Essay
The work of receiving
The ancient Church and the making of Anglicanism
In “The faith once received”, I argued that Anglicanism is, at its best, a disciplined way of receiving and practicing the apostolic and catholic faith. I pointed to Scripture read in the Church, the Creeds confessed with the Church, common prayer, sacramental worship, and ordered ministry as forms through which that faith is handed on. That essay sketched the claim; here I want to look more closely at its historical basis. Did the people who shaped the English Church understand their work in these terms, and what did they believe they were receiving?
Part of what draws me to Anglicanism is the possibility of belonging to a Church with a memory. I want the prayers and doctrines by which I am formed to reach beyond my own judgment and the concerns of the present moment. That desire also calls for discernment, since an inheritance may carry mistakes as well as gifts. The early sources show why reform was thought necessary and how later Anglicans continued to reason about what the Church had received. Their testimony gives us a place to begin examining the claims made on Anglicanism’s behalf.
A faith already handed on
Long before there was an English Reformation, Christians spoke of the faith as something entrusted to the Church. Near the end of the second century, Irenaeus described a Church scattered across languages and places that had “received from the apostles and their disciples this faith”. His account begins with confession of the one God, the incarnation and saving work of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. For Irenaeus, this common faith held the dispersed Church together across differences of language and teaching ability as it was received, proclaimed, and handed on.
That faith had a common life. In his account of Sunday worship, Justin Martyr describes the reading of apostolic and prophetic writings, exhortation, common prayer, thanksgiving over bread and wine, and provision for people in need. His account gives us a particular second-century instance of a Church learning to confess its faith through shared practices. Scripture is heard together; prayer and Eucharist are shared; the vulnerable are remembered in the assembly’s common responsibility.
These second-century accounts offer evidence of a faith publicly confessed and embodied in the Church’s life. Centuries of development stand between them and the English Reformation, so the reformers’ appeal to the ancient Church should be read against this inheritance and judged in light of what they actually said and did.
Cranmer’s work of receiving and reforming
The 1549 Book of Common Prayer’s account of the Church’s services looks back to an earlier pattern of sustained Scripture reading associated with the ancient Fathers. It argues that accumulated material and interrupted lessons had obscured this pattern. The proposed repair is an order in which Scripture can again be read widely and the people can understand what is prayed and sung. The preface invokes the Fathers’ purpose to explain why change is needed. It gives the reform a stated end: to make the Church’s inherited worship serve the hearing of Scripture and the people’s prayer.
This was a substantial undertaking. Diarmaid MacCulloch describes Cranmer drawing on the medieval Sarum Use—the worship associated with Salisbury Cathedral—other inherited forms, and liturgical experiments emerging in England and on the Continent. Cranmer selected and arranged these materials within a new order of public worship. Some prayers retained much of their earlier shape; other parts were newly written or more sharply revised. The substantial changes of 1552 show how the arrangement of a service, as well as the wording of its prayers, could carry theological weight.
The Collect for Purity lets us see this work at the scale of a single prayer. In the medieval Sarum rite, a Latin prayer beginning Deus cui omne cor patet belonged to the priest’s preparation for Mass. In the 1549 Communion service, the priest says the Lord’s Prayer and then its English descendant near the beginning of the rite: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid”. The familiar opening leads to a petition that the Holy Spirit cleanse the thoughts of our hearts so that we may love God and magnify his name. An inherited prayer has been translated into English and given a place in the ordered worship of the reformed Church.
Its placement matters. The 1549 rubric gives the prayer to the priest, who voices it in English near the beginning of Communion. In the older Latin arrangement, it belonged among the priest’s preparatory prayers. Here it turns those present toward a God who already knows them and toward the grace by which they may worship him. Its substance carries forward an earlier prayer, while its language and liturgical setting give it a new place in the Church’s worship. James Devereux’s study finds that roughly two-thirds of the 1549 collects were fairly close translations of Latin prayers found in Sarum books. His count concerns the collects; the Collect for Purity shows what one such prayer could become in a new order.
Cranmer was candid about the judgment involved in translation. In a 1544 letter to Henry VIII concerning proposed English processions, he said that he had used “more than the liberty of a translator”, altering, adding, and omitting material where he judged it necessary. The letter describes that earlier project and shows him exercising deliberate theological judgment over inherited worship. It helps us understand the kind of work involved in receiving some elements and changing others.
Cranmer’s use of inherited material directs us to the judgments by which he shaped it. How faithfully did those judgments serve the sources and the Gospel? His Prayer Book presents reform of received worship for intelligibility, Scripture reading, and common prayer. The Collect for Purity lets us hear one part of that larger work.
A claim made in public
The appeal to the earlier Church appears in the English reformers’ teaching about doctrine and ministry as well as in worship. The preface to the Ordinal, the book of rites for ordaining bishops, priests, and deacons, argues that Scripture and ancient authors attest these orders from the apostles’ time. The preface thus offers a historical and scriptural rationale for continuing ordered ministry within a reformed Church. Later disputes about ministry and succession call for closer examination of the history behind that claim.
An authorized teaching text makes a more specific doctrinal appeal. The 1547 Homily on Salvation argues that sinners are justified through Christ by faith rather than by the merit of their works. It cites Hilary, Basil, and Ambrose in support of its reading of Scripture and claims the support of ancient Christian writers. The homily also describes living faith as accompanied by repentance, hope, charity, and obedience. Each patristic citation deserves examination on its own terms. Here the homily shows a Reformation account of salvation being presented as answerable to the Church’s earlier teachers.
Cranmer made a similar appeal when defending his teaching on the Eucharist. The title of his 1550 Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament says that its account rests on God’s Word and has the consent of the ancient doctors of the Church. The book makes a contested doctrinal argument, and its title states the authorities by which Cranmer wanted that argument to be judged. His appeal to the earlier Church was thus part of his account of reforming doctrine as well as worship.
John Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England states the claim more broadly. He says the reformers searched Scripture and “returned again unto the primitive Church of the ancient fathers and Apostles”. Jewel wrote in controversy, defending England’s break with Rome, and his words tell us how he wanted the reform to be understood. The Ordinal and the Homily likewise show leading shapers of the English Church appealing to apostolic and ancient Christianity. Their stated aims give us reason to examine the particular teaching and practice that resulted.
The formularies’ discipline
The Articles of Religion, among the Church of England’s doctrinal standards or formularies, place this act of reception within a stated order of authority. Article VI[1] holds that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation. The Church can receive much from her history while asking what Scripture warrants her to require as necessary belief. A teaching or practice may be valuable through long use; a claim of necessity calls for scriptural grounds.
Article VIII[2] makes the relationship especially clear in its treatment of the Creeds. It receives the Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds because their teaching may be proved by Scripture. In worship, the Church confesses words received from earlier generations; in doctrine, she gives a reason for receiving them. The Article points to the truth of the Creeds as judged by Scripture, giving the Church a public confession and directing her back to the scriptural witness by which that confession must be understood.
Article XX[3] grants the Church authority in rites and controversies of faith within Scripture’s bounds: she may not ordain anything contrary to God’s written Word or require belief beyond it as necessary to salvation. As a witness and keeper of Scripture, the Church has responsibility for common teaching and worship. She exercises that authority under the Word she keeps and must answer for what she teaches and orders. The Prayer Book can thus be understood as an ordered inheritance shaped by reform.
Article XXXIV[4] adds that human ceremonies have varied across places and times and may be changed by a particular Church for edification—the building up of its people—provided nothing is ordained against God’s Word. The Article also takes common order seriously: a person’s private judgment does not alone justify disrupting a lawful rite. Inherited worship has weight, and the Church may change its forms through common judgment, with Scripture as its governing measure and the people’s spiritual good as a practical concern.
Hooker on what can be kept and changed
Richard Hooker gives this discipline a fuller account in the controversy over ceremonies retained after the Reformation. In Book IV, chapter 9 of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, he traces some of the disputed ceremonies to the older Church of Christ, an inheritance in which the Church of England may rightly share. Their use in Rome is part of their history; a judgment about keeping them also requires attention to their origin, meaning, and present use.
In Book IV, chapter 14, Hooker turns to the question of when inherited customs should be retained. Even a custom both ancient and widespread may need alteration when retaining it has become harmful. He also warns against discarding harmless, established rites without sufficient cause. The Church must ask what a practice teaches, whether it serves present worship, and what will be lost or gained by changing it.
This is a continuation of the earlier concern, with Hooker’s own emphasis. Cranmer’s work shows the activity of reforming inherited worship; the Articles state limits and permissions; Hooker reasons about the judgment required in a particular dispute. Historical continuity, on this account, asks the Church to know what it has received well enough to keep it wisely or change it responsibly.
Andrewes’s later account
By the early seventeenth century, the appeal to the ancient Church remained part of Anglican argument. In a Latin sermon before James I, Lancelot Andrewes named “one canon … two testaments, three creeds, the first four councils, five centuries” and the succession of Fathers through those centuries as establishing a rule for religion.[5] He was defending the antiquity of England’s faith against doctrines and practices he regarded as later additions.
Scripture heads the sequence, followed by creeds, councils, and patristic testimony. Andrewes’s summary belongs to this particular controversy; the Articles prescribe no number of councils. His appeal shows that a later English divine continued to describe the Church’s faith by reference to Scripture and witnesses from the early centuries. His list calls for interpretation in each dispute, as any claim of continuity does.
A Church with a memory now
Across worship, ministry, and doctrine, leading shapers of the English Church appealed to sources older than their own controversies. Cranmer’s Prayer Book preface invoked the Fathers to explain reforms of public reading and prayer. The Ordinal, the Homily, Cranmer’s eucharistic defence, and Jewel’s Apology each connected disputed teaching or practice to Scripture and earlier Christian witnesses. These writers had different emphases, yet they described their work as accountable to a faith the Church had already received. That repeated appeal gives a historical basis for the claim with which I began.
The Articles give that intention a more settled form. They receive the Creeds because Scripture warrants their teaching, recognize the Church’s authority to order common worship, and permit changes to human ceremonies for the people’s edification. Hooker and Andrewes later continued to argue from the Church’s inherited worship and early witnesses. Across these texts, continuity is an expressed aim. Changes are argued for in relation to Scripture and the Church’s edification.
That history still asks for careful judgment. The English Reformation was shaped by disagreement and political authority, and its appeals to antiquity do not establish the soundness of every decision. Yet the repeated appeal itself matters. It gives reason to understand Anglicanism as an effort to teach, pray, and order the faith once received, with Scripture governing the Church’s use of its inheritance.
This is the rootedness I seek in a Church with a memory. When a parish prays the Collect for Purity or confesses the Creeds, it receives words that reach beyond its own generation; the Prayer Book and Articles also teach it why those words have a place in common worship. We are entrusted with the task these early Anglican voices recognized: to know the faith we have received, to let its sources correct our judgments, and to hand it on through the Church’s prayer, teaching, and life together.
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Article VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scriptures we do understand those Canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church.
Of the Names and Number of the Canonical Books
- Genesis
- Exodus
- Leviticus
- Numbers
- Deuteronomy
- Joshua
- Judges
- Ruth
- The First Book of Samuel
- The Second Book of Samuel
- The First Book of Kings
- The Second Book of Kings
- The First Book of Chronicles
- The Second Book of Chronicles
- The First Book of Esdras
- The Second Book of Esdras
- The Book of Esther
- The Book of Job
- The Psalms
- The Proverbs
- Ecclesiastes or Preacher
- Cantica, or Songs of Solomon
- Four Prophets the greater
- Twelve Prophets the less
And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:
- The Third Book of Esdras
- The Fourth Book of Esdras
- The Book of Tobias
- The Book of Judith
- The rest of the Book of Esther
- The Book of Wisdom
- Jesus the Son of Sirach
- Baruch the Prophet
- The Song of the Three Children
- The Story of Susanna
- Of Bel and the Dragon
- The Prayer of Manasses
- The First Book of Maccabees
- The Second Book of Maccabees
All the Books of the New Testament, as they are commonly received, we do receive, and account them Canonical.
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Article VIII. Of the Three Creeds
The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Article XX. Of the Authority of the Church
The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Article XXXIV. Of the Traditions of the Church
It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, and utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word. Whosoever through his private judgement, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the traditions and ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.
Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.
The English list is a brief rendering of Andrewes’s Latin in Concio in discessu Palatini (1613), printed in Opuscula quaedam posthuma (1629), p. 86. His Quatuor Priora Concilia refers to the first four councils; he also names the Fathers through five centuries, specifying three before Constantine and two after. ↩︎