ANGLICANISM

A Reformed Catholic Tradition

Gerald Bray

Anglicanism: A Reformed Catholic Tradition

Copyright 2021 Gerald Bray

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at permissions@lexhampress.com.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683594369

Digital ISBN 9781683594376

Library of Congress Control Number 2020947198

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Matthew Boffey, Abigail Stocker, Jessi Strong

Cover Design: Peter Park

To the Anglican students at Beeson Divinity School

who are bearing witness to this tradition in

an ecumenical and evangelical context

Contents

What Is Anglicanism?

The Catholicity of Anglicanism

The Reformed (Protestant) Character of Anglicanism

The Local Articles and Matters Indifferent

Miscellaneous Provisions

The Book of Common Prayer

Church Government (Ecclesiology)

The Anglican World Today

Index

1

What is Anglicanism?

Anglicanism as we think of it today is essentially a nineteenth-century invention. The elements that make it up are much older than that, of course, but it was only from the 1830s or so that the particular configuration that Christianity assumed in the post-Reformation Church of England and its sister churches came to be regarded as something unique. Before that time, most people assumed that the Church of England was a Protestant body that had separated from Rome in the sixteenth century along with several other churches in Northern Europe. Everyone knew that the details of the separation were unusual, and that political factors had played as much of a role as theological ones, but these secondary matters did not affect the basic principle. The English church happened to have preserved a number of medieval features, like a territorial episcopate with cathedrals that continued to function much as they had before the Reformation. This gave it a certain traditionalist feel, which might look to Protestants like remnants of Roman Catholicism, but this was more in appearance than in reality. Almost all members of the Church of England saw themselves as Protestants and regarded Rome with varying degrees of enmity.

It was only when secularism began to take hold, and the bonds of church and state started to weaken, that people began to ask about the nature of the Church of England. Was it a Protestant church with distinctive characteristics or a Catholic church no longer in communion with Rome? That, in turn, raised the question of what catholicity is. Rome was quite clear that to be Catholic meant being in communion with the Holy See and accepting the pope as head of the church on earth, the vicar of Christ. English churchmen ...