§ 77. The Doctrinal Position of the Anglican Church and her Relation to other Churches.
The Reformed Church of England occupies an independent position between Romanism on the one hand, and Lutheranism and Calvinism on the other, with strong affinities and antagonisms in both directions. She nursed at her breasts Calvinistic Puritans, Arminian Methodists, liberal Latitudinarians, and Romanizing Tractarians and Ritualists. This comprehensiveness of the Church as a whole is quite consistent with the narrowness and exclusiveness of particular parties. It repels and attracts; it caused the large secessions which occurred at critical junctures in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but it also explains the individual accessions which she continually though quietly receives from other Churches.
The English mind is not theorizing and speculative, but eminently practical and conservative; it follows more the power of habit than the logic of thought; it takes things as they are, makes haste slowly, mends abuses cautiously, and aims at the attainable rather than the ideal. The Reformation in England was less controlled by theology than on the Continent, and more complicated with ecclesiastical and political issues. Anglican theology is as much embodied in the episcopal polity and the liturgical worship as in the doctrinal standards. The Book of Common Prayer is catholic, though purged of superstitious elements; the Articles of Religion are evangelical and moderately Calvinistic. [1142] The hierarchical, sacerdotal, and sacramental systems of religion are congenial and logically inseparable; they moderate and check the Protestant tendency, and if unduly pressed they become Romanizing. In great minds we often find great antagonisms or opposite truths dwelling together unreconciled; while partisans look only at one side. Augustine, Luther, and even the more logical Calvin, believed in divine sovereignty and human responsibility, free election and sacramental grace, and combined reverence for Church authority with independence of private judgment. The English Church leaves room for catholic and evangelical, mediæval and modern ideas, without an attempt to harmonize them; but her parties are one-sided, and differ as widely as separate denominations, though subject to the same bishop and worshiping at the same altar. She is composite and eclectic in her character, like the English language; she has more outward uniformity than inward unity; she is fixed in her organic structure, but elastic in doctrinal opinion, and has successively allowed opposite schools of theology to grow up which claim to be equally loyal to her genius and institutions. She has lost in England by those periodical separations which followed her great religious movements (the Puritan, the Methodist, the Anglo-Catholic) nearly one half of the nation she once exclusively controlled; yet she remains to this day the richest and strongest national Church in Protestant Christendom, and exercises more power over England than Lutheranism does over Germany or Calvinism over Switzerland and Holland. In the United States the Protestant Episcopal Church is numerically much smaller than most of the denominations which in England were cast out or voluntarily went out from the established Church as Non-conformists and Dissenters; but she will always occupy a commanding position among the higher classes and in large cities, because she represents the noble institutions and literature of the aristocratic, conservative, and venerable Church of England.
THE MELANCHTHONIAN INFLUENCE.
Germany received Roman Catholic Christianity from England through Winfrid or Boniface, and in turn gave to England the first impulse of the evangelical Reformation. The writings of Luther were read with avidity by students in Oxford and Cambridge as early as 1527. Cranmer spent some time in Germany, and was connected with it by domestic ties. [1143] Henry VIII. never overcame his intense dislike of Luther, kindled by their unfortunate controversy on the seven sacraments, and strengthened by Luther's breach with Erasmus; but he respected Melanchthon for his learning and wisdom, and invited him to assist in reforming the English Church. [1144] He entered into negotiations with the Wittenberg divines and the Lutheran princes of the Smalcald League, but chiefly from political motives and without effect.
Under Edward VI. the influence of the Melanchthonian theology, as embodied in the Augsburg Confession (1530) and the Suabian Confession (1552), became more apparent, and can be clearly traced in Cranmer's earlier writings, in some of the Articles of Religion, and in those parts of the Book of Common Prayer which were borrowed from the 'Consultation' of Archbishop Hermann of Cologne, compiled by Bucer and Melanchthon (1543). Hence the English Church has been called sometimes by Lutheran divines an Ecclesia Lutheranizans.
But the peculiar views of Luther on the real presence and the ubiquity of Christ's body found no congenial soil in England. Cranmer himself abandoned them as early as Dec. 14, 1548, when a public discussion was held in London on the eucharist; and he adopted, together with Ridley, the Calvinistic doctrine of a virtual presence and communication of Christ's glorified humanity. He held that 'Christ is figuratively in the bread and wine, and spiritually in them that worthily eat the bread and drink the wine; but, on the other hand, contended that our blessed Lord is really, carnally, and corporally in heaven alone, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.' [1145] This doctrinal change was embodied (1552) in the revision of the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI.; the prayer of oblation was converted into a thanksgiving, and the old formula of distribution, which was compatible even with a belief in transubstantiation ('The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ,' etc.), was replaced by another which a Zwinglian may approve ('Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee,' etc.). In the Elizabethan Service-Book the two formulas were combined (the second being an explanation of the first), and have ever since continued in use.
In the violent controversies which agitated Germany after Luther's death, and which led to the Formula of Concord, England sided with the milder Melanchthonian school. Queen Elizabeth made an effort to prevent the adoption of the Formula and the condemnation of the Reformed doctrines. [1146]