Elizabethan Anglicanism and the Reformed Tradition

A response to the Rev. Seth Snyder

“Reformation Anglicanism: A Critique”, a recent piece by the Rev. Seth Snyder on the North American Anglican website, was brought to my attention a few days ago, and I thought it was worth responding to here. In the piece, Snyder takes issue with ‘Reformation Anglicanism’ both as a proposal for the Anglican future and as a reading of the Anglican past. He argues that it fatally misconstrues the English Reformation as uniquely and distinctly Reformed in a way that largely invalidates its positive program, because its positive program depends upon the accuracy of its reconstruction of the Anglican past.

Now, as someone who has argued in favor of centering Anglican identity and theology in the Formularies understood as the expression of a capacious Reformed Protestantism, I expect I fall under Snyder’s critique. After all, just a few weeks ago I published a piece arguing for the centrality of Zurich and its theology for the Anglicanism of the Elizabethan Settlement, which seems to be exactly the position he is critiquing. And so I thought I’d respond.

I think that Snyder is entirely correct to point out that the positive argument made for Reformed Anglicanism by people like me does rest on a set of historical claims about the sixteenth century. If indeed we have gotten our Reformation history completely wrong, as Snyder alleges, then certainly no one should take seriously our claims to accurately articulate the ‘original’ Anglicanism of the Elizabethan Settlement.

So what does Snyder think that people like me get wrong in our account of Anglican history? He argues that it is wholly mistaken to read Elizabethan Anglicanism as distinctly Reformed (as he calls it, Reformed-Calvinist), or aligned with Swiss more than Wittenberg Protestantism. Rather, he thinks, in the central matters of worship, polity, certain key points of doctrine, and general approach to Continental Protestantism, the Elizabethan church actually tended towards Wittenberg, or at any rate cannot be described as unambiguously Reformed. This means that the Church of England as a whole must be understood not as Reformed or Lutheran but as a complex mix of the two, with some uniquely English elements thrown in.

I think that Snyder is wrong about this. And I think he is wrong about because of an unhelpfully narrow picture of what it means to be ‘Reformed’ that owes more to seventeenth century Scottish and English Presbyterianism than the international family of Reformed churches established in the sixteenth century. Indeed, his use of the category “Reformed-Calvinist” makes the problem clear, because in the sixteenth century and beyond, Reformed Christianity simply cannot be reduced to ‘Calvinism.’

Worship

Snyder argues that the Church of England is not truly Reformed because of its approach to ordering worship. He writes that adherence to the “regulative principle of worship,” in which everything done in corporate worship must conform strictly to Biblical command, is a distinctive of the Reformed tradition. But Article 20 of the Articles of Religion defends the right of the church to order ceremonies so long as they aren’t contrary to Scripture. This is a rejection of the regulative principle of worship and an articulation of the “normative principle of worship” held by Lutheranism (and for that matter essentially the rest of Christianity). If the Church of England rejects this definitive marker of the Reformed tradition, the argument goes, then it cannot be Reformed.

Here’s the problem with this argument: if asserting the authority of the church to order worship without explicit Biblical command means a rejection of the Reformed tradition, then the churches of Switzerland, Geneva, France, and the Low Countries weren’t Reformed either. To give one obvious example, these churches continued celebrating the old festivals of Christ’s birth, death, resurrection, and ascension despite the lack of explicit Biblical warrant for them. In fact, the Second Helvetic Confession explicitly defends the practice: “If in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord's nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly.”

More broadly, it’s not uncommon to find articulations of the church’s authority to establish ceremonies similar to the Church of England’s Article 20 in other mid-sixteenth century Reformed confessions. Thus, for example Article 32 of the Belgic Confession, which if framed slightly more negatively than the Anglican article makes the same point. Indeed, Calvin himself argues for the church’s legislative authority in Book IV of the Institutes, defending rules like requiring kneeling for prayer in church despite the lack of explicit Scriptural warrant for them.

Snyder’s picture of what the ‘regulative principle of worship’ means seems to me to owe more to later developments in the British and North American Reformed tradition than what was actually going on in the sixteenth century. One thinks, for instance, of Puritan and Scottish Presbyterian hostility to Christmas celebration. But this particularly hard-edged interpretation of what Scriptural worship meant was never the majority report within the Reformed tradition.

Now, it is true that the worship of the Church of England was unusual (although not uniquely so) among the Reformed churches in its relatively high level of liturgical conservatism, maintaining more clerical apparel, a relatively elaborate liturgy, and the traditional lectionary. But Reformed churches were quite happy to make this a matter of Christian liberty; each church was free to use or not use such elements as they found it convenient. Their rejection simply was not a requirement for ‘Reformed’ identity.

Polity

The second argument that Snyder makes has to do with polity. It has a similar structure to his argument about worship: he argues that presbyterian polity is a marker of Reformed identity, and so the Church of England’s retention of episcopacy means that it is not truly reformed. Rather, he says, it is once again closer to Lutheranism, which maintained either episcopal or (in the case of Germany) quasi-episcopal ways of ordering the church.

And once again, the problem is similar: the idea that presbyterian polity is a sine qua non of Reformed identity just is not the unanimous view among Reformed churches in the sixteenth century. Indeed, it’s not accurate to say that the Swiss Reformed churches were presbyterian, because presbyterian polity meant not just a lack of bishops but also a way of ordering church discipline which these churches emphatically rejected (I’ve written a bit about this here). Presbyterianism really emerges from Geneva and then becomes dominant in France, the Low Countries, and Scotland (and among some Puritans in England). It’s true that some presbyterians would argue that their polity was the only Scripturally-allowable one. But this wasn’t the only Reformed position.

In fact, the Church of England wasn’t the only Reformed church with bishops. The Polish and Hungarian churches also had them — and, frankly, one could argue that the antistes who led various Swiss Reformed churches held an episcopal role in practice too. Swiss theologians and also those more in the Genevan orbit like Calvin and Zanchi admitted the acceptability of episcopal governance. Even Beza could be brought to allow it, although one gets the sense with him that it was a most grudging admission.

Now, as with worship, it’s once again true that the Church of England was somewhat unusual among Reformed churches in maintaining episcopal polity. And in fact some conformist English writers did draw upon the example of episcopally-governed Lutheran territories to defend the English episcopate (thus Richard Bancroft, for example). But not even Calvin thought that maintaining bishops somehow placed oneself outside the ‘Reformed’ orbit.

Doctrine

This brings us to the third heading of Snyder’s objection to the Reformed reading of the English Reformation, doctrine. He begins with a discussion of Article 17 on predestination, arguing that because “there is no doctrine more closely associated with Reformed-Calvinism in the popular imagination than the doctrine of predestination,” this provides a helpful test case. He makes a similar argument to the ones he has made about worship and polity: a strong doctrine of predestination which emphasizes God’s will as the sole cause of predestination and includes the decree of reprobation is a Reformed distinctive. Article 17 lacks any discussion about reprobation or the cause of election and is generally pastoral and moderate. Thus, it is not Reformed-Calvinist — and in fact is better understood as Philippist, that is, moderately Lutheran.

Once again, I fear that Snyder underestimates the internal diversity of the Reformed tradition. For, on the same argument, the Scots Confession or the First and Second Helvetic Confessions cannot truly be considered Reformed, as all lack a discussion of the decree of reprobation. The Articles’ treatment of predestination is entirely in line with other Reformed confessions put out in the middle of the sixteenth century, even confessions put out by churches heavily inspired by Calvin’s Geneva. And not all of the Reformed churches were of one mind about predestination anyway. Indeed, the Swiss churches generally held to single rather than double predestination until the very end of the sixteenth century. Snyder’s apparent dichotomy between “Reformed-Calvinist” and “Philippist” views of election leaves out the thought of Heinrich Bullinger, antistes of the Zurich church — who was significantly more important and influential than Calvin when both of them were alive.

Now, it’s true that later Reformed confessional standards did tend to be more explicit about questions of the cause of election or the degree of reprobation. Archbishop Whitgift attempted to make the so-called Lambeth Articles, which addressed these matters, an English confessional statement but was prevented from doing so by Queen Elizabeth. And so while many other Reformed churches embraced more specific confessional treatments of predestination towards the end of the century, the English church’s official treatment was, as it were, frozen in the 1560s. This once again makes England a little bit odd, especially by the standards of the end of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. But a somewhat unusual member of the family is still a member of the family. The lack of an explicit treatment of, say, reprobation which was entirely normal in the 1560s was more unusual in the 1590s, but this didn’t make the Articles ‘un-Reformed’ in the 1590s.

On sacramental matters, Snyder concedes a Reformed teaching on the Lord’s Supper (although argues for some room for Lutheran views, not entirely compellingly in my view) while asserting a Lutheran view on baptism on the basis of the prayer book. This is getting long, but briefly, on baptism, a look at comparative sources would once again be helpful: once again, you can find other baptismal liturgies whose Reformed provenance no one questions that use presumptive language for regeneration in this way.

The view of other churches

Finally, Snyder argues that many English divines had a capacious sense of Protestant identity that included both Lutherans and Reformed, were active in seeking to build bridges with Lutherans, and generally related to the Lutherans as friends and allies. This lack of an anti-Lutheran identity, he seems to think, once again differentiates the Church of England from being Reformed.

Here, I think, perhaps most of all, Snyder gets things backwards. In its liturgical life, polity, and doctrinal formularies, the Church of England did have some unusual (but not unprecedented or out-of-bounds) features by the standards of the Reformed mainstream, at least by the end of the sixteenth century. But there is nothing more mainstream Reformed than expressing amity towards or minimizing differences with Lutherans, or indeed conceptualizing oneself as part of a broad Protestant project comprehending intra-Protestant division! Martin Bucer and John Calvin are both great examples of this — but even Ulrich Zwingli sought very sincerely to mend fences with Martin Luther and was apparently crushed when the Wittenberg reformer could not in good conscience recognize him as faithful fellow-Christian. Beza, who features in English church history mostly as a hard-headed advocate for presbyterianism, was also dedicated to resolving sacramental questions with Lutherans. The sort of generosity towards Lutheran sacramental views that Snyder praises in Hooker has a clear antecedent in, say, Zanchi. It is difficult to find a more enthusiastic proponent of intra-Protestant unity in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century than the Heidelberg theologian David Pareus. The Genevan response to the Formula of Concord, the Harmonia Confessionum, was basically one long attempt to show not only that the Reformed confessions were all in accordance with each other, but that the most important Lutheran confessional statements more-or-less were too!

It’s possible that there are some distinctive English features of this irenicism. This in fact is one of the things that my PhD dissertation is hoping to get at, and I’m genuinely not sure at this point. But I came into my own research thinking that England was probably unique for the irenic language its theologians tended to use for the Lutherans, and I’ve come to realize that I was mistaken. This is mostly just standard Reformed thinking.

Concluding Thoughts

In the end, I think that Snyder and I disagree less about what the Elizabethan settlement looked like than about what it means for something to count as ‘Reformed.’ He acknowledges that on the Lord’s Supper and the Christological questions that emerged from the Eucharistic debates, the Church of England clearly takes the Reformed side, but then asserts that there were a variety of Lutheran and Reformed influences on other matters. I agree with this, even if I think his arguments for unique Lutheran influence or affinity on the worship, polity, and doctrinal matters he discusses are rather weak. For significant Lutheran influences in the Elizabethan Church, I’ve been largely compelled by Alec Ryrie about the importance of the theology of the cross and a particularly Lutheran approach to consolation, incidentally. But here’s the thing: from the perspective of the sixteenth century, a church that reflects various influences from Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg but explicitly takes the Geneva-Zurich position on the Lord’s Supper and Christology just is a Reformed church.

It is unfortunate that popular understandings of Reformed identity or distinctives have become much narrower than the wide range of Reformed faith and practice in evidence in the sixteenth century. As someone who finds the moderate-Reformed-to-Philippist squishy center of sixteenth century Protestantism very attractive, I mourn the widespread association of Reformed Christianity with a suspicious deployment of the regulative principle of worship, a fanatical jure divino presbyterianism, an obsession with predestination and reprobation, and inveterate hostility towards other Protestant communions (to say nothing of the Catholics). Needless to say, this isn’t Snyder’s fault; there are some understandable grounds for the picture of Reformed identity that he seems to use.

But both as a historian-in-training of the Reformation and as someone personally committed to a capacious moderate Protestantism, I do think that it is worth realizing that to be ‘Reformed’ meant a lot more than this in sixteenth century Europe, and because of this fact, pretty much everyone in the second half of the sixteenth century recognized the Church of England as a Reformed church. This also means, for what its worth, that the Reformed Anglicanism that I am most interested in is not a ‘Westminster Anglicanism,’ a making of the advanced Reformed views of the 1640s and 1650s somehow normative for Anglican identity today (although I certainly think that such positions are allowable for Anglicans to hold!). It is rather the Anglicanism of the Formularies, a capacious and Reformed — and indeed capacious in part because it is Reformed — Protestant Augustinianism. This, I think, is both a historically defensible and theologically attractive vision of ‘Reformation Anglicanism’, one that both passes the historical sniff test that Snyder rightly demands and provides resources for welcoming people into deeper life in Christ today.