Download A Short History of the Anglican Communion Originally designed as a

A Short History of the Anglican Communion
Originally designed as a text supplement for the first semester of Anglican
Studies I at St. Philip’s Theological College
By Dr. C. B. Caples
@published by St. Philip’s Theological College, Maseno, Oct. 2011;
revised version Feb. 2016
Anglican Communion History, part 1
The Church of England, immediate ‘ancestor’ of all the Churches of the
Anglican Communion, was originally established as part of a series of
European schisms within the Roman Catholic Church in the first half of the
16th century, known to historians as the Protestant Reformation
SCHISMS IN THE EARLY CHURCH: ‘Schism’ means a breaking-apart.
Schismatic tendencies appeared in the very earliest Christian churches,
both ethnic schisms (Acts 6:1; the tensions between the Hellenists, or
Greek-speaking Middle Easterners, and the Hebrews, or Aramaicspeaking Palestinian Jews like the apostles), and theological schisms (I
Corinthians, 1:11-12).
The Christian Church historically broke up into a number of regional
Churches: the Eastern Syriac Church separated from the mainstream
Church after the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.; the Western Syriac,
Ethiopian, and Egyptian (Coptic) Churches separated after the Council
of Chalcedon in 451; the Eastern Orthodox Churches separated from the
Western Church after the so-called Great Schism in 1054; Protestant
Churches separated from the Roman Catholic (Western) Church after the
Reformation c. 1520.
1500: THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND: In 1500, all
Englishmen were members of the Western Catholic Church, which was
headed by the Pope in Rome. The average Englishman was a poor
farmer who probably could not read English. He certainly did not
understand Latin, the language in which the Western Catholic Church held
its services. The Bible was available in England almost entirely in the Latin
Vulgate translation of St. Jerome. English people learned their (Latin)
prayers by heart, and learned about the Bible stories from preaching in
church, or from sources like the paintings on the walls of the churches and
from church-sponsored popular plays based on Bible stories. If an
Englishman wanted to marry, or to bury members of his family, he could
only do so through the Church. He paid one-tenth of his harvest as a tax,
called a ‘tithe,’ to the Church.
In addition to poor country churches, there were bigger churches in
England’s towns, and grand cathedrals in some cities. There were many
monasteries in England where monks (or in nunneries, nuns) were a kind
of clergy who vowed to spend their lives in prayer and work, and in
poverty, chastity, and obedience. Some of the monasteries had declined,
with few members. Others had grown rich from donations over the
centuries; their members lived in great comfort which had little in common
with the poverty they had vowed. Bishops administered great landed
estates belonging to the Church. They sat in the House of Lords in
Parliament, along with the great landowners. It is estimated that by 1500,
between one-fifth and one-third of all the real estate (land and buildings) in
England belonged to the Church, although only an estimated one or two
percent of the English population were members of the clergy.
TAXES TO ROME: Since the early Middle Ages (c. 800-1500 A.D.), the
English branch of the Roman Catholic Church had paid a tax called
‘Peter’s Pence’ to the Papacy in Rome. After losing a dispute with the
Pope in 1213, King John agreed that the English Church would pay more
taxes to the Papacy; after c. 1300, it is estimated that England’s clergy
paid the Papacy a tax amounting to 1/10 of their income. Later, the
growing Papacy requested more money to pay its rising expenses.
THE CONVOCATIONS: England had two Archishoprics, Canterbury in the
south and York in the north, but the Canterbury Archbishopric was the
longer continuously-operating one and covered a larger and richer part of
England, so it was the more prestigious and influential of the two. Early
13th-century Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton did not want the
Church to act only as an arm of the government (in those times, the
Crown). Bishops called their clergy together from time to time to discuss
diocesan issues. In 1225, Archbishop Langton called the clergy of
southern England to a Convocation in Canterbury, to discuss how and
whether to meet the Crown’s request for money to pay national expenses.
The York Archbishopric soon organized its own Convocation. The
Convocations, like England’s Parliament (which was also organized in the
13th century), each consisted of an Upper House (for bishops) and a Lower
House (for representatives of the clergy); not until 1885 would the
Convocations include representatives of the laity. The Convocations of
Canterbury and York are, jointly, the ancestor of the Church of England’s
modern General Synod.
Anglican Communion History – part 2
ENGLISH CRITICISM OF THE CHURCH OF ROME: In the later Middle
Ages, some English clergymen criticized the Church for its growing wealth
and its neglect of poor Christians. They said that many things in the
medieval Church did not come from the Bible – which of course most
Englishmen could not read. In 1382, the scholar John Wycliffe and some
of his followers (later known as ‘Lollards,’ originally a name for wandering
singers) completed an English translation of the Latin Bible text so that
England’s Christians could understand it and be guided by it. Wycliffe also
denounced the wealth of the Church, saying that this was not what the
Gospels taught; his writings were widely known, and were influential in
Europe. The Church was angered by Wycliffe’s criticism. Wycliffe, already
an old man, was tried for heresy but not condemned, as he had powerful
political supporters. However, in 1401, Parliament passed a law (De
heretico comburendo, 2 Henry IV, c. 15) making it legal to burn heretics at
the stake, and some Lollards were executed in this way.
Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel in the 1409 Constitutions of
Oxford forbade Englishmen to own an English-language Bible without
diocesan consent. This made England the only country in Northern
Europe to forbid or restrict translations of Scripture into local languages.
Nonetheless, the Wycliffe Bible remained so popular in England that we
have more full or partial pre-Reformation manuscripts of it than we do of
Geoffrey Chaucer’s enormously popular ‘Canterbury Tales’ from the same
period.
INDULGENCES: From c. 1476, Papal indulgences were sold in England.
This late-medieval invention enabled a Catholic to purchase from the
Church, for money, the assurance that, in return, the penalties some dead
relative or friend was suffering in Purgatory would be cancelled or
shortened (technically, indulgences were only supposed to free people
from temporal penalties, but the distinction was often obscured). Many
people criticized the indulgences. They said it was not Christian to make
the forgiveness of penalties for sins depend on how much money your
relatives could pay. In 1517, a German Augustinian monk named Martin
Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral a list of 95 ‘theses’ or
ideas he was willing to defend in debate, about the corruption in the
Catholic Church that needed reform. He named the indulgences as one of
the most corrupt practices. In general, Luther said that Christian practices
should be only those laid down in the Bible.
1517, THE REFORMATION BEGINS IN GERMANY: Many people agreed
with Martin Luther. This was the beginning of the Reformation in northern
Europe. Reformed (‘Protestant’) Churches quickly began to break away
from the Catholic Church, usually on a national basis. Some Protestant
leaders were more radical than others. Disputes arose about the proper
nature of Protestant Reform. Local wars quickly broke out in continental
Europe between Catholics and Protestants, or between competing groups
of Protestants. Over the next 130 years, religious wars caused enormous
suffering and loss of life in northern Europe.
England in the late 15th century had suffered a series of civil wars, the
‘Wars of the Roses’ (named for the badges of the two opposing sides, the
Houses of Lancaster and York). These wars were resolved by the death in
battle of the last Yorkist King, Richard III, and the victory of Henry Tudor,
descended from a branch of the House of Lancaster. Crowned King Henry
VII, Henry Tudor brought peace and stability to England.
KING HENRY VIII: Henry VII had two sons, Arthur and a second Henry.
The older son, Arthur, was married when he was 15, to a Spanish
princess, Catherine of Aragon, but he died, probably of tuberculosis, only a
few months later. Henry VII did not want to send Catherine back to Spain
because he did not want to have to return her dowry. When he died a few
years later, his son Henry was crowned King Henry VIII, and married
Catherine. Henry VIII and Queen Catherine had six children. However,
only one of the six, their daughter Mary, lived to grow up. No woman had
inherited the English throne since the 12th century, and that had led to a
civil war. Henry VIII and many other English people were worried that
without a male heir, civil war could follow. At this time (c. 1526), Henry VIII
fell in love with a younger woman, Anne Boleyn, from an important family
at court. He hoped she could give him a son.
Anglican Communion History – part 3
HENRY SEEKS AN ANNULMENT: Henry VIII thought he had found a
legitimate way to annul his marriage to Catherine, so that he could marry
Anne; Leviticus 20:21 said that a man should not marry his brother’s wife
(of course, Deuteronomy 25:5-10 said that a man SHOULD marry his
brother’s widow if she had no sons by her previous marriage, but that
would not have been helpful to Henry’s case). Henry sent a messenger to
Pope Clement VII in 1527 to ask for an annulment. Such annulments were
sometimes granted. However, earlier that year the troops of the Spanish
king had occupied Rome, killing many people, and the Pope was a virtual
prisoner in his own castle. The Spanish king was Queen Catherine’s
nephew, and the Pope was afraid to anger him. He refused to make a
judgment that might offend either party.
Henry VIII decided to resolve the problem himself. In 1529, he convened
Parliament to discuss the question of his annulment. Gradually, under
great pressure from Henry, both Parliament and the English Church
yielded to the king’s wishes. In 1532, Henry forced the Convocation of
Canterbury to agree to treat the King, not the Pope, as head of England’s
Church, and to make no Church laws (‘canons’) without the King’s
approval. Later that year, Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer, an important
scholar and a chaplain in the household of Anne Boleyn’s father, as
Archbishop of Canterbury. By this time, Henry had secretly married Anne,
and she was pregnant – with a son, Henry hoped (unfortunately, it was a
daughter, Elizabeth). In January 1533, Archbishop Cranmer recognized
the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine and legalized Henry’s
marriage to Anne.
HENRY PRESSURES THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT INTO
APPROVING HIS ANNULMENT – AND AN ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF
ENGLAND: In April 1533, Parliament passed the Statute in Restraint of
Appeals (also known as the Ecclesiastical Appeals Act 1532, 24 Henry VIII
c. 12). This law forbade all Englishmen to appeal to Rome on religious or
other matters. It made the King the final legal authority in all such matters
in England and its possessions. Three months later, Pope Clement
excommunicated Henry. Early in 1534, Parliament passed the Act
Concerning Peter’s Pence and Dispensations (also known as the
Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533, 25 Henry VIII, c. 21), outlawing the
payment of Peter’s Pence and other payments to the Church of Rome.
Parliament also passed the Act of Supremacy (26 Henry VIII, c. 1), by
which it recognized the King, not the Pope, as the head of the Church in
England. (This was not as great a change as it may seem; since the 14th
century, English laws had made decisions of the Pope subject in England
to forms of royal approval, and 15th-century English bishops normally took
an oath to ignore anything, even in the Papal Bull that made them a
bishop, which might be “prejudicial to the crown.” In practical terms,
England’s king had long been the effective head of the Church in his
country, as was also true of the late-medieval kings of France and of
Spain.)
HENRY CLOSES ENGLAND’S MONASTERIES, LAUNCHES SOME
REFORMS: In 1536, Henry VIII needed money. Many of England’s
monasteries were wealthy, and as a group they were not widely popular.
Henry began to dissolve the monasteries, seize their valuables, and sell
their land to wealthy English landowners and businessmen at favorable
prices. In this way many Englishmen benefited from the closure of the
monasteries, so they supported Henry. Henry appointed bishops with
Protestant sympathies because they tended to support him, so Protestant
theology became influential in the Church of England. In 1536, Henry
published the so-called 10 Articles, which introduced mild Protestantism
into the Church (that is, they questioned the idea of intercession for the
dead, denounced the adorning of saints’ images as idolatrous, etc.).
However, in 1539 he had Parliament pass the Act Abolishing Diversity of
Opinions, also known as the Six Articles (31 Henry VIII, c. 14), which
forbade many Protestant practices such as marriage of the clergy. Henry
VIII did authorize the publication of the Great Bible in both English and
Latin, to be available in all parishes as a kind of reference book for any
who wanted to use it, but it was not required for use in church services.
Henry did not intend to be a radical reformer. He continued to worship
using the same Latin liturgy, in the same kinds of churches, that he had
known all his life. Despite his excommunication, he apparently did not
regard himself as cut off from the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, he laid
the political framework that established the Church of England as Britain’s
state Church.
Anglican Communion History – part 4
ENGLAND BECOMES MORE PROTESTANT UNDER EDWARD VI: The
theological framework of English Protestantism was established
mainly under Henry VIII’s son Edward VI (1547-53). Edward was only 9
years old when he became King, but he had been brought up by
Protestant teachers and was surrounded by Protestant advisers. In
1547 under their direction, Parliament repealed the 1539 Act of Six
Articles (1 Edw. VI, c. 1); in 1549, it legalized marriage of the clergy and
other Protestant practices (2 & 3 Edw. VI, c. 21, reinforced in 5 & 6 Edw.
VI, c. 12). Also in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer, written largely by
Archbishop Cranmer, was issued for the Church of England, replacing the
traditional Latin-language liturgy with an English-language one. The Act of
Uniformity (2 & 3 Edw. VI, c. 1) made this liturgy the sole legal form of
worship in England. In 1552, to accompany a more ‘Protestant’ revision of
the Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer issued a list of 42 Articles (later
reduced to 39 under Queen Elizabeth) to outline the Protestant theology
and practice of the Church of England.
QUEEN MARY BRIEFLY RETURNS ENGLAND TO CATHOLICISM: Like
his uncle Arthur, Edward VI died at the age of 15, probably from
tuberculosis. Henry VIII’s eldest surviving child Mary, his daughter by his
first marriage, was proclaimed Queen (1554-58). Mary was a devout
Roman Catholic. She married her cousin King Philip V of Spain, another
firm Catholic. Under Mary’s rule, the Latin Mass again became the only
legal one. She wanted a peaceful restoration of the Catholic Church in
England, but many Englishmen had sincerely accepted Protestantism and
were unwilling to abandon it. Over 300 bishops, clergy, and others who
refused to renounce Protestantism were burned at the stake for heresy,
including Archbishop Cranmer, already an old man. They became martyrs
to many English people, who increasingly regarded the Catholic Church as
foreign.
THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT: After Mary died of cancer, the crown
passed to Henry VIII’s last surviving child, his younger daughter Elizabeth.
Parliament‘s 1559 Act of Supremacy (1 Eliz., c. 1) again made the Crown
the head of the Church of England. Elizabeth was highly educated, very
clever, and a Protestant from childhood. She wanted a peaceful, stable
kingdom. The religious compromises her bishops and councilors worked
out between Catholic and Protestant ideas are known as the Elizabethan
Settlement, the basis of the Anglican Church of today, expressed in the
1559 Act of Supremacy (1 Eliz I, c. 1) and Act of Uniformity (1 Eliz 1, c. 2).
Elizabeth had some difficulty in persuading Parliament to pass the Act of
Uniformity, and it passed by only three votes. This Act again replaced the
Latin Mass with the English-language services in the Book of Common
Prayer as the only legally-approved liturgy in England.
SCOTLAND FOUNDS ITS OWN PROTESTANT NATIONAL CHURCH: In
Scotland in 1560, the Scottish Parliament, guided by radical-Protestant
Scottish Church of England clergyman John Knox, abolished the
jurisdiction of the Pope in Scotland and founded the Scottish national
church, or Kirk, which was Protestant. Over the next twenty years, the Kirk
became increasingly Presbyterian (that is, groups of its local churches
were governed by councils of representatives elected from senior
members of their congregations, a presbytery, rather than by single
bishops; the monarch was still allowed to appoint bishops if they had the
Kirk’s approval). Elizabeth’s cousin-once-removed Mary (granddaughter of
Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, who had married King James V of Scotland)
was the Queen of the Scots, but Mary was Catholic, and Scotland expelled
her in 1569, keeping her infant son James to be brought up as Protestant
King James VI of Scotland. Mary took refuge in England. In 1570 Pope
Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and any of her subjects who
obeyed her. Catholic sympathizers in England thought Mary Queen of
Scots should be queen of England rather than the Protestant Elizabeth.
Mary apparently thought so too, and Elizabeth had her executed in 1587
for plotting to seize the English throne.
SOME PURITANS ARE STILL NOT SATISFIED: As Catholicism
increasingly became identified with foreign intrigue, it became less popular
in England. Elizabeth had more trouble with radical Protestants (‘Puritans’)
for whom her reforms were not radical enough. Puritans wanted to purify
the Church of anything that was not laid out in the Bible, such as the
wearing of ceremonial robes (surplices, etc.) by the clergy – who in the
Bible wore such things, they asked? They objected to anything that looked
even remotely Catholic (which they called ‘papist’ or ‘Popish’), such as
making the sign of the Cross at baptism. Puritans varied in their theories
of what should be done; some thought that even in church, all prayer
should be spontaneous and from the heart, not a set formula from the
prayerbook – such as the Lord’s Prayer. Generally, Puritans particularly
disliked bishops and other signs of the Church’s worldly wealth and
prestige, which they considered unChristian.
Elizabeth’s personal preferences were conservative; she thought
clergymen should remain unmarried, and she preserved the old elaborate
liturgy and liturgical furnishings in her private chapel. Nonetheless, she
made many compromises to accommodate the Puritans, allowing ‘images’
(and much great art with them) to be destroyed in English churches to
eliminate idolatry. Despite all this, some Puritans still were not satisfied,
and began to set up independent services of their own. In 1593, Elizabeth
had Parliament pass the Act Against Seditious Sectaries, also known as
the Act Against Puritans (35 Eliz. 1, c.1). This act banned formal (Puritan)
worship services outside the regular services of the Church of England. It
also required all English citizens to attend Church of England services
regularly. A few radical Protestants, especially in eastern England,
continued to hold Puritan services in the privacy of their homes.
HOOKER DEFENDS THE VIA MEDIA: The most famous theologian in the
Elizabethan Church of England was clergyman Richard Hooker. In 1594,
he began publishing his most important work, ‘Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity’ (laws on how a Church is governed), defending the
Church of England against Catholic and Puritan criticism. Hooker spoke
for the via media between Catholicism and radical Protestantism. (‘Via
Media’ is Latin for ‘the middle way;’ Hooker himself never used this
expression, which became popular only in the 19th century.) Hooker
considered the Scriptures the basis of the Church, but he also accepted
the importance of reason and of later traditions as long as they did not
contradict Scripture. He said that the Church of England must seek a
balance between Scripture, reason and tradition, because all have
limitations. He concluded that the Church of England had never separated
from the faith of Christ’s apostles, whose succession it preserved in the
office of the bishops; “in the Church we were and we are so still.” Hooker’s
work is still read by many scholars and theologians as a definitive
statement of what it means to be Anglican.
Anglican Communion History – part 5
JAMES I DISAPPOINTS THE PURITANS: Queen Elizabeth’s heir as ruler
of England was Mary Queen of Scots’ son James Stuart, better known as
King James VI of Scotland, who had been brought up as a Protestant.
Though he also remained King of Scotland, James was very happy to
become King James I of England (1603-1625); England was a much larger
and richer country than Scotland. When James became King of England,
English Puritans hoped he would be sympathetic to their request for further
reform in the Church of England. They were disappointed. James was
satisfied with the traditional structure and rituals of the Church of England.
He expected the Puritans to accept them too. However, James did
commission a new English translation of the Bible, by the best scholars
and from the best available manuscripts. It was published in 1611 as the
King James Bible.
CHARLES I FIGHTS THE PURITANS, AND LOSES: King James’s son
and successor, King Charles I of England (ruled 1625-1649), was more
opposed to Puritan practices than James was, and Charles’s wife was a
Roman Catholic French princess. Charles appointed as Archbishop of
Canterbury the scholarly William Laud, a very High Church clergyman; the
‘High Church’ faction in the Church of England believed that an elaborate,
‘Catholic-like’ ritual and beautiful churches were important in helping
people feel reverence for the sacred (just the opposite of the Puritan view
that plain and simplified churches and church services were the best
supports for a truly spiritual, Christian frame of mind). Archbishop Laud
also believed that the Church’s duty was to support the King in all things
(sometimes called ‘Arminianism’). As King of both Scotland and England,
Charles hoped to transform the National Presbyterian Church (‘Kirk’) of
Scotland into something more like the Church of England. In 1638, the
angry Scots signed a National Covenant (agreement) to resist all acts that
might endanger the Presbyterian Kirk, and the Scottish General Assembly
(Scotland’s Parliament) voted to abolish the office of bishop. The English
Parliament similarly demanded a number of Protestant reforms, and in
1642 Charles set up his standard, signifying that he was at war with his
Parliament.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND DIS-ESTABLISHED: Parliament and its
Puritan army eventually defeated King Charles’s troops in the 1642-48
English Civil War. Parliament ordered the execution of King Charles in
1649. Later, Parliament made the head of the army, Oliver Cromwell, the
Lord Protector of England, which was now a Commonwealth rather than a
monarchy. In 1645, Parliament had voted to replace the Book of Common
Prayer with a Directory of Public Worship approved by the Scottish
Parliament. In 1646, Parliament dismissed all the Church of England’s
bishops. In 1650, it repealed the 1559 Act of Uniformity, effectively disestablishing the Church of England and making it Presbyterian in form,
though everyone still had to pay tithes for it. Other groups still had
different ideas about what to believe and how to worship; in 1653,
Cromwell’s ‘Instrument of Government’ guaranteed general freedom of
worship to most Protestant congregations in England.
‘ANGLICANS’ AND ‘DISSENTERS:’ As English people began to settle in
North America and the Caribbean in the early 17th century, the term
‘Anglican’ (from the late-medieval Latin phrase ‘ecclesia anglicana,’
English Church) came into use by 1635 to refer to all people and things
connected with the Church of England (technically, all overseas Anglicans
came under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of London). By that time,
England’s various radical Protestant groups, also known as ‘Dissenters,’
had already begun to establish their own churches. Some of the
Dissenters in eastern England who had begun their form of worship in
Queen Elizabeth’s time had moved to Holland, then to North America to
what would become the colony of Massachusetts, to set up the
Congregationalist Church. Other Dissenters in eastern England
established the first Baptist Churches by the 1630s. Some radical
Dissenters believed that each individual should make his or her own
approach to God without any visible Church at all, waiting for inspiration
from the Holy Spirit. In 1648, a group of such worshippers organized
around the preacher George Fox as the Society of Friends, later known as
the Quakers.
Anglican Communion History – part 6
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND RE-ESTABLISHED: After Cromwell died in
1658, there was no obvious leader who could hold the country together.
The leading men in England thought they could best preserve the country’s
stability if they returned to the old traditional order. This meant they
needed a king. They contacted King Charles I’s eldest son, who had spent
years in exile in France, and offered him the Crown. He accepted and
returned to England in 1660 to be crowned as Charles II. In 1661,
Parliament again gave Established Church status to the Church of
England, and restored the bishops.
THE SAVOY CONFERENCE AND ITS AFTERMATH: Puritans (both
Anglicans and Dissenters) hoped the new government would confirm the
freedoms they had enjoyed under the Commonwealth. When the Church
of England held the 1661 Savoy Conference to discuss a new edition of
the Book of Common Prayer, Puritan representatives were invited.
However, it quickly became evident that the Church of England did not
regard the Dissenter groups as their spiritual equals, and the High Church
faction rejected the Puritan proposals. Disappointed, nearly 1800 Puritan
Anglican clergymen (according to some estimates, as high as one-fifth or
one-fourth of all Anglican clergymen of this time) left the Church of
England to become Dissenters themselves. In 1662, Parliament’s Act of
Uniformity (14 Car. II, c. 4) made a mildly revised Book of Common Prayer
the only legal liturgy for church services in England. Additionally,
Parliament passed the 1661 Corporation Act (13 Car. II, st. 2 c. 1),
excluding anyone except members of the Church of England from holding
local office. In 1673 and 1678, Parliament passed the Test Acts (25 Car.
II, c. 2, and 30 Car. II, st. 2), which institutionalized the monopoly right of
Church of England members to hold civil or military office in England.
Dissenters and Roman Catholics were allowed to worship in private, but
they could not hold public office or enter the universities.
JAMES II IS EXPELLED FOR CATHOLICISM: In 1685, Charles II, who
had no legitimate offspring, died and was succeeded as king by his brother
James II, an acknowledged Roman Catholic. In the same year, King Louis
XIV of France abolished the Edict of Nantes, which for nearly a hundred
years had permitted France’s Protestants to worship openly; now they
were told to convert to Catholicism or leave France. Many French
Protestants refugeed to England, where they described to the English what
could happen if a king decided to impose Roman Catholicism on his
subjects. James II had promised his subjects that he would not interfere in
any way with the Church of England. However, in 1688 when James made
a Declaration of Indulgence for Liberty of Conscience to permit Roman
Catholics and Dissenters to worship publicly and enjoy other legal rights,
many Englishmen feared this was the first step toward imposing Roman
Catholicism on England’s people, as Louis XIV had done in France.
James’s elder daughter Mary was married to the solidly Protestant Dutch
prince William of Orange; leading Englishmen invited William and Mary to
assume the English throne to ensure Protestantism, and James fled into
exile in the ‘Glorious Revolution.’
EARLIEST CHURCH OF ENGLAND MISSIONARY SOCIETIES: Charles II
was a very worldly man, fond of drinking and gambling and womanizing,
and many Englishmen had worried that the king and his court were not
setting a high moral tone for the country or the Church. Beginning in the
late 1670s, groups of devout young Anglican laymen began to meet
together in ‘societies’ or ‘clubs,’ to pray together regularly under the
guidance of a minister, and to promote spiritual self-improvement for
themselves and others. As increasing numbers of Englishmen settled
outside England in the new colonies in North America, the Church of
England faced the problem of providing these people with spiritual
guidance as well. The High Church Rev. Thomas Bray in 1698 founded
the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) to provide
libraries of Christian reading materials and similar services in England and
in the colonies. In 1701, Bray and others also founded the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), England’s oldest
missionary society, to send clergymen to North America to evangelize
among the colonists there, and eventually among the natives of these
regions.
Anglican Communion History – part 7
SOME LEGAL TOLERATION EXTENDED TO DISSENTERS: In 1689-90,
the English rejected King James II for his Roman Catholicism. Instead,
leading Englishmen offered the crown to James’s Protestant elder
daughter Mary and her Protestant Dutch husband William. Because
William was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church rather than the
Church of England, Parliament had to accept a king “in communion with”
the Church of England, rather than requiring an Anglican who would
subscribe to all 39 of the 39 Articles. In 1689, Parliament’s Act of
Toleration (1 Will. and Mar., c. 18) granted non-Anglicans the right to
public worship in their own churches, with their own ministers – so long as
they were Trinitarian Protestants who took the Oath of Allegiance to the
Crown (so this did not apply for Roman Catholics, nor for Quakers, who
could not take oaths).
THE ‘NON-JURORS:’ A small minority (an estimated 4%) of the Church of
England’s clergy (c. 400 High Church ministers and six bishops including
the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, as well as all the
Scottish bishops) felt unable in good conscience to take the Oath of
Loyalty to William and Mary as long as the king to whom they had
originally taken this oath, James II, was still living. Called the ‘Non-jurors,’
they were suspended, then deprived of their office. Most retired quietly.
However, a group of Non-jurors led by Dean of Worcester George Hickes
maintained that the Church of England had lost its claim to be considered
a true, catholic, and apostolic church. Hickes’s group said that only the
Non-jurors could now fill this role in England. (In 1694, James II from exile
nominated Hickes as Suffragan Bishop of Thetford, despite the fact that
James had lost the authority to bestow bishoprics when he lost his Crown.
From that time, the Non-jurors no longer belonged to the Church of
England. They subsequently tended to be associated with the minority
movement to restore the Stuarts – that is, James and his male
descendants - to the English throne. In 1713, Hickes with the help of two
Scottish bishops consecrated three new Non-juror bishops-at-large. The
Non-juror shadow-episcopate largely ended with the death of the last
Stuart pretender to the English throne in 1788. It finally died out in 1805
with the death of Non-juror Bishop Charles Booth from Manchester.)
HOW SCOTLAND ESTABLISHED THE FIRST NON-ESTABLISHED
ANGLICAN CHURCH: Despite sharing a monarch with England, Scotland
was still technically an independent kingdom at this time [and remained so
until 1707], with a separate parliament. In 1690, the Scottish Parliament
dis-established Scotland’s restored Anglican Church. Instead, it once
again made the Presbyterian Kirk the state church in Scotland. The
remaining Anglican Church in Scotland was allowed to continue to function
under the name of the Scottish Episcopal Church, but it stayed poor and
small.
HIGH AND LOW CHURCH: Under the restored monarchy in the late 17th
century, England’s Parliament had split into two major factions: the
conservative Tory Party (which tended to support the Crown in order to
promote national unity), and the more liberal Whig Party (which believed
the Crown should share more power with the elected Parliament). The
Church of England’s High Church faction favored strict and exclusive
observance of Anglican ritual and structures of authority; High Churchmen
tended to support the Tories politically.
An opposing faction in the Church of England favored toleration towards
Dissenters (also increasingly known as ‘Nonconformists,’ from their refusal
to conform to all the regulations of the Church of England). This faction
hoped that the Dissenters, if treated with understanding, would return to
their original membership in the Church of England. Known as the Low
Church faction (sometimes also called ‘Latitudinarian’), this group tended
to support the Whigs.
In 1714, under the Tories, Parliament passed the Schism Act (13 Ann., c.
7), which required all of England’s teachers to conform to (i.e., to be
members of) the Church of England. Under the Whigs in 1727, however,
Parliament passed an Act of Indemnity for Nonconformists (1 Geo. II, c.
23), permitting them to serve in local government. The Act was renewed
every year for the next hundred years. Meanwhile, however, all England’s
Members of Parliament were still legally required to be members of the
Church of England.
CONVOCATIONS DISSOLVED FOR 130 YEARS: Because factional
feeling was so strong within the Church of England, the two Convocations
became noisy and divisive. King William III, and later King George I,
feared the Convocations’ disputes could contribute to national disunity.
After 1717, England’s monarchs did not call the Convocations to meet
again until the 1850s. This meant that for the next 130 years, the Church of
England’s senior clergy did not have a forum in which to debate how the
Church should address the problems and issues of the times, or to discuss
each other’s views and ideas on doctrine and worship.
ABUSES WITHIN THE CHURCH: One of the great abuses the
Reformation had hoped to address was the excessive accumulation of
wealth and power within the Church, and its very uneven distribution.
Some clergymen held extremely well-paid positions and lived in great
luxury, while others were paid hardly enough to live on. Clergy with
powerful family political connections were allowed to hold several well-paid
clerical ‘livings’ at the same time, receiving the income from all of them, a
practice known as ‘pluralism.’ Since clergymen with multiple appointments
could not actually serve in several places at one time, some of the livings
they were paid for were either not served, or they hired a poorer clergyman
to serve in them as ‘vicar,’ for a fraction of the salary they received. Some
laws had been passed under Henry VIII to restrict pluralism (e.g., 21 Henry
VIII, c. 13, para. ix), but these laws were easy to get round. By the end of
the 18th century, the problem of pluralism was apparently as bad as it had
been before the Reformation. In the early 19th century, Parliament would
estimate that only 40% of England’s parishes had resident clergy.
Some of the privileges the Church of England enjoyed under the British
government would become a two-edged sword. The state’s funds helped
to support the Church of England’s great or historic church buildings, so
they would be very hard to forego. Since the Church of England was the
State (‘Established’) Church, sn sppointment to a bishopric had to be
approved by Parliament, so it depended on the support of influential
Members of Parliament from the party currently in power. And since the
votes of the bishops in the House of Lords constituted a potentially
important bloc in support (or otherwise) of the policies of the party in
power, Prime Ministers were inclined to appoint as bishops men whose
political loyalty they felt they could count on. In consequence, Anglican
ministers with ambitions to become bishops could be tempted to identify
with the political factions of those from whom they hoped for promotion,
regardless of principle.
Many of the best-paid clerical appointments were under the control of
wealthy landowners, a class that included some bishops. The potential
financial advantages could tempt clergymen to adopt political and
theological views likely to suit those of possible patrons in a position to
decide who got the more desirable clerical situations. There were many
unfriendly jokes about Church of England clergymen who were allegedly
willing to support whatever side seemed likely to offer them material
advantages.
Not all bishops set a bad, or even a merely worldly, example. Some were
faithful shepherds of their dioceses. Some bishoprics had much poorer
revenues than other bishoprics in richer districts. But because the bishops
themselves normally lived in luxury, and some lived in splendor, they were
also among the most obvious signs of the Church of England’s unevenly
distributed wealth. As the bishops were themselves members of
Parliament’s upper house, the House of Lords, which met in London, they
spent much of the year in London away from their dioceses. Meanwhile,
some churches in poor rural parishes were in ruins because there was no
one to maintain them. Moreover, some English cities grew very rapidly in
the 18th century’s Industrial Revolution, as the new factories drew people
from all over the country looking for work. Their existing churches were
not always big or numerous enough to provide worship space for the large
numbers of new industrial workers.
HOW SHOULD ADVANCES IN SCIENCE AND LEARNING AFFECT THE
CHURCH? The 17th and the 18th centuries saw enormous, rapid
advances in the understanding of the laws that govern the natural world.
The 1687 publication of Isaac Newton’s ‘Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica,’ probably the single most famous scientific work in
history, demonstrated how the movements of Earth and other celestial
bodies are governed by universal gravitation and the laws of motion. For
the first time, it became possible to describe the processes of nature in
mathematically-expressed laws that appeared to be universally applicable.
Some traditional Anglican theologians such as the Rev. Joseph Butler
(later Bishop of Bristol, then of Durham) welcomed these advances; his
1736 ‘Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed’ argued that the scientific
discoveries of the age gave man even greater reasons to glorify God.
Others argued that natural laws, which could be studied by man, were
sufficient to reveal God’s existence and purpose without the traditional
reliance on special miracles and revelations; in extreme cases, this form of
rationalism tended towards Deism, the belief that the universe was created
by a Supreme Being who did not afterwards intervene directly in it.
Some Anglicans felt that this rational, scientific approach starved the
emotional side of spirituality. They also worried that it conflicted with Old
Testament traditions of frequent divine intervention in natural processes on
behalf of the faithful, e.g., Joshua 10:12-13 (“Joshua spoke to the Lord:
and He said in the sight of Israel, ‘Sun, stand still in Gibeon, and Moon, in
the valley of Aijalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped.”).
(Newton seems to have had his own theological problems; he was
unquestionably devout and wrote extensive private commentaries on
Scripture and the early Church Fathers, but some modern scholars deduce
from his writings that he interpreted the Scriptures as being in conflict with
the doctrine of the Trinity, a view which would then have made him
ineligible for university or public office if it had become publicly known).
BIBLICAL LITERALISM: Protestantism had always placed great emphasis
on Scripture, which the Church of England’s 39 Articles said contained all
information needful to salvation. Biblical scholars had noted since the early
third century (e.g., Origen) that the wording of Scriptural texts often varied
from one manuscript to another, usually in insignificant ways but not
always. As more ancient Biblical manuscripts came to light, modern
textual study increasingly revealed how they differed, so that it was
sometimes hard to be absolutely certain what the original text had said.
Anglican scholar and theologian John Mill (apparently no relation to 19thcentury British philosopher John Stuart Mill) in 1707 published the results
of his 30-year study of the Greek New Testament, in which he found over
30,000 variations in the c. 100 New Testament manuscripts known to him;
in 1709, conservative Anglican theologian Daniel Whitby attacked Mill’s
work, saying that it potentially discredited the Bible and thus gave support
to enemies of the Church (both Mill and Whitby wrote their studies in Latin,
so their work was mainly read by scholars and clergymen).
Early Church Fathers such as Origen and St. Augustine of Hippo had
argued strongly against treating all Old Testament texts literally. However,
some 18th-century clergymen concluded that they could not consistently
defend Scripture without defending every word of it equally; e.g., in his
journal in 1768, John Wesley wrote of Britain’s 1735 Witchcraft Act (9 Geo.
II, cap. 5, which outlawed the charge of witchcraft) that “the English in
general…have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere
old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it….the giving up of witchcraft is in effect
giving up the Bible” (in which witchcraft is several times mentioned). Both
the discoveries of science and the rise of Biblical literalism would become
increasingly important in the mid-19th century.
Anglican Communion History – part 8
PROBLEMS IN THE 18TH-CENTURY CHURCH OF ENGLAND: Anglicans
in the 18th century faced some of the problems England had faced before
the Reformation: the existing organization of the Church was in some
cases corrupt, with the pursuit of wealth and power more important than
service. As 18th-century England grew richer and more powerful, its
society became more materialistic. Parts of the Church of England
seemed to be materialistic as well. Additionally, much of the Church’s
energy and initiative had been in its Puritan circles. When many Puritans
left the Church of England to form their own Dissenting Churches, the
Church of England lost much of its spiritual energy. Many English people
felt that the Church no longer offered much help in the search for spiritual
renewal.
JOHN WESLEY’S CONVERSION: In May 1738, at an evening prayergroup meeting, Church of England clergyman John Wesley experienced a
‘conversion.’ His sense of himself as a hopeless sinner was replaced with
the sense that God offered salvation even to such sinners as himself.
Wesley was not your average sinner; at Oxford University in the late
1720s, he and his brother Charles, themselves sons of a High Church
Anglican clergyman, had established a club with a few fellow-scholars,
devoted to Bible study and to relieving the needs of the poor and the
unfortunate, such as people in prisons. Other Anglicans thought this was
funny and joked about the group, calling them the ‘Holy Club’ or
‘Methodists’ (because they tried to study the Bible in a regular and
methodical way).
Wesley became an Anglican clergyman, but he never felt fully confident
that God accepted him, weak and sinful as he considered himself to be.
Then at the 1738 meeting, he later wrote, he heard a reading from Martin
Luther’s commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where Luther
describes how his own sense of worthlessness was relieved by the Apostle
Paul’s explanation that we are saved through faith. This seemed to relieve
Wesley’s own doubts and fears, enabling him to have the experience
known as ‘justification,’ ‘sanctification,’ or being ‘born again.’ Wanting to
help others to share in this blessing, Wesley began preaching his faith
wherever he could. The pietistic theology Wesley accepted (belief in the
need for personal conversion; a high regard for Biblical authority; an
emphasis on the death and resurrection of Jesus as atonement for the sins
of mankind; the conviction that faith would express itself in godly works)
became known as ‘evangelicalism.’
THE RISE OF ANGLICAN EVANGELICALISM: Wesley was not the only
Anglican clergyman who preached this kind of theology, but others who did
so quickly acknowledged Wesley’s leadership. Though some Anglican
ministers supported Wesley’s ‘Methodist’ ideas, many others disapproved.
Some complained that when the ‘Methodists’ held their meetings at the
same time as church services, they drew their congregations away from
Anglican worship (Wesley urged his followers not to meet during regular
service hours). Most Anglican clergymen would not let Wesley preach in
their churches. Despite the Church of England’s ban on preaching in
unconsecrated locations, Wesley began preaching in the open air, to huge
crowds, often composed of poor laboring people. Though a quiet man,
Wesley was a charismatic preacher. When he preached, some listeners
shrieked, some wept, some fainted, and many proclaimed that their lives
had been changed.
Wesley knew that the experience of a moment could only work lasting
change if it was constantly renewed. He organized his followers into
Methodist “societies” modeled on those of the German Protestant
Moravian Brethren, whose work he admired, to meet regularly to pray
together and “help each other to work out their salvation.” To provide the
societies with ongoing guidance, the Methodists persuaded some Anglican
bishops to ordain especially suitable Methodist laymen for this purpose. In
other cases, Wesley allowed committed Methodist laymen to ‘testify’ and
act as ‘supervisors’ for Methodist societies. This was dangerously close to
appointing lay preachers, which the Church of England’s canons did not
permit. Some of the lay preachers went so far as to administer the
Eucharist, even though under English law only ordained Church of
England clergymen or government-licensed Dissenting ministers could
legally do this.
THE METHODIST SCHISM: As early as 1744, Methodist societies
founded a special Annual Conference for their preachers. Although
Wesley was not himself a bishop, after America’s independence in 1783
he ordained several Methodist lay preachers as ministers for service there
(i.e., outside England; he subsequently also ordained a few for service in
Scotland and in the Caribbean). This was contrary to the Church of
England canons which authorized only bishops to ordain ministers, but
Wesley thought he had a valid precedent in the practices of the Early
Church. Wesley also appointed Anglican Methodist Rev. Dr. Thomas
Coke as ‘superintendent’ for the American Methodists, with authority to
ordain Americans as Methodist ministers. This was tantamount to
consecrating Coke as a bishop (that was certainly Coke’s view of the
matter). There was no precedent or authorization for a minister to
consecrate a bishop.
Wesley was still a Church of England clergyman when he died in 1791. He
never thought of himself as a Dissenter. He always hoped that the
Methodist spiritual renewal would penetrate the entire Anglican Church.
Despite Wesley’s preference for remaining in the Church of England, the
Methodist Annual Conference separated formally from the Church of
England in 1795. (As happens with most schisms, the Methodists initially
had difficulty agreeing among themselves. They separated into three
principal Methodist Churches. However, two of the three reunited in the
mid-19th century, and all three were re-united in 1932.)
EVANGELICALS FOUND THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY:
Wesley believed we receive God’s grace through faith, not works.
However, he also believed that people demonstrate the presence of God’s
grace through good works. The Methodists became known for active work
to help others, for example helping to lead the English fight to abolish
slavery (in his 1774 essay, ‘Thoughts Upon Slavery,’ Wesley had written, “I
absolutely deny all slave-holding to be consistent with any degree of
natural justice”). Under the influence of Methodist evangelicalism and
other spiritual-renewal movements, evangelical factions arose within the
Church of England, including in wealthy circles. In 1799, a London
evangelical Anglican group called the Eclectic Society under the leadership
of John Venn established the Church Missionary Society (CMS), originally
aiming to bring Christianity to West Africans.
AMERICANS ESTABLISH THE FIRST ANGLICAN CHURCH OUTSIDE
BRITISH TERRITORIES: In 1783, a group of Anglican clergymen in the
newly-independent United States of America wondered how to continue
their newly non-established Church and ordain new ministers for it.
During the time of Charles I in the early 17th century, the British
government had decided that all Anglican British subjects living abroad
would come under the diocesan jurisdiction of the Bishop of London; in
1783, there were still no Anglican bishops outside the British Isles with
authority to ordain ministers. The American Anglicans thought they
needed a bishop of their own. One of their leading clergymen, William
White, who had been Chaplain to the American Continental Congress,
questioned whether America’s Anglicans really needed bishops, as the
earliest Christian churches had apparently not had any. White suggested
that ordained American Anglican ministers could form committees to
ordain new ministers for their Church. More conservative Anglican
clergymen in Connecticut felt that an Anglican minister must be episcopally
ordained to be legitimate. They sent one of their number, the Rev. Samuel
Seabury, to England to seek consecration as a bishop.
Under English law at that time, Church of England bishops could not
consecrate Seabury, because as an American citizen Seabury could not
take the legally-mandated Oath of Loyalty to England’s king. However, the
other non-established Anglican Church of that period, the small Episcopal
Church of Scotland, did not require the Oath and was able to consecrate
Seabury as a bishop in Nov., 1784. This persuaded Parliament to
reconsider the matter; in the next two years, Parliament made it legal for
the Church of England’s bishops to consecrate Anglican clergymen from
lands outside British rule without requiring the latter to take the Oath of
Loyalty (24 Geo. III, cap. 35, The Ordination of Aliens Act; and 26 Geo. III,
cap. 84, Consecration of Bishops Abroad Act). With this authority, the
Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated William White and his fellowAmerican Anglican minister Samuel Provoost as bishops in 1787 (White
and Provoost were not, however, the first overseas bishops consecrated
by the Church of England; earlier that year, Charles Price was consecrated
Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia in Canada, still under English rule). In
1789, the American Anglicans held their first General Convention (the
American equivalent of England’s Convocations). This was the first
Anglican Church convention that included lay members among its
delegates. After the model of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the American
Anglicans called their Church the Episcopal Church.
Anglican Communion History – Part 9
19TH-CENTURY REFORM MOVEMENTS OPEN PUBLIC OFFICE TO
NON-ANGLICANS: The early 19th century saw widespread movements
toward political reform in England, some of which touched on matters of
religion. In 1828, a coalition Parliament (in the Sacramental Test Bill, 9
Geo. IV., c. 17) repealed the Test and Corporation Acts of the late 17th
century; these laws had barred Nonconformists (i.e., Dissenters, nonAnglican Protestants) from holding national-level public office in England.
Similarly in 1829, Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act (10
Geo. IV, c. 7), extending the same civil rights to Roman Catholics. It was
now possible for non-Anglicans to serve in England’s government,
including in Parliament, whose members ceased to be automatically
identified with the Church of England.
In 1831, Parliament first voted on the Whigs’ great Reform Bill
(Representation of the People Act, 2 & 3 Will. IV, c. 45) to increase the
number of those who could vote and to put an end to certain abuses of the
electoral system. The Reform Bill passed in the House of Commons but
was voted down by 41 votes in the House of Lords; 21 of the votes against
the Bill came from Church of England bishops including the Archbishop of
Canterbury. The Bill subsequently passed in 1832, but meanwhile for
some months, Anglican bishops were extremely unpopular and much
criticized. Some Dissenters proposed that equality before the law should
be extended, not just to members of different Churches, but to the
Churches themselves, by disestablishing the Church of England. The
threat of disestablishment and other reforms drew a number of Anglican
clergymen toward the more conservative Tories. To defend the Church of
England’s rights and privileges, various factions within it moved to tighten
the Church’s dogmatic authority, and to strengthen its organizational
discipline.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE HIGH-CHURCH OXFORD (‘TRACTARIAN’)
MOVEMENT: Most Irishmen were Roman Catholics; only an estimated
12% of Ireland’s population were Anglicans, yet all the Irish were taxed (by
‘church rates’) to support the Anglican Church of Ireland, with its four
archbishops and 18 bishops (as compared with the two archbishops and
27 bishops the Church of England had before 1836). In the Irish Church
Temporalities Act (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 37), the reformist Whigs proposed to
reduce the tax burden on the mainly Roman Catholic Irish by cancelling
the church rates there (these were not abolished in England until 1867),
and by cancelling or reducing the number of dioceses of the Anglican
Church of Ireland to two archbishoprics and 12 bishoprics.
Some High Church English clergymen like John Henry Newman and his
friend John Keble at Oxford were appalled. They considered some of
these reforms an unjustifiable intervention by mere secular powers in the
affairs of the divinely-established Church. In July 1833, Keble preached a
sermon ‘On National Apostasy,’ calling for revival of the Church of
England’s authority as part of its sacred heritage handed down in the
Apostolic Succession. Newman and one or two Oxford colleagues had
already decided to form a society to defend the Church of England’s
liberties and principles. They joined with Keble to make these views better
known, in a widely-published series of essays, ‘Tracts for the Times’
(1833-41). The tracts were intended to rally all loyal Anglican churchmen
and infuse new life into the Church of England. From these beginnings,
this movement became known as the Oxford or Tractarian Movement. In
his autobiography many years later, Newman described Keble’s 1833
sermon as the start of the Oxford Movement.
PART OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT BECOMES ‘ANGLO-CATHOLIC:’
Some of the Oxford Movement’s later members favored borrowing
elements from pre-Reformation Roman Catholic ritual to give the Anglican
liturgy greater reverence and dignity. The Oxford Movement thus also
became known as “Anglo-Catholic.” (One early critic of the Oxford
Movement, Canon of St. Paul’s the Rev. Sydney Smith, complained that its
followers “make religion an affair of trifles, of postures, and of garments,”
and that they “lessen the aversion to the Catholic faith, and the admiration
of Protestantism;” Newman himself eventually converted to Roman
Catholicism and later became a Cardinal in the Catholic Church.) Some
“Anglo-Catholic” clergy introduced these ritual innovations into their
churches without diocesan authorization, effectively challenging episcopal
authority and discipline within the Church. In the parish of Cowley, Oxford
in 1866, an Anglican clergyman founded the Society of St. John the
Evangelist (SSJE), the first stable religious community of celibate men in
holy orders established within the Church of England since the
Reformation (today there are several small Anglican orders of monks or
nuns worldwide, but they are still very rare by comparison with the
continuing role of monastic orders in the Roman Catholic Church). The
Oxford Movement’s members also revived the term ‘Low Church,’ but
applied it (disparagingly) to the now-important Evangelical wing of the
Church of England. The previous Low Church (Latitudinarian) faction
became known after about 1850 as the ‘Broad Church.’
THE ECCLESIASTICAL COMMISSION CARRIES OUT REFORMS IN
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND: Parliament continued its efforts to support
reform in the Church of England. In 1835 it established an Ecclesiastical
Commission of both bishops and laymen to manage the Church of
England’s estates and revenues, and to redistribute the Church’s revenues
more equitably. In 1836, the Ecclesiastical Commission was made a
permanent institution and allowed to equalize the stipends of bishops
(Established Church Act, 6 & 7 Will. IV, c. 77); by 1838-40, the
Commission had begun eliminating pluralism (1838 Pluralities Act, 1 & 2
Vict., c. 106; 1840 Dean and Chapter Act, 3 & 4 Vict., c. 113).
As a result of the reform process, bishops ceased to carry much weight in
partisan political decisions in the House of Lords. In 1844 in the Bishopric
of Manchester Act (10 & 11 Vict. c. 108), Parliament voted to limit the
number of bishops who could hold seats in the House of Lords at any one
time to 26, thus reducing their importance as a potential political bloc.
(After the 1911 Parliament Act [1 & 2 Geo. V, c. 13] ended the powers of
the House of Lords to reject or change proposed legislation against the
wishes of the House of Commons, the Church of England's bishops
effectively ceased to exert direct legislative power in Great Britain.)
THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION: The Church of England played an
increasingly important role outside England as well as within it. In 1843,
the Church Missionary Society (CMS) ordained its first African minister,
Samuel Crowther, a former slave who in 1864 would become Bishop of the
Niger Territories. In the 1840s, the word ‘Anglicanism’ was coined to
describe the common religious tradition shared by the Church of England,
the Church of Ireland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the American and
Canadian Episcopal Churches, and newly formed churches within this
tradition in Africa and Asia. In 1851, the term ‘Anglican Communion’ was
first used to describe the worldwide Anglican Churches.
BUT MORE AND MORE ENGLISHMEN ARE NOT ACTIVE ANGLICANS:
In the 19th century, England’s population grew rapidly, from an estimated
11 million in the late 18th century to 37 million by 1910. Anglican worship
also grew greatly in Britain’s colonies and imperial possessions. Between
1841 and 1911, the Anglican Church underwent its only major period of
sustained growth since the Reformation: the number of its clergy rose from
14,613 to 24,968. From 1851 to 1911, the number of Anglican churches
rose from 14,077 to 18,026. By 1911, the percentage of English people
who said they belonged to the Church of England was higher than in 1831.
Yet at the same time, the Church of England was ceasing to be the
dominant spiritual force in England. Other Churches were growing, too,
while some people did not go to church at all. On the last Sunday in
March, 1851, a census was held in 14,000 churches of all kinds throughout
England, to see where English people worshipped on Sundays. In 1854,
the results were published: only a little less than half of all English people
attended any church at all; only half of this fraction, or about 22% of
England’s population, attended an Anglican Church.
Anglican Communion History – part 10
INTELLECTUAL AND SCHOLARLY CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL
BELIEFS: In the second half of the 19th century, Anglicanism faced new
intellectual and practical challenges. Biologist Charles Darwin published
‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; it seemed to call into question some of the
Creation accounts in the first two chapters of ‘Genesis’ (which, of course,
also differed from each other). In 1860 a group of seven Oxford Anglican
clergymen caused much greater shock by publishing a book, ‘Essays and
Reviews,’ popularizing the findings of modern Biblical scholarship
(sometimes known as the ‘Higher Criticism’), which demolished many
traditional ideas such as that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. ‘Essays and
Reviews’ sold more copies in the first two years of its publication than ‘The
Origin of Species’ did in twenty (two of the authors of ‘Essays and
Reviews’ were tried for heresy, though the convictions were later reversed;
one of the other five, Frederick Temple, whose essay included the
observation, “If geology proves to us that we must not interpret the first
chapters of Genesis literally…the results should still be welcome,” was
appointed Bishop of Exeter in 1869, and Archbishop of Canterbury in
1896). In 1862, the Anglican bishop of Natal (South Africa), the English
mathematical scholar John Colenso, drew on modern geological and other
scientific findings to recommend against an excessively literal
interpretation of the Pentateuch; one of Colenso’s fellow bishops in South
Africa tried to have him deposed for heresy.
THE LAMBETH CONFERENCES ARE ESTABLISHED AS A
CONSULTATIVE ORGAN FOR THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION: The
Church of England began to host a series of meetings to discuss the
demands of the new times and how to respond to them. Convocation was
revived in the 1850s, but it did not include the growing Anglican Churches
outside England. In 1867, at the request of Anglican bishops from the U.S.
and Canada, Archbishop of Canterbury Charles Thomas Longley invited all
bishops in the Anglican Communion to the first Lambeth Conference, to
discuss issues of particular interest to Anglicans such as the Colenso
case. Archbishop Longley said in his opening address that the Conference
was not meant to assume “the functions of a general synod of all churches
in full communion with the Church of England” but was intended only to
“discuss matters of practical interest, and pronounce what we deem
expedient in resolutions which may serve as safe guides to future action.”
THE ‘LAMBETH QUADRILATERAL’: After 1878, the Anglican bishops
decided to hold the Lambeth Conferences at regular 10-year intervals. The
1888 (Third) Lambeth Conference met in Canterbury to discuss the
possibility of reunion with other Christian Churches. The Third Conference
decided that Anglican Churches were the ones that preserved four points
of essential doctrine (still known as the Lambeth Quadrilateral, or the
Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, since it drew on a resolution from the
1886 Chicago meeting of the American Episcopal Church’s House of
Bishops): that the Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation; that
the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are sufficient statements of the Christian
faith; that the essential sacraments are baptism and the Eucharist; and the
importance of the historic episcopate, locally adapted. The Lambeth
Conference recommended that the Anglican Churches should only
consider uniting with other Christian Churches that accepted these four
points.
HIGH-CHURCH AND EVANGELICAL MOVEMENTS OF THE LATER 19TH
CENTURY: The second half of the 19th century was a time of great growth
in the Anglican Communion, partly due to increased missionary activity. In
1857 Scotch Congregationalist missionary and crusader against
slavery Dr. David Livingstone preached at Oxford and Cambridge
universities, urging missionary care for the oppressed of Africa. In
response, High Church members of both universities founded the
Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA).
Supporters of the Oxford Movement continued to introduce innovations
into the worship in their churches. In 1874, Parliament passed a Public
Worship Regulation Act (37 & 38 Vict., c. 85) introduced by Archbishop of
Canterbury Archibald Tait to curb illegal intrusions of Roman Catholic
practices concerning such matters as the use of candles, vestments, and
incense. In the same period, Evangelical groups were increasingly active.
In 1875, an Evangelical Anglican and a Quaker founded the yearly
meetings of the Keswick Convention in northwest England as the focal
point for a charismatic spiritual movement which stressed man’s sinful
state and the need for penance; the Keswick Movement became very
influential in Evangelical thinking. In 1885, the Canterbury and York
Convocations followed the century-old American model by introducing their
first representative bodies for laymen, the Houses of Laity.
Anglican Communion History – part 11
THE LAMBETH CONFERENCE’S FIRST CONSULTATIVE BODY: The
20th-century history of the Church of England is inseparable from
the history of the Anglican Communion. In 1897, the Church established
the Lambeth Conference’s Consultative Body; this was the Anglican
Communion’s first body charged with responsibility for regular
consultation between its different parts. (The 1920 Lambeth
Conference subsequently noted that the Consultative Body “is in the
nature of a continuation committee of the Lambeth Conference, and
neither possesses nor claims any executive or administrative powers.”)
PARLIAMENT ESTABLISHES THE CHURCH ASSEMBLY (LATER
CALLED THE GENERAL SYNOD): At home, the Church of England
moved to modernize its own structures and make them more
representative. In 1919, at the encouragement of the Convocations of
Canterbury and York, Parliament (in 9 & 10 Geo. V, c. 76) established a
Church Assembly based on the two Convocations and their Houses of
Laity, with the power to pass “measures” with the force of law on “any
matter concerning the Church of England,” subject to Parliament’s
approval. The Church Assembly effectively took over the role of the
Convocations in representing the Church in matters of doctrine and
governance. (In 1970, the Church Assembly was replaced by the General
Synod of the Church of England, consisting of a House of Bishops, a
House of Clergy, and a House of Laity; the two Convocations continued to
exist for ceremonial purposes, but ceased regular meetings.)
PARLIAMENT BLOCKS A REVISED BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER: The
Church Assembly was designed to take Parliament largely out of the
business of governing the Church of England. Nonetheless, Parliament
intervened decisively in the Church’s plans in 1927 when the
Convocations and the Church Assembly agreed on a revision of the Book
of Common Prayer that would include some of the ritualistic practices
favored by the Tractarians. In 1927 and again in 1928, a small group of
Members of Parliament refused to approve the revision because they
considered these practices a drift away from the Church of England’s
historically Protestant character. The Church of England abandoned
further efforts to revise the Book of Common Prayer, and instead
produced alternative prayerbooks which could also be used.
(Subsequently, other Anglican Churches increasingly developed their
own liturgy and prayerbooks, which now vary widely across the Anglican
Communion.)
CHANGES IN THE WORLD OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION: The
world around the Church of England was changing. In 1930, the Seventh
Lambeth Conference by a vote of 193 to 67 (Resolution 15) made the
Anglican Communion the first worldwide Church to issue a statement in
support of contraception. By this time, many of England’s farmers were
Nonconformists who understandably resented the historic tithe paid from
all agricultural crops including theirs to support the Church of England, to
which they did not belong. In 1936, Parliament finally abolished this
ancient tithe (26 Geo. V and 1 Edw. VIII, c. 43).
UNION WITH OTHER CHURCHES? The question of possible reunion with
formerly-Anglican Nonconformist groups had occupied the Church of
England since the 1888 Lambeth Conference. Various attempts at reunion
with other English Protestant groups were unsuccessful. However, in
southern India in 1947, the Anglican Church there united with several other
local Protestant Churches (e.g., Methodist, Presbyterian, and
Congregationalist elements) to form the Church of South India (CSI, which
is still a member of the Anglican Communion; in the 1990s, some Baptist
and Pentecostal groups also joined the CSI).
In 1963, a joint committee of representatives from the Church of England
and from England’s Methodist Church recommended that the two
Churches debate and vote on their possible reunion, although some of the
Methodists expressed reservations about this proposal, while AngloCatholic critics were concerned that reunion with the Methodists could shift
the Church of England in an evangelical direction overall. The matter
came to vote in the Convocations and in the Methodist Conference on the
same day in March 1969. In 1968, the Church of England had stipulated
that the reunion could only be approved if the proposal met with at least a
75% favorable vote. In the event, the Methodists voted in favor of reunion
by a majority of 77%, but the Church of England’s Convocations only by a
majority of 69%, so the proposal was defeated. It was voted down again
by the Church of England’s General Synod in 1972.
THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN AS PRIESTS? In 1944 during a wartime
shortage of male ordinands, Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong Ronald Owen
Hall ordained a woman deacon, Florence Li Tim-Oi, as a minister.
Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple (who died in Oct. 1944) and his
successor Geoffrey Fisher both deplored Li’s ordination, although Temple
sadly admitted that “if we could find any shadow of theological ground for
the non-ordination of women I should be immensely comforted, but such
arguments as I have heard on that line seem quite desperately futile.” Rev.
Li continued her activities as a deacon but gave up her license as a priest
(until 1984, when the Anglican Church of Canada installed her in a
functioning ministry). The 1948 Lambeth Conference declared that the
ordination of women was contrary to Anglican tradition and order “and
would gravely affect the internal and external relations of the Anglican
Communion.” At the Tenth Lambeth Conference, in 1968, when the
possibility of permitting women’s ordination was discussed, an Australian
bishop objected that doing so was likely to impede prospects of unity, if not
with the increasing number of other members of the World Council of
Churches that did ordain women, at least with the largest ones such as the
Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which still did not.
FOUNDING OF THE LAMBETH CONFERENCE’S ANGLICAN
CONSULTATIVE COUNCIL (ACC): In the 1960s, a number of African
countries gained independence from the colonial powers such as Great
Britain. What had been branches of the Church of England in those
countries became autonomous provinces within the Anglican Communion,
which grew accordingly. As communion among a wider world of Anglican
Churches became increasingly important, the 1968 Tenth Lambeth
Conference recommended to its member national Churches the formation
of a permanent Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), with representation
for all Provinces not only at the level of bishops but also of clergy and
laypersons. The ACC was to have no legislative powers, but was to make
recommendations in the light of local needs and cultures, with specially
weighted representation from Third World Provinces. At the same time,
the Lambeth Conference announced that no national or regional Churches
in the Anglican Communion were to act on the question of women’s
ordination without first consulting the ACC.
THE FIRST ACC MEETING DECLINES TO CONDEMN THE
ORDINATION OF WOMEN: The first full meeting of the ACC took place in
Feb.-Mar. 1971, in Limuru, Kenya. The Limuru ACC meeting decided by a
narrow margin that the ACC would not condemn the actions of any bishop
in the Anglican Communion who decided to ordain women to the
priesthood, provided the bishop had his Province’s consent or approval.
In Dec. 1971, Bishop Gilbert Baker of Hong Kong ordained two women,
Jane Hwang and Joyce Bennett, to the priesthood, and recognized as valid
the 1944 ordination of the Rev. Florence Li, then in detention in China
under the Cultural Revolution. By 2008, 28 of the Anglican Communion’s
38 Provinces ordained women to the priesthood, including Burundi,
Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, some dioceses in Tanzania, and West Africa.
Anglican Communion History – part 12
CHANGES IN THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION AFTER WORLD WAR II: In
the decades after the Second World War, Provinces across the Anglican
Communion continued to grapple with adjustments to a rapidly-changing
world. In 1970, the General Convention of the American Episcopal Church
opened the reception of the Eucharist in its churches to all baptized
persons. In 1972, the Church of England similarly allowed members of
other denominations to receive Communion in its churches. In 1973, the
American Episcopal Church abolished its requirement that divorced
persons must seek special permission from their bishop to remarry within
the Church. Almost thirty years later, in 2002, the Church of England’s
General Synod also approved Church marriage for divorced persons. In
the 1988 Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 26, the bishops present
recommended that the Anglican Communion cancel its previous stance
requiring converted polygamous persons to have only one spouse (and
implicitly to abandon any others, as well as children by them), and instead
allow Anglican Churches to accept such persons into membership together
with their previous (multiple) spouses and children. In the decades after
World War II, church attendance in most Western countries, including
Anglican church attendance, fell steadily; people who did not approve of
the changes in the Church blamed the falling attendance on these
changes.
GENDER ISSUES THE MOST DIVISIVE: The issues of modern gender
relations proved to be among the most sensitive, and divisive, faced by the
Church of England and the Anglican Communion in the past half-century.
The 1971 Limuru ACC meeting had voted not to condemn bishops who
might decide to ordain women to the priesthood. In 1976, the American
Episcopal Church became the first large Anglican Province to approve the
ordination of women to its priesthood, although a few of its dioceses
continued to resist the practice. In 1989, Barbara Harris was elected
Suffragan (assistant) Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, the first woman
bishop in the Anglican Communion; a few months later, the Anglican
Church of New Zealand ordained the Anglican Communion’s first woman
Diocesan bishop, the Rev. Penelope Jamieson, as the seventh Bishop of
Dunedin. The Anglican Church of Canada had also ordained its first
woman minister in 1976; it consecrated its first woman bishop in 1993. In
1992, after years of debate, the Church of England’s General Synod
likewise approved the ordination of women as ministers; its canon law was
changed in 2014 to allow women ministers to be consecrated as bishops,
and the Church of England now has several women bishops. By 2016,
there were women bishops in the Anglican Churches of New Zealand,
Australia, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, South India, South Africa, and Cuba.
TEC (The Episcopal Church; no longer specifically designated the
American Episcopal Church, since by now it included congregations in
Taiwan, Europe, and parts of South and Central America) elected a
woman as its Presiding Bishop from 2006 to 2015. The 1993 General
Synod of the Church of England voted to allow parishes who felt they could
not in conscience accept women priests to request that none be appointed
to them, and, if necessary, to request the pastoral care of a bishop from
outside the diocese who had not participated in the ordination of women
(such bishops are known as ‘provincial episcopal visitors,’ or sometimes as
‘flying bishops’).
A number of other Anglican Churches and members of Anglican Churches
were unhappy with the ordination of women. After the American Episcopal
Church approved women’s ordination, a group of conservative American
and Canadian Anglican clergymen felt that their opposition to it made
them, rather than the Episcopal Church, the true North American
representatives of the Anglican tradition. They met in St. Louis, Mo. in
1977 to plan a new, separate Church of their own outside the Anglican
Communion. They established a group of separatist Episcopal churches
provisionally called the Anglican Church in North American/ACNA, but later
re-named in the course of unions with other dissident groups. Today, such
groups are broadly known as the Continuing Anglican Movement/CAM.
Since the mid-1990s, some Anglican Provinces in, mainly, Africa and the
South Asia-Pacific area have formed an association of like-minded
conservative national churches known as ‘Global South.’
THE ORDINATION OF HOMOSEXUALS? For those who had objected to
the ordination of women, the ordination of acknowledged homosexuals
tended to represent a last line of resistance to changes in the traditional
male hierarchy of the Church. Anglican theological conservatives point to
a verse in Leviticus (Lev. 18:22, repeated in Lev. 20:13), Deuteronomy
23:17-8, and three short passages in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans
(Rom. 1:26-7), First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19), and the First
Letter to Timothy (1 Tim. 1:10) as evidence that homosexuality is banned
or disapproved by the Bible. (The Leviticus ban is one of a series of
prohibitions, many of which, such as the ban on sex with a woman who is
menstruating, or on trimming one’s beard, have long been abandoned by
Christians. What the Deuteronomy verses forbid is male prostitution, also
condemned in 1 Kings 14:24.) In the Gospels, Jesus never mentions
homosexuality, although he bans divorce and condemns remarriage after
divorce as a form of adultery in Luke 16:18 and in Mark 10:2-12, repeated
in Matthew 19:3-12 (with the variant that in Matthew 19:9, Jesus permits
one exception to the rule that remarriage after divorce is adultery, allowing
remarriage for men who have divorced their wives for “unchastity”).
THE AMERICAN EPISCOPAL CHURCH’S RIGHTER HERESY TRIAL:
TEC was among the earliest Anglican Churches, at the end of the 1980s
and the beginning of the 1990s, to ordain acknowledged homosexuals in
committed same-sex relationships as priests. In 1995, ten conservative
American Episcopalian bishops brought suit against a retired fellow bishop,
Walter Righter, who had ordained one of the earliest homosexual
candidates in 1990. They attempted to bring charges of heresy against
Righter for doing so; this was the first time in decades, and only the
second time in the Episcopal Church’s history, that an Episcopalian bishop
had been so charged. The Episcopal Church’s Ecclesiastical Court for the
Trial of a Bishop reviewed the charges against Righter and found them to
be without merit. The Ecclesiastical Court concluded that neither the
doctrine nor the discipline of the Episcopal Church currently prohibited the
ordination of a non-celibate homosexual living in a committed relationship.
(The only previous American Episcopal Church heresy trial, in 1925,
involved contentious former Arkansas Bishop William Montgomery Brown,
who had become a ‘convert’ to Marxism. Brown’s 1920 book ‘Communism
and Christianism’ rejected such concepts as the historical Jesus and
proclaimed, “The one god of the Jews and the triune god of the Christians,
if taken literally, are superstitions.” Excommunicated by a board of
Episcopalian bishops for heresy, Brown received an offer from the Old
Catholic Church, which did not accept papal supremacy, to consecrate him
as one of their bishops; ironically, the Old Catholic Church entered into full
communion with the American Episcopal Church in 1934, so that its orders
of the priesthood in apostolic succession, effectively including Brown’s,
were recognized by the Episcopal Church before Brown died.)
ANGLICAN COMMUNION RESPONSE TO THE ORDINATION OF
HOMOSEXUALS IN SOME PROVINCES: At the 1998 Lambeth
Conference, African and Asian bishops led the way in passing a resolution
that condemned homosexuality as “incompatible with Scripture.” However,
the 1998 Conference also said that this was not the last word on the
subject, and that research on the issue would continue. In 2002, the
Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of New Westminster voted to permit
a church blessing for same-sex relationships; the Canadian Diocese of
Niagara did the same in 2004. By that time, the Anglican Churches of
Brazil and Mexico, and the Scottish Episcopal Church, also supported the
view that there was no theological barrier to the ordination of non-celibate
homosexuals.
In 2003, the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire (U.S.) elected Gene
Robinson, an acknowledged homosexual in a committed same-sex
relationship, as its bishop. The Archbishops of the Anglican Churches of
Nigeria and Uganda initially threatened to leave the Anglican Communion
if Robinson was consecrated. In the event, the Nigerian and Southeast
Asian Anglican Churches and the Anglican Church of the West Indies
declared themselves in “impaired communion” with the American
Episcopal Church, though none of them defined what a state of impaired
communion might mean. The Anglican Churches of Kenya, Rwanda,
Tanzania, and Central Africa all expressed varying degrees of refusal
to accept the Robinson ordination, while the Anglican Church of Uganda
severed its ties with the Diocese of New Hampshire.
THE LAMBETH COMMISSION’S WINDSOR REPORT: In 2004, the
Lambeth Commission on Communion issued the Windsor Report on
challenges to unity within the Anglican Communion. The report called for
both a moratorium on the ordination of homosexual individuals, and a ban
on cross-diocesan and cross-Provincial incursions (in which, contrary to
canon law, a bishop from one diocese officiates or intervenes in the affairs
of another diocese without invitation). The 2005 Primates’ Meeting (first
established in 1979, this is a biennial meeting of the senior archbishops or
bishops from each of the Anglican Communion’s 38 Provinces) asked the
Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to voluntarily
withdraw from the ACC until the next Lambeth Conference; by a vote of
30-28 (TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada voluntarily abstaining as
requested; had they not abstained, the measure would not have passed),
the ACC reiterated the request a few months later.
DEVELOPMENTS OF THE PAST DECADE: TEC’s 2006 General
Convention called for its dioceses to “exercise restraint” in choosing
candidates for ordination. Some conservative American Anglicans were
not satisfied. Despite the Windsor Report’s call for a moratorium on cross-
Provincial incursions, they pursued alternate affiliation with other Provinces
of the Anglican Communion, or with the Continuing Anglican Movement
(CAM, see above). Some of CAM’s member groups are now in full
communion with the Anglican Churches of Nigeria and Uganda; one of the
CAM groups, the Anglican Church in North America/ACNA, founded in
Dec. 2008 (and not to be confused with the 1977 group of separatist
American and Canadian Episcopal churches which was provisionally so
named), subsequently asked the Church of England’s General Synod to
recognize it as an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion, thus
far without success. In June 2008, at the invitation of then-Church of
Nigeria Archbishop Peter Akinola, a number of conservative, mainly
African, Archbishops met together to form the association Global Anglican
Future (GAFCON), which subsequently made issues relating to human
sexuality among the most prominent ones under consideration in Anglican
Communion official meetings. Since then, the ACNA has frequently
collaborated with GAFCON to protest stances by Provinces which, they
claim, deny the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and promote “a variety of
sexual preferences and immoral behavior as a universal human right,” e.g.,
by permitting (not requiring) same-sex marriage.
The 2009 Episcopal General Convention’s Resolution D025 concluded
only that TEC remained firmly committed to the Anglican Communion, and
that the Episcopalian discernment process for candidates for ordination to
the priesthood was to be “open to all baptized persons,” thus eliminating
distinctions of gender or orientation. In Mar. 2010, TEC approved the
Diocese of Los Angeles’s election of a homosexual woman minister in a
committed same-sex relationship to be its Suffragan Bishop. In his
Pentecostal letter in June 2010, the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote that
Provinces of the Anglican Communion which had consecrated gay
bishops, blessed same-sex unions, or allowed cross-border interventions
were to be excluded from ecumenical dialogues and stripped of certain
decision-making powers within the Communion, but not expelled from it.
THE ANGLICAN CONVENANT PROPOSAL: In the past twenty years,
there has been a movement on the part of mainly African Provinces of the
Anglican Communion, seconded by the ACNA, to promote the creation of
a binding central authority on the Communion’s member Provinces,
something the Anglican Communion has never had. The Windsor Report
in 2004 had suggested as a possible instrument of unity the creation of a
binding covenant to which all Provinces of the Anglican Communion would
subscribe, with penalties for any who failed to do so; in 2006 the joint
Standing Committee of the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican
Consultative Council asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to set up a
Covenant Design Commission. The Covenant text eventually proposed by
the Commission was submitted to the Standing Committee and approved
in Nov. 2009, and it was then submitted to the individual Provinces of the
Anglican Communion for approval. Some Provinces approved the
Covenant proposal, others did not. The Church of England referred the
Covenant proposal to its dioceses for individual vote; by Mar. 2012 a
majority of the C of E dioceses had voted against the proposed Covenant,
so the matter effectively became a dead issue.
THE MARRIAGE EQUALITY CONTROVERSY: The cross-border
incursions opposed by the Windsor Report and, later, the Archbishop of
Canterbury have continued without reprimand. However, the trend among
the Canadian, New Zealand, South African, and some other Provinces as
well as TEC to accept homosexuals among their ordinands (and
increasingly as eligible for church marriage) became a focus of opposition
from the conservatives of the ACNA and the traditionally conservative
Sydney archdiocese of the Anglican Church of Australia. The General
Synod of TEC, nonetheless, on July 1, 2015, amended its canon I.18 “on
the solemnization of holy matrimony” to provide a church-approved liturgy
for church marriage of same-sex couples in jurisdictions recognizing samesex marriage as legal. The supporters of this change said that to deny
homosexual Anglicans full equality in marriage and the priesthood was to
deny them full human rights within their Church. Bishops from some
African Provinces said that the full acceptance of homosexuals by any
member Province of the Anglican Communion was un-Biblical and
exposed other Anglican Provinces to embarrassment and opprobrium in
societies where open homosexuality was still taboo, thus handicapping
these Provinces in competition with other local Churches and other
religious groups such as Muslims.
In Jan. 2016, the Archbishop of Canterbury hosted an informal meeting of
primates from Anglican Churches around the world (not an official
Primates Meeting), to which the ACNA archbishop was also invited on a
non-voting basis (since the ACNA is still not in full communion with the See
of Canterbury), to discuss whether a peaceful modus vivendi could not be
worked out among the Anglican Communion’s member Provinces. Some
of the GAFCON archbishops were openly hopeful that TEC could be
compelled by the others to retract and make open repentance for the
changes to its canon law that permitted same-sex marriage “in violation of
core doctrine,” possibly on pain of exclusion from the Anglican Communion
if TEC did not comply. Even the official Primates’ Meeting has no authority
to expel a member Province; in the event, the (unofficial) meeting issued a
statement ‘requiring’ TEC member-officials on representative Anglican
Communion bodies to withdraw, a requirement for which the Jan. 2016
meeting also had no authority in canon law. In effect, the GAFCON primates
attempted to impose their decision through what they considered to be
moral authority. Whether and to what extent this will work out remains to
be seen. TEC Presiding Bishop Michael Curry responded by noting the
Biblical basis for TEC’s change to its canon law on marriage: “Our decision
regarding marriage is based on the belief that the words of the Apostle
Paul to the Galatians are true for the church today: All who have been
baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is no longer Jew or Gentile,
slave or free, male or female, for all are one in Christ.”
COMPOSITION OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION: Today the Anglican
Communion, a family, or voluntary association, of Churches of Anglican
tradition (i.e., descended from the Church of England), consists of 38
autonomous Provinces (sovereign national Churches) and 6 regional
Churches, with a claimed worldwide membership of over 77 million
communicants in a total of over 160 countries. The Anglican Communion’s
Churches are in full communion with their parent church, the Church of
England, and in principle with each other, as well as with the Lutheran
Churches of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Estonia, and with the
Utrecht Union of Old Catholic Churches in the Netherlands, Germany, and
Switzerland.
Selected bibliography:
Bates, Stephen, ‘A Church at War: Anglicans and Homosexuality,’ Hodder and
Stoughton 2005
Barrow, Andrew, ‘The Flesh is Weak: An Intimate History of the Church of
England,’ Hamish Hamilton 1980
Baskerville, Geoffrey, ‘English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries,’
Bedford Historical Series, Jonathan Cape, London 1937
Bess, Douglas, ‘Divided We Stand: A History of the Continuing Anglican
Movement,’ Tractarian Press, 2002; revised edition, Apocryphile Press, Sept.
2006
Brailsford, Mabel Richmond, ‘A Tale of Two Brothers: John and Charles Wesley,’
Oxford University Press 1954
Chadwick, Henry, ed., ‘Not Angels, but Anglicans: A History of Christianity in the
British Isles,’ Church Times/Canterbury Press 2000
Chadwick, Owen, ‘The Victorian Church: Part I: 1829-1859; Part II: 1860-1901’,
3rd revised edition 1966
Duffy, Eamon, ‘The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 14001580,’ Yale University Press 1992
Gibson, William, ‘The Church of England, 1688-1832: Unity and Accord,’
Routledge 2000
Hattersley, Roy, ‘The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning,’ Doubleday
2003
Johnson, Paul, ‘A History of Christianity,’ 1976, Atheneum edition 1985
Kaoma, Rev. Kapya, “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African
Churches, and Homophobia,” Political Research Associates 2009,
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/files/MainlineChurches.pdf
Moorman, John Richard Humpidge, ‘A History of the Church in England,’ 3rd
Revised edition 1980
Neill, Stephen, ‘Anglicanism,’ 1958, Penguin Books Ltd., 4th edition 1977
Ollard, Sidney Leslie, ed., ‘A Dictionary of English Church History,’ Morehouse
Publishing Company, 1919
Rack, Henry D., ‘Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of
Methodism,’ Trinity Press International 1989
Righter, Walter C., ‘A Pilgrim’s Way,’ Knopf 1998