anglicanism’s most needed gifts in the present moment. In a culture of religious fragmentation, suspicion, and self-invention, it offers not novelty, credulity, or coercion, but rootedness, humble trust, and formation. And in a Church often tempted either to make peace too quickly with the age or to define itself primarily by resistance, it offers the quieter and more demanding path of receiving the apostolic faith, praying it, practicing it, and handing it on.

That is not all that needs to be said about Anglicanism. It raises further questions about Scripture and tradition, the Prayer Book, sacramental life, ecclesial authority, and the Church’s witness in the world. Those questions deserve more careful attention than one introductory essay can give them. But perhaps this is the place to begin: Anglicanism is not first a taste, a compromise, a temperament, or a party within the Church. At its best, it is a way of receiving the faith once entrusted to the saints, so that what we have received in mercy, we may teach and practice in faithfulness.