Anglicanism - A Very Short Introduction

A national church In 1904 Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, visited the United States to attend the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church. What he probably did not know was that among the congregation when he preached at Trinity Church in Boston was the great German theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch. Davidson’s sermon made a lasting impact, as Troeltsch recalled in a work published in 1921. Troeltsch, who pioneered the study of religious organizations with his typology of church and sect, was aware of what he called a ‘glaring deficiency’ in all his works: he had never studied the Church of England in any depth. This was a pity, since the Church of England might have provided him with a great deal of support for the thesis he developed in his magisterial work, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Groups. The Church of England can be understood as perhaps the purest form of the late medieval church ideal surviving after the Reformation. Indeed, an imaginative presentation of the Tudor Church could have provided Troeltsch with evidence of a rather eccentric Western example of something approaching a Byzantine state church. Henry’s VIII’s vision of power and authority was not too far removed from that of the Eastern emperors. Acknowledgements viii List of illustrations ix 1 The problems of Anglicanism 1 2 Establishing the Church 13 3 Competing visions for the Church of England 38 4 Evangelicalism 57 5 Anglo-Catholicism 75 6 The global communion 94 7 The future of Anglicanism 116 References and further reading 145 Index 152