LATIMER BRIEFING 1
The Church of
What It Is, And What It Stands For
by R. T. Beckwith
The Latimer Trust
© R. T. Beckwith 2006 (First published 1992)
ISBN 0 946307 85 7
Published by the
Latimer Trust
Dedication
to the former Archbishop of Canterbury 1
1. What is the Church of England?.................... 2
1.1. Its
Origins........................................................................ 2
1.2. The
Middle Ages and the Need for Reform........................ 3
1.3. Henry VIII and the Breach with
Rome............................ 4
1.4. Edward
VI and the Doctrinal Reformation...................... 5
1.5. The
Elizabethan Settlement............................................. 8
1.6. Subsequent Developments............................................... 10
2. What does the Church of England stand for? 14
2.1. A
Biblical Church........................................................... 16
2.2. A
Confessional Church................................................... 17
2.3. A Liturgical Church....................................................... 18
2.4. A
Covenantal Church..................................................... 19
2.5. An
Episcopal Church...................................................... 20
2.6. A Parochial Church........................................................ 21
2.7. A
National, Established Church...................................... 23
2.8. A Reformed Catholic
Church.......................................... 25
To George Carey, Archbishop and Anglican
This brief restatement of neglected and forgotten truths is by kind permission dedicated
In inviting you to accept
the dedication of this little book, and your acceptance of the invitation,
attention was drawn to the fact that, though old friends, we do not agree upon everything! However we
do agree in our common commitment to Anglican Christianity, which the book is
designed to explain and commend. The book is sometimes outspoken on the other
side of contemporary questions from the side which you are thought to favour
(though more often, perhaps,
on the same side). After 14 years, the book has now been updated for a new
readership.
With prayerful good
wishes,
Yours as ever,
Roger Beckwith.
1. What is the Church of England?
The people of
In 449, after the
withdrawal of the Romans, the invasion of
Because Augustine's
mission had been sent directly from
1.2. The Middle Age and the Need for Reform
The periodic tensions
between popes and kings after the Norman Conquest were not, of course, always the
fault of the pope. The king was
sometimes equally or more to blame, and if the pope had always been upholding spiritual values against
worldly-minded kings, the history of
The condition of the
church had indeed become deplorable. The monasteries, which had long set the
standard in godliness, were now largely infected by idleness and luxury, the
outcome of their great wealth. The bishops, who likewise enjoyed
extensive earthly possessions, were frequently preoccupied with
affairs of state. Many of the theologians had overlaid and perverted
the gospel
with unbiblical speculations. Ignorance, avarice and unchastity were rampant
among the clergy, and sometimes, when they committed crimes, they were protected
by 'privilege of clergy' from being called to account. The laity, who had neither the Bible in
English nor services in English, were, for lack of sound instruction and good
example, the victims of gross superstition. It would be foolish to suppose that, in a
period which
continued to produce the wonderful churches, cathedrals and abbeys of which we
are the heirs, devotion to God was dead, but it was undoubtedly very sick. Despite
the efforts of mediaeval
reformers like John Wycliffe, New Testament Christianity
was now confused with grievous error in the popular mind.
1.3.
Henry VIII and the Breach with
When the formal breach
with
At the same time, the
incident is disgraceful not only to Henry but also to the papacy. Not very long
before, one of the popes had permitted the King of Castile to take a second
wife because his first was childless; and the main reason why Henry was now
refused an annulment was probably that his wife was related to the Emperor
Charles V, whom the pope (Clement VII, a man of weak character) was afraid to
offend.
1.4. Edward VI and the Doctrinal Reformation
Much more important
than any of these considerations, however, is the fact that the
contemporary reform of doctrine and practice, since known as the Protestant
Reformation, took place in many parts of Europe and not simply in the British
Isles; and
everywhere it took place there was a breach with
Indeed, despite the
breach with
One of the best known
sights in
But fashion, as so often, is a poor guide. The three
bishops died for the truths of the Reformation. And, without idolizing
the sixteenth-century
Reformers, it has to be said that the two chief points for which they contended were two of the fundamental truths of Christianity, which had not
been formally denied in the mediaeval church but had been fatally obscured.
The first of these
truths is the doctrine of revelation. It teaches that God has revealed himself
uniquely through Jesus Christ, and through the prophets and apostles who bear
witness to Christ, and that the permanent written form of his
revelation is Scripture.
So, if you are
concerned to know what God has revealed, you cannot be satisfied
simply to know what has been handed down from generation to generation by tradition,
or what contemporary bishops and theologians declare. You may and should go on
to ask, but is this
what the Bible teaches?
The Reformers did go on
to ask this, and in many cases it cost them their lives. They discovered that
the teaching of Christ and the apostles had become corrupted as it had been handed down. They discovered
that much of what contemporary theologians and bishops were teaching - even,
much of what the Bishop of Rome was teaching - was different from what the
Bible teaches.
But when they called for such teaching to be corrected by the Bible, they were
not thanked for it but condemned.
The second of the great
truths of the Reformation is the doctrine of salvation. It teaches that man is not
justified in God's sight by his own efforts but by God himself. Nor is he justified by what God
does in him, but by what God has
already done for him,
through Jesus Christ, in whom we must place our trust. Christ on the
cross has paid the just penalty for our sins, so that, by repenting of them and
putting our faith in Christ, we may be acquitted of them, and thus saved.
Even the reception of sacraments and the doing of good works are
no substitute
for faith in Christ, our only Saviour. Without faith sacraments are not
efficacious, and good works only result from the repentance which accompanies faith.
Here, as the Reformers
saw, was the most important matter on which tradition had gone astray - on which the Bible taught one thing and most church
leaders of the day taught another. But here again the Reformers were not thanked
for pointing the fact out. On the contrary, their own teaching, on
justification by grace through faith, was caricatured and condemned.
Of course, the doctrine
of revelation and the doctrine of justification by faith were not the only truths which the
Reformers
were concerned to reaffirm. On the basis of Holy Scripture (applied with
the aid of reason), they attempted a comprehensive reform of whatever was amiss
in church life. In
However, what the
Reformers maintained in this connection was far from being unrelated
to the two great truths of the Reformation. The doctrine of revelation was the basis on which they attempted to get
back to biblical teaching about the sacrament; and, as to the doctrine of salvation, Cranmer's Communion service
(substantially that of the 1662 Prayer Book)
has been well described
by Gregory Dix as 'the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical
expression to the doctrine of
justification by faith alone'.
Of course, the truths
which the Reformers reasserted were not new. They were based on the Bible
and were well understood in the early church. Nor had they been wholly forgotten
during the Middle Ages, although, in so far as they were remembered,
they had
tended to become minority views. The Reformers were by no means without debts to
the mediaeval theology in which they had been trained, though they viewed it
through the medium of the Greek learning of the Renaissance (and especially
through the medium of the Greek New Testament). They thus reformed
it, using the new
learning in the service of faith.
Moral reform was
introduced into the Church of Rome as well, though doctrinal reform continued
to be resisted there, and the Bible and the services remained for another 400 years (though happily no longer) in Latin.
1.5. The Elizabethan Settlement
The persecution which
engulfed Cranmer and his fellow-Reformers, though severe, was
short-lived. With the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, the work of
the Reformers was progressively restored, in a slightly modified form. The
settlement that was made left much of the ancient constitution of the Church of
England unchanged, but with certain significant developments, due
to the Reformation.
The monarch was now
unambiguously the supreme governor of the national church, without any
half-acknowledged allegiance to the Bishop of Rome. The formularies of faith
were now the ancient creeds, supplemented only by the documents in which the Reformers had
formulated the great biblical truths of the Reformation, namely the 39 Articles (based on
Cranmer's 42 Articles) and the doctrinal
parts of Cranmer's Prayer Book, notably
the Catechism. This Prayer Book was now the liturgy of the Church of England: it was in the English
language, and was fully conformed to
the teaching of the Bible. At the heart of the life of the Church of England,
however, stood the Bible itself - the
English Bible, as translated by Tyndale and Coverdale, now regularly read in the services of the church.
The Elizabethan
Settlement defined permanently the character of Anglicanism. The constitution
of the Church of England has never been changed since, but only modified in detail.
The monarch remains the
supreme governor, though now as a constitutional,
not an absolute, monarch: and in 1688 it was made explicit (after the attempt of James II to do so) that the monarch
could never renounce that supremacy, by again submitting himself and his church to the Bishop of Rome. The
formularies of faith remain what they were, and in the new Canons and Declaration of Assent, introduced in the 1960s and
1970s, they are specified as the Creeds, the 39 Articles and the Book of Common Prayer, these being recognised as faithful
expressions of the teaching of the
Bible. For worship, the standard liturgy remains the Book of Common Prayer, according to its 1662 revision: the widely used services of Common Worship are in fact only a permitted alternative to the Book of Common Prayer, and they are not among the formularies of faith. The English Bible of Tyndale and Coverdale has been several times
revised - in 1611 (the Authorized Version), in 1881-94 (the Revised Version)
and in 1952 (the Revised Standard
Version) - and many independent translations have recently been added; but the
old translation, especially in its 1611 form, continues to hold its own in popular
esteem.
The permanence of the
Elizabethan Settlement is symbolised by the fact that Richard Hooker, the most
eminent of Elizabethan theologians and the classical expositor and defender of
that settlement, is generally recognised as the greatest and
most characteristic
Anglican theologian of any period. All subsequent
schools of thought in the church like to claim him as their own and are content
to defer to his views.
The subsequent schools
of thought that have arisen in the Church of England have placed particular emphasis
on different aspects of historic Anglicanism, in reaction to a perceived or
supposed neglect of those aspects. The Caroline High Churchmen of
the 17th
century and the Anglo-Catholics of the 19th century emphasised the traditional features of Anglicanism. The
Latitudinarians
of the 17th century and the Broad Churchmen or Liberals of the 19th century
emphasised the rational moderation of Anglicanism. The
Puritans of the 17th century and the Evangelicals of the 18th century emphasised
the biblical basis of Anglicanism. All
these emphases reflected real features of the Elizabethan Settlement and of the
theology of Hooker, though the subsequent schools of thought developed them in new,
and not always
defensible, ways.
In historic Anglicanism,
as represented by Hooker, tradition and reason are subordinate to the authority
of the Bible: to emphasise their authority at the expense of the Bible is therefore a distortion.
The Reformers corrected mediaeval tradition by the Bible, so Anglicans have no business to
try to restore
mediaeval tradition in disregard of the Bible, as Anglo-Catholics have
sometimes tried to do. The Reformers also emphasised the mysterious and miraculous
character of the biblical gospel as beyond the reach of reason, so
Anglicans have no business to use reason as an argument against
elements of the biblical faith, as has been sometimes done by Liberals. On the
other hand, to interpret the authority of the Bible as leaving no place for tradition or reason is
likewise a distortion; and so is a theoretical emphasis on biblical authority
which masks an actual neglect of parts of biblical teaching (e.g. on the
importance of the sacraments). These are matters in which Puritans and
Evangelicals have sometimes erred.
Like the
other churches of the Reformation, the Church of England has been more
profoundly influenced in its later history by the Enlightenment of the 17th and
18th centuries than by any other development. The Enlightenment was an
intellectual movement as significant as the 15th century Renaissance, and
attempted to bring all things under the scrutiny of reason. Modern scientific
enquiry is one of its fruits, and the historical approach to the Bible is
another.
Unhappily,
the men of the Enlightenment often failed to realise that reason has any
limits, and, when they applied reason to Christianity, were apt to dismiss its mysterious
features as simply irrational, forgetting that man is not the measure of God.
David Hume’s denial of the credibility of miracles as being contrary to the
‘laws of nature’, is a good example. His argument, propounded in the 18th
century, has influenced philosophical and theological thinking to this
day. The schools of thought which have
since arisen in the church have represented moderate or extreme expressions of
Enlightenment thinking, or else reactions against it. The Latitudinarian school
of the 17th century and the