Reception of Grace via William Laud
In recent days the liturgical calendar has commemorated William Laud (1573–1645), who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by King Charles I in 1633. Caught up in the tumultuous circumstance of the English Civil war he remained in office until executed in 1645. It was the Long Parliament of 1640 that first accused him of treason and, the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, (which comprised a list of grievances presented to King Charles I of England by the English Parliament on 1 December 1641 and was a key prelude to the civil war itself) called for his imprisonment. Laud remained imprisoned in the Tower of London throughout the early stages of the English Civil War. After an abortive initial trial in the spring of 1644 collapsed for the want of evidence of any specific treasonable action, Parliament took up the issue directly and eventually passed a bill of attainder, under which Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill on 10 January 1645, a fate later shared by his patron King Charles himself in January 1649.
Laud represents a figure of great importance for the shape of Anglicanism and of the high church tradition in particular. He achieved this influence not merely through his actions in office, (many of which were highly controversial at the time) but through the legacy of his thought and writings of which in the collected edition run to seven volumes, as eventually published between 1847 and 1860 in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology.
As so often with notable Anglican divines, his theology defies simple categorization. He upheld both the formal Protestant credentials of the Church of England, as by law established, yet articulated a vision of faith, sacrament, and ecclesiastical order that was significantly different from the Reformed theology that had dominated the earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean establishments.
He was firmly opposed to aspects of Calvinist soteriology and held a notably high view of episcopal authority as divinely ordained and fundamental to the Church as a liturgically unified body existing through time as visible reality ministering the Word and sacraments as instituted by Christ himself. Taken together, there was a powerful internal logic uniting his theological views on ecclesiology and grace, ministry and worship.
He firmly rejected the Calvinist doctrine on the nature of salvation, wherein God before the foundation of the world was held to have immutably predetermined the salvation of the elect and the reprobation of those not elect. This theology as encoded in the Lambeth Articles of 1595, would, he felt, have left God as “the most unreasonable tyrant in the world” and would also have fatally undermined human moral accountability and deprived the sacraments and clerical ministry of the church of all efficacy too.
His reorientation of the doctrine of the English Church led to his being labelled “Arminian”— even though he himself resisted the label and saw his views as merely recovering the authentic tradition of the ancient Church and a reassertion of theological principles implicit in the Thirty-Nine Articles themselves –– when properly interpreted.
Laud saw that understanding the human will as ultimately possessed of the capacity to be free, as non-illusory and a presupposition central to making possible the movement of our will to cooperate with the divine grace, which accomplishes the actualization of salvation. God provides prevenient grace — which is to say the grace that precedes and enables the human will’s assent — but this grace does not compel; rather, it invites and enables our positive response. The human agent, thus empowered by God’s preceding grace, can freely choose to receive that grace, to embrace the sacraments, and to persevere in the Christian life which is the life long work of sanctification.
Laud rejected thus the idea of sacramental participation as comprising merely the external sign of an already-determined internal election; to him, this would have reduced the sacraments to mere theatrical and performative accompaniments to an immutable decree. For Laud, the sacraments are genuine instruments through which grace is conveyed and appropriated — with an efficacy independent of the worthiness of the minister or the recipient but always open to our rejection. The sacraments are possessed of intrinsic power as divinely instituted means of grace but that power is not “invincible,” as Calvinists maintained, in order that our free will be real.
It was in the light of this understanding of salvation as mediated through sacramental channels and thus involving participation in the Church’s liturgical and sacramental life, that the ordained ministry, which presides over and administers the sacraments, acquired for Laud theological weight and becomes essential to the Church’s very identity and function.
Laud’s understanding of the Eucharist again exemplifies an Anglican distinctiveness, with its integration of his anti-Calvinist soteriology with a recovered Catholic ecclesiology.
Laud clearly rejected the memorialism of the Reformed tradition — wherein the sacrament functioned primarily as a commemorative sign pointing backward to Christ’s completed sacrifice on Calvary — yet he also rejected the requirement to believe in the specific theory of transubstantiation. That particular way of trying to explain the high catholic doctrine –– that the bread and wine undergo metaphysical conversion into the body and blood of Christ while retaining only the accidents of bread and wine –– he rejected as too metaphysically extravagant to be made of obligation.
And once again, Laud’s own position articulated a distinctive synthesis. In Laud’s understanding, Christ is truly and substantially present in the Eucharist after consecration, which is to say present in a manner both real and mysterious, spiritual and objective. This therefore does mean that we are in a position to affirm this reality as true but there is nonetheless a degree of intellectual humility here for we are not fully able to understand in this life what it means for this to be true –– in terms of an explanation we can demonstratively set out. In Laud’s own words, Christ is present “really, substantially, and truly, after an incomprehensible way of being, and not after a corporal or bodily manner of existence.”
All of which means that, while the mode of presence remains ultimately beyond human conceptual apparatus fully to explicate, its objective reality is nonetheless a fact to be accepted beyond question. This presence is moreover not dependent upon the faith or mental dispositions of the communicant; rather, it inheres in the sacrament, and thus in the consecrated elements, by virtue of the priest’s valid pronouncement of the words of institution. God has ordained this means of grace; and the sacrament’s efficacy does not depend upon the inner conviction or spiritual state of those who approach it. This understanding unites us with the genuinely sacrificial character of the Eucharist — not as a repetition of Christ’s unique and completed sacrifice on Calvary, but as its sacramental re-presentation, making present and applying the benefits of that once-for-all oblation.
Laud saw here too that the priest-celebrant was not merely a presbyter who happened to oversee congregational prayer; but was rather a sacrificial minister, whose ordained hands and consecrating words effect the mystery. The priest thus stands in the unity with Christ in this act.
The physical positioning of the altar, its separation from the nave by rails, the vestments worn by the celebrant, and the orientation of the priest’s body during the liturgy — all of these became theologically significant rather than liturgically indifferent.
Moreover the objective presence of Christ in the sacrament warranted in Laud’s view devotional practices that Reformed Protestants rejected: such as bowing before the consecrated elements, kneeling at the altar rail to receive communion, and the physical reverence shown to the place and time of sacramental celebration. Such gestures are in no sense concessions to “superstition” but are instead fitting responses to the mystery of the real presence of the Son of God.
A characteristic liturgical and ceremonial emphases immediately follows as highly appropriate. This all then reflects what in more modern terms we would call a distinctive theological anthropology that integrated the sensible and the spiritual, the material and the immaterial, the body and the interior life.
Laud and the Caroline Divines spoke of the “beauty of holiness”— a phrase drawn from the Psalte — by way of expressing their conviction that authentic worship addresses not merely the intellect or the inner heart and emotions but the whole person, body, mind and soul united.
Where Puritan theology tended to subordinate the sensible and ceremonial dimensions of worship to the dry preached Word and internal persuasion of the Spirit, Laud insisted that the body with all its senses should participate in the reception of grace.
From this in turn followed the characteristic Laudian emphasis on the physical restoration and adornment of churches, goals that were not merely aesthetic preferences, but visible expressions of the conviction that churches are sanctified space, set apart for God’s dwelling and worthy of costly and beautiful adornment as part of our worship in all its fulness. The ceremonial movements and gestures then prescribed by the prayer book — the bowing at the name of Jesus, the kneeling for communion, the priest’s eastward orientation at the altar — were not mere outward forms that might be dispensed with in seasons of reform. They were spiritually powerful actions expressive of the soul’s posture before God that also inculcated habits of reverence and awe. The music in church became also far more than mere decoration and was in fact yet another mode of theological instruction as well as of worship. Taken together all these means were understood as designed to lead the soul toward the mysteries enacted –– and the work of salvation accomplished for us in Christ. In this expansive understanding, emotion, imagination, and intellect all participate in the apprehension of truth and the reception of grace.
It is this rich understanding of our Anglican faith and worship that is our heritage in the Parish of the Advent and which it is our calling and privilege to renew and advance.