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Christian History Magazine—Issue 48: Thomas Cranmer & the English Reformation is unavailable, but you can change that!

His faith was diplomatic at best: his absolutist devotion to king and country daily competed with his loyalty to God. Yet Thomas Cranmer’s propensity toward diplomacy led him to find the via media—middle way—between Catholics and Protestants in an age when compromise equaled a double portion of treason. His ensuing martyrdom sparked the brushfire of English Reformation, and his Book of Common...

Anglicanism follows a middle way, retaining the best of Roman Catholicism (liturgy and tradition) and Protestantism (authority of Scripture and justification by faith). Recently, in a book called The Renewal of Anglicanism, I argue that a more helpful middle way today would run between fundamentalism and liberalism. Anglicanism at its best avoids fundamentalism, which rejects culture, and liberalism, which accommodates itself too much to culture. For both Episcopalians in the United States and Anglicans