Theopedia

Anglicanism

Definition

Anglicanism is the tradition of the Church of England and the churches in communion with it, formed in the sixteenth-century English Reformation under Thomas Cranmer and confessed historically in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer. It holds an episcopal form of church government under bishops claiming succession from the apostles, and combines Reformation doctrine with much of the church’s pre-Reformation liturgical shape. Its own historians have long debated how thoroughly Protestant that combination actually is.

Historical Origin

Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 and spent roughly the next fifteen years working for reform under Henry VIII.1 When the boy king Edward VI succeeded his father in 1547, substantial authority passed to Cranmer, who brought continental Reformers including John à Lasco, Martin Bucer, and Peter Martyr Vermigli to teach at Cambridge and Oxford, a move credited with helping “turn the Church of England decidedly Protestant.”1 Cranmer used that influence to write the Forty-two Articles of 1552-53. Article 8, “Of Original, or Birth Sin,” stated plainly that original sin is not a matter of merely following Adam’s bad example, as the Pelagians and Anabaptists taught, but “the fault and corruption of the nature of every man,” a corruption that “does remain” even in the baptized, so that indwelling concupiscence itself “has of itself the nature of sin.”2 Mary I’s restoration of Roman Catholicism brought Cranmer’s trial and execution in 1556, but once her reign ended the Forty-two Articles were revived and became the basis for the Thirty-nine Articles adopted in 1563, retaining the original-sin statement almost unchanged.3

Doctrinal diversity followed quickly. In the seventeenth century, “Arminian strains gained influence not only in the Anglican church but also among dissenters,” feeding a bitter English controversy over the ground of justification in which Richard Baxter’s “neonomian” view (faith itself as the ground of justification) was opposed by others who insisted the only ground was Christ’s imputed righteousness.4 The Restoration-era Church of England also had a formal, legally defined relationship to Christians who dissented from it: the 1689 Act of Toleration required Nonconformist ministers, Particular Baptists among them, to subscribe to thirty-six of the Thirty-nine Articles before their congregations could worship legally, with Baptist ministers exempted from one further article over their rejection of infant baptism.5 A few years later, an anonymous Socinian-leaning tract touched off a Trinitarian crisis serious enough that in 1695 William III directed his archbishops and bishops to enforce “the trinitarian doctrine enshrined in the creeds and Thirty-Nine Articles,” followed in 1697 by a Blasphemy Act punishing denial of the Trinity.6

Core Tenets

The Thirty-nine Articles carry a genuinely Protestant content on several points central to the Reformation: Article 11 states that believers “are accounted righteous only by faith and only by the merit of Christ,”7 and Article 8’s statement on original sin affirms the same Augustinian reading of inherited corruption the Reformed confessions teach. Anglican predestination language, by contrast, is markedly more restrained than the Continental Reformed confessions: where the Canons of Dort, the Lambeth Articles, and the Westminster Confession make full, detailed statements of the doctrine, the Anglican Articles “speak in restrained terms about predestination.”8

Anglican church government is episcopal: dioceses are governed by bishops who are held to stand in an unbroken succession from the apostles, a polity retained from the pre-Reformation church rather than replaced at the Reformation. Anglican sacramental theology has likewise moved over time, in Bavinck’s assessment, away from the Reformation’s own recovery of the Lord’s Supper as a meal at a table and toward the altar-and-sacrifice framing shared by Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, a drift the Lutheran church avoided only by treating the altar itself as a matter of indifference.9

Comparison with the Reformed Baptist Confession

The 1689 London Baptist Confession states the decree in full, unqualified terms: “God hath Decreed in himself from all Eternity, by the most wise and holy Councel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things whatsoever comes to passe.”10 Anglican predestination language is, by comparison, deliberately restrained, and the Church of England’s own history includes a substantial Arminian party that the LBCF’s Calvinistic confessional tradition does not accommodate.

On church government, the confession assigns each congregation “Bishops or Elders and Deacons,” chosen “by the common suffrage of the Church it self” rather than appointed through a diocesan hierarchy.11 Where Anglican polity locates final teaching and governing authority in bishops claiming apostolic succession, Reformed Baptist ecclesiology locates it in the local congregation acting through its own elected officers. The claim that a diocesan, bishop-led form of government continues an unbroken apostolic pattern is itself disputed on historical grounds: “diocesan episcopacy did not exist during the apostolic age,” a plan of government that Reformed writers hold was introduced only gradually in the centuries that followed.12

On the sacraments, the confession baptizes only professing believers by immersion, while the Anglican Catechism instructs infants baptized before any profession of their own. The confession also recovers the Lord’s Supper as a spiritual, table-based meal, against the sacrificial, altar-based direction Bavinck describes Anglican practice as increasingly following.

Variants

The Church of England has never spoken with one voice on justification. Alister McGrath’s Justitia Dei directly rejects the idea, associated with John Henry Newman, that Anglicanism has consistently held a stable via media between Protestantism and Catholicism, concluding instead that “it is difficult to argue that the Anglican Church was completely Protestant in makeup.”7 The Caroline divines of 1590-1640 developed an account of justification that McGrath judges parallel to Lutheran orthodoxy, and a further Restoration-era trend, after 1660, moved toward including a believer’s own inherent righteousness as part of the ground of justification.7 A genuinely Reformed and Calvinistic party existed alongside these currents too: the Arminian controversy was fought within the Anglican church itself, not only against it, since Arminian views had gained real influence among Anglican clergy.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 96. ↩ ↩2

  2. Thomas Cranmer, “Article 8, of Original, or Birth Sin,” quoted in Moore, Concupiscence, 96-97. ↩

  3. Moore, Concupiscence, 97-98. ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 15. ↩

  6. Steven Tshombe Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill,” 82. ↩

  7. Micah John McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 83. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩

  9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  10. 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩

  11. 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 26, “Of the Church,” paras. 8-9. ↩

  12. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. V, “Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” 131. ↩