Tradition · 1534

Anglican

The Church of England and the churches descended from it, now a worldwide communion that keeps bishops and historic liturgy while accepting key Reformation teachings.

History

Roots

Anglicanism began as a political break and only later became a theology. In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring Henry VIII “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England” after the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Henry wanted an English Catholic church without the pope, and his own doctrine stayed conservative: the Six Articles of 1539 upheld transubstantiation, clerical celibacy and private masses. But the break opened the door to reformers already at work in England, chief among them Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533.

Cranmer had read Martin Luther and corresponded with continental reformers, and his views moved steadily toward the Reformed side of the Reformation. Under Edward VI (1547–1553) he produced the first Book of Common Prayer (1549, text), a single English liturgy for the whole realm, then a more plainly Protestant revision in 1552 and the Forty-Two Articles of 1553. Mary I restored Roman Catholicism in 1553, and Cranmer was burned at Oxford in 1556.

The Elizabethan Settlement

Elizabeth I (1558–1603) fixed the shape that lasted. The Settlement of 1559 restored the royal supremacy (with Elizabeth as “supreme governor”) and a lightly revised 1552 Prayer Book, and the Thirty-Nine Articles followed in 1563 and 1571 (text). The result was Reformed in its doctrine of salvation and sacraments, but kept bishops, vestments, set prayers and the church year. John Jewel defended it against Rome in his Apology of the Church of England (1562, text), and Richard Hooker defended it against the Puritans in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (from 1594, texts).

The seventeenth century tested the arrangement. Puritans wanted further reform; Archbishop William Laud pushed ceremony and order the other way. During the Civil War and Commonwealth, Parliament abolished bishops and the Prayer Book. The Restoration brought both back with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (Church of England), still the church’s legal standard of worship, and with the Great Ejection of about two thousand clergy who would not conform. Those dissenters fed the English Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Baptist churches.

Expansion and renewal

Anglicanism spread with British trade, settlement and empire. After American independence, Samuel Seabury was consecrated bishop by Scottish bishops in 1784, and the Protestant Episcopal Church organized in 1789: the first Anglican church outside the British Isles with no tie to the English Crown. Missionary societies such as the Church Missionary Society (1799) planted churches across Africa and Asia that are now the Communion’s largest.

Two renewal movements shaped the modern church. The eighteenth-century Evangelical revival, which also produced John Wesley and the Methodist churches that left after his death, gave the Church of England its evangelical wing: Charles Simeon at Cambridge and the Clapham Sect around William Wilberforce. The Oxford Movement began in 1833 with John Keble’s sermon on “National Apostasy” and the Tracts for the Times (Tract 1). John Henry Newman and E. B. Pusey argued that the Church of England was a branch of the one catholic church, with apostolic succession and real sacramental grace. Newman’s Tract 90 (1841, text) read the Thirty-Nine Articles in a catholic sense; the outcry helped push him to Rome in 1845. The Anglo-Catholic wing he left behind transformed Anglican worship.

Influence

In 1867 Archbishop Charles Longley called the first Lambeth Conference of bishops, and the worldwide Anglican Communion took shape around it. The Communion today counts around 42 provinces and claims some 85 million members, most of them now in Africa (figures are the Communion’s own and widely questioned). It has no central authority with power to bind: its “instruments of communion” are the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting.

The Prayer Book’s English shaped the language, and its pattern of daily offices and set collects shaped worship far beyond Anglicanism, including Methodist and Lutheran liturgies. Anglicanism also produced C. S. Lewis, John Stott, whose Lausanne leadership made him a central figure of world Evangelical life, and N.T. Wright, whose work on Paul is discussed under the New Perspective on Paul.

Key ideas and contributors

Catholic and reformed. Anglicans describe their church as catholic in order and reformed in doctrine. The Articles teach the sufficiency of Scripture (Article 6), justification “by Faith only” (Article 11) and two gospel sacraments (Article 25), and they reject transubstantiation (Article 28) and purgatory (Article 22). Yet the church kept the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and the Ordinal’s preface claims these orders go back to the apostles. This is Episcopal Polity joined to Protestant soteriology.

Common prayer as doctrine. Anglicans have no Book of Concord or Westminster Confession at the center. The old maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief) captures the instinct: what Anglicans believe is learned largely through the Prayer Book, the creeds and the Ordinal, alongside the Articles. Thomas Cranmer is the key figure because his liturgy carried his theology into every parish.

Scripture, tradition and reason. Richard Hooker argued against the Puritans that Scripture is supreme and sufficient for salvation, but that it does not prescribe every detail of church order. Where Scripture is silent, reason and the church’s tradition may decide (Laws, Book I and Book V). This sits between strict Sola Scriptura read as a regulative rule and Rome’s coordinate authority of Holy Tradition and Magisterium. The popular image of a “three-legged stool” with equal legs is a later gloss; Hooker gave Scripture first place (see the controversy below).

Sacraments. Cranmer’s eucharistic theology was close to Spiritual Presence as John Calvin taught it, and the 1552 rite was designed to exclude a sacrifice of the mass. Article 28 calls the supper “a partaking of the Body of Christ” received “only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.” Anglo-Catholics later taught a stronger real presence. Anglicans practise Infant Baptism.

A minimum for unity. The Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886, 1888, text) named four essentials for any reunion of churches: the Scriptures as “the rule and ultimate standard of faith,” the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and “the Historic Episcopate, locally adapted.” It still frames Anglican ecumenism, including full communion with Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches (the Porvoo agreement, 1992) and with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (2001).

Key controversies

How Reformed is it? From the start Anglicans have argued over what kind of church Elizabeth made. Evangelicals read the Articles, the 1552 and 1662 Prayer Books and Cranmer’s own writings as a Reformed settlement; Article 17 teaches predestination in terms close to Calvinism. Anglo-Catholics read the same church through the Ordinal, the creeds and the early Fathers as a reformed branch of the catholic church, with Newman’s Tract 90 as the founding argument. In the seventeenth century the “Arminian” party around Laud rejected Calvinist predestination, and Arminianism gained ground among Anglicans from then on. The phrase “via media,” a middle way between Rome and Geneva, came mostly from Newman and the Tractarians, while historians such as Diarmaid MacCulloch place the sixteenth-century church nearer Zurich and Geneva than Wittenberg (Wikipedia (secondary)).

Are Anglican orders valid? Anglicans claim unbroken apostolic succession through Matthew Parker, consecrated in 1559. In Apostolicae Curae (1896, text), Leo XIII declared Anglican ordinations “absolutely null and utterly void,” arguing that the Edwardine Ordinal lacked the right intention to ordain sacrificing priests. The archbishops of Canterbury and York replied in Saepius Officio (1897). Later dialogue through ARCIC, begun after the Second Vatican Council, found much agreement on the eucharist and ministry, but Rome has never withdrawn the ruling, and women’s ordination added a further barrier. Rome’s Papal Primacy remains the other unresolved question.

Women in ordained ministry. Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained priest in Hong Kong in 1944. The Episcopal Church authorized women priests in 1976, and the General Synod of the Church of England voted in 1992 to do the same (Church of England Ordains Women), with women bishops following in 2014. Provinces still differ: some ordain women at every level, some only as deacons. Opponents, both Anglo-Catholic and conservative evangelical, have arrangements for alternative episcopal oversight. See Women in Ministry, Male Priesthood and Egalitarianism.

Sexuality and the shape of the Communion. The sharpest dispute of the past three decades. Lambeth Conference 1998 passed Resolution I.10, which called homosexual practice “incompatible with Scripture” and opposed same-sex blessings, by a large majority driven by African and Asian bishops. In 2003 the Episcopal Church consecrated Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire, and a Canadian diocese authorized same-sex blessings. The Windsor Report (2004) asked for restraint and proposed an Anglican Covenant, which several provinces later declined.

Conservatives organized instead. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) met in Jerusalem in 2008 and issued the Jerusalem Declaration (Gafcon), which affirms the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Prayer Book and the authority of Scripture. The Anglican Church in North America formed in 2009 as a rival province. When the Church of England’s bishops commended Prayers of Love and Faith for same-sex couples in 2023, after the Living in Love and Faith process (Church of England), the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches said it could no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as “first among equals,” and Gafcon’s Kigali Commitment (2023) called for the Communion to be reset. The appointment of Sarah Mullally in 2025 as the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury, following Justin Welby’s resignation in 2024 over a safeguarding report, deepened the split, and on 16 October 2025 Gafcon declared that “the Anglican Communion will be reordered,” rejected the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting, and said “we are now the Global Anglican Communion” (Gafcon). The arguments on each side are set out under Traditional Marriage Ethic, Affirming Theology and Sexuality and Marriage.

What holds Anglicans together. Behind all of these lies a question about Authority. A communion with no confession everyone must sign, no court and no pope relies on shared liturgy, bishops in fellowship with Canterbury and mutual restraint. Critics on the right say this leaves doctrine at the mercy of synod votes. Critics on the left say the Articles and Lambeth resolutions are used to police provinces that have moved on. Defenders call the looseness Anglicanism’s genius: room for evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics and liberals to pray the same prayers.

What remains unresolved

Anglicans still disagree about what they are. One answer says Anglicanism is a confessional Reformed church with a liturgy, defined by the Articles and the 1662 Prayer Book. Another says it is a branch of the catholic church defined by bishops, creeds and sacraments. A third says it is a fellowship of churches in communion with Canterbury, defined by relationship more than doctrine. The sexuality dispute forced the question, because each answer gives a different verdict on who belongs. The geographic center of the Communion has already moved to the global South; whether its institutional center follows is the open question.