Was the English Reformation a Mistake?

By Robin G. Jordan

According to its Anglo-Catholic critics in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, and in this century the English Reformation was indeed a huge mistake—a mistake from which the Anglican Church has not yet fully recovered and therefore must be enticed, cajoled, and badgered to move in a more Catholic direction. If the truth is twisted in the process, well, it is done in the service of a good cause. The sacrifice of intellectual honesty is a small price to pay for the restoration of Catholic doctrine, order, and practice in the Anglican Church.

But really was the English Reformation a mistake? Would Anglicans have been in better shape if it had not happened?

The English Reformation gave us an English Bible. William Tyndale risked his life to translate the Bible into a language that his fellow Englishmen understood. He was betrayed and seized, tried as a heretic, and garroted to death. His corpse was burned and the ashes scattered. Tyndale rejected the view of the Roman Catholic Church that only approved clergy should read and interpret the Scriptures. He looked forward to the day when even a common ploughboy would know more of the Scripture than the Pope.

The English Reformation inspired a growing desire in the English people to learn to read so they could read the Bible for themselves. It would encourage the printing of more books—not just in Latin, the language of clergy and scholars, but in English, the language of the people.

The English Reformation encouraged the education of all classes of people. The Sunday school movement began as a movement to educate poor children who worked in England’s factories and whose only day off was Sunday. The process was a slow one but it eventually led to compulsory universal education in most of the English-speaking world. An education would no longer be a privilege of society’s elite.

The English Reformation would inspire future generations of English-speaking Christians to learn the languages of unreached peoples and translate the Bible into their languages and to teach them to read so they might read the Bible for themselves.

The English Reformation gave us the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, the Anglican Church’s historic confession of faith. The Articles are the shortest of the Reformation confessions. They do more than reject the worst of the abuses of the medieval Catholic Church. The Articles give the Anglican Church a reformed faith that is thoroughly grounded in the Scriptures. They support the claim that the Anglican Church is “a true apostolic church, teaching and maintaining the doctrine of the apostles.” The Articles “safeguard the truth of the gospel.” They protect the Anglican Church from heretical preachers and teachers and provide the doctrinal standards for the interpretation of the Prayer Book. The Articles establish an “evangelical comprehensiveness” that keeps “doctrinal requirements down to the minimum” and which permits “the maximum of flexibility and variety on secondary matters.”

The English Reformation gave us the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. It is a service book that not only enabled the English people to worship God in their own language but which also provided them with a liturgy whose doctrine and liturgical usages had been reformed in accordance with the Scriptures. The Anglo-Catholic monk and liturgist Dom Gregory Dix begrudgingly admitted that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had done an excellent job of giving liturgical expression to the New Testament and Reformation doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith in Christ alone in its service of Holy Communion. With some additions and alterations it has served the Anglican Church for more than four centuries. In its 1662 revision it is the official Prayer Book of a number of Anglican provinces and with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571 and the Ordinal of 1661 forms the longstanding Anglican standard of faith and worship. It has been translated into numerous languages and dialects.

The English Reformation gave us a clergy who are called to be messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord, who have been entrusted with the task of leading others to salvation by teaching the Scriptures, and to that end have been charged to do all that they can with God’s help to sanctify and shape their lives and the lives of their families “according to the rule and teaching of Christ,” and to be “wholesome and godly examples for the people to follow.” As a reminder that they are first and foremost ministers of God’s Word, they are given a Bible at their ordination.

The English Reformation restored the song of the church to the church, that is, to the people. It revived congregational singing. It also sparked a renewal of cathedral music. In the ensuing centuries it would lead to a veritable mountain of hymns and worship songs, to which Anglicans around the world have added their contributions.

Most important of all, the English Reformation would restore to the English Church the gospel that had been lost during the Middle Ages.

The English Reformation would produce many other positive results.

No, the English Reformation was not a mistake. It was a movement of the Holy Spirit purifying the English Church of centuries of superstition and error which had not profited the English people but had blinded them and obscured the glory of God. It enabled the English people to walk in the light as children of light and wherever they brought their reformed faith, it enabled other nations to do likewise.

The Anglican Church does not need a second Oxford movement. The Anglo-Catholic movement, which the first Oxford movement spawned, created a ladder whose rungs liberalism was able to use to gain ascendancy in the Episcopal Church and other Anglican provinces. Through the exploitation of Anglo-Catholic doctrine and practices liberalism was able to take these provinces captive.

What the Anglican Church needs is a second Evangelical Revival. It needs to own its Reformation roots, not turn its back on them. It needs to regain the evangelical fire that caused it to spread the gospel to the farthest corners of the earth. It needs to become once more a church ablaze.