Kicking Final/Unconditional Perseverance Out of Anglicanism

I’m not surprised that James Clark’s piece on Final Perseverance and the Thirty-nine Articles [Commentary on Browne: Article XVI (2)] is a difficult of a business at it is. It is an issue that has been complicated by the passage of time, by the change in the way Protestant Christianity has come to look at itself, and of the Anglican divines who are all over the map on the issue.

It is my conviction that Article XVI is the doorway out of Calvinism’s insistence on final perseverance and into a more Wesleyan view of the topic, which I expressed a long time ago in my piece Anglican Evangelicalism: The Limitations of Augustinian Theology (and, as Clark points out, Augustine wasn’t always clear on the subject.) These points are what I hold to be self-evident on the subject:

• The Articles of Religion antedate the invasion of Calvinism into the Anglophone Protestant world. So to expect them to be Calvinistic is anachronistic and unreasonable.
• Calvinism has pushed itself to be the “gold standard” of Protestant thought when in fact does not deserve that position. It sets itself up as “intellectual” when in fact it is not, it is just the assertion of dogmas with unappetising consequences from which Calvinists frequently backpedal.
• The strongest case to be made against final perseverance as the proper interpretation of Article XVI can be found in the Book of Common Prayer. All three of the major liturgies–Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and the Holy Communion–have penitential rites, which are totally superfluous if people have unconditional perseverance (which is a better way of describing what is actually at issue here) penitential rites and absolution are totally superfluous. (They’re really not necessary for absolute predestination, either.) Some Anglican divines haven’t quite put it together on this, but the Baptists–Calvinistic and non-Calvinistic on election–certainly have.
• The whole game of “was he/she ever saved/elect to start with” is really no better than the Roman Catholic “is he/she in a state of grace” situation. It just replaces one uncertainty with another, except that now if a person becomes firmly convinced that he or she is one of the elect they have no real reason to be constrained in their behaviour.
• Baptismal regeneration only complicates the subject. It is at best the beginning of the journey, not the end. The tendency to lean too heavily on baptism as a salvific act is another import from Roman Catholicism we could do without, and my own position on the subject is detailed in Why I Support the Idea of Believers’ Baptism. I should also add that I can’t see even the most die-hard Tulip Calvinist supporting the idea that, if you’re baptised, you’re in the elect.

It’s time for Anglicanism to be sui generis on this subject, which would both put it in commonality with its progeny and go a long way to end its reputation as a gateway to something else.