Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction

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Mark Chapman
ANGLICANISM
A Very Short Introduction
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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© Mark Chapman 2006
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First published as a Very Short Introduction 2006
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Chapman, Mark D. (Mark David), 1960-
Anglicanism : a very short introduction / Mark Chapman.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–0–19–280693–2 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0–19–280693–9 (alk. paper)
1. Anglican Communion. I. Title.
BX5005.C35 2006
283—dc22 2006005507
ISBN 0–19–280693–9
978–0–19–280693–2
13579108642
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Ashford Colour Press Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of illustrations ix
1 The problems of Anglicanism 1
2 Establishing the Church 13
3 Competing visions for the Church of England 38
4 Evangelicalism 57
5 Anglo-Catholicism 75
6 The global communion 94
7 The future of Anglicanism 116
References and further reading 145
Index 152
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the many people who have helped me with this
project – in particular, a number of friends have given freely of their
time to read through the entire manuscript, helping me correct
errors of fact and interpretation. By name I should mention Canon
Dr Judith Maltby, the Revd Dr Peter Doll, the Revd Dr Andrew
Atherstone, and my colleague, Canon Prof. Martyn Percy. I would
also like to thank my students at Cuddesdon who have encouraged
me for many years to think that I have something worth saying
about Anglicanism. It is to them that this book is affectionately
dedicated.
List of illustrations
1 Procession of Anglican
Bishops at Glastonbury,
1897, by David
Robertson 8
Lambeth Palace Library
2 Henry VIII, c. 1540,
Anglo-Flemish
Workshop 16
© Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney, Australia/
Bridgeman Art Library
3 Infant King Edward VI
with his counsel, c. 1570,
by unknown artist 24
© 2006 TopFoto.co.uk/Fotomas
4 Thomas Cranmer, 1545,
by Gerlach Flicke 28
© 2006 TopFoto.co.uk/RHR
5 John Jewel, from
‘Memoirs of the Court
of Queen Elizabeth’,
1825 33
Private collection/the Stapleton
Collection/Bridgeman Art
Library
6 Richard Hooker 42
© 2006 TopFoto.co.uk/PAL
7 Chancel of Hailes
Church 48
From Mark Chatfield,
Churches the Victorians Forgot
(Moorland Publishing, 1989)
8 St Mary’s Church,
Ingestre 55
© E & E Picture Library/
J. Litten
9 Charles Simeon, 1798,
by John Kay 65
Mary Evans Picture Library
10 John Henry Newman,
unknown artist, from
Illustrated London
News, 1844 77
Mary Evans Picture Library
11 All Saints’ Church,
Margaret Street,
London 83
© John Crook
12 Samuel Seabury 98
Courtesy of the Library of
Congress
13 Samuel Crowther,
1892 107
© 2006 TopFoto.co.uk
14 Florence Lei Tim-Oi 135
Courtesy of The Anglican
Journal, Toronto
15 Bishops at the 1998
Lambeth Conference 139
Anglican Episcopal World/
Rosenthal
16 Bishop Gene Robinson,
November 2003 141
Courtesy of the Archives of the
Episcopal Church, USA
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions
in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at
the earliest opportunity.
Chapter 1
The problems of Anglicanism
A national church
In 1904 Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, visited the
United States to attend the General Convention of the Protestant
Episcopal Church. What he probably did not know was that among
the congregation when he preached at Trinity Church in Boston was
the great German theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch.
Davidson’s sermon made a lasting impact, as Troeltsch recalled in a
work published in 1921. Troeltsch, who pioneered the study of
religious organizations with his typology of church and sect, was
aware of what he called a ‘glaring deficiency’ in all his works: he had
never studied the Church of England in any depth. This was a pity,
since the Church of England might have provided him with a great
deal of support for the thesis he developed in his magisterial work,
The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Groups. The
Church of England can be understood as perhaps the purest form of
the late medieval church ideal surviving after the Reformation.
Indeed, an imaginative presentation of the Tudor Church could
have provided Troeltsch with evidence of a rather eccentric Western
example of something approaching a Byzantine state church.
Henry’s VIII’s vision of power and authority was not too far
removed from that of the Eastern emperors.
While it will become apparent through the course of this book that
1
there is much more to Anglicanism than the English state church, it
is nevertheless crucial to see the roots of today’s global phenomenon
in a Reformation which was experienced, as the historian
Christopher Haigh puts it, ‘as obedience, rather than conversion’.
Most people ‘obeyed the monarch’s new laws rather than swallowed
a preacher’s new message’. However much doctrinal and liturgical
innovation there might have been in the last 70 years of the 16th
century, what was perhaps most important in shaping the Church of
England was a vision of a Christian nation upheld by a Christian
monarch. Uniformity and obedience were at the heart of the
settlement. The Church of England owes as much to what one early
20th-century commentator called the ‘absurd theory’ of the Divine
Right of Kings as to anything else. It was simple: kings had a right
to rule over both their spiritual and temporal realm and no foreign
potentate could usurp this power.
In the last 300 years or so, the Divine Right has mutated beyond
recognition. While it is still very much a part of the British
Constitution, in that governments still act on the basis of the
prerogatives of the Crown, it is unthinkable that anybody could or
would seek to impose a unified national religion. As the state
changed, so the Church of England has had to mutate to have any
chance of survival. The advantages it might have retained in
aligning itself with the political classes through the 18th and 19th
centuries were modest compared with the difficulties it began to
experience as England opened up to a whole range of competing
denominations and religions, not to mention the all-pervasive
secularism of modern society.
The Church of England became a voluntary organization in which
there was no longer any sense of external compulsion; it changed
from being the religion of the English to being simply one
denomination among others, though always one with certain
privileges. Compulsory membership of the Church of England
(apart from monarchs and their spouses) was finally abolished with
the removal in 1871 of the religious tests on those attending Oxford
2
Anglicanism
and Cambridge universities. Consequently, the history of the
Church of England from the 18th century is the search for an
alternative locus of authority after the breakdown of the Divine
Right of Kings. Some looked for authority in the direct experience
of God in the heart or in God’s Word as set forth in Scripture (the
Evangelicals). Others sought it in God’s appointed messengers, the
bishops (the Anglo-Catholics).
That is the story of the Church of England which forms the subject
of a significant part of this book. But what is obvious is that the
Church of England is not the same thing as ‘Anglicanism’.
Anglicanism exists across the world in many different forms. The
kind of independence from the state which was forced on a
reluctant Church of England by various acts of parliament was
embraced enthusiastically elsewhere. The American Protestant
Episcopal Church, which was constitutionally forced to sever links
with government during the American Revolution, had to learn to
survive in the emerging democracy of the United States. Where
there was no King there could be no Church of England. But could
there be something else which resembled it? If the authority of the
Church of England was derived from the divinely anointed King in
Parliament, then what would replace it when that form of authority
had been challenged or completely cast aside?
One of the most important problems in Anglicanism continues to
be the search for authority. Some overseas churches tried out
something like the English model with a unified vision of church
and state under political control; but hardly any of these worked.
For these churches, and for those many churches in the Anglican
Communion that never enjoyed the benefits of establishment, there
was a need to locate an alternative source of authority. While
churches might have owed their origins to the Church of England,
they were forced by their particular political circumstances to adopt
new constitutions and forms of authority. Many began to enjoy the
benefits of independence. In this way, Anglicanism became very
different from the Church of England.
3
The problems of Anglicanism

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