Dr. Peter Toon on being evangelical and catholic

Today I was reading in Peter Toon’s excellent book The Anglican Way: Evangelical and Catholic, and this passage really had a great point about being both evangelical and catholic:

It is possible to be evangelical and effectively to disown Christ.  It is possible to be catholic-minded and effectively to betray Christ.  This is possible, and this in fact happens, because either a system of doctrines or a system of ritual becomes primary in Christian experience.  Even as Marxists are committed to an ideology, so religious people may be committed to an ideology – a system of beliefs – in such a way that this system is their basic interest and primary commitment.  The personal relationship to Jesus Christ is thereby eclipsed or made ineffectual.  Much the same applies to an excessive commitment to ritualism and ceremonial.  Here persons are so involved with the apparatus, structure, and functioning of things that they miss the divine Reality behind the appearances.  There is little possibility, therefore, for a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ because a false barrier exists to prevent such a relationship.

To say this is not to say that commitment to the Gospel and commitment to Catholicity are wrong.  It is to say, rather, that both only take on their true meaning and function when they are in the right relationship to Jesus Christ; or, put another way, when the Christian, who is in a right relationship to Jesus Christ, knows how each of them should function in his experience and faith.  There must always be the primacy of Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Without him there is no Gospel and without him there is no Catholicity.  The Gospel exists and is proclaimed because he not only rose from the dead but ascended into heaven to sit at the Father’s right hand, from where he sent the Holy Spirit to be his representative on earth.  He is the Lord of the Church; it is he who not only guides and rules the Church but who also gives the Church spiritual life.  He is the One who provides the gifts of the Spirit to all believers, according to the wisdom of God.  He is the One who is present at, and in, every sacrament.  It is Christ who presides at the Holy Communion and gives the food of his own crucified and now glorified body; it is Christ who acts in every baptismal service giving his Spirit to the one who is baptized and making that person a member of his spiritual body, the Church…

On the one side, Jesus Christ is seen as tremendously active in the creation of the Gospel and the foundation of the Church; yet he is dismissed as basically ‘inactive’ throughout the centuries until the birth of Protestantism in the sixteenth century (or even to the birth of modern denominations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  On the other side, Christ is seen as active throughout history guiding the Church from the first through to the present century, but he is not wholly recognized as the One who created the Gospel and is ever concerned to renew the Church by the Gospel.  These two sides are the two extremes of the pendulum and in what they positively affirm they are right.  Of course Christ created the Gospel: of course Christ ruled and rules the Church.  What we do not want is merely one swing of the pendulum in one direction or the other.  We want the whole movement of the pendulum swinging in both directions and covering all space between each extreme; we want to be committed to the Evangel and to Catholicity.  We want the Christ who created the Gospel as well as the same Christ who has ruled and rules the Church today.

And Dr. Toon was entirely right about this.  He also saw the Anglican faith as being uniquely able to be both of these things, evangelical and catholic.  I commend his book to you if you are interested in such a vision.