Church of England

Church of England. Though, as an Erastian institution, the Church of England dates only from the 16th cent., Christianity in these islands originated with merchants, administrators, and soldiers in 2nd- and 3rd-cent. Roman Britain. Alban was martyred in the 3rd century and three British bishops were present at the Council of Arles (314), but the 5th-cent. Anglo-Saxon invasions virtually obliterated all trace of Christian presence, leaving a remnant in Wales whence Ireland and southern Scotland were converted. The present English church dates from the reintroduction of this Celtic Christianity into Northumbria by Aidan (635) and Roman Christianity into Kent by Augustine (597). After the union of these two streams at the Synod of Whitby (664), Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury, restructured the church to form the basis of the medieval ecclesiastical system. Though medieval kings exercised considerable authority over the church, it was the break with Rome (1534) which fully established royal supremacy, from which date the established Church of England (Ecclesia Anglicana) can be said to exist. The Act of Supremacy (1534) declared Henry VIII to be ‘the only supreme head of the Church’ in place of the pope, which Elizabeth's Act (1559) moderated to the less offensive ‘Supreme Governor’.

Apart from this the church remained legally and administratively much the same. The church courts and their penalties, diocesan administrative systems, the authority of bishops and archdeacons all continued. The non-monastic cathedrals—those of the old foundation—survived as before with the same legal standing and statutes. Only those which since Anglo-Saxon times had been monastic were perforce given revised constitutions. Ecclesiastical law remained as before. Though now under royal control the convocations of Canterbury and York survived. Even crown appointments to bishoprics and cathedral deaneries showed little change, for royal nomination by congé d'élire and letters dimissory had been the norm until the late Middle Ages; even then ‘the royal will was the final factor’. The church after Henry VIII was thoroughly Erastian, its officials little more than agents of the crown. Indeed post-Restoration clergy were also agents of royalist propaganda, parsons thundering from their pulpits the doctrines of divine right, non-resistance, and passive obedience. Every church building had to display the royal coat of arms on the chancel arch in place of the rood. All licensed Anglican clergy and ordinands still take the loyal oath and licensed clergy have the right to administer marriage recognized by civil law without a civil registrar's presence. Though the last prelate holding senior political office was John Robinson, bishop of London (1713–23), 18th-cent. episcopal appointments were a powerful means of government patronage, for the 26 bishops in the House of Lords, though sometimes breaking free, normally supported the government. More recently Archbishops Tait and Davidson in particular had substantial political influence, the latter, for instance, in the passage of the Parliament Act (1911). Though today there are 43 diocesan bishops, only 26 sit in the Lords where they try to represent the multi-cultural spiritual and ethical dimension of national life.

Though Henry VIII made virtually no theological or liturgical break with the past, there was under Edward VI a considerable influx of continental reform and liturgical innovation from Bucer, Zwingli, and Calvin. After a brief reversion to papal catholicism under Mary, the church moved towards a comprehensive settlement under Elizabeth. Enshrined in the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, this attempted to reconcile the diverse shades of English opinion. Provided citizens fulfilled the royal injunction to weekly church attendance, there was to be no test as to conscience, ‘no windows into men's souls’. Episcopacy and royal supremacy marked the boundaries—presbyterianism and adherence to Rome were unacceptable. Most accepted, but minorities existed, some still adhering to Rome, others, though not yet schismatic, to presbyterianism or more extreme protestant views. Elizabeth and her first archbishop, Matthew Parker, used strict liturgical uniformity to mask theological differences between catholic and Calvinistic wings within the church. After the heyday of the sects in the Interregnum (1649–60), compromise became impossible. Moderate presbyterians' offer of limited episcopacy fell on deaf Anglican ears; instead, the Restoration settlement refused to recognize those already ordained non-episcopally, and demanded tests. A thousand incumbents were ejected—and thus became nonconformists. From that time the church ceased to be the church of the whole nation.

Nevertheless a distinctive Anglican theology had already sprung up. The writings of John Jewel (Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1562) and Richard Hooker (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1593–7) demonstrated that Ecclesia Anglicana, in attempting a return to the early church before its infection with medieval accretions, was both ‘catholic and reformed’, appealing to the Scriptures, the early fathers, and reason. Seventeenth-cent. Caroline divines including Lancelot Andrewes, John Cosin, George Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, and Nicholas Ferrar, through their personal sanctity, scholarship, and poetry, built on this foundation. The Prayer Book and the King James Bible became part of English culture.

After 1689 church life remained turbulent but settled down from 1714. Eighteenth-cent. ecclesiastics' reputation for idleness and rationalist indifference is undeserved. Modern research reveals that bishops and clergy were far more committed to their charges than hitherto supposed. Nor were they mere political hacks. Nevertheless liturgically the church was deadening. Medieval ecclesiastical corruption did not prevent the mysterious action of the medieval mass from touching the hearts of the humblest of men. Eighteenth-cent. Prayer Book liturgy and weighty preaching was another matter—too cerebral and unsuited to a mainly illiterate, uneducated people, about whose absence from, or misbehaviour in, church we often read in church court records. The preaching of the Wesley brothers thus fell on ready ears, but it was to the church's shame that these two devoted Anglican priests, both high churchmen, and their followers were rejected. Enthusiasm was dangerous, leading to fanaticism.

Though there is evidence of both evangelical and Caroline high-church strands in the 18th cent., the full evangelical revival spilled over into the 19th cent. and, with the tractarian movement, invigorated church life. Evangelicalism following in the Wesley tradition produced many of note, clergy like Fletcher, Newton, and Simeon and leading laymen such as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. Tractarianism, led by Keble, Newman, and Pusey, initially traced Anglicanism's traditions back to Augustine, but developed later into a powerful movement to restore fully the church's catholic wing. By 1900, in the shape of Anglo-catholicism, it became increasingly ritualistic and caught the imagination and the hearts of the newly developed urban working class.

As the British empire spread throughout the world by commerce and the sword in the 18th and 19th cents., the church followed—or in some cases with its missionaries led the way. Two overseas dioceses in 1800 increased to 72 in 1882, and to 450 dioceses (in 28 provinces) in the 1990s. The Ecclesia Anglicana from having been merely the church of the English people became a world-wide communion of many nations and tongues. The archbishop of Canterbury, as St Augustine's successor, was not just ‘Primate of all England’ but came to hold a universal primacy of honour, ‘a presidency of maturity and affection’, though without authority. To provide cohesion and consensus, initially over the Colenso affair, the first Lambeth conference with 67 bishops met in 1867, to be followed at Tait's inspiration by the second in 1878. Tait and his successors kept increasingly frequent contact with the overseas churches. The archbishop still presides at the Lambeth conference each decade, and continuity is provided since 1968 by the Anglican Consultative Council and primates' meetings. Davidson was the first archbishop to visit the Church abroad—in Canada and the USA (1904). It is now part of the archbishop's quasi-patriarchal role to visit provinces world-wide. Commonly held Anglican principles are enshrined in the so-called Lambeth Quadrilateral (1888)—the Scriptures, the creeds, the historic episcopate and threefold ministry, and the sacraments.

Twentieth-cent. liturgical scholarship deeply affected all Christian denominations; Anglicanism is no exception. Recent liturgical modifications have meant that, with each Anglican province making its own modifications, the 1662 Prayer Book is no longer the global cohesive symbol. After England's attempt to produce a revised prayer book (1928) was foiled by Parliament, the Synod 50 years later introduced an Alternative Service Book 1980, providing services in modern English, embodying the fruit of liturgical study. Though worship is now closer to that of the early church and to modern practice in other denominations, the new forms have lost linguistic beauty, regarded by some as essential for true worship.

Because all religious orders were disbanded at the Reformation, there were no monasteries, convents, or friaries until the restoration of the catholic hierarchy in the 19th cent., except for Nicholas Ferrar's short-lived 17th-cent. Little Gidding community, but the Oxford movement spawned several Anglican religious orders in the monastic tradition, such as the Cowley Fathers (SSJE), Mirfield, and Kelham, while the Society of St Francis, founded in the 1920s, follows the Franciscan tradition, working in the Third World and in British inner cities.

Twentieth-cent. developments included women's ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood (in England 1987 and 1994), making the Anglican church the first episcopal church to take this step. Ecumenism, so much a part of 20th-cent. church life, has extended to dialogue with non-Christian faiths, which are now prominent in the English scene.

Though its regular practising members are fewer than the catholics, the Ecclesia Anglicana with its unique liturgical, musical, and architectural heritage is still the church of the nation. Through its parish system all citizens have a church building and the ministry of a parish priest. All citizens in a real sense belong, whatever their threshold of belief, and whether or not they are practising members. Today with regular church-going at 7 per cent (Church of England 2.4 per cent, in all UK 2.9 per cent), but with 70 per cent believing in God, the ubiquitous church building in village or city, together with mosque, synagogue, and temple, is sacramental, a vital outward and visible sign of the spiritual dimension of man's existence. Quite by chance in its creation as a ‘catholic and reformed’ national church, the Church of England happens to be pivotal between Roman catholic and eastern orthodox churches on the one hand and protestant reformed churches on the other. Its diversity under a cloak of uniformity, though apparently a weakness, is also its greatest strength, recognizing as it does disparate, but equally valid, paths to God, hints of which appear as early as New Testament times.

Revd Dr William M. Marshall