P Is For Protestant

By Robin G. Jordan

Introduction.In my last article in this series, “Discovering Classical Anglicanism, I exposed the theory of the Anglican via media for what it is—a theory of Anglican identity that originated with the nineteenth century Oxford movement. It is not the given that via media theorists try to make it. I briefly introduced my readers to how post-Reformation English Churchmen had, before the nineteenth century, understood the character of classical Anglicanism to be a peculiarly English conservative form of Protestantism. I must point to my readers’ attention that the term “classical Anglicanism,” much less “Anglicanism,” was not used before the nineteenth century. Rather post-Reformation English Churchmen referred to the faith of the Reformed Church of England and its formularies or to the “Protestant Reformed Religion.” To them the Church of England was Protestant and had been Protestant since the Reformation. Even High Churchmen agreed that the English Church was Protestant. Evangelicals, High Churchmen, and Latitudinarians agreed not only on the Protestant character of the Church of England but also on its peculiarly English character and conservatism in comparison with the continental Reformed Churches. In this article I will examine this peculiarly English conservative form of Protestantism that is classical Anglicanism and the faith of the Reformed Church of England and its formularies, the “Protestant Reformed Religion” that since the Glorious Revolution all English monarchs have sworn to uphold.



Peculiarly English. Classical Anglicanism is peculiarly English in the sense that a number of its preoccupations reflect the English national character as well as the particular situation in England at the time of the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement. The peculiar Englishness of the reformed English Church is most evident in its practices. Unlike the continental Reformed Churches the English Church retained bishops and its existing ecclesiastical structures—archdeaconries, cathedral chapters, consistory courts, convocations, deaneries, dioceses, traditional methods of appointment to benefices, and the like. The English Church retained the use of vestments in its church service but limited them to a comely white surplice with long sleeves and in cathedrals and college chapels, a cope, a long cloak worn especially in processions. Rochet and chimera were the prescribed vesture for bishops. It also kept a distinctive garb for its clergy—a long ankle-length black cassock and a flat, four-cornered Canterbury cap.

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer established a single rite and usage for the whole nation, including the Channel Islands. He adapted for use of the English Church services and forms from the medieval Latin service books, rendering the Latin into English. He retained the traditional bidding, collect, litany and versicle and response forms of prayer rather than adopting the lengthy prayers that came to characterize the liturgies of the French, Scottish and Swiss Reformed Churches. These churches used the medieval prone as the basis for their liturgies. The prone was a vernacular preaching service that was inserted into the Latin Mass. The English Church was the only Reformed Church to use the daily offices, the Litany, and the Mass as the basis of its liturgy, as the Lutheran Churches had as the basis of theirs.

In the reign of Elizabeth I the fledgling Puritan movement would criticize the retention of these practices as evidence that the English Church had not fully abandoned papalism and needed further reforming. In the nineteenth century and later Anglo-Catholic writers would claim that the English Church’s retention of the same practices was evidence that the Edwardian and Elizabethan Reformers were more Catholic than an earlier generation of scholars was willing to admit. They used Puritan criticism of the English Church to support their contention. However, if we look at the doctrine of the Elizabethan Puritan movement and the Elizabethan Church, their claim does not hold water. The Puritan movement was then within the English Church. The doctrine of the movement and the English Church are identical. The English bishops themselves were not unsympathetic to the movement. Rather being the evidence of lingering Catholic sympathies, the English Church’s retention of such practices is evidence of the conservativeness and practicality of the English people.

This claim also collides with what else we know about the Elizabethan Church. Elizabethan parish churches were unadorned with whitewashed interiors. In appearance their interiors were very much like the churches of the Swiss Reformation. Rood screens were torn down, crosses, crucifixes, images, reliquaries, and stone altars were removed, and all traces of medieval Catholicism were expunged. The only ornaments permitted in the church were painted wooden boards displaying the royal coat of arms, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, or passages from Scripture. A wooden communion table stood at the east end of the church except when it was used for the Communion Service. It was then moved to the steps of the chancel or placed in the body of the church. The communicants knelt, stood, or even sat around the table.

The principal form of church music in parish churches was the metrical Psalm, a form of church music that is strongly associated with the Reformed Churches, as is the chorale with the Lutheran Churches. Metrical Psalmody was very popular with the Elizabethans but not their queen. Metrical Psalms were sung to popular folk tunes and traditional melodies. Elizabeth derisively referred to them as “Geneva jigs.” They enjoyed such popularity with the English people that huge crowds would gather at St. Paul’s Cross in London and sing them for hours on end. The English people also learned them by heart and sung them as they went about their daily tasks— the housewife in her kitchen, the ploughman in the field and the tailor in his shop. The Lord’s Prayer, the Prayer Book canticles, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Nicene Creed, and even the Quicunque Vult, or Athanasian Creed were set to meter and sung. Most metrical Psalm singing was unaccompanied.

The singing of metrical Psalms is itself a witness to English conservatism. The practice was still going strong in the early nineteenth century. By this time their singing was often led and accompanied by the village “quire,” a group of village musicians and singers in a gallery at the west end of the parish church. The Oxford movement was responsible for the suppression of the practice. It introduced the reed organ, hymnals like Hymns Ancient and Modern, and vested boys’ choirs into parish churches.

In cathedrals, college chapels, “quires and places where they sing” more elaborate forms of church music were used. The latter was arguably a Catholic survival since it was largely the work of Roman Catholic composers.

As in the Swiss Reformed Churches, with the exception of the Genevan Church, the relationship of church and state was that the magistracy governed the church, including the selection and appointment of pastors, and the church served as the conscience to the magistracy. In the case of the English Church the English queen was the magistrate, and the bishops administered the church as her appointees. In Geneva the relationship of church and state was that the church governed the state with the pastors functioning as the magistrates or selecting and appointing the magistrates. Behind Elizabeth’s opposition to the Elizabethan Puritan movement was that a number of its more outspoken leaders advocated the establishment of a similar theocracy in England.



Conservative. Classical Anglicanism is conservative in the sense that it seeks to conserve what is good and useful from the past and in doing so to maintain continuity with the past. This is in keeping with a principle that Archbishop Cranmer articulates in “Of Ceremonies, Why Some Be Abolished, and Some Retained,” the short essay that was originally published in the back of the 1549 Prayer Book but appears in the front of the 1662 Prayer Book: To retain the old “where the old may be well used” and not to “reprove the old only for their age.” Largely for this reason, Cranmer retained the practices of observing the festivals and feast days of the Church year, reading the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer and the Litany, kneeling to receive communion, marking the sign of the cross on a baby’s forehead after baptism, giving to the woman a ring at weddings, burying the dead with prayers and Scripture readings, and giving thanks after childbirth.

In “Of Ceremonies, Why Some Be Abolished, and Some Retained,” Cranmer lays out a number of principles that are helpful in understanding why he kept some practices but discard others. He acknowledges that a number of the ceremonies used in the Church and instituted by man, while they had originally been devised with godly intent and purpose had over time become valueless and superstitious. A number of these ceremonies entered the Church through the combination of devotion and zeal that lacked discreetness and knowledge. Because no one paid any notice to these ceremonies, they proliferated in number and misuse. These ceremonies were not only unbeneficial but they also “have much blinded the people, and obscured the glory of God.” Such ceremonies, Cranmer concludes, “are worthy to be cut away and clean rejected.”

Cranmer identifies a class of ceremonies that although they have been devised by man, should be retained for the edification of the people as well as for decent order in the Church, the purpose for which they were first devised. He notes that all things done in Church should be considered with a view to how edifying they are, alluding to the Pauline principle: Let all things be done for edification (1 Corinthians 14:26).

Cranmer goes on to offer a more detailed explanation of why some of the ceremonies to which men are accustomed have been discarded and why some have been kept. He draws attention to the fact that Saint Augustine complained that the proliferation of ceremonies in the Church of his time had made the state of his fellow Christians worse than that of the Jews, “and he counseled that such yoke and burden should be taken away, as time would serve quietly to do it.” Cranmer wonders what would be St. Augustine’s reaction if he had seen the numerousness of the ceremonies that burdened the sixteenth century English Church. These ceremonies had become so numerous, and “many of them so dark, that they did more confound and darken, than declare and set forth Christ’s benefits” to the English Church.

Cranmer calls to the attention of his readers that “Christ’s Gospel is not a Ceremonial Law…but is a Religion to serve God…in the freedom the Spirit. It is content “only with those Ceremonies which do serve to a decent Order and godly Disciple, and such as be apt to stir up the dull mind of man to his remembrance of his duty to God, by some notable and special signification, whereby he might be edified.” He explains that the principal reason that “certain Ceremonies” were abolished was that they were so abused that the abuses could not be corrected unless the ceremonies themselves were abolished.

Cranmer further explains that some ceremonies are need to maintain “Order and quiet Discipline in the Church” He takes the position that it is both reasonable and sensible to use the old “where the old may be well used” and not to discard the old “only for their age.” The ceremonies that have been abandoned were those that were the most abused, “and burdened men’s consciences without any cause.” Those that have been kept were retained for discipline and order. They may, for just causes, “be altered and changed, and therefore are not be esteemed equal with God’s Law.” They are also “neither dark nor dumb Ceremonies, but are so set forth, that every man may understand what they do mean, and to what use they do serve.” They are not likely to be abused as other ceremonies have been abused.

Cranmer’s final principle is that “every Country should use such Ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God’s honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living, without error or superstition.” They should abolish what “they perceive to be the most abused,” since “in men’s ordinances” abuses are likely to occur differently in different countries.

Cranmer did not see the retaining of a number of pre-Reformation ceremonies as inconsistent with the Scriptures or “the Protestant Reformed Religion.” In preparing a Reformed liturgy he was guided by the principles that Paul set down in his first letter to the Corinthians: Let all things be done for building up” – for edification (I Corinthians 14:26 ESV) and “But all things should be done decently and in order” (I Corinthians 14:40, ESV). As Cranmer saw it, the use of some ceremonies was permissible provided that they were edifying, contributed to discipline and order, were not prohibited by Scripture either specifically or in principle, and were recognized to be of human devising and not accorded the authority of Scripture. Cranmer was not attempting to chart a middle course between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as some writers have sought to interpret this retaining of some pre-Reformation ceremonies. Cranmer was not particularly unique in his use of forms of prayer and ceremonies from the pre-Reformation Latin service books. The Lutheran liturgies were drawn from these sources, as well as from the Bible. The early French and Swiss Reformed liturgies were also not compiled from scratch.

Cranmer did not solely draw from the pre-Reformation Latin service books. He drew from the Bible and from the German Lutheran Church Orders. Cranmer’s 1552 Book of Common Prayer is recognized as one of the best, if not the best, of the Reformed liturgies. A. H. Couratin in “The Eucharist under Revision,” in Tell Wales, describes the 1552 Communion Service as “a superb piece of liturgical composition, the finest flower of Reformation liturgy.” Dom Gegory Dix who was no admirer of Cranmer begrudgingly acknowledges in The Shape of the Liturgy that the 1552 Communion Service was “the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of justification by faith alone.”

Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book combines sound doctrine and the use of eloquent language, the two indispensable elements of good liturgy. Recent liturgies have not been as successful in combining these elements. The 1552 Prayer Book is not only an important part of the Protestant Reformed heritage of the Church of England but also of the Anglican Church of Canada, the former Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA and the Anglican bodies that seceded from the last two churches. The 1918 Canadian Prayer Book was based on the 1662 Restoration Prayer Book, which is substantially the 1552 Prayer Book. The 1789 Prayer Book was also based on the 1662 Restoration Prayer Book, except its Canon was influenced by the Scottish Non-Juror Canon of 1764, which was the work of the last two surviving bishops of the minority Usager wing of the Scottish Non-Jurors. Bishop Samuel Seabury championed the adoption of the controversial 1764 Scottish Non-Juror Canon that teaches that Christ did not offer himself as a sacrifice for our sins on the cross but at the Last Supper. He only died on the cross. In addition to this peculiar view of the atonement, the Canon appears to teach the doctrine of Christ’s substantive presence in the Bread and Wine. The 1789 General Convention made a number of changes to the Canon before adopting it.



Protestant. Classical Anglicanism is Protestant in the sense that it believes the Holy Scriptures to be the ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice. Classical Anglicanism requires that nobody should believe as an article of the Christian faith or regard as necessary for salvation, anything not found in Scripture or that that cannot be proved from Scripture. Classical Anglicanism takes the position that no tradition or ceremony should be ordained that is contrary to God’s Word. Ceremonies and rites that are not repugnant to the Word of God and which have been ordered only by human authority are permissible as long as things are done for edification. For classical Anglicanism the test against which every doctrine and every practice must be tried is the Bible. Consequently, a doctrine or practice may not be adopted solely on the basis of its antiquity. It must also be agreeable to Scripture.

This, of course, is not the only sense in which classical Anglicanism is Protestant. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Homilies, two of the historic Church of England formularies that date from the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement, affirm the New Testament and Protestant doctrines of justification by grace alone by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone and good works as the fruit of faith and the evidence of justification.

Classical Anglicanism also affirms the New Testament and Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers albeit this doctrine is more inferred in the historic Church of England formularies than stated. Two
of the earliest reforms in the Church of England were the translation of the Litany and the Bible into English. The people were able to join in the prayers with understanding. They were able to hear the reading of the Scripture in a language that they understood; they were also able to read it for themselves and to read it to others. These two reforms were major steps toward the recovery of the common priesthood of all Christians.

In regards to the Scriptures and their interpretation classical Anglicanism takes the position that ordinary Christians can understand the Word of God. As well as being inspired, breathed by God, the Scriptures are inerrant, that is, they are totally true in everything that they affirm. They are sufficient. They tell us everything that God wills to tell us, everything we need to know for salvation and eternal life. They are perspicuous, expressing their principles and truths with clearness. They are not only straightforward on every matter of importance but they also interpret themselves. Nowhere does Scripture contradict Scripture. One passage explains another. The clearer passages explain the more obscure ones. If we are not yet able to see this, the fault lies not in Scripture but in us.

In the reign of Edward IV the first vernacular liturgies were produced. The two service books significantly were called The Book of Common Prayer. Both books contained reformed versions of the canonical hours or offices. The latter had been conflated into two daily offices—Mattins and Evensong. The two daily offices had in turn been greatly simplified and redesigned for parochial and not monastic use. They recovered the ancient cathedral or popular pattern of the Christian community gathering in the morning and the evening and beginning and ending each day with praise, proclamation, and prayer. As in the Primitive Church the two daily offices were understood to be the concern of the laity as well as the parish clergy. The reformed offices represented further steps toward the recovery of the priesthood of all believers.



In his first epistles the apostle Peter calls to the attention of his readers that as they comes to Jesus Christ, “a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious,” they “like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:4-5 ESV). He goes on to point to their attention that they “are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession,” that they may proclaim the excellencies of him who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9 ESV).

In reforming the canonical hours or offices and making them parochial, Cranmer had these passages and others like Hebrews 13:15 in mind. “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name” (Hebrew 13:15 ESV). The daily singing or recitation of the Psalms and the Prayer Book canticles was the parish community’s sacrifice of praise. Taking time from their daily work to join their parson in praying Mattins and Evensong the people were offering a spiritual sacrifice. Their prayers were a pure offering and rose before God like incense.

The Prayer Book does not limit the common priesthood of all Christians to Mattins and Evensong. The minister who reads the supplications of the Litany serves as the “tongue” of the Christian assembly. The congregational responses show that the General Supplication is the intercession of the whole assembly, God’s “holy priesthood” at prayer. The rubric after the Absolution, or Remission of sins, in service of Mattins, or Morning Prayer, gives the following direction:

“Then the Minister shall kneel, and say the Lord’s Prayer with an audible voice; the people also kneeling, and repeating it with him, both here and wheresoever else it is used in Divine Service.”

In the medieval service books the Lord’s Prayer was often the private devotion of the priest. But in The Book of Common Prayer the people repeat the Lord’s Prayer with the minister. It is their prayer too. This includes the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of the Communion Service.

Although the General Thanksgiving comes from the Restoration period, it contains a strong affirmation of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. The General Thanksgiving is the work of the Puritan Bishop of Norwich Edward Reynolds who composed it in its present form for the 1662 Restoration Prayer Book. The passage “And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days…” contains clear allusions to a number of Biblical words and phrases. They include Psalms 9:14, 51:15, 79:13, Psalm 100:4, Colossians 3:15-17; and 1 Peter 2:9.

The Authorized Version renders 1 Peter 2:9 as follows: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” To “show forth” is to display, spread out to view, exhibit, let appear. The General Thanksgiving is a magnificent description of what it means to be Christ’s royal priesthood, his peculiar people. We are royal because Christ is the King of Kings. We are peculiar because we belong exclusively to Him. We are God’s elect. God has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light for the sole purpose of making known to all and sundry His excellencies—his character, his attributes, his mighty deeds, and the salvation that he offers through Jesus Christ. We are also exhibits of what God has done in our lives through His Holy Spirit. We are to spread His works in full view that all men may glorify God. “….thou … hast wrought all our works in us…” (Isaiah 26:12 KJV). “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven (Matthew 5:16 KJV).

The sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise to which the Prayer of Oblation in the Communion Service refers is that of all Christ’s royal priesthood, as is the offering of “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively {living] sacrifice” to God.

The 1552 Ordinal may be cause confusion with its references to the office of Priest, the holy order of the Priesthood, and the ministry of the Priesthood. These references appear to suggest that presbyters of the Church of England form a separate priesthood from that of the common priesthood of all Christians. However, priest as it is used in the 1552 Prayer Book is a contraction of presbyter. From the 1552 Litany with its reference to “bishops, pastors, and ministers” and the 1552 Ordinal’s description of the duties of a “priest,” the minister to which the Ordinal refers is not the sacrificing priest of the pre-Reformation medieval ordinal who re-offered the bloodless immolation of Christ’s Body under the forms of bread and wine for the living and the dead for the remission of sin but the pastor-teacher of the New Testament. The latter has no separate priesthood from the common priesthood of all Christians. After laying hands on the ordinand and praying over him, the bishop gives a Bible to the new presbyter with these words:

“Take thou aucthoritie to preache the word of god, and to minister the holy Sacramentes in thys congregacion, where thou shalt be so appointed.”

The presentation of the Bible signifies that the presbyter’s ministry is above all else the ministry of the Word. This fits with both a New Testament and Protestant understanding of the ministry of the pastor-teacher, an understanding consistent with the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.



Conclusion. What passes as Anglicanism in North America in the twenty-first century is a far cry from classical Anglicanism. It is more indebted to the nineteenth century Oxford movement and ritualism and twentieth century liberalism than it is to the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Bishop John Jewel, or even Richard Hooker would not recognize it as an offspring of the reformed Church of England.

The English Reformers lifted from the back of the Church of England the burden of false doctrines and “dark and dumb ceremonies” that it had accumulated over 1500 years. They gave it back the Bible, reminded it of its mission and the message it had been given to proclaim, warned it of the distractions that might draw it from its task, and set its feet once more on the right path. 450 odd years later its descendants are struggling under a burden of their own. A little over a 175 years ago they began to pick up the things that the Reformers had taken from the back of the English Church. But not satisfied with these “bargains,” they have become like obsessive shoppers, stopping at every mall, antic shop, flea market, and roadside stall and at each stop buying even more “bargains”. They have burdened themselves with all kinds of doctrines other than the message of the gospel that Jesus commissioned them to proclaim. They have overloaded themselves with all kinds of practices that do more to “confound and darken, than declare and set forth Christ’s benefits.”

North American Anglicans do not need a new Reformation. They desperately needs the old Reformation to restore them to sanity and to get them back on the right track, to become the gospel people that they were meant to be.