When the System Must Be Defended: Anglicanism, Certainty, and the Loss of the Via Media

By David Straw

Special to Virtueonline

www.virtueonline.org

August 3, 2026

This is the third piece in a series. In A Palace Built on a Slope I described a closed theological system that many Roman Catholic apologists have constructed. I called it the Mind Palace. In The Unfalsifiable Church I tested that system against history and watched it absorb every objection I raised. This essay asks a different question.

Why do systems become closed in the first place?

I do not think they usually begin that way. More often they are the corruption of something that was once open.

What an Open System Looks Like

Classical Anglicanism makes a claim that sounds modest but is anything but.

Holy Scripture is the final authority because it contains all things necessary to salvation. In the language the Reformers used, Scripture is the norma normans, the norming norm. It judges everything else and is itself judged by nothing.

The Fathers and the ancient Church are a norma normata, a normed norm. Their authority is real but derivative. They carry weight because they bear faithful witness to Scripture, not because they stand beside it as an equal source.

Scripture’s supremacy does not mean private judgment. Scripture is read within the consensus of the ancient Church, not against it, and not against private opinion, whether that opinion comes from a Roman magisterium or a Reformer’s own conclusions. Where the Fathers agree, that agreement carries real weight. Where a reader, however learned, breaks from that consensus on his own authority, he has not appealed to a higher court. He has simply become his own.

That is the hinge the whole system turns on.

The Church has real authority, but it is ministerial, not magisterial. A ministerial authority serves the Word. It cannot bind the conscience beyond what Scripture warrants, and it cannot declare itself infallible. A magisterial authority claims the opposite power: the right to settle, finally and without appeal, what Scripture means. Rome claims that kind of authority for itself.

Anglicanism, at its best, has refused to claim it, for itself as much as for anyone else. The Anglican Reformers did not throw out the Fathers. They went back to them. Scripture remained the supreme judge, but it was meant to be read alongside the ancient Church, not against private opinion or later invention.

This produces real messiness. An open system is not simply one that tolerates disorder. It takes work to sustain, and the work is spiritual before it is intellectual. It asks for intellectual humility, because we might be wrong. It asks for patience with questions that may never resolve in our lifetime. And it asks us to stay receptive enough that the right answer might come from outside our own tradition or century. These are the virtues that separate an open system from mere untethered vagueness.

Vagueness refuses to commit to anything. Anglican Christianity, as an open system, commits fully to Scripture and stays humble about its own reading of Scripture.

Those look similar from a distance. Up close they are not the same thing at all. The Caroline Divines are a good example of what this looked like in practice. Men like Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor read the Fathers carefully, not to decorate conclusions they had already reached, but as witnesses whose testimony had to be weighed against Scripture and against each other. They disagreed with some of the early Church Fathers when Scripture required it. They disagreed with Rome when Scripture and

the ancient Church did not back Rome’s claims. They disagreed with the Puritans when the ancient Church stood against a narrow biblicism that threw out the Church’s first several centuries. They argued in every direction. That willingness to argue in every direction is what an open system looks like from the inside, and it is not comfortable. It was never supposed to be.

The Fathers did not agree about everything. There was no golden age when every bishop spoke with one voice on every question. Anyone who has read them for long enough knows this.

That disagreement is not proof the system failed. It shows the system was still in contact with reality.

Real wrestling is messy. A system that never produces genuine tension has usually decided its answers in advance.

I lived through what I think of as one of the last stretches when much of the Episcopal Church still assumed that Scripture and the catholic tradition stood above the surrounding culture. Others older than I am remember it even more clearly. They describe a church that was deeply rooted in Scripture and ancient church tradition, intellectually serious, and confident enough to shape the culture instead of being shaped by it.

That confidence did not come from having every question settled. It came from staying answerable to something outside itself.

Why Closed Systems Are Tempting

A system closes when it can no longer stand an authority outside itself. Instead of staying accountable to that authority, it quietly becomes its own referee. Every objection gets processed by the very system under examination, and the system always rules in its own favor.

Why does this happen? Partly because uncertainty is hard to live with. Partly because institutions want stability. Partly because our identities get bound up in systems we have spent our lives defending. The pull is deeply human. We all want a place where the hardest questions finally stop.

Reality, though, has a stubborn habit of refusing to cooperate.

The Mechanism of Closure

It helps to name the mechanism plainly, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

A closed system takes evidence that should count against it and quietly recounts it as

evidence for it. It treats its own internal consistency as if that consistency were proof from

outside, when consistency only shows a system holds together, not that it is true. It puts the interpreter beyond correction, since the interpreter now decides what counts as a valid objection in the first place. And it turns criticism into confirmation. The objection is never actually answered. It gets absorbed and relabeled as more evidence for the very thing it was meant to challenge.

I described one example of this in Roman Catholic apologetics. Newman’s theory of doctrinal development gives the system a remarkably flexible way to absorb historical discontinuities. What looks like contradiction becomes clarification. What looks like innovation becomes the unfolding of something that was supposedly present all along. The system cannot lose, because it has quietly redefined what losing would even look like.

Once that framework is in place, walking a development back becomes extremely difficult. Any proposed reversal must be justified inside the same interpretive authority that certified the earlier movement. Change is continually narrated as deeper fidelity, so the possibility of genuine external correction is structurally limited.

The Assumption of Mary is a clean example of the pattern at work. The teaching appears nowhere in Scripture and shows no clear consensus among the early Fathers. It surfaces centuries later, gains devotional traction, and in 1950 is defined as dogma binding on every Catholic. The warrant offered is not Scripture as final norm and not early consensus. It is fittingness, the judgment that this is what the deposit of faith was always tending toward,

certified by the very authority that alone gets to decide what counts as legitimate development. A late, extra-scriptural teaching becomes irreversible doctrine. Discontinuity is reclassified as continuity. And the system that made the call is the same system no one outside it is permitted to correct.

The same mechanism shows up in very different settings.

Certain forms of critical theory treat disagreement itself as confirmation. An objection stops being evidence against the theory and becomes evidence that the objector has been shaped by the very structures the theory describes.

Freudian orthodoxy often worked the same way. Rejecting the analyst’s interpretation became evidence of psychological resistance, and the resistance confirmed the interpretation.

Conspiracy thinking runs on the identical pattern. No evidence surfacing just proves the cover-up is especially good.

The content is different in each case. The underlying structure is not.

This is not a claim that Roman Catholics are secretly Marxists or that activists are secretly Freudians. Their beliefs share almost nothing. What they share is a self-sealing habit, a system built so that no conceivable evidence is allowed to overturn its central conclusions.

That is what makes a system closed.

Where Anglicanism Has to Answer the Same Question

If I am going to hold Rome to this standard, I have to hold my own tradition to it too. What would actually count as evidence against classical Anglicanism?

The honest answer is: quite a lot. If the ancient Church, read broadly and where the Fathers substantially agree, turned out to teach something Anglicanism denies, that would count against it. If Scripture itself, read plainly, through the lens of the early Fathers, and in its own context, contradicted the Anglican reading, that would count against it too.

Anglicanism does not get to declare its own conclusions unfalsifiable the way a closed system does. It has to keep answering to Scripture and to the ancient Church, and it has to be willing to lose that argument if the evidence runs the other way. That willingness to lose is not a weakness in the system. It is the thing that keeps it honest.

Two Directions, One Flight

I do not think most people set out wanting certainty at any cost. I think they simply grow tired.

Scripture, tradition, and reason do not always fit together neatly. Anglicanism asks us to stay faithful to all three while letting unresolved questions stay unresolved. That is a hard discipline, because it asks for real humility.

Some people eventually tire of the tension. They move toward systems that promise a final answer. Sometimes that means Rome. Sometimes it means one variety of fundamentalism or another. The details differ, but the pull is the same. The wrestling is over. The answers are settled. Certainty has arrived.

I do not think most of these people are dishonest or looking for an easy way out. Most of them are simply tired, and looking for rest. That desire is not itself a sin. But the system they have joined demands constant defense, and defending a system that cannot be questioned will eventually harden even a gentle and sincere person.

Others move the opposite way. Unable to bear the same tension, they replace Scripture and the ancient catholic witness with the surrounding culture. The referee changes. Instead of asking whether the culture conforms to the faith once delivered, the Church starts asking whether the faith conforms to the culture.

That is how churches slowly lose the ability to resist the changing spirit of the age. The Episcopal Church did not abandon historic Christianity overnight. The process was gradual. As the surrounding culture became the practical standard by which Scripture was judged, the Church lost its independent point of reference in Scripture. Once that happened, there was little left to slow the drift.

These two paths look opposite, heading toward Rome on one side and toward the culture on the other. Both still claim, in different ways, to submit to something outside themselves. Rome does not abandon the claim to stand under Scripture and the ancient Church. It relocates the deciding voice inside a magisterium that determines, unappealably, what Scripture and tradition mean, so the submission is real in name and closed in function. Once doctrinal development is the working rule, every shift can be narrated as fidelity, and genuine reversal becomes nearly impossible.

Progressivism does not bother with the pretense. It simply swaps Scripture for the will of the age and drops the claim to an independent check altogether. Because the age itself keeps changing, the theology must keep changing with it. The mechanisms differ. The outcome does not. In both cases, nothing outside the system’s own judgment is left standing that could actually correct it or walk a drift back.

This is why I have often said Anglicans make excellent conservatives, and especially good traditionalists, but very poor fundamentalists.

Faithful Anglicans have disagreed with each other for centuries. Evangelicals, Anglo Catholics, and Prayer Book churchmen have argued for generations. Those arguments stayed possible because everyone still agreed that Scripture, read within the received faith of the ancient Church, stood above all of them.

The collapse comes the moment someone decides the tension itself has to end. That is the moment the via media disappears.

The via media was never about splitting the difference or finding a comfortable middle point. It was about staying accountable to an authority none of us has the right to redefine on our own terms.

A Failure of Trust, Not Just a Failure of Logic

Here is what I think is the deeper problem, and it is not mainly intellectual.

A person who cannot live with unresolved tension is often not really making an argument. He may be telling you something closer to a confession, whether he realizes it or not, that he no longer feels confident God speaks reliably through Scripture and the ordinary life of the Church, and he wants a human guarantee to stand in for that confidence. I say this carefully. I cannot see another person’s heart, and I could be wrong about any one person in front of me. But as a pattern, this is often less a failure of reasoning than a failure of trust. It belongs more to the territory of spiritual formation than to the territory of logic.

That is why closed systems rarely get argued out of their positions. You are not correcting a syllogism. You are speaking to a wound, and wounds do not usually respond to better arguments.

The Ground Beneath Every Palace

Certainty is not the enemy. Christianity makes claims that are true or false. The Creeds are not suggestions. The problem was never confidence.

The problem is becoming immune to correction.

Healthy confidence stays answerable to God’s Word as received in the faith of the ancient Church. A closed system slowly loses that accountability until nothing is allowed to count against it anymore. Once that happens, defending the system and defending yourself become the same act.

If you find yourself talking with a Catholic apologist who has an answer for every historical difficulty, or with an activist who has already diagnosed your motives before you have finished a sentence, you may not be talking with a dishonest person. You may simply be talking with someone who has decided the wrestling has to end, someone tired in the same way we all get tired, who has mistaken a closed system for rest.

You will not talk such a person out of it by being cleverer inside their system. Instead, try asking what evidence would actually change their mind. Not as a trap, and not expecting a tidy answer. Ask it the way you would ask a friend, because underneath the system he is defending, that is probably still what he is.

His answer, or his failure to give one, will tell you whether you are talking with someone who holds convictions or with someone a system has swallowed whole, a system that no longer lets any conviction of his be tested.

Classical Anglicanism was never meant to end the struggle. It was meant to give us solid ground to stand on: Holy Scripture, read within the received faith of the ancient Church, always open to correction by God’s Word, and honest enough to admit some questions, like our differences in churchmanship, will stay unresolved this side of glory. Because that standard stands outside the present interpreters, the tradition retains the capacity, at least in principle, to check or reverse a drift that has already begun.

The palace next door may look more finished. It may have a well-kept garden and grand halls inside its walls. But a house built to stand permanent inspection is safer ground than one built to survive by never being questioned. It costs something to keep standing there. Mostly it costs the willingness to still be wrong.

The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (ACNA/REC) in Evansville, Indiana. A church planter, he has helped plant three Anglican congregations. He was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary.