By Robin G. Jordan
Since I launched Anglicans Ablaze fifteen years ago, I have become increasingly aware of the tremendous amount of false information about the Anglican Church on the Internet. This misinformation is found primarily in articles about the Anglican Church. These articles may be peppered with a few verifiable historical facts. But it is quite evident that the authors of these articles has cherry-picked these facts with the intent of lending the appearance of factuality to the entire article. Rather than being factual, however, the articles are propaganda. The views presented in the articles are traceable to the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement.
In the nineteenth century the Anglo-Catholic movement launched an intensive campaign to promote and spread its ideas, beginning with the Tracts for the Times. Through books, lectures, pamphlets, and sermons it sought to reshape the beliefs and practices of the Anglican Church. Its aim was to undo the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement which had established not just Protestantism as the faith of the Church of England and its daughter churches but Reformed Protestantism.
The earliest phase of the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement was the Tractarian movement. It is associated with the publication of the Tracts for the Times from 1833 to 1841. In its next phase the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement was comprised of three parallel movements. These movements often involved the same people and differed only in their emphasis.
- The Ritualist movement. This was an organized effort to reintroduce not only pre-Reformation Medieval Catholic doctrine and practices into the Anglican Church but also post-Tridentian Catholic doctrine and practices.
- The Rome-ward movement. This was an organized effort to reunite the Anglican Church with the Church of Rome. Its aim was to make the Anglican Church indistinguishable from the Church of Rome and thereby facilitate “home reunion.”
- The Cambridge Cambden movement. This was an organized effort to revive Medieval church architecture and clergy and church ornaments in the Anglican Church. It sparked the Gothic Revival in church architecture. It also did serious damage to a number of Medieval English churches, refurbishing them according to its idealized conception of a Medieval church.
The Rome-ward movement would lose steam after it became evident that the Church of Rome was not going to accept Anglo-Catholics on their own terms. Pope Benedict XVI’s issuance of Anglicanorum coetibus in 2009 and the creation of personal ordinariates in England, the United States, and Australia was the death knell of that movement. Pope Benedict’s message was simple. If Anglicans want to unite with the Catholic Church, they must become Catholics.
The influence of the Cambridge Camden movement would weaken in the first half of the twentieth century for a variety of reasons. Among these reasons is that Gothic Revival churches are expensive to construct. The Liturgical movement of the second half of the twentieth century promoted the construction of more functional buildings with more flexible liturgical space than the Gothic Revival church. Some Anglicans and Episcopalians still mistakenly believe that the Gothic Revival church is quintessentially Anglican, which is far from the case.
The Ritualist movement would morph into what we know as the Anglo-Catholic movement today. Having abandoned the idea of reunification with the Church of Rome, the focus of the modern-day Anglo-Catholic movement is on the transformation of the Anglican Church into a church that is Catholic in its doctrine, ecclesiology, and practice. While references are made in its statements to the Catholicism of the “undivided Church” before the East-West schism of the eleventh century, its beliefs and practices have been influenced by late Medieval and post-Tridentian Catholicism. One of the detrimental effects of the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement was that it opened the floodgate to all kinds of beliefs and practices which had never been those of the English Church even in Medieval times.
Among the articles spreading nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement propaganda are those which people who are unfamiliar with the Anglican Church are likely to turn for a quick summary of Anglican Church history, beliefs, and practices. The modern-day Anglo-Catholic movement, I may add, has never repudiated this propaganda or distanced itself from the propaganda. Members of the modern-day Anglo-Catholic movement may believe it themselves. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that most effective propaganda was that which propagandists came to believe themselves. It required less effort to disseminate. In time it might become self-disseminating. This appears what has happened with the propaganda of the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement. It has taken on a life of its own. The same erroneous ideas and deliberate untruths that the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement promoted and spread keep cropping up again and again in books and articles and on websites.
One such article which caught my attention was about the Elizabethan Settlement. I am a historian and teacher by training and I have extensively read and studied the history of the Christian Church, particularly the Anglican Church. The English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement are one of my particular areas of interest.
The Protestant Reformation was not a foreign idea that was exported to England from Europe. In actuality it was the other way around. The struggle for the soul of the Anglican Church began in the fourteenth century with John Wycliffe and the Lollards, or “mumblers,” the derogatory name given Wycliffe’s followers. The Lollards were also known by the more neutral name Wycliffites.
John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement were the forerunners of the Protestant Reformation. Wycliffe and one or more of his followers translated the Bible into English. The Lollards upheld the Bible as the final authority in matters of faith and practice, rejected the Roman Catholic doctrines of papal supremacy, transubstantiation, purgatory, and clerical celibacy and opposed a number of Roman Catholic practices.
The Lollards suffered unremitting persecution for their beliefs. They were put on trial for heresy and burned at the stake as heretics. Their ashes were cast to the winds or thrown into the nearest river.
The beliefs of the Lollards would influence the Czech reformer John Hus and Hus in turn would influence Martin Luther. Hus would be burned at the stake for his beliefs. Luther escaped Hus’ fate and became the prominent leader of what is known as the Lutheran phase of the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation would get off to a slow start in England and would suffer major setback during its early stages. The Act of Supremacy of Henry VIII of 1534 abolished papal authority in England and made the King the Supreme Head of the Church of England. It did not create a new church. What it did was reassert the ancient independence of the English Church from the Church of Rome. Princes had exercised considerable authority over the Church in their domains since post-apostolic times. The Roman Emperors had established the precedent. Henry VIII was not breaking new ground.
Henry VIII, however, was no friend of the Protestant Reformation. Before he fell out with the Pope, he had written a polemic against the teachings of Martin Luther, earning the title of “Defender of the Faith” for himself. He permitted very few reforms in the English Church during his reign and only when they served his purposes. They were limited to the translation of the Litany and the Bible into English
During the reign of Henry VIII a number of English Protestants were burned at the stake for their beliefs. John Tyndale who was working on a translation of the Bible into English at great personal risk to his own life would flee to Europe where he was betrayed, seized, tried as heretic, and condemned to death. He was tied to a stake and strangled with a rope around his neck, slowly twisted by his executioner. His body was burned and the ashes were scattered. The Tyndale Bible would be incorporated into the Church of England’s first authorized translation of the Bible into English.
During the reign of Edward VI the struggle for the soul of the Anglican Church entered a new phase. Edward had been raised a Protestant. Two of his tutors would flee England during the reign of his older sister, Mary, joining the other Marian exiles in Europe. He took a strong interest in religious matters. He corresponded with a number of the European Reformers, including John Calvin. He would undertake the reform of the doctrine and practices of the English Church. If Edward VI had not died at the tender age of sixteen from tuberculosis, he would have in all likelihood moved the English Church much further in a Protestant direction, based upon we know about the young king. In the twenty-first century we may think of Edward VI as young and therefore inexperienced and malleable but he lived in the sixteenth century. In the sixteenth century young people were expected to assume great responsibility at far earlier age than they are in this century.
Upon the death of Edward VI, his older sister Mary ascended the English throne. She was not only a staunch Roman Catholic and married to the Roman Catholic king of Spain but also she harbored a grudge against Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Edwardian phase of the English Reformation, and a hatred of everything that was Protestant. She not only persecuted England’s Protestants with a vengeance but also imprisoned her younger sister Elizabeth in the Tower of London and then exiled her. She bore no love for Elizabeth who was the child of Henry VIII’s second wife Ann Boleyn for whom he divorced her mother, Catherine of Aragorn. She not only reestablished the authority of the Pope over the English Church and abolished all the reforms that her brother had undertaken but she also brought the Inquisition to the British Isles.
By this time Archbishop Cranmer was old and in frail health. Mary might have imprisoned him and let him die from old age. However, she put him on trial for heresy. Cranmer ably defended his beliefs from the Holy Scriptures. The church court that has been assembled to try him nonetheless found him guilty of heresy and turned him over to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake. At one point Cranmer recanted, hoping to spare himself a painful death, only to learn that Mary intended to burn him at the stake irrespective of whether he recanted. Cranmer would recant recanting much to the consternation of his persecutors. As the flames leaped up around him, he thrust the hand with which he had signed the recantation into the flames.
What was so remarkable about Mary’s persecution of England’s Protestants during her reign was the number of the ordinary men, women, and children that were tried as heretics for their Protestant beliefs and were burned at the stake. It showed that the reforms that had been introduced during Edward VI’s brief reign had impacted the faith of the common people, not just the intellectual elite. England had been well on its way to becoming a Protestant nation. Mary’s persecution of England’s Protestants earned her the epithet “Bloody Mary.
Mercifully God spared the English Protestants from further persecution at the hands of Mary. Like her younger brother’s her reign was a short one. Her younger sister Elizabeth I would ascend the English throne and the English Reformation entered its second and what would be its most important phase.
Elizabeth had been raised as a Protestant. She had been befriended by Henry VIII’s last wife Catherine Parr who had strong Protestant sentiments. She was not as some Anglo-Catholic writers have speculated a crypto-Catholic, basing their conclusions on extremely flimsy evidence.
In 1558 Parliament adopted the Act of Supremacy of Elizabeth I, which severed the Church of England’s ties to the Church of Rome and declared Elizabeth the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The Act received the royal assent and became the law of the land. In 1559 Parliament adopted the Act of Uniformity of Elizabeth I, which reinstated the 1552 Book of Common Prayer which contained the Protestant rites and services of the Church of England originally adopted toward the end of Edward VI’s reign. This book is much more reformed than its 1549 predecessor and unlike the 1549 book represents Archbishop Cranmer’s mature thinking. The Act would receive the royal assent.
The three changes that were made to the 1552 Prayer Book in the Act of Uniformity of Elizabeth I would become a major source of controversy in the nineteenth century. These changes were the addition of an ornaments rubric, the combination of the Words of Administration of the 1549 and 1552 Communion Services, and the omission of the Declaration on Kneeling. They would be misinterpreted by the Anglo-Catholic movement which ignored the historical facts in its interpretation of these changes and argued that the 1559 Act of Uniformity countenanced the use of Mass vestments, altars, crucifixes, and the like and the doctrine of the Objective Real Presence of the Christ in the consecrated elements. The article on the Elizabethan Settlement to which I referred earlier reflects these erroneous claims and other misinformation that Anglo-Catholic writers have spread about the Elizabethan Settlement since the inception of that movement. Those who want to read a more accurate account of these developments and related developments may wish to read the Church Association Tracts, J. T. Tomlinson’s Collected Tracts on Ritual, Fredrick Meyrick’s An Appeal from the Twentieth Century to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: or, The Faith and Practice of the Two First Centuries of the Reformed Anglican Church and other works, .and Charles Wright and Charles Neil’s A Protestant Dictionary’s articles on these topics.
In The Tutorial Prayer Book Charles Neil and J.M. Willoughby explain why the Words of Administration from the 1549 and 1552 Communion Services were combined.
The history of the words is sufficient answer to all argument: The first sentence of 1549 is an old form with the significant addition of ‘which was given (shed) for thee’; the second, in 1552, took the place of the first to silence misinterpretation; the two were combined in 1559, in order to preserve the ancient form and yet to safeguard it from misuse. The ‘this’ of the 1552 clauses, could only then mean the elements given to the recipient; this is all it means now (p. 272).The same article claims that the Elizabethan Settlement established the Church of England as via media, or middle way, between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, an Anglo-Catholic myth which originated with the Tractarian leader John Henry Newman. Before he converted to Roman Catholicism, Newman rejected this view. Other Anglo-Catholic writers would perpetuate the myth.
The Thirty-Nine Articles were adopted by Parliament and Convocation in 1563, with one omission. Elizabeth I withheld her royal assent until 1571, at which time the omitted article was added. Elizabeth had been involved in delicate negotiations with several Lutheran princes. She had wanted to keep these princes friendly to her reign. The omitted article, Article 29, rejected the Lutheran view of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. All clergy of the Church of England were required to subscribe to the Articles.
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion are a revision of the Forty-Two Articles of Religion prepared by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and published on Edward VI’s own authority during the last months of his reign. A royal proclamation requiring the subscription to them from all clergy, schoolmasters, and members of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was also issued.
J. I. Packer further draws to our attention in The Thirty Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today, that the Articles provide the doctrinal standards by which the Prayer Book must be interpreted.
In Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today the GAFCON Theological Resource Group emphasize that the Articles derive their authority from the Holy Scriptures. Acceptance of their authority is essential to Anglican identity. In other words, if you do not accept their authority, you are not an Anglican.
At the time of Elizabeth’s death the Church of England was not only Protestant but Reformed. It was not a hybrid of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as some Anglo-Catholic writers would have us believe.
The interiors of Elizabethan churches had whitewashed walls and were undecorated except for passages of Scripture painted or carved on wooden boards. All statues, reliquaries, holy water stoops, rood screens, and the like had been removed. Altars had been dismantled and replaced with movable wooden communion tables. These tables were placed lengthwise in the chancel or the body of the church. Clergy stood at the north end of the table and wore surplices, not Mass vestments. The cope, while authorized for use in cathedrals and college chapels, had fallen into disuse. Clergy who were not licensed to preach were required to read a portion of one of the homilies in the two books of homilies authorized for use in place of a sermon. Congregations sung metrical psalms before and after the service and before and after the sermon.
Congregations stood or knelt on the straw-covered floor of the church. The only seating were the stools that the members of the congregation brought to church with them. If a church had an organ, it was often as not a barrel organ, operated with a hand-turned crank. A typical pattern of worship on Sundays was Morning Prayer, Litany, and Ante-Communion. Church attendance was mandatory. Anyone who missed church was fined. The church wardens were equipped with catch poles with which they could seize the leg of a miscreant if they caught him skipping church.
Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker had introduced the systematic reading and study of the Bible and Henrich Bullinger’s Decades as the required preparation for all clergy who desired a license to preach. In his Decades, a collection of fifty sermons, Bullinger explains the doctrines of the Reformed faith. Bullinger’s Decades would serve as the Elizabethan Church’s theological textbook. At the University of Oxford students who wished to learn more about the Christian faith were encouraged to read John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, as well as Bullinger’s Decades.
In his magnus opus, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the sixteenth century benchmark Anglican divine Richard Hooker also took the position that Christ was not present in the consecrated bread and wine in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. He posited that Christ was present in the heart of the believer. The believer was united to Christ by the Holy Spirit. Through this union the believer was able to feed on Christ in his innermost being. The last clause, “and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving,” in the words for the administration of the bread in the 1559 Communion Service correspond with that view.
The Declaration on Kneeling was omitted because it was added to the 1552 Prayer Book at the last minute and was not authorized by law. Its omission did not affect the Elizabethan Church’s understanding of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The prevailing view in the Elizabethan Church was that while Christ was spiritually present in sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, in the hearts of the communicants, he was not really and substantively present in the consecrated bread and wine. Feeding on Christ was a spiritual operation that occurred apart from the bread and wine. Eating the bread and drinking the cup symbolically pointed to that spiritual feeding.
Anglo-Catholic writers who try to claim continuity between the Elizabethan Church and the Anglo-Catholic movement are clutching at straws. What they cite as proof of such continuity is no proof at all. The only Catholics in Elizabethan England were the Recusants who clung to Roman Catholic faith in secret, the Jesus priests who had entered the country secretly and whom the Recusants hid in their homes, and foreign merchants and diplomats.
James VI of Scotland who became James I of England upon Elizabeth’s death was not only a Protestant but a Calvinist! The 1604 Prayer Book, like the 1559 Prayer Book was essentially the 1552 Prayer Book with some modifications. The most important of these modifications was the addition of a section on the sacraments to the Prayer Book Catechism. The 1604 Canons which were adopted by Parliament and Convocation and which received the royal assent required the subscription to the Prayer Book and the Thirty-Nine Articles from all clergy of the Church of England. In addition to authorizing a new translation of the Bible—the King James Bible—James sent a delegation to the Synod of Dort which condemned the teaching of the Dutch Arminian Remonstrants. James himself has written a polemic against the Remonstrants. Among the things that the Synod of Dort accomplished was that it recognized the Church of England as a Reformed Church, adopted the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and the Synod of Dort, and established the shape of Reformed theology for generations to come.
Few questioned the Protestant, Reformed, and Evangelical character of the Anglican Church until the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement. Leading High Churchmen like Bishop Lancelot Andrews and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud recognized the Thirty-Nine Articles as the Church of England’s confession of faith. After the Restoration the Arminians argued that the Articles were open to an Arminian interpretation. The Reformed wing of the Church of England ably refuted this claim. The Coronation Oath Act of 1688 required the monarchs of England to take a solemn oath at their coronation to maintain "the true Profession of the Gospel and the Protestant Reformed Religion Established by Law." Key figures of the eighteenth century Evangelical Revival like Charles Simeon and John Whitfield were Calvinists.
Former ACNA Archbishop Robert Duncan who has called for a “new settlement,” ACNA Bishop Keith Ackerman who has called for a “new Oxford movement,” and others who share their views are essentially seeking to undo the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement as did the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic movement. They want to change the direction of the Anglican Church, setting it on a course that takes it away from historic Anglicanism. In this regard they are no different from their liberal counterparts in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church. Both groups want to export their ideas to the rest of the Anglican Communion.
ACNA’ers who are attracted to the ancient-future movement may be playing into their hands. As I wrote in my previous article, “The Struggle for the Soul of the Anglican Church,” the ancient-future movement has become an entry point for Catholic doctrine and practices into the Anglican Church.
The intentions of those who are involved in the ancient-future movement may be well-meaning but their fascination with Catholic doctrine and practices is a dangerous one. They are like a small child playing with matches. The child may start a conflagration that destroys property and takes lives.
Ten years ago this coming June then Archbishop-Elect Robert Duncan gave an address in which he warned his audience about returning to slavery in Egypt. He was referring to adopting a constitution and set of canons for the Anglican Church in North America, which were more explicit in their provisions than the governance documents that he wanted the new province to adopt.
Anglicans have a goodly inheritance. It would be a grave mistake to trade this inheritance for trifles. Yet that is what a number of ACNA leaders are urging them to do. Rather they should treasure this inheritance instead of turning their backs on it. At its center is the Gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ, of how he died on the cross for our sins and opened to us the way of salvation, of how we are justified in the eyes of God, not because of any righteousness of our own, but because of his righteousness, of how that righteousness is imputed to us through faith in him alone. None of these things do we merit. They are a gracious gift to us from a loving God. Having tasted the salvation of God, it would be monstrous to throw away such a precious thing.
2 comments:
Superb. Well said.
Thank you for your courage.
Outstanding! Thank you for all of your efforts. For those of us on the front lines, who contend for our Gospel heritage, these articles make all the difference!
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