What is the Anglican Way in Lent?
Something we may tend to overlook is the fact that Anglicans have always observed Lent. This is interesting because, amidst the turmoil of the Reformation, there were many of the extreme Protestant persuasion who felt that such observances smacked of “works righteousness” and ought therefore be abandoned. Yet Anglicans have not done this, and we have faithfully kept Lent in the calendar. We do nonetheless bring a distinctive approach: this sees penitential practice as entirely consistent with the New Testament understanding of grace. Sorrow and penitence may not “save” us, but they are entirely appropriate responses to the hard facts of our sinful condition and they open the way to the process of sanctification to which we are called by our faith, in the justification made available to us all, through the unique and all-sufficient sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
As the Exhortation – which we heard on Ash Wednesday – reminds us, Lent is a Season with many layers. From the earliest times, it functioned as a time of intensive preparation for baptism and reception into the church as the culmination of the catechumenate. It functions too as a season for the reconciliation of public penitents, whose readmission to communion at Easter was an historically highly visible expression of the Church’s constant ministry of reconciliation and forgiveness. In addition, it serves for all of us as a universal season of fasting, abstinence, and special devotions (such as observing the Stations of the Cross) by means of which we can better prepare ourselves spiritually for renewal to come in the joys of Easter.
Thus, the Lenten season ultimately belongs to the mutable, ecclesiastically‑ordered sphere of church life. This reflects the fact that the imposition of ashes, fasting, and additional devotions do not bring about our salvation, but they are nonetheless edifying and improving ascetical practices.
“I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self‑examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self‑denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.”
These words express concisely a very Anglican synthesis wherein Lent is a corporate invitation, rooted in the Church’s memory of and witness to Christ’s passion and resurrection. It is thus a season so ordered as to effect renewed repentance and faith, structured by the triad of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, while further enjoining particular attention to Scripture and the Daily Office.
Sixteenth‑century English reformers were wary of any suggestion that Lenten fasting could “make” the believer more acceptable to God. Their concern paralleled that of Lutheran and Reformed contemporaries for whom external works must not be confused with the justifying work of Christ apprehended by faith. Nonetheless, Anglicans went on observing Lent while seeking to integrate its ascetic discipline with corporate worship as well as the wider processes of baptismal preparation and ecclesial reconciliation and reception.
This continued Anglican practice was rooted in that of the broader Western church, wherein by the fourth century, the Council of Nicaea (325) had referred to a forty‑day period (tessarakonta) of preparation for Easter, marking the first conciliar mention of a forty‑day Lent. Patristic sources such as Athanasius and others speak of a forty‑day fast, explicitly patterned on Christ’s fasting in the wilderness and on biblical typologies of forty days (as we see in the case of Moses and Elijah).
Anglicanism has, thus, characteristically received this heritage but read it in the light of the reformation emphasis upon justification by faith and the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement.
The Homily “Of Good Works: And First, of Fasting” (authorised in the Books of Homilies and thereby given quasi‑confessional status) is highly illustrative of the Anglican approach. On the one hand, it is quite rigorous and insists that biblical fasting entails a whole‑day abstention and has a genuinely ascetical role, yet it also holds that as a merely human ordinance, fasting cannot bind the conscience or justify before God. In its second part, it argues that humanly‑devised ecclesiastical rules about fasting are in themselves adiaphora—“things indifferent”—and may be altered by lawful authority. This reminds us that what matters are the spiritual fruits of fasting, not the mere fasting of itself, and legalistic interpretations, and derived debates, about what is involved therefore miss the point.
As Article 34 “Of the Traditions of the Church,” reminds us, traditions and ceremonies “have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word.” It rebukes those who, by private judgement, openly break lawful ceremonies that are not repugnant to Scripture, but simultaneously insists that the church may “ordain, change, and abolish” such rites as our spiritual benefit may require.
When we turn to Cranmer, we find, in his Lenten collects, his distilled theology of asceticism. Hence, the collect for the First Sunday in Lent prays:
“O Lord, which for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights; Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness, and true holiness, to thy honour and glory…”
Here fasting is neither dismissed nor “absolutized.” It is a subordinate means of spiritual training and preparation through which “our flesh [is] subdued to the Spirit.” This neatly echoes the Pauline themes from Romans 8 and Galatians 5. Fasting is “training in righteousness,” but not righteousness itself. It is valuable because it assists us in rendering obedience to the Spirit’s “godly motions,” yet it is limited too because it cannot in itself confer grace or merit.
What distinguishes the Anglican approach is what might be called one of ceremonial flexibility but doctrinal stability. Lent, for Anglicans, is not therefore reducible to any particular and distinctive observance – for we are each enjoined to that which can bear within us the greatest spiritual fruit; rather, it is defined by theological posture, through penitence without Pelagianism, asceticism without legalism, discipline without rigidity, and communal practice without erasing individual conscience. For Anglicans, it has been well said that Lent “remains an annual schooling in the grammar of grace—a time when the church learns again to tell the truth about sin and death under the sign of the cross, in order to enter more fully into the joy of the resurrection.”