Unfortunately, Anglo-Protestants such as the UECNA's Presiding Bishop Peter Robinson have impaled themselves on the horns of a dilemma. As I responded on Bishop Robinson's Facebook page tonight, any Anglo-Protestant worth his salt must hold true to the Reformation's positions on the fallibility of ALL creeds and confessions (and in the strange case of the Church of England, a collection of homilies), as well as the principle that the church is ever-reforming. IF it is the case that the 39 Articles is a fallible confession, and IF it can be shown that they have actually or even possibly missed the biblical mark somewhere, then "semper reformanda" kicks in. It is then the duty of Anglo-Protestants to either correct the error or to simply admit, in accordance with the Protestant view of creeds and confessions, that the Articles are in fact fallible, have erred, and that certain other possibilities follow regarding the Anglican view of authority.
The change of language in the form of subscription was deliberate. We are asked to affirm today, not that the Articles are all agreeable to the Word of God, but that the doctrine of the Church of England as set forth in the Articles is agreeable to the Word of God. That is, we are not called to assent to every phrase or detail of the Articles but only to their general sense. This alteration was made of set purpose to afford relief to scrupulous consciences. (E.J. Bicknell, A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles of of the Church of England, pp. 20-21.)
By "scrupulous consciences" Bicknell is surely referring to those Anglican academics and clergy, who, after a couple of hundred years of scholarly analysis and reflection, and on a biblical and catholic basis, have found certain of the Articles and Homilies defective at points. Alister McGrath provides a sterling example here. In the 17th century, a number of scholars in the Church of England had become uneasy with the solafidianism of the Edwardine and Elizabethan divines. This slow but steady shift away from it began with Caroline divinity:
"With the exception of their Arminianism, the Westminster Assembly confirmed the chief features of the early Caroline doctrine of justification:
1) Justification and sanctification are distinguished.
2) The formal cause of justification is declared to be imputed righteousness.
However, perhaps as a reaction against the theology of the Westminster divines, the divines of the Restoration developed a very different doctrine of justification, as will become apparent.
The doctrines of justification which emerged in the writings of the Caroline divines in the period after the Restoration of the monarchy (1660) may be characterized as follows:
1) The teachings of Paul and James are harmonized, so that both faith and works are held to be necessary for justification. This position frequently involved the assumption that faith was itself a work.
2) Justification and sanctification are no longer distinguished, so that justification is understood as a process which includes the sanctification of the believer.
3) The formal cause of justification is stated to be either infused righteousness alone, or both infused and imputed righteousness- but not imputed righteousness alone.
4) As before, an Arminian doctrine of the universal redemption of
mankind in Christ is taught.”
However, it must be pointed out that these opinions can be shown to be in circulation prior to the Civil War. Thus the Considerationes of William Forbes, the first Bishop of Edinburgh, can be shown to contain elements of this doctrine of justification. Although written before 1634, these Considerationes were only published after their author's death, and it cannot be proved that the Restoration divines drew upon this work (which appeared in 1658) for their own teaching. Of this school, the most important are Henry Hammond (1605-60), George Bull (1634-1710) and Jeremy Taylor (1613 - 67). . . .
The pre-Commonwealth divines followed Richard Hooker, insisting that justifying righteousness was imputed to man, that faith was not a work, and that justification was to be considered distinct from sanctification. The post-Commonwealth divines taught, in general, that justifying righteousness was either inherent to man, or a combination of inherent and imputed righteousness; that man was justified on account of 'believing deeds'-i.e., that faith was a human work and that sanctification was essentially an aspect of justification. The intervention of the Commonwealth between these two schools of thought suggests that the new directions taken within Anglicanism relating to the doctrine of justification arose as a reaction against the teaching of the Westminster Divines, whose theology of justification was similar, in many respects, to that of the pre-Commonwealth divines. . . .
What, then, remains of the via media? The possibility of a coherent Anglican theology of justification as a tertium quid is no longer taken seriously. In practice, it may be regarded as near-certain that Anglican theologians will continue to embrace a spectrum of theologies of justification, as they have in the past. Those with evangelical persuasions will continue to hold doctrines of justification which are essentially Protestant in substance and emphasis, while those who are Anglo-Catholic will continue to hold doctrines which are closer to the teaching of Trent. The Anglican Church, therefore, by its very nature, may be said to possess a via media doctrine of justification. This does not, however, mean that Anglicans are agreed upon a single doctrine of justification which mediates between Protestant and Roman Catholic, but rather that the tensions which are everywhere evident between the Protestant and Catholic wings of the Church of England inevitably lead to a spectrum of theologies of justification within one church.
Regarding the Homilies, Browne avers:
All writers on the subject have agreed, that the kind of assent, which we are here called on to give to them, is general, not specific. We are not expected to express full concurrence with every statement, or every exposition of Holy Scripture contained in them, but merely in the general to approve of them, as a body of sound and orthodox discourses, and well adapted for the time for which they were composed. For instance we cannot be required to call the Apocrypha by the name of Holy Scripture, or to quote it as of Divine authority, because we find it so in the Homilies. We cannot be expected to think it a very cogent argument for the duty of fasting, that thereby we may encourage the fisheries and strengthen the seaport towns against foreign invasion. And perhaps we may agree with Dr. Hey, rather than with Bp. Burnet, and hold, that a person may fairly consider the Homilies to be a sound collection of religious instruction, who might yet shirk from calling the Roman Catholics idolaters. The Homilies are, in fact, semi-authoritative documents. . . .
The foregoing should serve as ample witness that a number of standard divines and many other Anglicans find Article 11 and some of the Homilies "incomplete", and yet it is only the die-hard Evangelicals who have suggested that those "scrupulous" folk should leave Anglicanism. Sorry, but we're having none of it. As I wrote here, "The term 'Anglican' didn't come into usage until about 1800, long after Edwardine divinity was left in the dust and only 30 years before the Oxford Movement." The "Anglicanism-As-Established" crowd therefore has no exclusive claim on term "Anglican". Quite the opposite is true.