Women Bishops - cutting the knot

What did the Anglican Reformers think they were doing when they subscribed to the notion that the monarch was more entitled to rule the Church than was the Pope?

Personally, I believe that the ‘settlement’ achieved under Henry VIII was the uniquely Anglican contribution to the Reformation itself. Certainly it was not a viewpoint shared by Martin Luther, who wrote about Henry in strong terms to the Elector John Frederick in 1539,

Away, away with this head and defender! Gold and money make him so cocky as to think that he should be worshipped, and that God could not get along without him. (LW 50:206) Nor, despite a ‘high’ view of secular authority amongst some of the ‘magisterial’ Reformers, did others come to quite the same view about the Church’s relationship with the state.

Yet it is often forgotten that the affirmations made about the monarch required corresponding denials to be made about the Church’s ministers. The most obvious of these is in Article XXXVII:

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

But that was, as it were, the tip of the iceberg, for it was not just the Bishop of Rome who lacked jurisdiction over the Church. A necessary plank of the English Reformation was the assertion that, in the absence of the monarch, none of the clergy had such ‘jurisdiction’. Read more