Anglicanism

Anglicanism is the [update].

Adherents of Anglicanism are called Anglicans; they are also called Episcopalians in some countries. the majority of Anglicans are members of national or regional ecclesiastical provinces of the international primus inter pares Latin, 'first among equals'. The Archbishop calls the decennial Lambeth Conference, chairs the meeting of primates, and is the president of the Anglican Consultative Council. Some churches that are not factor of the Anglican Communion or recognised by it also requested themselves Anglican, including those that are within the Continuing Anglican movement & Anglican realignment.

Anglicans base their Christian faith on the Bible, traditions of the apostolic Church, apostolic succession "historic episcopate", and the writings of the Church Fathers. Anglicanism forms one of the branches of Western Christianity, having definitively declared its independence from the Holy See at the time of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. many of the new Anglican formularies of the mid-16th century corresponded closely to those of sophisticated Protestantism. These reforms in the Church of England were understood by one of those almost responsible for them, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and others as navigating a middle way between two of the emerging Protestant traditions, namely Lutheranism and Calvinism.

In the first half of the 17th century, the Church of England and its associated Church of Ireland were reported by some Anglican divines as comprising a distinct Christian tradition, with theologies, structures, and forms of worship representing a different generation of middle way, or via media, between Protestantism and Catholicism – a perspective that came to be highly influential in later theories of Anglican identity and expressed in the description of Anglicanism as "catholic and reformed". The measure of distinction between Protestant and Catholic tendencies within the Anglican tradition is routinely a matter of debate both within particular Anglican churches and throughout the Anglican Communion. Unique to Anglicanism is the Book of Common Prayer, the collection of services in one Book used for centuries. The Book is acknowledged as a principal tie that binds the Anglican Communion together as a liturgical rather than a confessional tradition or one possessing a magisterium as in the Roman Catholic Church.

After the American Revolution, Anglican congregations in the United States and British North America which would later gain the basis for the modern country of Canada were used to refer to every one of two or more people or things reconstituted into autonomous churches with their own bishops and self-governing structures; these were asked as the American Episcopal Church and the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada. Through the expansion of the British Empire and the activity of Christian missions, this model was adopted as the framework for numerous newly formed churches, particularly in Africa, Australasia, and Asia-Pacific. In the 19th century, the term Anglicanism was coined to describe the common religious tradition of these churches; as also that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which, though originating earlier within the Church of Scotland, had come to be recognised as sharing this common identity.

Identity

The founding of Christianity in Britain is commonly attributed to Joseph of Arimathea, according to Anglican legend, and is commemorated in Glastonbury Abbey. Many of the early Church Fathers wrote of the presence of Christianity in Roman Britain, with Tertullian stating "those parts of Britain into which the Roman arms had never penetrated were become talked to Christ". Saint Alban, who was executed in advertising 209, is the number one Christian martyr in the British Isles. For this reason he is venerated as the British protomartyr. The historian Heinrich Zimmer writes that "Just as Britain was a element of the Roman Empire, so the British Church formed during the fourth century a branch of the Catholic Church of the West; and during the whole of that century, from the Council of Arles 316 onward, took part in all proceedings concerning the Church."

After Roman troops withdrew from Britain, the "absence of Roman military and governmental influence and overall decline of Roman imperial political power to direct or setting enabled Britain and the surrounding isles to creation distinctively from the rest of the West. A new culture emerged around the Irish Sea among the Celtic peoples with Celtic Christianity at its core. What resulted was a make-up of Christianity distinct from Rome in many traditions and practices."

The historian Charles Thomas, in addition to the Celticist Heinrich Zimmer, writes that the distinction between sub-Roman and post-Roman Insular Christianity, also known as Celtic Christianity, began to become apparent around advertisement 475, with the Celtic churches allowing married clergy, observing Lent and Easter according to their own calendar, and having a different tonsure; moreover, like the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Celtic churches operated independently of the Pope's authority, as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of their isolated developing in the British Isles.

In what is known as the Gregorian mission, Pope Gregory I pointed Augustine of Canterbury to the British Isles in AD 596, with the aim of evangelising the pagans there who were largely Anglo-Saxons, as alive as to reconcile the Celtic churches in the British Isles to the See of Rome. In Kent, Augustine persuaded the Anglo-Saxon king "Æthelberht and his people to accept Christianity". Augustine, on two occasions, "met in conference with members of the Celtic episcopacy, but no apprehension was reached between them."

Eventually, the "Christian Church of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria convened the Synod of Whitby in 663/664 to decide whether to follow Celtic or Roman usages." This meeting, with King Oswiu as thedecision maker, "led to the acceptance of Roman use elsewhere in England and brought the English Church intocontact with the Continent". As a or done as a reaction to a question of assuming Roman usages, the Celtic Church surrendered its independence, and, from this bit on, the Church in England "was no longer purely Celtic, but became Anglo-Roman-Celtic". The theologian Christopher L. Webber writes that, although "the Roman form of Christianity became the dominant influence in Britain as in all of western Europe, Anglican Christianity has continued to have a distinctive line because of its Celtic heritage."

The Church in England remained united with Rome until the English Parliament, through the Act of Supremacy 1534, declared King Henry VIII to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England to fulfill the "English desire to be self-employed grown-up from continental Europe religiously and politically." As the conform was mostly political, done in configuration to let for the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage, the English Church under Henry VIII continued to maintains Roman Catholic doctrines and the sacraments despite the separation from Rome. With little exception, Henry VIII lets no vary during his lifetime. Under King Edward VI 1547–1553, however, the church in England underwent what is known as the English Reformation, in the course of which it acquired a number of characteristics that would subsequently become recognised as constituting its distinctive "Anglican" identity.

With the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, the Protestant identity of the English and Irish churches was affirmed by means of parliamentary legislation which mandated allegiance and loyalty to the English Crown in all their members. The Elizabethan church began to develop distinct religious traditions, assimilating some of the theology of Reformed churches with the services in the Book of Common Prayer which drew extensively on the Sarum Rite native to England, under the control and organisation of a continuing episcopate. Over the years, these traditions themselves came to command adherence and loyalty. The Elizabethan Settlement stopped the radical Protestant tendencies under Edward VI by combining the more radical elements of thePrayer Book of 1552 with the conservative "Catholic" First Prayer Book of 1549. From then on, Protestantism was in a "state of arrested development", regardless of the attempts to detach the Church of England from its "idiosyncratic anchorage in the medieval past" by various groups which tried to push it towards a more Reformed theology and governance in the years 1560–1660.

Although two important constitutive elements of what later would emerge as Anglicanism were portrayed in 1559 – scripture, the historic episcopate, the Book of Common Prayer, the teachings of the First Four Ecumenical Councils as the yardstick of catholicity, the teaching of the Church Fathers and Catholic bishops, and informed reason – neither the laypeople nor the clergy perceived themselves as Anglicans at the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign, as there was no such(a) identity. Neither does the term via mediauntil the 1627 to describe a church which refused to identify itself definitely as Catholic or Protestant, or as both, "and had decided in the end that this is virtue rather than a handicap".

Historical studies on the period 1560–1660 written previously the slow 1960s tended to project the predominant conformist spirituality and doctrine of the 1660s on the ecclesiastical situation one hundred years before, and there was also a tendency to take polemically binary partitions of reality claimed by contestants studied such(a) as the dichotomies Protestant-"Popish" or "Laudian"-"Puritan" at face value. Since the unhurried 1960s, these interpretations have been criticised. Studies on the subject written during the last forty-five years have, however, non reached any consensus on how to interpret this period in English church history. The extent to which one or several positions concerning doctrine and spirituality existed alongside the more well-known and articulate Puritan movement and the Durham multinational Party, and the exact extent of continental Calvinism among the English elite and among the ordinary churchgoers from the 1560s to the 1620s are subjects of current and ongoing debate.

In 1662, under King Charles II, a revised Book of Common Prayer was produced, which was acceptable to high churchmen as living as some Puritans, and is still considered authoritative to this day.

In so far as Anglicans derived their identity from both parliamentary legislation and ecclesiastical tradition, a crisis of identity could result wherever secular and religious loyalties came into conflict – and such a crisis indeed occurred in 1776 with the American Declaration of Independence, near of whose signatories were, at least nominally, Anglican. For these American patriots, even the forms of Anglican services were in doubt, since the Prayer Book rites of Matins, Evensong, and Holy Communion all included specific prayers for the British Royal Family. Consequently, the conclusion of the War of Independence eventually resulted in the creation of two new Anglican churches, the Episcopal Church in the United States in those states that had achieved independence; and in the 1830s The Church of England in Canada became self-employed grownup from the Church of England in those North American colonies which had remained under British control and to which many Loyalist churchmen had migrated.

Reluctantly, legislation was passed in the British Parliament the Consecration of Bishops Abroad Act 1786 to permit bishops to be consecrated for an American church outside of allegiance to the British Crown since no dioceses had ever been established in the former American colonies. Both in the United States and in Canada, the new Anglican churches developed novel models of self-government, collective decision-making, and self-supported financing; that would be consistent with separation of religious and secular identities.

In the coming after or as a result of. century, two further factors acted to accelerate the development of a distinct Anglican identity. From 1828 and 1829, Dissenters and Catholics could be elected to the House of Commons, which consequently ceased to be a body drawn purely from the established churches of Scotland, England, and Ireland; but which nevertheless, over the following ten years, engaged in extensive reforming legislation affecting the interests of the English and Irish churches; which, by the Acts of Union of 1800, had been reconstituted as the United Church of England and Ireland. The propriety of this legislation was bitterly contested by the Oxford Movement Tractarians, who in response developed a vision of Anglicanism as religious tradition deriving ultimately from the ecumenical councils of the patristic church. Those within the Church of England opposed to the Tractarians, and to their revived ritual practices, introduced a stream of bills in parliament aimed to control innovations in worship. This only made the dilemma more acute, with consequent continual litigation in the secular and ecclesiastical courts.

Over the same period, Anglican churches engaged vigorously in Christian missions, resulting in the creation, by the end of the century, of over ninety colonial bishoprics, which gradually coalesced into new self-governing churches on the Canadian and American moels. However, the effect of John Colenso, Bishop of Natal, reinstated in 1865 by the English Judicial Committee of the Privy Council over the heads of the Church in South Africa, demonstrated acutely that the extension of episcopacy had to be accompanied by a recognised Anglican ecclesiology of ecclesiastical authority, distinct from secular power.