The Birth of Anglicanism

Extract

The paper surveys the English Reformation in the wider European context to demonstrate that the concept of ‘Anglicanism’ is hardly appropriate for the post-Reformation English Church in the sixteenth century: it was emphatically Protestant, linked to Reformed rather than Lutheran Protestantism. Henry VIII created a hybrid of a Church after breaking with Rome, but that was not unique in northern Europe. There were widespread attempts to find a ‘middle way’, the model being Cologne under Archbishop Hermann von Wied. Wied's efforts failed, but left admirers like Albert Hardenberg and Jan Laski, and their Reformations gradually moved towards those of central Europe—the first Reformed theologians. Edward VTs Reformation aligned itself with this new grouping, and produced prototypes of liturgy and theological formulary which endure to the present day—with the exception of a proposed reform of canon law, with its provisions for divorce. Elizabeth Ts 1559 religious settlement fossilised Edward's Church from autumn 1552. It made no concessions to Catholics, despite later A nglo- Catholic myth-making: minor adjustments were probably aimed at Lutherans. There is nevertheless a ‘Nicodemite’ association among the leading figures who steered the Settlement through its opening years. Important and unlikely survivals were cathedrals, uniquely preserved in a Protestant context and a source of future ideological Catholic ‘subversion’. Nevertheless the theological tone of the Elizabethan Church was a broadly-based Reformed Protestantism, aligned to Zürich rather than to Geneva. Early seventeenth-century Arminianism or Laudianism represented a new direction, and the Puritanism of New England may better represent the English Reformation than the ‘Anglican’ synthesis which came to fruition in the English Church after Charles II's restoration in 1660. In any case, Anglicanism continues to represent in uneasy but useful tension the two poles of theology contending for mastery in the century after Elizabeth Is coming to power.