The Church of England

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.

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1. What is the Church of England?

1.1. Its Origins

The people of Great Britain are a single nation with a single monarch and government. Yet they are spread over four countries (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and have in their veins the blood of different races who have successively ruled over part or the whole of their realm. At the beginning of the Christian era, the country was divided among several tribes of Celts, and much of it was under Roman rule. This was the situation when the Christian gospel was first brought to our southern shores, probably from Gaul (modern France) in the second century. The church in Rome was already becoming the most influential church in the western world, mainly because it was located in the capital of the Roman Empire; and it was afterwards to help hold Christendom together even when the Empire collapsed; but it had not yet started claiming the right to govern other churches, and for many centuries the Celtic churches had great independence. It was Celtic missionaries, such as Ninian (died about 432), Patrick (died about 461) and Columba (died 597), who spread the gospel to Scotland and Ireland.

In 449, after the withdrawal of the Romans, the invasion of Britain by the pagan Anglo-Saxons began, as a result of which the Christian Celts were driven to the extremities of the land. The reconversion of the country was partly the work of Celtic missionaries from the north, beginning in 635, and led by Aidan, but partly the work of Roman missionaries from the south, who were sent to Kent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great as early as 597 under the leadership of Augustine (not to be confused with the great theologian Augustine of Hippo, two centuries before). At the Synod of Whitby in 664, even the Christians of Northumbria adopted Roman customs, but Celtic customs survived much longer in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Because Augustine's mission had been sent directly from Rome, the English church recognised that it owed a special debt to the church in Rome. Right up to the sixteenth century, despite the increasingly extravagant claims of the popes to temporal authority and the tensions with monarchs in England and other countries which developed, the relation between the church in Rome and the church in England was a close one. The breach, when it came, was necessary, but it was a sad necessity.

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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 Europe would have been different. But, regrettably, the later Middle Ages were a time of grave moral and spiritual decline, in which the clergy, the monastic orders and the papacy itself fully shared. In such circumstances, the claim of the pope to have supreme authority over princes, to be entitled to intrude foreigners into bishoprics, or to support bishops against their monarch, was naturally felt to be a crying evil, and fostered the wish to reassert national independence. Whatever the original motives of the papal claims, or the abuses which they sought to remedy, the fact was that they were relatively new, and were now, often enough, being made by popes of worldly character, who sold ecclesiastical posts to the highest bidder.

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.

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1.3. Henry VIII and the Breach with Rome

When the formal breach with Rome finally came, it was precipitated by Henry VIII's desire to be rid of his first wife. It is possible to make excuses for this shameful incident, on the grounds of the insecurity of the Tudor dynasty and its need for a male heir, or on the grounds of the doubt that had been felt about the legality of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon (as being within the prohibited degrees) when it was first contracted. However, Henry's subsequent conduct makes any such excuses unconvincing.

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.

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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 Rome, because Rome resisted all far-reaching reform. Henry's desire for an annulment of his marriage was therefore simply the occasion of the English Reformation and not its underlying cause.

Indeed, despite the breach with Rome, reform was not able to make much progress during the reign of Henry, who was a rebellious Roman Catholic rather than a Protestant, and it had to wait for the accession of his son Edward VI. Henry patronised Renaissance learning, but was less interested in applying it to religious reformation. His other main 'reform' was the somewhat ambiguous one of dissolving and plundering the monasteries. He did allow some use to be made of Coverdale's English Bible, but two things had to wait until the next reign. One was the introduction of biblical services, and in English not Latin, while the other was the revival of biblical preaching.

One of the best known sights in Oxford (where the author lives) is the Martyrs' Memorial, erected to commemorate the burning of Bishops Ridley and Latimer and of Archbishop Cranmer, which took place in Oxford in 1555 and 1556 respectively. This was after Edward also had died and Mary had come to the throne, bent on reversing the Reformation. It is unfashionable today to describe the three bishops' deaths at the stake as martyrdoms. In a generation when few church people have strong convictions about anything, a man who went to the stake rather than recant is considered as a victim of his own bigotry quite as much as of the bigotry of those who burned him.

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 England, the debate concentrated in a remarkable way on the sacrament of holy communion. The immediate cause of the condemnation of many of the Reformers was their denial of transubstantiation and the mass-sacrifice, and their advocacy of a more spiritual view of Christ's presence in the sacrament, and of the New Testament doctrine that Christ's sacrifice for our sins took place once for all at Calvary (Rom. 6:10; Heb. 10:10; 1 Pet. 3:18), and therefore does not take place every time a priest celebrates mass.

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.

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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.

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1.6. Subsequent Developments

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 Broad Church or Liberal school of the 19th century were more or less moderate expressions, whereas the Deist and Arian schools of the 18th century were extreme expressions. The radical Liberalism of the 1960s and since is another ex