The Reformation in Anglicanism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Ryrie
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
The Church

The outline of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and the later Tudors is no longer heavily contested. While politically led and slow to take root, it eventually took shape as a decisively Reformed Protestant, even Calvinist, Reformation with a stress on the doctrine of predestination, even though Cranmer retained some traditional trappings in his Prayer Books. Terms such as ‘Anglican’ and ‘via media’ ought not to be applied to the Church of England before 1662. However, that church’s subjugation to the state and the central position it acquired in English national identity helped to sow the seeds of later Anglican distinctiveness. The Reformation’s legacy for modern Anglicans is divisive, and it is used dishonestly, as a weapon, by all sides. This is in part because the true extent of its popularity in its own time remains open to dispute.

Calvin's Influence on the Theology of the English Reformation

Ecclesiology ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-341
Author(s):  
Martin Davie
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Westminster Assembly

AbstractThis paper traces the influence of John Calvin on the English Reformation from the time of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII until the great ejection of dissenting puritan clergy from the ministry of the Church of England in 1662. It argues that Calvin's teaching only began to have an impact on the English Reformation during the reign of Elizabeth I and that although his theology had a widespread impact on both individuals and groups within the Church of England it never shaped the Church's official doctrine, liturgy or pattern of ministry, although it seemed likely that this would be the case at the time of the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. It also raises the question of whether Calvin sought episcopacy from the Church of England in the reign of Edward VI.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.

Confessional History and the Authority of Erudition

2019 ◽  
pp. 264-300
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Main Text ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Genuine Effort

In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.

Heretics and Believers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church

Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. This new history argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of reform in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora's Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life. With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, the book frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of religion itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the Church of England.

Remembering the English Reformation in the Revision of the Communion Liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, 1906–1920

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-257
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Liturgical Theology ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Main Period ◽  
The Church

This paper will examine how the Convocations of the Church of England remembered their past liturgies, and the reformation theology that formed the previous Prayer Books of the Church, in their main period of work on the revision of the Prayer Book from 1906 to 1920. Focusing on the Communion Service, it considers the lack of defenders of the 1662 Communion service and its reformed theology. It will examine how the 1549 Prayer Book was used as a basis for reordering the Communion service, and how this original Prayer Book was seen in relation to preceding medieval Roman Catholic theology. Ultimately it considers how a re-imagination of the English Reformation was used to justify the incorporation of liturgical theology that had no historical basis in the Church of England.

Parliament and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Colin Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Enoch Powell ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church ◽  
Previous Paragraph

A title such as this hardly suggests one is breaking new ground. But I edge into print on the subject, stirred by the interesting Speaker's Lecture given by the outgoing Second Estates Commissioner, Sir Tony Baldry, in December 2014, and published in the May 2015 edition of this Journal. It reads as the enthusiastic, even romantic, expression of the State–Church relationship by an almost doctrinaire establishmentarian; and I use the word ‘doctrinaire’ deliberately, for I have spent a lifetime of bumping up against leaders of both Church and State, from Enoch Powell to George Carey (let alone Derek Pattinson and Philip Mawer), who exude a firm conviction that the establishment of the Church of England is entrenched somewhere in the Apostles' Creed. Sir Tony continues in this tradition as he serenely asserts ‘We come then to the reign of Henry VIII. I think the important point here is that the Church of England is the creation of Parliament.’ But would not Augustine, Anselm and the drafters of Magna Carta (who are cited in Baldry's previous paragraph) all be turning in their graves? And what apoplexy would have come upon Newman, Pusey and Keble to have learned that their Church was thus created? Or, more to the point, is the ecclesiastical action of Parliament in the days when church and nation were co-terminous of any relevance to whether and how an unbelieving Parliament should hold control of a Christian body today? However, it is his brief section on ‘Parliament and Anglican liturgy’ which prompted the present submission.

The Shock of Change: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Elizabethan Church Of England

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (35) ◽  
pp. 429-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This paper questions accounts of the English Reformation which, in line with sometimes unacknowledged Anglo-Catholic assumptions, present it as a mere clean-up operation, the creation of a reformed Catholicism which removed medieval excesses but left an essentially Catholic Church of England intact. It argues instead that the Elizabethan reformers intended to establish a Reformed Church which would be part of a Protestant international Church, emphatic in disowning its medieval inheritance and rejecting the religion of Catholic Europe, with formularies, preaching and styles of worship designed to signal and embody that rejection. But Anglican self-identity was never simply or unequivocally Protestant. Lay and clerical conservatives resisted the removal of the remains of the old religion, and vestiges of the Catholic past were embedded like flies in amber in the Prayer Book liturgy, in church buildings, and in the attitudes and memories of many of its Elizabethan personnel. By the early seventeenth century influential figures in the Church of England were seeking to distance themselves from European Protestantism, and instead to portray the Church of England as a conscious via media between Rome and Geneva. In the hands of the Laudians and their followers, this newer interpretation of the Reformation was to prove potent in reshaping the Church of England's self-understanding.

Grace and Nation: Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church and State

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Alan Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
National Life ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTUnderstanding Coleridge's classic work On the Constitution of Church and State requires paying close attention to the system of distinctions and relations he sets up between the state, the ‘national church’, and the ‘Christian church’. The intelligibility of these relations depends finally on Coleridge's Trinitarianism, his doctrine of ‘divine ideas’, and the subtle analogy he draws between the Church of England as both an ‘established’ church of the nation and as a Christian church and the distinction and union of divinity and humanity in Christ. Church and State opens up, in these ‘saving’ distinctions and connections, important considerations for the integrity and role of the Christian church within a religiously plural national life.

The Political Theory of the Disruption

1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Laski
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Political Principles ◽  
The Church

“Of political principles,” says a distinguished authority, “whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions.” No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups of which the state is so formidably one be regarded as in its gift to define? Can the state tolerate alongside itself churches which avow themselves societates perfectae, claiming exemption from its jurisdiction even when, as often enough, they traverse the field over which it ploughs? Is the state but one of many, or are those many but parts of itself, the one?

‘This Romish business’ - Ritual Innovation and Parish Life in Later Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire

1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Mixing Water

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document