Faith of
our Fathers
Holy
Order
Queen
Elizabeth I herself told Parliament in 1589 ‘that the state and government of
this Church of England, as now it standeth in this reformation ... both in form
and doctrine it is agreeable with the scriptures, with the most ancient general
Councils, with the practice of the primitive Church, and with the judgements of
all the old and learned fathers’ ( JIE Neale, Elizabeth and her Parliaments
(London, 1953/7) II, 198).
Anglicanism
has never deviated from this claim. ‘We do not arrogate to ourselves a new
Church, a new Religion, or new Holy Orders. Our religion is the same as it was,
our Church the same, our Holy Orders the same, differing from what they were
only as a garden weeded from a garden unweeded’ (Archbishop John Bramhall, Vol
I, LACT, p119). ‘We maintain that our Church and the pastors thereof did
always acknowledge the same Rule of faith, the same fundamental Articles of the
Christian Religion, both before and since the Reformation’ (Bishop Bull, Vol
II, LACT, p205).
The
ancient Church was not abolished at the Reformation in England, nothing new was
created; the same clergy and the same people continued to be combined in one and
the same institution. The same Creeds were recited and the same Sacraments were
administered. The Prayer Book assumes as a matter of course the continuity of
the Church of England with the past, and also her unity in all that is essential
with the wider area of the whole Catholic Church. The thirtieth Canon of 1604 is
definite in stating that the purpose of reformation was not to divide, or
separate from the unity of the Church, but ‘only departed from them in those
particular points wherein they were fallen both from themselves in their ancient
integrity and from the Apostolic Churches, which were their first founders.’
If,
then, the Church of England is catholic, and the apostolic ministry, by divine
institution, is part of the very definition of the Catholic Church, then her
ministers cannot be less. The clergy of the unreformed Church continued for the
most part in unbroken possession of their offices during the changes of the
middle part of the sixteenth century. There was no re-ordination. Their
ordination by the forms of the old pontificals were accepted, and they continued
their ministrations to their flocks without any question. But to the Puritans
there was an absolute difference in kind between ‘the reformed ministry’ and
the historic ministry of the Catholic Church.
The
Preface of the first reformed Ordinal (1550), which has remained practically
unaltered ever since testifies to this:
It
is evident unto all men reading holy Scripture and ancient Authors that from the
Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church;
Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. Which Offices were evermore had in such reverend
Estimation.
No
new office is proposed nor any innovating of existing catholic order. The Church
of England has no right or authority to extend catholic order and at no
time have her Canons sanctioned such an extension. Not only would it be a
contradiction of the very essence of catholicity, but also outside the intention
and beyond the jurisdiction of Anglicanism at the Reformation and since. Her
catholicity consists of certain qualities of faith and order, which are of
universal rather than of a parochially English significance. To speak of the catholicity
of the Church is to speak of wholeness, not only communion, and
not a simple empirical communion. Katholike means first of all the inner
wholeness and integrity of the Church’s life, and belongs not to the
phenomenal and empirical but to the noumenal and ontological plane. To extend
and innovate catholic order unilaterally would impair that wholeness and
integrity of the Church’s life, the inevitable consequence of which would be
schism. Such an action would be an innovation, not a reformation.
The
ministry of the reformed Church of England is to be absolutely identical and
continuous with that of pre-Reformation times. There is no difference in
principle between the one and the other. It is the old offices, and no other,
which have been in the Church of Christ from the beginning, and which have
always existed in the Church of England, that are here specified, and for whose
continuance careful provision is made. This principle is fundamental to the
Church of England.
Arthur
Middleton is a tutor at St Chad’s College, a writer and a retreat conductor
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