The Protestant Face of Anglicanism by Paul F.M. Zahl

The Protestant Face of Anglicanism Reviews

• 
  John

  This book is a polemic, and not in a good way. Like many recent political books, it does not aim to persuade the unpersuaded--it only seeks to confirm the views of the already persuaded.
  
  The author's thesis is the the protestant "face" of Anglicanism has been hidden by the enemy: Broad Church liberals and Anglo-catholics. He argues there is no via media or synthesis of Reformed and Catholic. Of course he hates the 1979 BCP. He ignores large swaths of Anglican history such as the Anglican Divines (he barely mentions Hooker) and grossly simplifies English history, specifically the Elizabethan Settlement, Archbishop Laud, and the Glorious Revolution. Of course he loves the Puritans.
  
  Finally, the author picks and chooses (scanty) authority to prove his tendentious points. One humorous example of this cherry-picking of authority to prove a point is the following: "An important glimpse into the Protestant self-understanding of the vast majority of English people at mid-century is crystalized in a letter of Queen Victoria ..." We are not amused.
  
  I was very disappointed by the book.
• 
  Ben Crosby

  I wanted to like this book. Although my churchmanship is decidedly high, I think the near disappearance of low-church piety and evangelical belief in today's Episcopal Church is indeed a tragedy. I have some Reformed sympathies, especially in soteriology. I've enjoyed Zahl's other books. And his fundamental thesis, that the idea of Anglicanism as a 'via media' between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism would have been incomprehensible for most of the history of Anglicanism as a distinct ecclesial body, is sound. But alas! On my reading, this is more of a morality play than a history: Queen Mary, the Laudians, and the Tractarians are all villains, effacing the purity of the Gospel and spitting on religious freedom. The embattled evangelicals, then, stand boldly against their catholicizing enemies. For all Zahl's assurances that this is not a polemical work, I found it rather unfair. That said, it was a valuable introduction to a couple centuries of evangelical thought and practice within Anglicanism, and gave me some books to add to my reading list.
• 
  Joseph Holm

  helpful for me to better understand Anglicanism.
• 
  Alex Strohschein

  I myself am not an Anglican. I think that is the reason I did not enjoy this book. In this slim book, Zahl provides a helpful history of the Anglican/Episcopal Church in both England and America (the history of the Anglican Church in England I had previously gleamed from Alister McGrath's book "Christianity's Dangerous Idea").
  
  However, his central aim is to demonstrate the Protestant nature of Anglicanism. He separates Anglicanism into Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals, Protestants, Liberals and Charismatics. This is ultimately the point at which I felt completely lost. Not being an Anglican, I am not so aware or attuned to the varying traditions within the Anglican Church (I believe Zahl would consider himself an Evangelical Anglican, but I cannot be certain). For instance, how does Zahl define a Protestant compared to an Evangelical? This is never made clear.
  
  He ends with suggestions for recovering a Protestant Anglicanism. Many of his suggestions I can affirm. He points to the three-pronged Anglican approach of Bible, tradition, reason. He also stresses the importance of the Christian's unmediated relationship with God, a Protestant point he believes needs to be recovered, especially from Anglican churches that may have moved closer to Anglo-Catholicism.
  
  Personally, I would rate in 2/5, but that's because I had just learned about much of Anglican history in England and so a lot of the history outlined by Zahl in the book was redundant. But if you are unaware of the struggles between the Catholic, Anglican and Puritan Christians, then Zahl's review of Anglican church history is valuable.