“You’re making that up,” I said. No, my wife responded, “I do know a family who changed churches primarily because of pew cushions.” When I was in graduate school, around the same time Covenant was founded in 2007, I was training primarily in medieval and Reformation-era church history, and I adopted a particular model for understanding the religious cultures of the past. That model has also served me equally well in navigating the complexities of contemporary religious life. As I come to this new role as editor of Covenant, an online journal in sight of its 20th anniversary and with an expanding audience, I think this model will likely inform how I serve as editor and caretaker of its stories.
The historiography of Reformation-era England, that is, the reflection on how we tell the story (or, better, stories), is a field in itself. This is not merely because of some narcissism or insularism (yes, that’s a pun) among those who work in that particular subfield, but rather because suspicions have reigned for centuries about the motives and methods, often driven by calcified church party commitments, of the writers. These suspicions became so pronounced that some scholars grew doubtful that anyone who is an Anglican could possibly do sober work on the subject. I vividly recall having a cup of coffee in the café at the National Archives in Kew, outside of London, 15 years ago with a leading scholar whom I still tremendously respect. We were discussing an important monograph and he whispered to me, “I’m not sure I would trust her. She’s an Anglican.” He didn’t know that I was likewise an Anglican and pursuing ordination.
While I have no intention of reviewing in this space how historians of the period in the early 20th century adapted the Annales School and started digging in archives or offering a rundown of the major voices of revisionism and post-revisionism, I want to bring to the fore a simple term coined by the historian Ethan Shagan at the turn of this century: spiritual amphibians. Eamon Duffy’s monumental The Stripping of the Altars (1992) marked a major turning point in how we tell the story of Reformation-era England. Looking to real village life rather than big documents like royal decrees or even official prayer books, Duffy’s work appeared to overturn the lingering Protestant triumphalism of A.G. Dickens. Duffy gave us Catholics who had to deal with a series of Tudor regimes forcing them to be Protestants. But, as many have since recognized, there was a gap in Duffy’s story: the monasteries. What does one make of these devout people who loved the saints and the Mass, who had little interest in Protestant preaching, rising to loot the monasteries? Knee-jerk Marxism won’t solve the question either; these people were believers. They were, to use Shagan’s term, spiritual amphibians, people who were complex and who held a variety of commitments and lived in a messy world.
In short, people are complicated. I’ve written previously for Covenant about the importance of listening to converts and not pigeonholing them. Not all evangelicals who become Anglicans, for example, are “ex-vangelicals,” people who love the Bible but who have adopted a more progressive moral theology. But neither are they all “Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail,” people who are still theologically conservative but who now desire the sacraments and maybe a few references to Augustine in the sermon. No, everyone has a story. People migrate and commit themselves and their families to church bodies for all manner of reasons, some rather imaginary. I know one former Roman Catholic who became an Episcopalian in his mind before he ever set foot in an Episcopal parish church, largely by reading select things on the internet and envisioning the kind of church he’d like. A little of X. A little of Y. A dash of this. A pinch of that. In reality, I fear, it only existed in his mind. But am I any different? Real flesh-and-blood relationships make things harder and yet more lively.
Again, people are complicated, and they have a story. Their motives jostle against one another in their hearts, their minds, and their relationships. But this in no way makes their experiences less interesting, less able to generate a conversation, elicit questions, and perhaps shed light on our common hunger for the peace of Jesus Christ in his body the church. As I take on this work of caretaking and curating the stories of spiritual amphibians, I can’t help but recall that the sixteenth-century Zurich publisher, Christoph Froschauer, a man who also cared for the ideas and stories of others, used the image of a frog as his printer’s mark, a play on his name “frog meadow.” While I’ve always been fond of owls as a totem, perhaps the amphibious frog is better.
I have clear theological convictions, which I hope I hold charitably, and likewise this online journal was formed and perdures with some clear theological and ecclesiological commitments. Our leadership is not hiding any of that. I have no desire to descend into a morass of uncertainty. But nuance and complexity, guarded by a spirit of charity, are not to be feared. My hope, as editor, is that we foster conversations, and in so doing see more clearly and grasp more firmly the hope of the New Jerusalem, the cross of Christ and his empty tomb — a hope for me and for you, dear reader. I hope you will return to this space often to be challenged and encouraged, to think carefully, sometimes to laugh or maybe even grumble a bit. But I hope you will find your mind and heart kindled by what you read here, by the arguments, the reflections, and the stories.
