History of the English Church

 
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SPREAD OF THE CHURCH

From the time of the Reformation, the Church of England followed explorers, traders,
colonists, and missionaries into the far reaches of the known world. The colonial
churches generally exercised administrative autonomy within the historical and creedal
context of the mother church.

As the successor of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval English Church, it has valued and
preserved much of the traditional framework of medieval Catholicism in church
government, liturgy, and customs, while it also has usually held the fundamentals of
Reformation faith.

The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, who began invading Britain after Rome stopped
governing the country in the 5th century, was undertaken by St. Augustine, a monk in
Rome chosen by Pope Gregory I to lead a mission to the Anglo-Saxons. He arrived in
597, and within 90 years, all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England had gradually
accepted Christianity.

In the 11th century, the Norman conquest of England (1066) united England more closely
with the culture of Latin Europe. The English Church was reformed according to Roman
ideas: local synods were revived, celibacy of the clergy was required, and the canon law
of Western Europe was introduced into England.

The English Church shared in the religious unrest characteristic of the latter Middle Ages.
John Wycliffe, the 14th century reformer and theologian, became a revolutionary critic of
the papacy and is considered a major influence on the 16th century Protestant
Reformation.

The break with the Roman papacy and the establishment of an independent Church of
England came during the reign of Henry VIII of England (1509-47). When Pope Clement
VII refused to approve the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the
English Parliament, at Henry's insistence, passed a series of acts that separated the
English Church from the Roman hierarchy, and, in 1534, made the English monarch the
head of the English Church. The monasteries were suppressed, but few other changes
were immediately made, since Henry intended that the English Church would remain
Catholic, though separated from Rome.

After Henry's death, Protestant reforms of the Church were introduced during the six-year
reign of Edward VI. In 1553, however, when Edward's half-sister, Mary, a Roman
Catholic, succeeded to the throne, her repression and persecution of Protestants created
sympathy for their cause.
When Elizabeth I, Henry's daughter, became queen in 1558, an independent Church of
England was reestablished. The Book of Common Prayer (1549, final revision 1662) and
the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) became the standard for liturgy and doctrine.
MOVEMENTS WITHIN THE CHURCH

The Evangelical Movement in the 18th century tended to emphasize the Protestant
heritage of the Church, while the Oxford Movement in the 19th century emphasized the
Catholic heritage. These two attitudes have persisted in the Church, and are sometimes
characterized as "Low Church" and "High Church." Since the 19th century, the Church
has been active in the Ecumenical Movement.

POLITY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

The Church of England has maintained the episcopal form of government. It is divided
into two provinces, Canterbury and York, each headed by an Archbishop, with
Canterbury taking precedence over York. Provinces are divided into dioceses, each
headed by a bishop and made up of several parishes.

The Church of England is identified by adherence to the threefold ministry of bishops,

priests, and deacons, and by a common form of worship found in the Book of Common
Prayer. The Church also is characterized by a common loyalty to Christian tradition,
while seeking to accommodate a wide range of people and views. It holds in tension the
authorities of tradition, reason, and the Bible, but asserts the primacy of the Bible. It thus
seeks to combine Catholic, humanist, and reformed elements, historically represented by
Anglo-Catholics (high church), Liberals (broad church), and Evangelicals (low church).

WORLDWIDE CHURCH POLITY

It was probably not until the first meeting of the Lambeth Conference in 1867 that there
emerged among the various churches and councils a mutual consciousness of
Anglicanism. Although its decisions do not bind the autonomous churches of the
Anglican Communion, the Lambeth Conference has constituted the principal cohesive
factor in Anglicanism. While population differences and other factors account for some
variation in the basic structure among the churches, several elements do predominate.
The diocese, under the leadership of a bishop, is the basic administrative unit throughout
the communion. The diocese is a group of church communities (parishes) under the care
of a pastor. In many of the national churches, several dioceses will be grouped together
into provinces. In some, parishes may be grouped within a diocese into deaneries (rural)
and archdeaneries (urban).

(Copyright 1999, Diocese of Oregon. All rights reserved.)

An Ancient Church
The roots of the Church of England go back to the time of the Roman Empire when a Christian
church came into existence in what was then the Roman province of Britain. The early Christian
writers Tertullian and Origen mention the existence of a British church in the third century AD and
in the fourth century British bishops attended a number of the great councils of the Church such as
the Council of Arles in 314 and the Council of Rimini in 359. The first member of the British church
whom we know by name is St Alban, who, tradition tells us, was martyred for his faith on the spot
where St Albans Abbey now stands.

The British church was a missionary church with figures such as St Illtud, St Ninian and St Patrick
evangelising in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but the invasions by the pagan Angles, Saxons and
Jutes in the fifth century seem to have destroyed the organisation of the church in much of what is
now England. In 597 a mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great and led by St Augustine of
Canterbury landed in Kent to begin the work of converting these pagan peoples. What eventually
became known as the Church of England (the Ecclesia Anglicana - or the English Church) was the
result of a combination of three streams of Christianity, the Roman tradition of St Augustine and
his successors, the remnants of the old Romano-British church and the Celtic tradition coming
down from Scotland and associated with people like St Aidan and St Cuthbert.

An English Church
These three streams came together as a result of increasing mutual contact and a number of local
synods, of which the Synod of Whitby in 664 has traditionally been seen as the most important.
The result was an English Church, led by the two Archbishops of Canterbury and York, that was
fully assimilated into the mainstream of the Christian Church of the west. This meant that it was
influenced by the wider development of the Western Christian tradition in matters such as
theology, liturgy, church architecture, and the development of monasticism. It also meant that
until the Reformation in the 16th century the Church of England acknowledged the authority of the
Pope.

A reformed Church
At the Reformation the Western Church became divided between those who continued to accept
Papal authority and the various Protestant churches that repudiated it. The Church of England was
among the churches that broke with Rome. The catalyst for this decision was the refusal of the
Pope to annul the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, but underlying this was a Tudor
nationalist belief that authority over the English Church properly belonged to the English
monarchy. In the reign of Henry's son Edward VI the Church of England underwent further
reformation, driven by the conviction that the theology being developed by the theologians of the
Protestant Reformation was more faithful to the teaching of the Bible and the Early Church than
the teaching of those who continued to support the Pope.

In the reign of Mary Tudor. the Church of England once again submitted to Papal authority.
However, this policy was reversed when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558.

The religious settlement that eventually emerged in the reign of Elizabeth gave the Church of
England the distinctive identity that it has retained to this day. It resulted in a Church that
consciously retained a large amount of continuity with the Church of the Patristic and Medieval
periods in terms of its use of the catholic creeds, its pattern of ministry, its buildings and aspects of
its liturgy, but which also embodied Protestant insights in its theology and in the overall shape of
its liturgical practice. The way that this is often expressed is by saying that the Church of England
is both 'catholic and reformed.'

At the end of the 16th century Richard Hooker produced the classic defence of the Elizabethan
settlement in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a work which sought to defend the Church of
England against its Puritan critics who wanted further changes to make the Church of England
more like the churches of Geneva or Scotland.

An established Church
In the 17th century continuing tensions within the Church of England over theological and liturgical
issues were among the factors that led to the English Civil War. The Church was associated with
the losing Royalist side and during the period of the Commonwealth from 1649-1660 its bishops
were abolished and its prayer book, theBook of Common Prayer, was banned. With the restoration
of the monarchy in 1660 this situation was reversed and in 1662 those clergy who could not accept
this decision were forced to leave their posts. These dissenting clergy and their congregations were
then persecuted until 1689 when the Toleration Act gave legal existence to those Protestant groups
outside the Church of England who accepted the doctrine of the Trinity.

The settlement of 1689 has remained the basis of the constitutional position of the Church of
England ever since, a constitutional position in which the Church of England has remained the
established Church with a range of particular legal privileges and responsibilities, but with ever
increasing religious and civil rights being granted to other Christians, those of other faiths and
those professing no faith at all.
As well as being the established Church in England, the Church of England has also become the
mother church of the Anglican Communion, a group of separate churches that are in communion
with the Archbishop of Canterbury and for whom he is the focus of unity.

A comprehensive Church
The history of the Church of England from the 18th century onwards has been enriched by the co-
existence within it of three broad traditions, the Evangelical, the Catholic and the Liberal.

 The Evangelical tradition has emphasized the significance of the Protestant aspects of the
Church of England's identity, stressing the importance of the authority of Scripture, preaching,
justification by faith and personal conversion.

 The Catholic tradition, strengthened and reshaped from the 1830s by the Oxford movement,
has emphasized the significance of the continuity between the Church of England and the
Church of the Early and Medieval periods. It has stressed the importance of the visible Church
and its sacraments and the belief that the ministry of bishops, priests and deacons is a sign
and instrument of the Church of England's Catholic and apostolic identity.

 The Liberal tradition has emphasized the importance of the use of reason in theological
exploration. It has stressed the need to develop Christian belief and practice in order to
respond creatively to wider advances in human knowledge and understanding and the
importance of social and political action in forwarding God's kingdom.

It should be noted that these three traditions have not existed in strict isolation. Both in the case
of individuals and in the case of the Church as a whole, influences from all three traditions have
overlapped in a whole variety of different ways. It also needs to be noted that since the 1960's a
fourth influence, the Charismatic movement, has become increasingly important. This has
emphasized the importance of the Church being open to renewal through the work of the Holy
Spirit. Its roots lie in Evangelicalism but it has influenced people from a variety of different
traditions.

A Church committed to mission and

unity
From the 18th century onwards the Church of England has also been faced with a number of
challenges that it continues to face today.
 There has been the challenge of responding to social changes in England such as population
growth, urbanisation and the development of an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-faith
society.

 There has been the challenge of engaging in mission in a society that has become increasingly
materialist in outlook and in which belief in God or interest in 'spiritual' matters is not seen as
being linked to involvement with the life of the Church.

 There has been the challenge of providing sufficient and sufficiently trained clergy and lay
ministers to enable the Church of England to carry out its responsibility to provide ministry
and pastoral care for every parish in the country.

 There has been the challenge of trying to overcome the divisions of the past by developing
closer relationships between the Church of England and other churches and trying to move
with them towards the goal of full visible unity.

As this brief account has shown, the changes that have taken place in the Church of England over
the centuries have been many and various. What has remained constant, however, has been the
Church's commitment to the faith 'uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the
catholic creeds,' its maintenance of the traditional three fold order of ministry, and its
determination to bring the grace of God to the whole nation through word and sacrament in the
power of the Holy Spirit.

A History of the English Church and People

By Bede, Leo Sherley-Price

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Excerpt

Bede (Baeda) was probably born in the year of the Council of Hertford (A.D.
673) on lands that were shortly afterwards granted by King Egfrid of
Northumbria to S. Benedict Biscop's new monastery of Saint Peter at
Wearmouth. He himself tells us (v. 24) that when he reached the age of
seven, his parents -- of whom we know nothing -- placed him under the care
of Abbot Benedict for his education and upbringing. But when the monastery
of Saint Paul was established as a joint-foundation at Jarrow in the year 682,
Bede seems to have been transferred to the care of its first abbot, Ceolfrid,
and to have remained a monk there for the remainder of his life.

To have served under abbots of such learning and ability as Benedict and
such holiness as Ceolfrid (whose biographies Bede was to write in his Lives
of the Abbots) can have had no small influence on Bede's own life and
activities, and his own inborn love of learning and devotion to the spiritual
life must have received constant stimulation and encouragement. A touching
incident which almost certainly refers to Bede's boyhood is preserved in the
anonymous Life of Abbot Ceolfrid, which tells how the plague of 686
attacked Ceolfrid's monastery and swept away all the choir monks capable of
maintaining the regular services of the Church 'with the exception of the
Abbot himself and one boy reared and educated by him, who is now a priest
of the same monastery and commends the Abbot's admirable doings both
verbally and in writing to all who desire to learn them. Greatly distressed by
this catastrophe, the Abbot decided to discontinue their usual practice, and to
recite and sing all the psalms without antiphons except at Vespers and
Matins. But when they had done this for a week with great sorrow and regret,
he could bear it no longer and directed that the psalms and their antiphons w

The Venerable Bede

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Historian and Doctor of the Church, born 672 or 673; died 735. In the
last chapter of his great work on the "Ecclesiastical History of the English
People" Bede has told us something of his own life, and it is, practically
speaking, all that we know. His words, written in 731, when death was not
far off, not only show a simplicity andpiety characteristic of the man, but
they throw a light on the composition of the work through which he is
bestremembered by the world at large. He writes:
Thus much concerning the ecclesiastical history of Britain, and especially of the race
of the English, I, Baeda, a servant of Christ and a priest of the monastery of
the blessed apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, which is at Wearmouth and at Jarrow
(in Northumberland), have with the Lord's help composed so far as I could gather it
either from ancient documents or from the traditions of the elders, or from my
ownknowledge. I was born in the territory of the said monastery, and at the age of
seven I was, by the care of my relations, given to the most
reverend Abbot Benedict [St. Benedict Biscop], and afterwards to Ceolfrid, to
be educated. From that time I have spent the whole of my life within
that monastery,devoting all my pains to the study of the Scriptures, and amid the
observance of monastic disciplineand the daily charge of singing in the Church, it
has been ever my delight to learn or teach or write. In my nineteenth year I was
admitted to the diaconate, in my thirtieth to the priesthood, both by the hands of
the most reverend Bishop John [St. John of Beverley], and at the bidding
of Abbot Ceolfrid. From the time of my admission to the priesthood to my present
fifty-ninth year, I have endeavored for my own use and that of my brethren, to
make brief notes upon the holy Scripture, either out of the works of the
venerable Fathers or in conformity with their meaning and interpretation.

After this Bede inserts a list or Indiculus, of his previous writings and finally

concludes his great work with the following words:

And I pray thee, loving Jesus, that as Thou hast graciously given me to drink

in with delight the words of Thy knowledge, so Thou wouldst mercifully grant
me to attain one day to Thee, the fountain of all wisdom and to appear
forever before Thy face.

It is plain from Bede's letter to Bishop Egbert that the historian occasionally

visited his friends for a few days, away from his own monastery of Jarrow,
but with such rare exceptions his life seems to have been one peaceful round
of study and prayer passed in the midst of his own community. How much
he was beloved by them is made manifest by the touching account of
the saint's last sickness and death left us by Cuthbert, one of hisdisciples.
Their studious pursuits were not given up on account of his illness and they
read aloud by his bedside, but constantly the reading was interrupted by
their tears. "I can with truth declare", writes Cuthbert of his beloved master,
"that I never saw with my eyes or heard with my ears anyone return thanks
so unceasingly to the living God." Even on the day of his death (the vigil of
the Ascension, 735) the saint was still busy dictating a translation of
the Gospel of St. John. In the evening the boy Wilbert, who was writing it,
said to him: "There is still one sentence, dear master, which is not written
down." And when this had been supplied, and the boy had told him it was
finished, "Thou hast spoken truth", Bede answered, "it is finished. Take my
head in thy hands for it much delights me to sit opposite any holy place
where I used to pray, that so sitting I may call upon my Father." And thus
upon the floor of his cell singing, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and
to the Holy Ghost" and the rest, he peacefully breathed his last breath.

The title Venerabilis seems to have been associated with the name of Bede

within two generations after his death. There is of course no early authority
for the legend repeated by Fuller of the "dunce-monk" who in composing an
epitaph on Bede was at a loss to complete the line: Hac sunt in
fossa Bedae . . . . ossa and who next morning found that the angels had
filled the gap with the word venerabilis. The title is used
by Alcuin,Amalarius and seemingly Paul the Deacon, and the
important Council of Aachen in 835 describes him asvenerabilis et modernis
temporibus doctor admirabilis Beda. This decree was specially referred to in
the petitionwhich Cardinal Wiseman and the English bishops addressed to
the Holy See in 1859 praying that Bede might be declared a Doctor of the
Church. The question had already been debated even before the time
of Benedict XIV, but it was only on 13 November, 1899, that Leo
XIII decreed that the feast of Venerable Bede with the title ofDoctor
Ecclesiae should be celebrated throughout the Church each year on 27 May.
A local cultus of St. Bede had been maintained at York and in the North
of England throughout the Middle Ages, but his feast was not so generally
observed in the South, where the Sarum Rite was followed.

Bede's influence both upon English and foreign scholarship was very great,

and it would probably have been greater still but for the devastation inflicted
upon the Northern monasteries by the inroads of the Danes less than a
century after his death. In numberless ways, but especially in his
moderation, gentleness, and breadth of view,Bede stands out from his
contemporaries. In point of scholarship he was undoubtedly the most
learned man of his time. A very remarkable trait, noticed by Plummer (I, p.
xxiii), is his sense of literary property, an extraordinary thing in that age. He
himself scrupulously noted in his writings the passages he had borrowed
from others and he even begs the copyists of his works to preserve the
references, a recommendation to which they, alas, have paid but little
attention. High, however, as was the general level of Bede's culture, he
repeatedly makes it clear that all his studies were subordinated to the
interpretation of Scripture. In his "De Schematibus" he says in so many
words: "Holy Scripture is above all other books not only by its authority
because it is Divine, or by its utility because it leads to eternal life, but also
by its antiquity and its literary form" (positione dicendi). It is perhaps the
highest tribute to Bede's genius that with so uncompromising and evidently
sincere a conviction of the inferiority of human learning, he should have
acquired so much real culture. Though Latin was to him a still living tongue,
and though he does not seem to have consciously looked back to
the Augustan Age of RomanLiterature as preserving purer models
of literary style than the time of Fortunatus or St. Augustine, still whether
through native genius or through contact with the classics, he is remarkable
for the relative purity of his language, as also for his lucidity and sobriety,
more especially in matters of historical criticism. In all these respects he
presents a marked contrast to St. Aldhelm who approaches more nearly to
the Celtic type.

Writings and editions

No adequate edition founded upon a careful collation of manuscripts has
ever been published of Bede's works as a whole. The text printed by Giles in
1884 and reproduced in Migne (XC-XCIV) shows little if any advance on the
basic edition of 1563 or the Cologne edition of 1688. It is of course as an
historian that Bede is chieflyremembered. His great work, the "Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum", giving an account
of Christianity inEngland from the beginning until his own day, is the
foundation of all our knowledge of British history and a masterpiece
eulogized by the scholars of every age. Of this work, together with the
"Historia Abbatum", and the "Letter to Egbert", Plummer has produced an
edition which may fairly be called final (2 vols., Oxford, 1896).Bede's
remarkable industry in collecting materials and his critical use of them have
been admirably illustrated in Plummer's Introduction (pp. xliii-xlvii). The
"History of the Abbots" (of the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow),
the Letter to Egbert", the metrical and prose lives of St. Cuthbert, and the
other smaller pieces are also of great value for the light they shed upon the
state of Christianity in Northumbria in Bede's own day. The "Ecclesiastical
History" was translated into Anglo-Saxon at the instance of King Alfred. It
has often been translated since, notably by T. Stapleton who printed it
(1565) at Antwerp as a controversial weapon against
theReformation divines in the reign of Elizabeth. The Latin text first
appeared in Germany in 1475; it is noteworthy that no edition even of
the Latin was printed in England before 1643. Smith's more accurate text
saw the light in 1742.

Bede's chronological treatises "De temporibus liber" and "De temporum

ratione" also contain summaries of the general history of the world from
the Creation to 725 and 703, respectively. These historical portions have
been satisfactorily edited by Mommsen in the "Monumenta Germaniae
historica" (4to series, 1898). They may be counted among the earliest
specimens of this type of general chronical and were largely copied and
imitated. The topographical work "De locis sanctis" is a description
of Jerusalem and the holy places based upon Adamnan andArculfus. Bede's
work was edited in 1898 by Geyer in the "Itinera Hierosolymitana" for
the Vienna "Corpus Scriptorum". That Bede compiled
a Martyrologium we know from his own statement. But the work attributed
to him in extant manuscripts has been so much interpolated and
supplemented that his share in it is quite uncertain.

Bede's exegetical writings both in his own idea and in that of his

contemporaries stood supreme in importance among his works, but the list
is long and cannot fully be given here. They included a commentary upon
thePentateuch as a whole as well as on selected portions, and there are
also commentaries on the Books of Kings,Esdras, Tobias, the Canticles, etc.
In the New Testament he has certainly interpreted St. Mark, St. Luke,
the Acts, the Canonical Epistles, and the Apocalypse. But the authenticity of
the commentary on St. Matthew printed under his name is more
than doubtful. (Plaine in "Revue Anglo-Romaine", 1896, III, 61.)
The homilies of Bede take theform of commentaries upon the Gospel. The
collection of fifty, divided into two books, which are attributed to him
by Giles (and in Migne) are for the most part authentic, but
the genuineness of a few is open to suspicion. (Morin in "Revue
Bénédictine", IX, 1892, 316.)

Various didactic works are mentioned by Bede in the list which he has left us
of his own writings. Most of these are still preserved and there is no reason
to doubt that the texts we possess are authentic. The grammatical treatises
"De arte metricâ" and "De orthographiâ" have been adequately edited in
modern times by Keil in his "Grammatici Latini" (Leipzig, 1863). But the
larger works "De naturâ rerum", "De temporibus", "De temporium ratione",
dealing with science as it was then understood and especially
with chronology, are only accessible in the unsatisfactory texts of the earlier
editors and Giles. Beyond the metrical life of St. Cuthbert and some verses
incorporated in the Ecclesiastical History" we do not possess much poetry
that can be assigned to Bede with confidence, but, like other scholars of his
age, he certainly wrote a good deal of verse. He himself mentions his "book
of hymns" composed in different meters or rhythms. So Alcuin says of
him: Plurima versifico cecinitquoque carmina plectro. It is possible that the
shorter of the two metrical calendars printed among his works is genuine.
The Penitential ascribed to Bede, though accepted as genuine by Haddan
and Stubbs andWasserschleben, is probably not his (Plummer, I, 157).

Venerable Bede is the earliest witness of pure Gregorian tradition in England.

His works "Musica theoretica" and "De arte Metricâ" (Migne, XC) are found
especially valuable by present-day scholars engaged in the study of the
primitive form of the chant.