From the early seventeenth century the Anglicans/Episcopalians, starting in Virginia, and the Puritans,76 starting in New England, constituted the twin confessors of the Thirty-Nine Articles,77 the Articles of Religion, in the New World. However, those “articles of religion”78—slowly—entered into deviant confessional erosion, one motivated and dominated by creeping materialism.
1–2
Within a hundred years after British colonization in North America began, the restless search to tap into the enormous riches of the continent perverted the determining glue of neighboring Anglican/Episcopal and Puritan jurisdictions. The intense and protracted search for wealth that compelled Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus to reach across the Atlantic for the fabled Orient gained control of North American immigrants too; only, they sought these riches at first along the Eastern Seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida, then far inland, always westwards. This unrelenting covetousness consumed both Anglicans and Puritans.
The slide of the Anglicans/Episcopalians into covetousness occurred through efforts to establish a viable plantation system.
One Down
This contaminating movement of the heart constricted the Episcopalian spirit with age-old evil. Upon discovery of a tobacco cultivation industry, the introduction of English common law with due process, and the institution of private property laid in Virginia the groundwork for capitalistic enterprise. With little or no regard for the unifying power of the Thirty-Nine, nor its forward Kingdom perspective, Anglicans/Episcopalians spread out along river banks to make money by cultivating tobacco.79 Procuring enormous continental wealth, in accommodation to Matt 6:24’s mammonism, overrode establishing a flourishing Anglican/Episcopalian community in the New World.
Two Down
The slide of the Puritans into covetousness has been documented much more prodigiously. “New England was becoming involved in the ways of the Old World, striving for commercial success, competing for profits, tasting power and assuming rights, ready to defend them legally or otherwise. The spirit of European nationalism, capitalism and rationalism, with its apparatus of political and legal theory, was already growing strong.”80 Rather than the professed biblical, all-consuming, glory to God, material covetousness disengaged the Puritan spirit from the Bible.
Slowly, the Puritan cultural power sank away from high ideals. “In America the character of the people underwent a change; they moved further (sic) into the frontier, they became more absorbed in business and profits than in religion and salvation . . ..”81 In effect, inland frontier areas served as escape routes from alleged religious domination along coastal areas.
Succumbing to “love of money,” 1 Tim 6:10, multiple Puritan explorers for riches bade defiance to the letter and the spirit of the Thirty-Nine; out of this waywardness an unforeseen complication arose. “The energetic, executive, alert, practical shrewd American, in a word the Yankee, begins to emerge out of the Puritan saint.”82 To stress this Yankeeism: “He becomes in time less and less preoccupied with the war on Satan, more and more with the practical problems of making a life for himself and his people, saints and sinners alike, in the new environment.”83 Procurement of the enormous continental wealth overrode initial intents of the Puritans; the establishment of the New Jerusalem vision faded into a patchwork of sordid Old World preoccupations.
At first, then, Puritanism as manifested along the Eastern Seaboard, focused on the primary, encompassing significance of the Bible as confessed in the Thirty-Nine, living inclined to and suffused by the glory of God. Intentionally, patterns of deference to the Articles of Religion held the colonists’ loyalty. Then, gradually, in passages of time, disarming changes took hold and confessional insensitivity crept in. “Leadership by the learned and dutiful subordination of the unlearned—as long as the original religious creed retained its hold upon the people these exhortations were heeded; in the eighteenth century, as it ceased to arouse their loyalties, they went seeking after gods that were utterly strange to Puritanism. They demanded fervent rather than learned ministers and asserted the equality of all men.”84 Numbing combinations of Arminianism swept more and more away. Contrary, then, to the Thirty-Nine patterns for tomorrow and in search for egalitarianism, they violated and downgraded scriptural givens as Eph 4:11–14, the commissioning of Christ Jesus’s office bearers from and in the Church, which many ill-trained ministers among the Puritans abused with high-profile elitism, another sinister air of covetousness.
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Over time, erosion of faithfulness settled in and commandeered an appeasing influence. Easier unobservable pangs of reprobation than bolder steps of growing community on the foundation of the Scriptures as confessed in the Articles of Religion. Thus these British colonists, Anglican/Episcopalian and Puritan alike, generally emulated diverse Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch explorers, dreaming of wealth as they peopled as well as mapped first all of Virginia and New England. Love-of-money soon betrayed confessional integrity.
2–2
In 1648, upon the Westminster Assembly, many Puritans adopted the Cambridge Platform, thereby essentially turning into the way of Presbyterianism, or Congregationalism.
With Puritan adoption of the Westminster Standards, in North America the Anglicans/Episcopalians alone carried responsibility for the Thirty-Nine. This North American manifestation of the Church of England, Episcopalianism, suffered constant decline, eventually soft-pedaling the Articles of Religion, the more as congregations succumbed to middle-class slackness in wealthier sorts of cultures.
The Canadian Descent
In Canada, during the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, valuation of the Thirty-Nine underwent constant deterioration, compromising the original impact of this confession of faith. Specifically, as interpreted in the late twentieth century, “During the reign of Edward VI, a number of Articles were published to define the position of the Church of England on a number of issues, to attempt to define a middle way between the old Catholic ways and the new Calvinist reforms. In all 42 Articles were proposed in 1552. These were not accepted but, in 1559, during the reign of Elizabeth, the Thirty-Nine Articles were adopted as a balanced statement of the Anglican positions on certain disputed topics . . .. They are not a formal and full statement of doctrine but rather attempt to deal with certain controversies of the 16th century. The articles try to avoid a narrow definition and leave room for a variety of interpretation . . . an important principle of Anglican theology.”85 This pushing into the twenty-first century revaluation of the Thirty-Nine for a now characteristic middle-of-the-road Anglican movement, even an agnostic spirit, tells of the current worth the Articles possess, at best a token presence. Even though the Thirty-Nine portray a rounded confessional statement, they were for the road ahead revised in quality and diverted into historical mists. Now, “The Anglican Church is not a ‘confessional’ church, a church which subscribes to a particular set of beliefs written down in a confessional statement.”86 Rather than a written-out list of beliefs, Canadian Anglicans tend to take pride in theological pluralism with its contempt of Scriptures.
The American Descent
In America, prevailing wind currents of unbelief urging to change direction dramatically further demolished Episcopalian confessional integrity. “So believers . . . are forced to face the fact that today all Bibles, creeds, doctrines, prayers, and hymns are nothing but religious artifacts created to allow us to speak of our God experience at an earlier point in our history. But history has moved us to a place where the literal content of these artifacts is all but meaningless, the traditional definitions inoperative, and the symbols no longer competent points to reality.”87 This revolutionary contempt gutting all creeds, inclusive the Thirty-Nine, opened up Episcopalians for anti-biblical, man-centered days after tomorrow. “So being a disciple of Jesus does not require me to make literal creedal affirmations in propositional form about the reality of this theistic God who supposedly invaded our world and who lived among us for a time in the person of Jesus.”88 South, then, of the 49th Parallel and the Great Lakes, Episcopalians arrived at confessional devaluation as the right thing to do—less than even the Apostles Creed.
Across North America, however religious Anglicanism/Episcopalianism may be, neglect, if not rejection,