Footnote #16
Critique of a conservative counter-proposal
Canon Gore has recently been urging---at the Shrewsbury Church Congress and elsewhere---that there should be no vague ``understandings'' as to the sense in which the Church's formulæ are accepted. Yet he proposes that (1) the Canticles should be dropped; (2) the Athanasian Creed treated frankly as a canticle, while acceptance of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds should be rigidly enforced without any ``understandings'', and apparently without any latitude of interpretation whatever. I can only describe this suggestion as a proposal to abolish the existing Church of England and to erect another with such a doctrine as is personally acceptable to Canon Gore. (He has not told us what is to become of the profession of belief in Scripture in the Ordinal.) Canon Gore is perfectly entitled to urge such a project; but until it is successful he cannot blame the conduct of those who do not draw the limit of permissible latitude at exactly the same point at which be does himself. We belong to the Church of England as it is, not to the Church of England as Canon Gore thinks it ought to be. The principle upon which the two early Creeds are treated as more important or more binding than the Athanasian Creed, the Articles, and the Ordinal is intelligible enough, but it is a principle nowhere officially recognized by the existing Church of England or the existing test of uniformity. Canon Gore holds the Athanasian Creed to be a Canticle; the Church of England holds it to be a Creed. Canon Gore thinks that it possesses less authority than the other two. The Church of England holds that all three alike ``ought thoroughly to be received and believed''.
Those who, however strongly they are attached to the general view of Christ's person and work expressed in the Creeds, do not hold that the Fourth-Century expression of this view is necessarily binding on the Church for all time, will be unable to concur in Canon Gore's proposal to install the two Creeds as the sole expression of the Church's doctrine. It is worthy of remark that the original Nicene Creed---as accepted by the Council---contained no allusion to the Virgin birth. The time may come when a proposal to go back to the original Creed of Nicæa may get a hearing.