Anglicanism Proper

Via VirtueOnline:

By deathbredon
http://rtbp.wordpress.com/author/deathbredon/
May 2010

Although today the term "Anglican" is most commonly employed in a generic or institutional sense to refer to the official communion of the Church of England, such usage is relatively new. Indeed, "Anglicanism," in its more traditional sense, more narrowly refers to a particular point of view within the Established Church and its progeny that "wished to see neither servility to Rome nor subservience to Geneva but a Church of England truly catholic in all essentials and yet cleansed and reformed from the abuses which and gathered round it during the Middle Ages."

As such, Anglicanism proper owes it origin firstly to the work of John Jewel and Richard Hooker, who defended the English Religious Settlement against both Roman and Puritan criticism, and secondly, to their "successors in the seventeenth century [who] did much, by their lives as well as by their [writings,] to give quality and strength to the Church of England and earned for the English clergy the title of stupor mundi, 'the wonder of the world.'

Among the most distinguished of these successors, apart from [Archbishop] Laud, was a group of Cambridge scholars including such famous names as Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Montague, John Cosin, Thomas Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, George Herbert, and Nicholas Ferrar."

"The point of view of [Anglicanism proper] may be summed up in the dying words of Thomas Ken, who had inherited the great tradition laid down by the Caroline Divines. 'I die,' he said, 'in the Holy Catholic and Apostolick Faith, professed by the whole Church before disunion of the East and West. More particularly, I dye in the Communion of the Church of England, as it stands distinguished from all Papal and Puritan Innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross.' These words indicated the basis of the work of the Caroline Divines."

The Anglican party, then, adhered the express intent of Elizbeth I, who famously said, "We and our people - thanks be to God - follow no novel and strange religion, but that very religion which is ordained by Christ, sanctioned by the primitive and Catholic Church and approved by the consistent mind and voice of the most early Fathers." Indeed, "theirs was an attempt to get back to the early Church before the accretions of the Middle Ages [that] the reformers were so anxious to get rid of."

"The Anglicans, [then,] stood between two great religious systems. On one side was Rome, active and aggressive under the impetus of the Counter-Reformation, trying to rebuild a Christendom shattered by the cataclysms of the sixteenth century. But to the Anglicans, there could be no return to Rome since the faith which she taught was, in their eyes, impure–corrupted by the 'innovations' which were no part of the 'Holy Catholic and Apostolick Fatih' as taught by the Primitive Church."

On the other side were the Calvinists and Lutherans, who had separated from catholic tradition and had magnified certain doctrines out of all proportion. The Anglicans were equally clear that they could not fall into line with them since they had abandoned things which the Early Church thought essential." Consequently, the Anglicans, who both received and sought to maintain and to perfect the English Religious Settlement "aimed at a Via Media between two extremes; but the Via Media which they sought was not a compromise or a 'lowest common denominator;' rather it was a real attempt to recover the simplicity and purity of primitive Christianity."

In sum, it is the vision of Anglicanism proper that is worthy of preservation today and which must be the basis of hope for the future of the Anglican Communion as an institution. Indeed, the later is hardly worth saving but for the former, as institutional Anglicanism void of the substance of Anglicanism proper cannot hope to continue as a discreet entity, as it would be nothing more than a duplicate of one or more preexisting deviations from the authentic and pure Christianity that abound today.

Indeed, those in the Established Communion that would like to see "Anglicanism" merge into the Liberalism of Mainstream Protestantism, or be absorbed into a somewhat conservative pan-Evangelical Movement, or even to once again submit to the Rome yoke, simply are not worthy of the appellation.

Moreover, either by intent or ignorance, they are engaged in a sort intellectual dishonesty when they hold themselves out as Anglicans–for they are but hollow Anglicans whose only claim to the title is by the thinest of formalistic claims. Yeah, now is the time for those loyal to the Elizabethan Settlement and its patristic method to reassert themselves as the true heirs and successors of the mantle of Anglicanism.


-----For quotations and authority, see, J H R Moorman, A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND (3d ed., Moorehouse, 1980) pp. 200, 212-16, 225-226, 233-235