Introducing Browne’s Exposition of the 39 Articles
Anglican Compass is proud to announce the republication of 19th-century bishop E. Harold Browne’s An Exposition of the 39 Articles: Volume One, the first of four volumes, now available on Kindle and in hardcover on Amazon. Complete with gently updated prose and featuring helpful commentary by James Clark, this new edition resurrects one of the most insightful and helpful guides through the scriptural and historical support for Anglican doctrine.
Why Browne’s Exposition Still Matters
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion lie at the heart of Anglicanism, alongside the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies. As Fr. Chris Findley has observed, Anglicans should make them “our first stop for understanding Anglican theology and doctrine.” Yet the Articles still require careful interpretation. Article III, for instance, teaches that Christ “went down into Hell,” a statement that immediately raises questions: what does “Hell” mean here, what did Christ do there, and why did he go there at all? Most people today would probably assume it refers to the place of torment where departed souls who are not in Christ go after death, but did the framers of the Article mean this by the term? When exploring questions like this, Bishop Edward Harold Browne’s An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Historical and Doctrinal, written in the mid-19th century, has long stood as one of the most trusted guides.
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Who Was E. Harold Browne?
For centuries, Anglican ministers and scholars have written commentaries on the Articles to answer questions like these. Anglican Compass lists several of these works on its Thirty-Nine Articles page, but Browne’s commentary deserves special attention. Browne was born on March 6, 1811, in Buckinghamshire, England. He graduated from Cambridge University with a B.A. in 1832 and was ordained a priest in 1837.
Browne later served as Bishop of Ely and then Bishop of Winchester, though he published his two-volume commentary on the Articles much earlier, between 1850 and 1853.
Continuity with the Early Church
To reiterate, many commentaries on the Articles have been written over the years, but Browne’s work stands out in at least two respects. First, he devotes much of his exposition to showing how we can trace the doctrinal positions expressed in the Articles to the Early Church Fathers. This is significant because at the time of the English Reformation, the Church of England was at pains to argue that in breaking from Rome, they were not heretics and turncoats from the Faith—quite the contrary, they maintained that they were returning to the uncorrupted Faith of the early church, and the English Reformers sought to prove this by appealing to the church fathers. In the same spirit, Browne then quotes copiously from the fathers to demonstrate the doctrinal continuity between them and the Church of England.
Scriptural and Catholic Interpretation
Second, in commenting on the Articles, Browne seeks to prove that their meaning is, to quote the man himself, “both Scriptural and Catholic.” This approach strikes an interpretive balance between the tendency to elevate tradition at the expense of fidelity to the Bible and the tendency to embrace a biblicist hermeneutic without regard for tradition. Browne’s treatment of the sacraments in Article XXV illustrates this interpretive balance in action. An overly restrictive reading of this Article could lead one to conclude that only baptism and the Eucharist can be called sacraments in any sense, with rites such as confirmation, matrimony, and so on lacking sacramental character altogether.
Browne, for his part, recognizes that the five “commonly called Sacraments” are not on the same level as baptism and the Eucharist, yet he simultaneously holds that most of them are “in some sense Sacraments.” This moderate position upholds the biblical truth that Baptism and Eucharist enjoy a special status because Christ instituted them directly, while acknowledging the importance of the other five rites in the historic Christian faith and practice. Thus, by expositing them as “both Scriptural and Catholic,” Browne unfolds the Articles as doctrinally fitting for a church that has historically identified itself as Reformed and Catholic.
A New Edition for Today
Browne’s commentary therefore remains an informative and insightful guide to the Articles more than 150 years after he wrote it, and it can still benefit Anglicans just as much as it did when he originally published it. For this reason, Anglican Compass is currently republishing Browne’s Exposition in a new four-volume edition, with Vol. 1 available now. This new edition includes a few changes to improve readability, such as translations of Browne’s Greek and Latin citations, updated archaic spellings, and other minor alterations. Additionally, I include brief comments on Browne’s text with an eye toward contextualizing the Exposition in light of present-day concerns, elaborating on certain points, and supplementing parts of Browne’s account in light of modern developments.
A Hope for Theological Retrieval
George Kitchin, Browne’s biographer, predicted that the Exposition might one day play a role in Anglican theological retrieval, writing that it “will surely have a fresh time of favor; and people will see in the learning, the charitable spirit, and moderation of it, a true picture of the position occupied by the English Church.” I pray that this is the time now, and that you who read my words might find your interest piqued in this great work on the Articles of Religion.
Image: Public-domain photographs of E. Harold Browne and the Winchester Cathedral interior, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Digital editing by Jacob Davis.
Praise for Browne’s Exposition of the 39 Articles: Volume One
This new edition features helpful commentary on each of Browne’s expositions… It is already getting notable praise from Anglican leaders.
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion As established by the Bishops, the Clergy, and the Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, in Convention, on the twelfth day of September, in the Year of our Lord, 1801. I. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity. There is but one living and true…
