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Anglicanism sometimes seems like a country with a proportional representation system of government that is doomed, Groundhog Day-style, to be forever in an election year. For the last 150 years or more, Anglicans have subdivided into three basic groups. Labels have varied based on time period and nuance, but, for convenience, let's use Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, and Modernist. As any student of politics knows, three parties means coalitions. As there is no election day, however, Anglican party strength is perpetually being testedevery decision and every appointment can be read as a triumph for one faction or another.
St. Paul's: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004 by Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, Andrew Saint Yale Univ. Press, 2004 538 pp. $125.00 
Stewart Headlam's Radical Anglicanism by John Richard Orens Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003 184 pp. $29.95 |
Related to this is another curiosity: most everyone, whether insider or outsider, will tell you that Anglicanism's notable strengths include tradition and continuity (not to mention unity). Nevertheless, the great rock of traditionalism seems more than most denominations to be forever anxious about what it must do to be relevant in the contemporary world.
There is no more delightful way into this terrain than John Richard Orens' urbane study of that quixotic Anglican priest of the Victorian age, Stewart Headlam. Headlam's father had been an Evangelical, but that was the one thing he was not. Everything that he thought was wrong with Anglicanism Headlam attributed to "Manichaean Calvinism." Never one to do things by halves, he eventually gave institutional expression to this antipathy by founding the Anti-Puritan Leaguea band of convivial polemicists whose members included G.K. Chesterton. Headlam embodied the natural anti-Evangelical coalition, being either a Modernist Anglo-Catholic or an Anglo-Catholic Modernist.
Headlam's Modernism was informed by such Broad Church classics as Essays and Reviews (1860) and the writings of F. D. Maurice, both of which provoked investigations for heresy. Well-established Modernists adopted Headlam when he was a young curate, but he proved too reckless a freethinker even for them. Headlam taxed his Modernist vicar to the breaking point by preaching universalism and was sent off to the bishop to explain himself.
On the other hand, Headlam was also a keen Anglo-Catholic and had to answer formal charges for introducing such contentious liturgical innovations as kissing the altar and the gospel book, genuflecting, and making the sign of the cross. This made him paradoxically also a guardian of tradition in a way that most Modernists are not. He even went so far as to defend the eminently assailable Athanasian Creed, waggishly retorting to Modernists who complained of its untenable level of philosophical abstraction that it was easier to understanding than the neo-Hegelian thought of T.H. Green which was then the rage.
To top it all off, Headlam was an irrepressible champion of radical politics, slum missions, popular amusements, and people who got in trouble for being irreligious or immoral. His politics included republicanism (a hard sell in Queen Victoria's England) and socialism. When given the opportunity to preach in Westminster Abbey on Maundy Thursday, 1881, he declared to this high-society congregation that the solution to such social ills as bad housing was "the Christian Communism of the Church of the Carpenter." Headlam publicly supported the defiantly anti-Christian atheist leader, Charles Bradlaugh, infuriating Anglican leaders by his attempt to recast the self-styled "Iconoclast" as a heroic anonymous Christian. The piece de resistance along these lines came when Headlam, who was a man of independent means, put up 1,250 for Oscar Wilde's bail and sheltered the writer in his home on his release from prison. Headlam also had a Mr Toad-like obsession with the Music Hall. He founded the Church and Stage Guild in an attempt to remove the stigma of worldliness from chorus linesanother uphill cause among Victorian church people.
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