The Anglican Branch Theory

"The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same." (Article 19 "Of the Church")

The 39 Articles of Religion are held by some Anglicans as containing the boundaries of Anglican theology. Some Anglican theologians have argued that the 39 Articles do not have binding authority and that some of the articles are even contrary to the apostolic faith. As an Anglican priest, I always struggled with the apparent vagueness of the 39 Articles. Article 19 quoted above is one such article. The article basically defines the visable church is where "the pure Word is preached" and "as one that administers the sacraments according to Christ's ordinance". Some have said that the "pure Word" includes the doctrine of justification by faith only (article 11) which would exclude the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches from being part of the visible church. Others have said that the "pure Word" simply means the Nicene creed which immediately brings to mind the controversy of the filiouque clause (article 5). Some have said that the article refers to the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion as the sacraments that define the church as opposed to the 7 sacraments that the council of Trent articulates. Other Anglican commentators on the 39 Articles have said that the 19th article implies Bishops as being necessary for valid sacraments. If this is what the article means then it would exclude the validity of most Protestant sacraments because they do not have an apostolic succession of the episcopate but many Anglicans are just unwilling to affirm that. So the 19th article can include all Protestant churches and exclude Rome and Orthodoxy or it could include Rome and Orthodoxy as sharers in apostolic succession and exclude most Protestant churches. The latter does not seem to fit with the historical context of the 39 Articles since the 39 Articles seem to be in part a response to Roman Catholic errors. In the 19th century the Oxford movement began to explain the catholic church in terms of a tree with branches.They said apostolic succession is what allows a church to claim catholicity. So the three branches on the catholic tree are the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The Anglicans believe apostolic succession to be an episcopal form of government with a proven line of succession from the apostles to present day bishops. I had learned about this theory in seminary but I never grasped the meaning of it until I read Vernon Staley's book The Catholic Religion. I wanted to be catholic without excluing Rome and Orthodoxy so I thought it was a good way to explain how the Anglican Church is catholic and yet lacks unity with the other two branches. I was comfortable with this theory for a while until one day in the middle of the liturgy it hit me that the church was one which means undivided, yet the branch theory holds that the church is divided. It later occured to me that the branch theory of the church cannot be found as a way the historic apostolic church understood catholicity so that would make the branch theory not catholic but merely a creation of the Oxford Movement. I next want to explore next how the branch theory became unworkable for me.