It would probably scare some folks half to death to hear that the commonest form of high churchmanship in the mid-1800s was described as a robust Protestantism. This was because it took seriously the Bible, the Prayer Book, and the Articles of Religion, and had, historically, grown out of churchly reaction against rigid Calvinism which had emerged in the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign. Because of the influence of Anglo-Catholic writers around 1890-1920, folks today tend to see Elizabeth and Jacobean churchmanship in terms of Anglican versus Puritan rather than as a crisis within the English Reformed tradition. It is well-known that Reformed theology in the mid-to-late 1500s had both a developed doctrine of Predestination and Election, and a strong sacramental theology based on the concept of mystical union. The trouble was that the two tendencies had (and have) the potential to become two separate systems depending on whether election or mystical union becomes the dominant influence on the theology. Both Conformists and Puritans shared a common Reformed theology, and a Baptism-Nurture-Confirmation model of Christian initiation with the divergence only becoming apparent as the differing theological emphases as the predestinarian and sacramental strands pulled apart, and the tensions over liturgy and governance sharpened towards the end of the century.
The variety of high churchmanship that developed at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign is not an alien import into the English Reformed tradition, but a development of the churchly, liturgical, and sacramental side of the Elizabethan Settlement. Thus, concepts such as biblical sufficiency, the Fall, depravity, justification by grace through faith, the basic stuff of Augustinian and Protestant Christianity remained intact, but an increasing emphasis was laid on the visible Church as not simply ‘the congregation of faithful men’ but as a worshipping, sacramental body.
The effects of this can be seen in Archbishop Laud’s attempts to make church practice fit liturgical theory by insisting on the table being moved back to the east end and surrounded by a rail to protect it from abuse and to provide a handy communion place. Although Laud’s attempts to mandate this were met with howls of protest in the 1630s, many parishes conformed, and the “Laudian” amendments to the interior of English churches became all but universal after the Restoration in 1660, though the odd awkward building might depart from the norm. Services were, to quote Anthony Trollope, “…decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral…”[1] Writing in the 1850s, 175 years after the Laudian revolution, he could state that the clergy, “…all preached in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats… they made no private genuflections, and were contented to confine themselves to such ceremonial observances as had been in vogue for the last hundred years.”[2]
The setting of Anglican worship was as simple and dignified as its ceremonial with parish churches often being used as two rooms – the chancel for communion, and the nave for all other services. Theologically, the old high churchmanship tended to reach out Lutheranism, and the German Reformed. England’s 18th century political links to Hanover encouraged dialogue with Lutherans, whilst Jablonski’s[3] effort to introduce both the Prayer Book and the Articles into Prussia opened a short-lived dialogue with the Prussian monarch. Bishop John Robinson, when he was the English representative in Sweden, worked on a proposal for intercommunion between the Lutheran Church there and the Church of England, but he was about two hundred years too early for that proposal to be accepted, the Swedish bishops rejecting it on the basis that the English Articles were too Reformed.[4]
What can be seen from these links, and from the continued use of continental Protestant texts in the Universities was that despite its episcopal system of government, the English Church remained, to paraphrase Archbishop Brillioth, “a self-willed member of the great family of Reformed Churches” that maintained the cardinal principles of the Reformation. The character of high churchmanship only began to alter about 1830 with Lloyd’s tenure of the Regius Chair at Oxford, and his more dynamic understanding of Tradition in the church.[5] This was picked up Newman, and became one of the influences, along with Romanticism and the fear of rationalism, that shaped the intellectual development of Tractarianism, Ritualism, and Anglo-Catholicism.
As late as 1869 Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli could write commending the appointment of Christopher Wordsworth as Bishop of Lincoln on the grounds of his being ‘a true High Churchman, and a sound Protestant.’ Alas, those days were coming to an end, and the name high churchman was to be taken over by the moderate adherents of the Tractarian school with their reverence for a dynamic understanding of Christian Antiquity and ambivalent attitude to the English Reformation.
There is still a need for a robust liturgical Protestantism to provide a grounded Christian culture, especially in the US and the UK. Without an adherence to Scripture and the Confessions, reinforced by the liturgy, the tendency of confessional churches is to retreat into what makes them ‘different’ rather than to rely on the whole deposit of the faith as it has been received. The widely distributed, but relatively shallow mainstream Protestantism of the 20th century is fading rapidly, the revivalist-evangelical tradition is not grounded enough to sustain a Christian society, so that means a return to high church Protestantism – whether Anglican, Lutheran, or Reformed, as the best hope for sustaining a biblical, confession church in the 21st century.
Image: Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, John Constable (1823). Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Barchester Towers, Chapter 6 – War ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- For a more detailed treatment of this subject see R. Barry Levis, “The Failure of the Anglican-Prussian Ecumenical Effort 1710-14” in Church History, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp.381‒399 (Dec. 1978) ↑
- Robinson was the English minister in Sweden in the reign of Queen Anne, and succeeded to the Bishopric of London in 1713. ↑
- See, William J. Baker, ‘Beyond Port and Prejudice,’ University of Maine at Orono Press, 1981. ↑
