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. The present English church dates from the reintroduction of Celtic Christianity into Northumbria by Aidan (635) and Roman Christianity into Kent by Augustine (597). 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 survived as before. Ecclesiastical law remained unchanged. Though now under royal control the convocations of Canterbury and York survived. 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.

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 innovation from Bucer, Zwingli, and Calvin. After a brief reversion to 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’. Presbyterianism and adherence to Rome were unacceptable. Most accepted, but minorities existed, some still adhering to Rome, others to presbyterianism or more extreme protestant views. After the heyday of the sects in the Interregnum (1649–60), compromise became impossible. 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.

After 1689 church life remained turbulent but settled down from 1714. Eighteenth‐cent. ecclesiastics' reputation for idleness and rationalist indifference is undeserved. Nevertheless liturgically the church was deadening. Eighteenth‐cent. Prayer Book liturgy and weighty preaching was unsuited to a mainly illiterate, uneducated people. 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, were rejected.

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 produced many of note, clergy like Simeon and 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.

As the British empire spread throughout the world in the 18th and 19th cents., the church followed—or in some cases 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. To provide cohesion and consensus, the first Lambeth conference with 67 bishops met in 1867, to be followed at Archbishop Tait's inspiration by the second in 1878. The archbishop still presides at the Lambeth conference each decade.

Twentieth‐cent. developments include 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.