The Origin of the Thirty-nine Articles

The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion are Archbishop Matthew Parker’s revision of the Forty-two Articles, which had been drafted under the supervision of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and received the royal assent on 12 June 1553. Cranmer had been working on a Protestant doctrinal statement for some time. Seventeen years earlier, in 1536, he was part of the team which produced The Ten Articles, a document which began to move the Church of England in the direction of Lutheran Protestantism. Right away Cranmer began work on the next stage and what became known as The Bishop’s Book—a document that was never given royal assent nor that of Parliament—appeared a year later. Its official title was The Institution of a Christian Man and it was essentially an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacraments (it still held to seven!) and the Ave Maria. Of particular significance was the inclusion of articles on justification and purgatory. But movement in a more overtly Lutheran direction would be gradual and risky, especially given King Henry VIII’s very limited agenda. What is clear, though, is that Cranmer was committed to developing a Protestant doctrinal statement for the Church of England from an early date.

Cranmer was also concerned that any Articles produced by the English church should have wider recognition as thoroughly orthodox and faithfully Protestant. In 1538 he initiated conversations between the English and German theologians with the hope of producing a common statement. The proceedings were hampered from the outset by political interference. At the king’s insistence the English delegation included not only Cranmer and Nicholas Heath, another evangelical, but also a number of Catholics. After a while the king became directly involved (Henry always considered himself the equal of any of the theologians—after all, hadn’t he crossed swords with Luther? wasn’t he the Defender of the Faith?) and the negotiations, predictably, stalemated. Notes in Cranmer’s papers give a sense of what might have been. In the draft there was clearly a great deal of dependence upon Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession, but in the end no agreed statement emerged from this frustrating endeavour. Read more