Lewis Anglicanism

Over on the Crunchy Con site I came across a thread discussing "Lewis Episcopalians" - "people from an evangelical background, their faith much enriched by the writings of C. S. Lewis, [who] went into the Episcopal Church".

It's an excellent term. Lewis' generous orthodoxy, his love and reverence for Scripture without subscribing to rationalist concepts of inerrancy, his impatience with those concerned with whether the person in the next pew crossed themselves or did not cross themselves, his immersion in the riches of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and his commitment to engaging the culture with the Gospel: here is a model for a generous but robust Anglicanism.

As to what such a generous but robust Anglicanism might look like with regards to the contemporary controversies surrounding human sexuality, Radical Orthodoxy's leading voice - John Milbank - perhaps gives us a clue in his comments on Oliver O'Donovan's recent A Conversation Waiting to Begin:

"[O'Donovan] hints that [a consensus] might well be at once more conservative and yet more radical than the political moralising and prudishness of theological liberals might desire. Yet, if campaigning for 'gay rights' is dismissed as inappropriate and premature, the schismatic reaction of certain evangelicals is roundly condemned. Indeed, O'Donovan has has here achieved nothing less than an indication of just how Anglicanism can in the future reconstruct itself through a recovery of a Hooker-like sense of Episcopalian catholicity, and the patristic integration of Platonic wisdom with biblical revelation, on the part of more discerning evangelicals like himself".

Lewis, O'Donovan, Hooker. They offer the vision of an Anglicanism that is not defined by its travails and frustrations, nor by the politicised and narrow agendas of radical left or radical right, but rather by a generous, engaging orthodoxy - a vision rooted in Trinity and Incarnation, baptism and eucharist, and the ordered reading of Scripture.