Our Anglican Heritage, Second Edition: Can an Ancient Church be a Church of the Future?

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An Ancient Church

The Historic Roots of the Church in England

The rise of Christianity from a persecuted sect to a global religion is a remarkable story of guts, faith, chance, politics and Providence.

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BBC, History of England

There is a bumper sticker which reads Don’t believe everything you think. Not bad advice. For example, many otherwise well-informed people believe the Church of England was an ecclesiastical convenience, created in the sixteenth century by England’s infamous King Henry VIII solely to legitimate his notorious and shameful divorce(s) and remarriage(s). Actually, the Church of England has a rich biblical, historic, and theological heritage that goes back almost to the time of Jesus. Yet, the colorful story of Henry VIII’s interventions raises a legitimate question: How was it that the Church in England, a wonderful and mighty work of God, found itself in a situation which seemed to require a ruthless and rascally king to restore it? How has this church grown from these humble—some would say humiliating—beginnings to become part of the third largest Christian body in the world (the Anglican Communion, after Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy)? The story of how God established, nurtured, renewed, and empowered his Church in England is one of history’s greatest and most enduring dramas.

The restoration and reformation of the Church in England in the sixteenth century hinged on a great truth, that it was—and still is—possible for a church to be catholic² without being Roman Catholic. At its core, the English Reformation was an effort to maintain the church’s catholic (or universal) heritage while at the same time reasserting its independence from the Roman Catholic Church.

The English Reformation was just as much a protest against the confusion and corruption of the medieval Church as were the other Protestant movements in Europe. Like their Christian brothers and sisters on the continent, British reformers were self-consciously trying to return their church to its historic and biblical roots. Unlike their continental counterparts, the English Reformation mixed politics with religion in a way that was more overt than the similar movements in Germany, Switzerland and the rest of Europe.

How did Christianity come to England in the first place? And why does a great deal of human history turn on the answer?

The Historic Roots of the Church in England

When was the Christian gospel first proclaimed in Britain? No one knows for sure. We do know that there was a church in England long before there was a Church of England—in fact, there was a church in England before there was an England.³ Popular folklore told stories of Saint Paul, Joseph of Arimathea,⁴ and even Jesus himself visiting the British Isles during the first century. As William Blake wrote:

And did those feet, in ancient times,

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

A more accurate answer, perhaps, is that Roman soldiers or merchants with dealings in the Holy Land brought back the good news that God had become man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We do know that long before the Nicene Creed was adopted as the expression of catholic faith in 325, a vigorous Christianity had sprung up throughout southern Britain. Three bishops from this area attended the first meeting of Christian bishops in the Western Roman Empire at the Synod of Arles (314) in what is now southern France. This indicates that the Christian Church was well established in England at least by the beginning of the fourth century.

The Roman Church Steps onto English Soil and into English History

Tradition tells us that in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great witnessed a slave auction in Rome. He saw some young, fair-haired boys being sold into slavery. He asked one of his associates who they were. He was told they were Angles. They look like angels to me, he punned. As a result of his encounter, he developed a burden for these fair people from far away. In 597, he sent one of his assistants, a librarian named Augustine,⁵ from Rome as a missionary/emissary to the people in southern England to introduce them to Roman-style Christianity. The irony, of course, is that by this time, Celtic Christians, as they were called, were already sending their own missionaries to the non-Christian people on the European continent. These Celtic missionaries ventured as far afield as Germany and Switzerland.

The Celtic Church

The enduring interest in Celtic culture and spirituality both highlights and side-steps the vibrant and vital contribution these early Christians made to the life of the Church. The faith and courage of St. Patrick’s missionary efforts to what was then a heathen⁶ country still serve as a model for the entire Church. The stirring hymn known to us as St. Patrick’s Breastplate⁷ reminds us of the spiritual vitality it took to be a missionary in those dangerous days.

Many historians believe that the Celtic church developed in relative isolation from European and Roman influences. If this is true, it may help account for its distinctly rigorous temperament. It was much more egalitarian than the hierarchical church that developed on the continent under the shadow of the hierarchical Roman Empire. The European church took its form from the Empire’s elegant but complex governmental structure. Celtic Christianity was more earthy, more conscious of humanity’s place as part of creation and less focused on the role of humans as temporal lords over it. It was also focused on the authority of local monks and monasteries as compared to the European model which focused authority in a more rigid chain of command and which often looked to distant rulers who occupied ecclesiastical offices.

The English Church Aligns Itself with the Church in Rome

Through the efforts of Augustine and his followers, European influence within the British church grew. British allegiance to the Roman style and structure was formalized at the Synod of Whitby in the seventh century (664). Even so, many local customs had become firmly established in English faith and practice. For instance, due to the distances involved and the dangers of travel in the ancient world, British kings were given great power in ecclesiastical matters.⁸ Even after all of present-day England was united under one king, British monarchs retained the right to approve all ecclesiastical appointments and forbade the removal of English court cases to Rome. This established an important precedent which foreshadowed later developments in the relationship between English Christians and their continental brothers and sisters. Thus, from the beginning, a certain tension between conformity and independence characterized English Christianity. The very fact that the island kingdom was commonly called by its Anglo-Saxon name, England, and not its Roman name, Britain, speaks to this point. So also does the fact that the English language is more Germanic (following its Anglo-Saxon roots) than what have come to be called romance languages, which tended to follow the Roman/Latin roots of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Thus, the Church in England is historic, apostolic, catholic, and unique.

It is historic because it can trace its heritage back to the first century.

It is apostolic because its birth was directly tied to the life, ministry, and teachings of the earliest apostles and because, from the very beginning, English Christians embraced the challenge of reaching others with the good news of Jesus.

It is catholic because it self-consciously and intentionally sees itself as part of the whole body of Christ.

Finally, the Anglican Church is unique because its special geography and its providential connection to the nation of England continues to give it global influence and reach.

The Medieval Church

Despite its reputation for labyrinthian bureaucracy, corrupt curates, and ineffective popes, the medieval church was not an evil church. The church’s emphasis on hierarchy and ritual, the constant attempts of faithful men and women to hold those structures accountable to biblical standards, its on-again–off-again relations with the many secular structures with which it had to contend, all these things (and others as well) actually made possible the modern, Western civilization which we take for granted today.

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However, in coping with the oppressive conditions in which it found itself during what history now calls the dark ages, the church allowed itself to fall into certain patterns and practices which sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

To make a long, complex, and fascinating story short and simple (and perhaps somewhat less interesting), during the thousand years between the Synod of Arles (314) and the fourteenth century, the city of Rome had taken a central role in governing the "small c" catholic church. In its purest, original Greek form, the word catholic is an adjective, not a noun. When used with a small c, the word is used as an adjective to describe all Christians, in every age and place. When used with capital C, the word is used as a noun and refers to the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian tree. Given that the word catholic means universal, it is a powerful testimony to the greatness of Rome’s influence that by the time of the Great Reformation—and even up to today—many people associate the word catholic with one particular branch of Christendom: the Roman Church. The ancient Nicene Creed, however, proclaims that the Church,¹⁰ the organism and organization which Christ himself inaugurated and empowers, is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

By the end of the fifteenth century, medieval Roman Catholicism had evolved into something very different from the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). Over the centuries, the Bible and biblical Christianity had been interpreted and reinterpreted by various ecclesiastical councils. By the late 1400s, the then current worldview was to see the Bible and the Christian life almost exclusively through the lens of Aristotelian philosophy.

Aristotle’s (ca. 384–322 BC) philosophical system was as brilliant as it was elegant; but it was also Greek. Therefore, it failed to adequately reflect the Jewish background of the Christian faith. Returning Crusaders brought back long-lost Greek ideas from their travels to the Holy Land in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Medieval Roman Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) did a masterful job of incorporating these Greek concepts and worldviews into Christian categories. But, over time, the implicit neglect of biblical and Hebrew insights led to severe problems within the medieval church.

Salvation was no longer seen as a matter of simply trusting God’s love and grace as it was revealed in Jesus Christ. Increasingly, salvation was seen as something humans earned by attending religious services and/or giving money to the Church. The communion meal had become an elaborate sacrifice, offered on an altar by a priest in whose hands the bread and wine were transformed into Christ’s body and blood. The Mass¹¹ was in Latin, a language which almost no one (not even many clergy) spoke or understood at the time. Medieval popes claimed political as well as religious supremacy and financed wars through heavy taxation, the sale of ecclesiastical offices, and even, in a crude sense, the sale of salvation in the form of indulgences. As historian William Manchester observed: In 1502, a procurer-general of the Parliament estimated that the Catholic hierarchy owned 75 percent of all the money in France; twenty years later . . . the Church was credited with owning 50 percent of the wealth in Germany. . . . The Popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lived like Roman emperors. They were the richest men in the world.

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Despite its worldly wealth and earthly power, many Christians all over the world lamented the sorry spiritual state into which the Church, the very bride of Christ, had fallen. Bishop J. C. Ryle wrote: "I believe the plain truth is, that the vast majority of Dissenters in England [those who had left the Church of England] did not leave the Church of England at first from any abstract dislike of the principle of the episcopacy [the role of bishops], or liturgies, or establishments.—But they did dislike the moral essays and inconsistent lives of the clergy; and we must confess, with shame, that they had only too much reason."

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John Wycliffe: The Morningstar of the Reformation

As we have noted, even in the darkest of days God does not leave himself without prophetic voices. On the continent of Europe, brave and faithful men and women raised their voices in protest, calling God’s people back to their historic and biblical heritage.

In the middle of the fourteenth century—a full 200 years before Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer—one of the most eloquent voices calling for reform was that of an Englishman, John Wycliffe (1320?–1384), rightly called the Morning Star of the Reformation. In open defiance of the Roman Church, Wycliffe, a scholar at the University of Oxford, translated major portions of the Bible into English and called for the church to return to the Scriptures. The principle of sola scriptura (the Scriptures only), which would later become a battle cry of the Reformation, was trumpeted in England a century and a half before Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenburg church. Wycliffe himself was silenced, but his followers, the Lollards,¹⁴ persisted. As Bishop Stephen Neill wrote, It is not surprising that the Reformers believed themselves to be reaping where Wycliffe had sown.¹⁵ As the seeds planted by Wycliffe took root, at least three other factors were vital in establishing the foundation of the Protestant Reformation. These will be discussed in the next chapter.

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Biblical Insight

There are seasons when God’s ongoing work in the world becomes manifest. God sent his Son in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4), when conditions in the world were just right. The first half of the sixteenth century was also such a momentous time. God was, and is, big enough to use the tumultuous, and often wicked, events of that time to call his bride, the Church, back to himself.

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Questions for Thought and Discussion

1. Why is it important that a church can trace its heritage back to the apostles?

2. What are some implications of the fact that the Christian Faith is a Jewish root planted in Greco/Roman soil?

3. How might history have been different if the medieval church had welcomed, rather than persecuted, men like John Wycliffe?

4. How does the story of Pope Gregory the Great illustrate how one person can change the history of the world?

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/history/uk_1.shtml.

2. The word catholic is actually an ancient Greek word which means universal, or having authority in all places at all times. It was not until late in Christian history that it came to be virtually synonymous with the distinctly Roman style of catholic Christianity. More on this later.

3. Even the name England does not refer to original inhabitants of the British Isles, the Celts, but to Germanic Angle and Saxon invaders who conquered the island in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Romans referred to the islands as Britain, but history also remembers them as the land of the Angles—Angleland.

4. Some ambitious folktales assert that, among other things, Joseph of Arimathea was Jesus’ maternal uncle, that he helped raise the young Jesus after his earthly father’s death, that he took the boy Jesus with him on business trips to England, that he caught Jesus’ blood in the goblet that became the so-called holy grail, that he led a group of evangelists to England after Jesus’ death and resurrection, etc. There is no basis in fact for any of this.

5. There are two prominent St. Augustines and it is important not to confuse them. Augustine of Canterbury was an emissary of Pope Gregory I and lived in the late sixth century. It was he who helped connect the Christians already in the British Isles with the Christians in Rome. Augustine of Hippo lived in the fourth and fifth centuries in northern Africa and is most well known for writing his Confessions and The City of God.

6. So-called heathen were people who lived on the heath, far away from the cities and towns where the gospel was first proclaimed. Similarly, so-called pagans were the paganus, Latin for country or village dwellers.

7. See the Appendices for the text of the hymn.

8. It could take up to four years to get correspondence back and forth between England and Rome.

9. See especially Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages and the Beginning of the Modern World.

10. Throughout this book, when referring to the Church as the whole, universal body and bride of Christ, we will use a capital C (Church). When referring to a specific denomination or group, we will use a small c except where the word Church is part of the title of the group (e.g., Orthodox Church).

11. The Roman Mass was so-called because it was the last word spoken, in Latin, at the end of the Roman Liturgy. It meant to dismiss or send.

12. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, 132.

13. Ryle, Knots Untied, 186.

14. They were derisively called Lollards (after a Dutch word for mutter) because they were seen as people who muttered prayers rather than using the more formal forms from the then authorized worship services.

15. Neill, Anglicanism, 2.

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A Reformed Church

The Beginnings of the Reformation

Anyone who is to find Christ must first find the Church. How could anyone know where Christ is and what faith is in him unless he knew where his believers are?

—Martin Luther

At the end of the fifteenth century, Europeans were absorbing the news that Christopher Columbus had discovered a new continent, which soon came to be called The New World. In the old world of continental Europe, men and women were facing a different type of new world. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, three powerful forces were at work which would change the way the world saw itself and, as a consequence, how the Christian Faith was experienced, organized and, ultimately, reformed. These forces were:

the Renaissance

the rapid spread of information and information technology, and

the emergence of nation states and nationalism.

The Renaissance

The first factor leading toward reformation was the impact of the Renaissance, literally a rebirth of learning. When the Crusaders returned from the Middle East, and as trade opened up between Europe and Asia, insights in philosophy, mathematics and science which had flourished in the East were repatriated to the West. The writings of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers opened new approaches to understanding the world. So-called Arabic numerals, which we in the West now take for granted, replaced cumbersome Roman numerals and made modern mathematics possible. The word algebra is actually an Arabic word brought from the Middle East during the Middle Ages. In science, revolutionary techniques of metallurgy, optics, and chemistry all came from the East. Again, the English words alchemy and alkali are of Arabic origin.

Finally, the desire to gain easy and unfettered access to the delights of the orient, and to bring the gospel to the unreached people, led Christian explorers such as Christopher Columbus to sail west in search of a way to connect with the amazing cultures to the east.

These new ways of thinking about the world and Christianity gave honest people permission to think critically about traditional sources of authority. Such energies would naturally strike most heavily against the source of greatest authority. In the medieval world, that was the established church and especially the Pope. In God’s providence, these new desires (and abilities) to question authority came at the time when the papacy was at its weakest point in history.

In many ways, the authority of the Roman Church was based on the claims of the Pope. But, as we have noted, the papacy was in a shambles. In addition to financial malfeasance and its spiritual and moral bankruptcy, for most of the fourteenth century the papacy was effectively relocated to Avignon, France. In fact, for a time, there were three separate men claiming to be the real Pope. This muddle was not resolved until well into the fifteenth century. Also, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, scholars proved that many of the most important documents on which the Pope’s authority had been based were forgeries from as late as the ninth century. Thus, a rising tide of sentiment against the papacy and its attendant hierarchy was building.

An Ancient Information Age

The second factor fostering reformation was the availability of information. The modern-day explosion of information made possible by the Internet and computers is paralleled by the power unleashed in the sixteenth century by the printing press. For the first time in human history written communication became available cheaply, quickly, and in abundance. Pamphlets, tracts, and the scriptures were made available in the language of the common people. The press was Luther’s greatest tool and his books were distributed throughout Europe. Largely as a result of this new information age, by the early 1520s Protestant ideas and insights were well known and increasingly accepted throughout Europe and England.

In Cambridge, England, groups of young theologians and clergy gathered at the White Horse Tavern to discuss Luther’s works. They were dubbed the Germans by their detractors for their openness to Lutheran insights. It has been estimated that by the time Henry VIII declared his independence from Rome, perhaps fifty percent of the English bishops had been drawn to the Protestant cause through exposure to the writings of Luther and other reformers. Thus, the theology of the Reformation had become part of the life of the English church before the politics of the Reformation became a consideration.

The Emergence of Nationalism

The third factor, and one which is so much a part of our world we can barely discern its impact, was the rising tide of nationalism. The existence of nation states, which today we take for granted, was actually a new way of organizing human society in the early sixteenth century. Isolated, individual fiefdoms were being consolidated into coherent political units. On a chessboard (a virtual picture of the medieval world), the knights are separated from the king and queen by bishops. At the dawn of the Reformation, newly enriched and empowered noblemen were no longer content to go through bishops and church to get to their kings and queens.

Groups of people became more conscious of their own identities and sovereignty. As a result, there was a desire on the part of both church and state to limit interference by foreign powers—including the Pope—in their internal affairs. A conviction that England should be English lay at the root of King Henry VIII’s political agenda and accounts for much of the support he received in his efforts to free England from the political influence of Rome. Thus, in reality, Henry VIII did not represent the beginning of the English Reformation but simply a catalyst for its fulfillment.

King Henry VIII

In 1491, as an Italian adventurer made his preparations to sail under the flag of his Spanish sponsors, another event was unfolding across the English Channel which would change the world almost as much as his historic voyage. As every school child learns, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. A year earlier, the child who would become King Henry VIII (1491–1547) was born in England. The world in which he would exercise his regency would be vastly different from that of his father or of any other monarch in history.

This youngest son of King Henry VII acceded to the English throne in 1509 at age eighteen. That same year, he was married to Catherine of Aragon, technically his older brother’s widow and the daughter of the same Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who had sponsored Columbus’ voyages.

Catherine had been married to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, in 1501. Arthur had been only fourteen at the time and Catherine only sixteen. This arranged marriage had been an attempt to smooth relationships between England and Aragon (a part of what would later become Spain). But Arthur died within six months and the marriage was never consummated. After Arthur’s death, Henry VII had Catherine betrothed to his younger son, Henry VIII, who was then only ten years old. This was contrary to canon law, but Pope Julius II granted a dispensation.

Over the next sixteen years (1509–1525), Henry and Catherine had six children, but only one—a daughter named Mary—survived infancy. In 1525 Queen Catherine turned forty. Henry was still without a legitimate male heir. Only one woman had ever ruled England and, in the dim light cast by Matilda’s brief reign in the twelfth century, it was an open question whether a woman could rule England. Citizens of twenty-first-century democracies cannot appreciate how important an orderly royal succession could be in a medieval, hierarchical society. As historian Roland Bainton put it, The problem . . . was not passion but succession. [Henry] knew how to satisfy passion without benefit of matrimony.¹ Henry believed, and all England with him, that a legitimate male heir must follow him to the throne. England was being hard-pressed by enemies on the continent. If succession failed, the country could fall into a vulnerable chaos.

Henry’s attempts to annul² his marriage were destined to provide history with one of its most far-reaching and misunderstood events. Henry was desperate. He believed he was running out of time and options. He wasn’t getting any younger and neither was Catherine. Henry needed a way out of his marriage and a way forward that ensured an orderly succession.

By this time, Pope Julius II (who earlier approved the marriage) had died and been replaced by Pope Clement VII. Henry argued to this new Pope that the dispensation which had allowed his marriage to Catherine should never have been granted. He had found a loophole. He maintained that he would be unable to father a child with Catherine (disregarding his daughter, Mary) because their marriage was under a curse. Something of an amateur Bible scholar, he quoted Leviticus to make