by Dan Marotta

(This article was originally published in The Gospel Coalition blog.)

A new visitor to our parish recently told me, “I read your Thirty-nine Articles, and I was underwhelmed. It just seems like a basic Christian statement of faith.”

A basic Christian statement of faith. Exactly.

The Anglican Church’s Thirty-nine Articles of Religion aren’t comprehensive. They don’t answer every theological or ecclesiastical question a follower of Jesus might have. But there’s an elegance in the Articles’ brevity and simplicity that both roots us in the historic church and is timely today.

Catholic, Reformed, Local

The Thirty-nine Articles were originally composed as 42 articles by the English reformer Thomas Cranmer in 1553 to unify the Church of England doctrinally. In Cranmer’s own words, the Articles were composed “for the avoiding of controversies in opinions.” After multiple revisions, they reached their final form in 1571, and together with the Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, and the Two Books of Homilies, they serve as the formularies of the global Anglican Communion.

Weighty but Not Infallible

Packer helps us understand the nature of the authority of historic confessions like the Thirty-nine Articles:

[They] come to us as . . . time-honoured judgements, on specific issues relating to the faith of Christ, as set forth in the Scriptures. They come to us as corporate decisions first made by the Church centuries ago, and now confirmed and commended to us by the corroborative testimony of all later generations that have accepted them, down to our time. . . . It is a prime obligation for Anglicans to take full account of the expository formulations to which our Church has bound itself; and to ignore them, as if we were certain that the Spirit of God had no hand in them, is no more warrantable than to treat them as divinely inspired and infallible.

Confessions like the Thirty-nine Articles are to be neither dismissed nor deified. We shouldn’t view our own doctrinal confessions as infallible, but followers of Jesus who worship in parishes within the Anglican Communion are to give the Articles appropriate weight. They’ve stood the test of time, and we shouldn’t arrogantly think of ourselves as wiser than our forebears.

Read the entire article at The Gospel Coalition here.

The Rev. Dan Marotta is Rector of Redeemer Anglican Church in Richmond, VA.