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Anglican
heritage
by Joshua
Lian and Josep
Rossello
The beginnings of the Anglican Church were in
England. Even before the Pope sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to England,
as Archbishop of Canterbury in 597 AD, there were already Christians in
England. The earliest mention of Christians in England was in first years
of the 3rd century accounted by the Church Fathers Tertullian and
Origen.
However, the story of the Reformed Church of England began roughly. Unlike the reformed churches on the continent (which began due to religious convictions), the Anglican Church began because of political reasons. Several times during the medieval period, English kings sought to limit the power of the church and the claims of its independent canon law, but without success until the reign of Henry VIII. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul King Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, King Henry induced Parliament to enact statues saying that he was the head of the Church of England. Thus the Church of England became independent, but remained "Catholic" (i.e. Roman) in practice and theology, but required all clergy to swear allegiance to the King. (Under Elizabeth I, the title was changed to "Supreme Governor" instead of "Supreme Head". Elizabeth recognized that Christ was the head of the Church of England.) Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, instituted reforms in the Anglican Church. He translated the
liturgy into English. When Henry VIII died, Cranmer then introduced
Protestant reforms that made the Church of England even more reformed in
theology and practice. Under the reign of Edward he created a reformed
liturgy and bound it together in a single volume called the Book of
Common Prayer. He created "official" homilies to be read in church.
(To be read if the minister was too lazy to write his own or if he was not
learned enough to write his own.) Also, he summed up the doctrines of the
Church of England in his very Protestant 42 Articles of
Religion which formed the basis of the 39 Articles of
Religion, a condensed version created under the reign of
Elizabeth I. (By the way, the Post-Reformation Church of England was
originally Calvinist, now the large majority are
Arminian.) The CEEC was birthed as a result of
a more general work of the Holy Spirit among the Christian churches now
known as "the convergence movement", or "convergence of the streams"
renewal. This, as most of you are aware, is the spiritual vision, rooted
in the New Testament revelation and the experience of the early
Christians, that saw the Church as one Body with many diverse and
contributing parts. Or, to put it another way: one river with many
streams. In the 1940's the well-known mission pioneer of the union Church
of South India, Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, wrote a seminal work called "The
Household Of God", examining the spiritual and functional nature of the
Lord's one Church from a missions perspective. His prophetic observation
at one point in the book was that the revelation of Scripture in Ephesians
4 is that there is one Body, one Faith, one Lord, one Spirit, one Baptism,
one hope of our calling, one God and Father of us all. However, through
history this one Body of Christ has been fragmented into separated and
often competing groups, camps, or streams, all having been originally a
part of the one river of God's saving grace poured out into the world
through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Suggested external links: The Historical of the
Communion of Evangelical Episcoapl Churches |