Christianity :: Anglicanism -- Encyclopedia Britannica

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Anglicanism

The Anglican Communion encompasses not only the established Church of England but also various national Anglican churches throughout the world. Like Lutheranism, Anglicanism has striven to retain the Roman Catholic tradition of liturgy and piety; after the middle of the 19th century the Oxford movement argued the essential Catholic character of Anglicanism in the restoration of ancient liturgical usage and doctrinal belief. Although the Catholic revival also served to rehabilitate the authority of tradition in Anglican theology generally, great variety continued to characterize the theologians of the Anglican Communion. Anglicanism is set off from most other non-Roman Catholic churches in the West by its retention of and its insistence upon the apostolic succession of ordaining bishops. The Anglican claim to this apostolic succession, despite its repudiation by Pope Leo XIII in 1896, has largely determined the role of the Church of England in the discussions among the churches. Anglicanism has often taken the lead in inaugurating such discussions, but in such statements as the Lambeth Quadrilateral it has demanded the presence of the historic episcopate as a prerequisite to the establishment of full communion. During the 19th and 20th centuries many leaders of Anglican thought were engaged in finding new avenues of communication with industrial society and with the modern intellectual. The strength of Anglicanism in the New World and in the younger churches of Asia and Africa confronted this communion with the problem of deciding its relation to new forms of Christian life in these new cultures. As its centuries-old reliance upon the establishment in England was compelled to retrench, Anglicanism discovered new ways of exerting its influence and of expressing its message.

Presbyterian and Reformed Churches

Protestant bodies that owe their origins to the reformatory work of John Calvin and his associates in various parts of Europe are often termed Reformed, particularly in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In Britain and in the United States they have usually taken their name from their distinctive polity and have been called Presbyterian. They are distinguished from both Lutheranism and Anglicanism by the thoroughness of their separation from Roman Catholic patterns of liturgy, piety, and even doctrine. Reformed theology has tended to emphasize the sole authority of the Bible with more rigour than has characterized the practice of Anglican or Lutheran thought, and it has looked with deeper suspicion upon the symbolic and sacramental traditions of the Catholic centuries. Perhaps because of its stress upon biblical authority, Reformed Protestantism has sometimes tended to produce a separation of churches along the lines of divergent doctrine or polity, by contrast with the inclusive or even latitudinarian churchmanship of the more traditionalistic Protestant communions. This understanding of the authority of the Bible has also led Reformed Protestantism to its characteristic interpretation of the relation between church and state, sometimes labeled theocratic, according to which those charged with the proclamation of the revealed will of God in the Scriptures (i.e., the ministers) are to address this will also to civil magistrates; Puritanism in England and America gave classic expression to this view. As the church is “reformed according to the Word of God,” so the lives of the individuals in the church are to conform to the Word of God; hence the Reformed tradition has assigned great prominence to the cultivation of moral uprightness among its members. During the 20th century most of the Reformed churches of the world took an active part in the ecumenical movement.