Among the many voices calling for Anglican realignment, one of the more resounding is that of the Reformation Anglicans. Reformation Anglicans aspire to anchor the Anglican tradition in its Reformation roots and principles, and, in doing so, resolve the current tensions and paradoxes involved in the question of Anglican identity, as well as provide a relevant, compelling ethos for facing contemporary challenges in broader society. In brief, the five Protestant solae, a renewed commitment to Anglicanism’s historic formularies, moderate Reformed, or Calvinist soteriology (especially justification by faith), and simple but elegant worship are the bread and butter of Reformation Anglicanism, and the platform for its project of centering the tradition.
In praise of this movement, Reformation Anglicans are very much correct in their assessments of the problems facing us as Anglicans in particular, and Westerners more generally. It is common knowledge that Anglicanism is presently facing something of an identity crisis, and will need a strong, centering identity for it to remain an effective vehicle for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And it is also common knowledge that Western civilization, with its increasingly secular, and even anti-Christian spirit, presents us with a number of challenges, including radical progressivism, post-modernism, and relativism, all of which Reformation Anglicans rightly observe. Proper diagnosis plays no small role in remedying the ailment, and in this, the Reformation Anglican movement is to be commended. Reformation Anglicanism also proposes clear and bold solutions to these problems. I find this refreshing. Over the last century or so, Anglicanism (and especially Canterbury) has more and more taken on a sort of flaccid tolerance as its modus operandi, embracing vagaries, living with irresolvable disagreement, and theological sheepishness as the highest virtues. Anglicanism could use some iron in its blood and hair on its chest, and Reformation Anglicanism, with its confident and forthright approach to Anglican realignment, goes some way in supplying those deficiencies. In these and other ways, Reformation Anglicanism is a gift to the Church, and worthy of praise.
Is Anglicanism Calvinist?
That being said, Reformation Anglicanism has a number of problems, theological, philosophical, historical, and so on. In a series of articles, I will be addressing these problems, beginning with the historical. Gerry McDermott, Hans Boersma, and others have already critiqued Reformation Anglicanism on the historical grounds that the English Reformers were principally concerned with recovering a purer catholicity, primarily through patristic ressourcement, and not with perfecting and consummating Reformation principles and sensibilities (including the solae). This is, I think, by and large correct, and has been well argued by the abovementioned scholars, for which reason I will not add to it here. The issue I want to tackle here is the Reformation Anglican understanding of the English Reformation itself. This is important, because Reformation Anglicanism understands itself as the defender of the English Reformation tradition, usually against Tractarian historiography and its construal of Anglicanism as a via media between Rome and Protestantism. In this, Reformation Anglicanism is at bottom a project of restoration, an attempt at returning to a prior status quo in the Church. Therefore, if Reformation Anglicanism doesn’t get the Reformation right, it’s a pretty big deal. So what is the central claim that Reformation Anglicans make concerning the English Reformation and early post-Reformation Anglicanism, which I find to be in error? It is the following: the Reformation Anglican interpretation of the English Reformation and early Anglicanism consists largely in the claim that the English Reformation, and the early Anglican Church following it, was essentially and decidedly Reformed-Calvinist in its general character, and that it ultimately rejected the Lutheran side of the Reformation. Gerald Bray makes this plain:
A divide had opened between self-proclaimed Lutherans and other reformed people, loosely known nowadays as Calvinists, and the Church of England tried to steer a middle course between them. That proved to be impossible, and in the end it came down on the side of the “Calvinists” where it was to remain.[1]
Alec Ryrie reinforces this identification of early Anglicanism with Calvinism when he declares the “death of Lutheran England,” referring to the waning influence of Lutheran thought on the English Reformers during the later years of the Reformation, and its eventual settling on Reformed Calvinism.[2] Similarly, Gillis Harp, in rejecting Newman’s theory of Anglican identity as a via media between Rome and Protestantism, identifies Anglicanism in its formularies as “thoroughly Reformed,” and with only some minor Lutheran elements.[3] In a word, early Anglicanism, according to the Reformation Anglicans, is fundamentally Reformed-Calvinist, and categorically not Lutheran, or at most only minimally Lutheran.
It is this understanding of the historic Anglican Church as Reformed-Calvinist that buttresses the Reformation Anglican project of realignment. Indeed, continuity with this Church is what gives strength to the Reformation Anglican claim that they should be the ones realigning the Church according to their Reformed model: ‘we were here first, things were better then, so let’s go back.’ In laying this claim, the Reformation Anglican ethos is fundamentally both originalist and declensionist. Reformation Anglican originalism and declensionism also determine the movement’s primary antagonists. The Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics are obvious foils, especially their notion of Anglicanism as a via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (which is not entirely undeserving of criticism); but the Reformation Anglicans trace their declensionist narrative further back to the avante-garde conformists, and especially to the so-called Anglican “Arminians” and the Laudians. On this view, Andrewes, Laud, and Taylor, rather than being gems in the Anglican crown, are the beginning of the end, gateway drugs to latitudinarianism and then to theological liberalism, or to the duck-billed platypus that is Anglo-Catholicism (or so the narrative goes). Chuck Collins, the head of the Center for Reformation Anglicanism, who often takes Reformation Anglican sensibilities to the point of caricature, is clear on this front, calling Anglican Arminianism a “kudzu” (i.e., an invasive plant that often chokes the life out of surrounding vegetation) and Laud “Anglicanism’s greatest calamity.”[4] This entire narrative and the realignment project built upon it all rest principally on the Reformation Anglican claim that the Reformation and early post-Reformation Church of England, as codified in the formularies and the thought of the early Anglican divines, was essentially Reformed-Calvinist, not Lutheran, and certainly not at all Roman Catholic or Tridentine-friendly (per Tractarian historiography); and that certain developments in the seventeenth century were tragic departures from this original Reformed identity, eventually leading to our sad state today. If this historical claim does not stand, the whole narrative and project would fall with it.
So, is the identity of Reformation and early post-Reformation Anglicanism as Reformed-Calvinist really this simple? Can we really say that the English Reformers and the early Anglican Church were decidedly and unabashedly for the Swiss Reformed, and jettisoned Lutheranism and the old Catholicism altogether? For this article, I will be leaving aside the question of the English Reformation’s relation to the old Catholicism and its compatibility with Trent, and instead I will look at it strictly with respect to the Reformation, and how it aligns with the Reformed-Calvinist and Lutheran branches of the Reformation. Methodologically, we will proceed by considering some of the trademark doctrines, disciplines, and sentiments of the Reformed churches, especially as they compare and contrast with those of the Lutheran, and determine whether or not Bray and the Reformation Anglicans’ identification of early Anglicanism with Reformed-Calvinism holds water.
Worship
Beginning with worship, one of the principal identifiers of the Reformed tradition is its adherence to Calvin’s regulative principle of worship, which maintains that corporate worship must strictly conform to specific directives in Scripture.[5] This view contrasts with the normative principle of worship, which holds that corporate worship may include elements not specifically directed in Scripture, so long as they are not prohibited in Scripture. The regulative principle sets the Reformed tradition apart not only from Lutheranism, but also from Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and even contemporary Evangelicalism. In this distinction, it is a truly defining feature of the tradition. But here the early Anglican Church, in her historic formularies, is explicitly for the normative principle. In article XX (Of the Authority of the Church), it expressly says that the Church maintains the authority to decree rites and ceremonies, so long as they are not contrary to God’s Word, which is a plain affirmation of the normative principle. If we are to take the Articles as expressing the mind of our Reformers, then it must be admitted that, in their approach to corporate worship, they were decidedly on the Lutheran rather than the Reformed side.
Polity
Moving on to ecclesiastical polity, presbyterianism, or, the rule of elders, which was developed by John Calvin, and later transmitted to Scotland through John Knox, is another defining feature of the Reformed tradition. To be sure, there are some exceptions to this rule, such as the Reformed Churches in Hungary, Lithuania, and Poland; but Presbyterian polity remains a trademark feature of the Reformed-Calvinist tradition, defining it over and against Lutheranism, Rome, and the Eastern Churches. And here, as in worship, the English Reformers and the early Anglican Church are somewhat closer to the Lutherans than the Reformed. Some of the Lutheran churches, along with the Anglican, maintained an episcopal or quasi-episcopal form of church polity, while the vast majority of Reformed Churches abandoned it for presbyterianism, or, as in the Puritan colonists in North America, for Congregationalism. Now, I say quasi-episcopal in anticipation of the argument that only the Scandinavian Lutherans retained episcopacy, while the German Lutherans rejected it, and that I am therefore overstating the similarities between Anglicanism and Lutheranism on this front. But it is arguable, and in fact the historic Anglican position, that the German Lutherans only nominally reject episcopal polity. Indeed, the majority Anglican position is that the German Lutheran tradition, with its rule by superintendents, has retained episcopacy in substance, if not in name. Laud identifies superintendents with bishops where he defends the Protestant character of episcopacy and its place in the English Church; likewise Bramhall, in The Serpent Salve, points to superintendency as a form of episcopacy.[6] But supposing (though not granting) that German Lutheranism retained only a defective episcopate or a quasi-episcopate, the early Anglican Church and the Lutheran churches still share more in common when it comes to church polity than do the Anglican and Continental Reformed, the latter of which are defined in large part by their peculiar form of presbyteral polity. Anglicanism’s siding with the Lutherans over the Swiss Reformation on worship and polity cannot be overestimated when it comes to the question of early Anglican identity. Worship and polity are the concrete facets of Christian life: the former pertains to that chief act which we, as Christians, do together when gathered corporately, and the latter has to do with the way we actually function as an institution. They are, in a word, the concrete and defining aspects of our actually living together as an ecclesia (a gathered people).
Doctrine
But let us move on to doctrine. There is no doctrine more closely associated with Reformed-Calvinism in the popular imagination than the doctrine of predestination. Therefore, this is an excellent test case for the allegedly Reformed, “un-Lutheran” character of the English Reformation and early Anglicanism, at least as popularly conceived. When we look at the principal Anglican formulary pertaining to this doctrine, Article XVII of the 39 Articles, the case is a bit murkier than the cases of worship and polity. It seems that Article XVII is perfectly compatible with a Reformed-Calvinist view of predestination, as evinced by the many Calvinists who subscribed in good faith to the article in the early post-Reformation Anglican Church, and who claimed it for their own side. Indeed, Gilbert Burnet, though demonstrating the compatibility of the Article with an Arminian view of predestination, admits that it inclines somewhat in the Calvinist direction.[7] But when we consider the measured tone of the Article, its pastoral character, and moderation, as well as the complete absence of any mention of the moving cause of election, or, for that matter, any mention at all of reprobation or the eternal decree, it points more towards Melanchthon than Calvin’s influence. Peter Heylyn, Archbishop Richard Laurence, and Bishop Harold Edward Browne, amongst others, have made this argument for the Melanchthonian character of Article XVII quite persuasively. Heylyn shows from their epistles and correspondences that the English Reformers were especially indebted to Melanchthon and his writings, to which Lawrence adds evidence of the close confidence and correspondence between Cranmer and Melanchthon during the former’s writing of the Article.[8] Browne notes the close similarities between Article XVII and the Augsburg Confession, the latter of which was written by Melanchthon.[9] Granting these arguments and the Melanchthonian character of Article XVII, the English Reformers and the early Anglican Church must be said to incline more in the direction of moderate, Philippist Lutheranism, though allowing for more Reformed-Calvinist interpretations and positions. The moderate Philippism of the Articles’ soteriology can also be seen in Articles XVI and XXXI, the former pushing against the Reformed notion of the indefectibility of grace, and the latter siding with Lutheranism on the universal extent of the atonement (though this article is compatible with Reformed-Calvinist soteriologies of a hypothetical universalist variety).
What about the sacraments? On the Eucharist, the Anglican Church is, by and large, distinctly Reformed-Calvinist. The Articles and the language of the Prayer Book are most naturally read and interpreted according to either a dynamic-receptionist or virtualist understanding of the Real Presence, though allowing for Bullinger’s symbolic parallelism, all of which positions are associated with the Swiss Reformation. But even here there is some wiggle room for the Lutheran sympathizer. Article XXIX, for example, denies only that the wicked “partake [participes]” of Christ, which, being interpretable as the benefits of Christ’s death, does not absolutely exclude the Lutheran manducatio impiorum in the way the analogous Westminster article does by explicitly excluding reception of the thing signified, or the res sacramenti.[10] The “spiritually given … taken” language of Article XXVIII is also amenable to Lutheran glosses. In short, we might say that the Articles on the topic of the Eucharist are, read in their plain sense, Reformed-Calvinist, though not absolutely so, permitting Lutheran interpretations with some tolerable casuistry. On the other hand, on baptism the Formularies are just the opposite. Against Zwingli’s notion that baptized infants are not regenerate,[11] and in tension with Calvin’s tying baptismal regeneration closely to election,[12] the Book of Common Prayer plainly declares baptized infants regenerate. This teaching evinces a far more Lutheran understanding of baptism, though Calvinist-leaning Anglicans make the argument that this declaration amounts to a “charitable hypothesis,” that is, that the Church is expressing her charitable hope that the baptized infant is among the elect, and therefore regenerate.[13] While permissible, this looks a lot like a Newmanesque, Tract 90 sort of move, no less strained than the abovementioned move admitting Lutheran views under the protection of Article XXIX. Thus, when read according to its plain, natural sense, the Prayer Book baptismal liturgy, and concomitantly the early Anglican Church, is once again more Lutheran than Reformed-Calvinist. So what do we make of this tension in the Church’s sacramental theology? It would seem that, according to the formularies, the English Reformers and the early Anglican Church is actually a middle way between Wittenberg and Geneva on the sacraments: the Eucharist is predominantly Reformed-Calvinist, though patient of Lutheran theology (again, with some tolerable casuistry); while Baptism is predominantly Lutheran, though patient of Calvinist (though not Zwinglian) Reformed theology (also with some tolerable casuistry).
When we move from particular and concrete doctrines to more general theological temperament, the Reformed-Calvinist tradition is defined in large part by its penchant for system, and its great and voluminous production of texts in dogmatics. Calvin’s Institutes, Vermigli’s Loci, and the Reformed scholasticism that followed them are illustrative of this systematizing impulse amongst the Reformed. In this respect, the Reformed and Lutheran traditions are actually quite close to one another. Beginning with Melanchthon’s Loci, the Lutheran tradition, like the Reformed, produced an impressive body of literature in dogmatics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Chemnitz and Gerhard’s Loci, and culminating in Quenstedt’s Theologia-Didactico Polemica. Interestingly enough, in this respect early Anglicanism is removed in theological temperament from both the Reformed and the Lutheran traditions. Early Anglicanism, having been more liturgically focused, never produced nor attempted to produce anything like the abovementioned systematic theologies, remaining content with commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed, the Articles of Religion, or the Church catechism. Anglican theologians were generally more contingent and reactionary in their approaches to theology, not systematic and comprehensive. In this facet, the early Anglican tradition is an eccentric expression of Protestant theology, neither Reformed nor Lutheran.
A Broad Consensus
To conclude our examination, let us complete our observations by looking at some of the great divines, clergy, and magistrates, and what they thought of the Anglican Church in its relationship with the Continental Reformed and the Lutherans, and their theologies. While Elizabeth I’s piety has been a subject of debate, the current consensus is that her faith was largely traditionalist and Lutheran, with strong doses of the old Catholicism; and her hostility towards Calvinists (and especially the Puritans) is well known.[14] King James, on the other hand, was more Calvinist in his thinking, though amenable towards Lutherans, even sending the British delegation to the Synod of Dordt in part to resolve the controversy among the Reformed in a manner that would be acceptable to the Saxon Protestants.[15] Amongst the bishops and church leaders during the Reformation and early post-Reformation period, there was a significant minority of Lutheran sympathizers, including Bishops Latimer, Hooper, and Gheast, though the majority were Calvinists, with a small, predominantly Puritan minority being hostile towards Lutheranism, as evinced by their charging Archbishop Parker with being a “Lutheranizer.” This hostility from the Puritans, however, was a rare sentiment of a minority, as becomes clear in the writings of the divines. Most of the divines, including those of a more Reformed persuasion, made no sharp distinction between the Reformed and Lutherans, and saw each party as collaborators with the English Church in a common Christian cause. Richard Field, for example, spends no less time defending Luther and Melanchthon against their Roman antagonists than he does Calvin, Bucer, and Vermigli, and he takes great pains to articulate the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity in as favorable and orthodox a light as possible.[16] Hooker likewise approaches the Lutherans as allies and friends, despite his disagreement with them on some few topics (including ubiquity and the Real Presence), and even praises them as forerunners and fathers in the project of reform.[17] Perhaps most telling, the Reformed Conformist par excellence, John Davenant, happily includes the great Lutheran divine Martin Chemnitz amongst the “band of our [my own emphasis] theologians,” exhibiting a sense of shared identity and camaraderie with respect to the Lutherans.[18] Examples could be multiplied, but it is, I think, clear from the above examples that the early Anglican Church had no self-awareness as a decidedly Calvinist or non/anti-Lutheran church. It was, to be frank, a mixed bag, with a variety of parties and opinions on how the English Church ought to be understood relative to other Protestant groups. In my view, the English Reformers’ and early Anglican Church’s self-understanding, according to her sovereigns, clergy, and theologians, might be best described as irenic or pan-Protestant, though more argument would be required to substantiate this generalization, which is beyond the scope of this article.
I hope to have shown, or at least begun to have shown, that the English Reformation and early post-Reformation Anglicanism cannot be neatly described as Reformed-Calvinist or as non-Lutheran or minimally Lutheran. There are far too many similarities and shared doctrinal sensibilities between early Anglicanism and Lutheranism, and too many central features of Reformed theology and discipline missing from Anglicanism, for Bray and the Reformation Anglicans’ claim that the English Reformation “came down on the side of the Calvinists” to hold. No doubt many will reject this conclusion on the grounds that the English Reformation and post-Reformation Anglican Church is commonly said to have been characterized by a “Calvinist Consensus” (to use Nicholas Tyacke’s phrase), having basically settled on a Reformed-Calvinist soteriology (including predestination), until the Laudians intervened and radically transformed the character of the Church.[19] This is a highly influential narrative, and not without credible scholars supporting it, including Tyacke, Patrick Collinson, and Stephen Hampton. It is, however, overstated. There is no doubt that the Calvinist party represented the dominant majority during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; but a dominant majority does not make for a consensus, nor does it amount to an established or de jure authority. The fact of the matter is there was always opposition to Calvinism in the English Church, first Philippist, and then Arminian (though in truth Anglican Arminians were more influenced by the Lutheran Orthodox, and especially Gerhard), so the notion that there was anything like a straightforward “consensus” on Calvinism in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church is at best an exaggeration. Indeed, even while dominant, Calvinism was always contested. Moreover, the Calvinist majority, however influential during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, never secured its theological positions in the form of any accepted confession or canon law: the Reformed-Calvinist Lambeth and Irish Articles, and the Synod of Dordt held on the Continent, never became any doctrinally authoritative statement for Anglicans, despite attempts from the Calvinist majority to make it so. In consequence, that majority position enjoys at best a sort of moral authority grounded in seniority. But why the historical fact of a roughly thirty-year hegemony of one church party that never secured its position, and was, moreover, eventually overthrown by the Laudians (who did legally secure their position at the Restoration in a number of articles, laws, and the 1662 BCP), should serve as the model for realignment now, centuries after its fall from power, I cannot tell. The Federalist Party enjoyed a comparative majority in late 18th-century American politics, but no one would think to reason from this historical fact to the conclusion that Americans should all be Federalists, or that the Democratic-Republican Party that overthrew the Federalist majority amounted to a betrayal, or was unconstitutional. One vision of the American project overcame the other, just as the Laudian vision of the Church of England, though formerly a minority, prevailed over the previous Calvinist majority. In short, even if the most aggressive versions of the declensionist narrative of the English Church’s decline from an ostensibly pure Calvinism to Laudianism are true, it matters little, since the Laudians finally and decisively won. Love it or hate it, Laudianism happened to the Church, and it was Laudian Anglicanism that spread throughout the colonies, including the American—not to mention the strong influence of the Nonjurors, who represent an even higher-church movement.
“Whose Reformation?”
That being said, I do not here want to argue that Reformation and early post-Reformation Anglicanism is simply not Reformed, or that it is basically Lutheran in doctrine and discipline. The Reformed character of Anglican theology on the central doctrine of the Eucharist is too important to ignore, and pushes against any such identification; the Christology of the English Reformers and post-Reformation divines is also clearly Reformed rather than Lutheran, especially as against the more radical ubiquitarians; early Anglicanism’s regular use of covenantal categories, and its strong embrace of the third use of the Law, also veers it in the direction of the Reformed and against the Lutheran. In these areas, both Tractarian rejections of the Reformed aspects of early Anglicanism, and Lawrence and other Lutheran sympathizers’ identification of Anglicanism and its formularies as purely Lutheran, are overstatements: they underappreciate the Reformed elements of the early Anglican tradition. In short, it would be an error to try and describe early Anglicanism as non- or anti-Reformed, or to set up an “Augsburg Anglicanism” in the place of the Reformation Anglicans’ “Westminster Anglicanism.” I want only to show that Reformation Anglicanism’s neat and tidy classification of the English Reformation and early post-Reformation Anglicanism as decidedly Reformed-Calvinist, and not—or only marginally—Lutheran, is a drastic overstatement. The English Church did indeed undergo a Reformation, for which we ought to be grateful; but it was neither determinatively Swiss nor German, but a complex combination of elements from both—with, of course, a good deal of Anglicizing for being transplanted into English theological soil, and a bit of the old Catholicism, all culminating in a generous and eccentric Protestantism. So, when Ashley Null and John Yates tell us that, from among the many “Anglican ways,” the “Anglicanism shaped by the Reformation is the best way forward,” one must ask, “Whose Reformation?”[20] If when they say the English they really mean the Swiss-Calvinist (the English Reformation, on their view, having “come down on the side of the Calvinists”), I’m afraid I cannot go forward with them; if they mean the complex aggregate of Reformed and Lutheran elements with some small doses of the old Catholicism that the English Reformation really was, I’m happy to talk.
Notes
- Gerald Bray, “An Anglican Historian and Theologian: A Church in Search of its Soul,” in The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism, p. 155. ↑
- Alec Ryrie, “The Strange Death of Lutheran England,” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History. ↑
- Harp, “Via Media: Factual or Fanciful?,” Meet the Puritans column, Place for Truth, https://www.placefortruth.org/blog/via-media-factual-or-fanciful. ↑
- Collins, “Anglican Arminianism and Kudzu,” https://www.anglicanism.info/writing/anglican-arminianism-and-kudzu, and “Laud: Anglican’s Greatest Calamity,” https://www.anglicanism.info/writing/laud-anglicans-greatest-calamity, Center for Reformation Anglicanism. ↑
- See Ligionier Ministry’s treatment of the regulative principle, by Derek Thomas, “The Regulative Principle of Worship,” Ligonier Ministries, https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/regulative-principle-worship. ↑
- An excellent article on this topic can be found at “‘The Thing is retained’: Episcopacy and the Laudian defence of German Lutheranism,” Laudable Practice, http://laudablepractice.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-thing-is-retained-episcopacy-and.html. ↑
- See Gilbert Burnet, Exposition of the 39 Articles, art. 17. ↑
- See Heylyn, Historia Quinque Articularis, pp. 18-19; Laurence, An Attempt to Illustrate those Articles of the Church of England which the Calvinists Improperly Consider Calvinistical, serm. 8. ↑
- Browne, An Exposition of the 39 Articles of Religion, pp. 421-422. ↑
- See Westminster Confession, ch. 29, sec. 8. ↑
- ↑
- ↑
- Brown treats this interpretation, and ultimately rejects it, in his Exposition, Article XXVII, sec. 3. ↑
- See David MacCullough, The Later Reformation in England. ↑
- See Anthony Milton, The British Delegation at the Synod of Dordt. ↑
- Richard Field, Of the Church, 1:311–312, 3:77, 4:402–409. ↑
- Hooker, Laws, vol. II (), 5.55.4–6. ↑
- Davenant, Treatise on Justification, vol. II (), 7. ↑
- See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism. ↑
- Ashley Null, Reformation Anglicanism: A Vision for Today’s Global Communion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017), 186. ↑