“These be
cases not of wit, but of faith; not of eloquence, but of truth; not
invented or devised by us, but from the Apostles and the holy Fathers and
founders of the Church by long succession brought unto us. We are not the devisers thereof, but only the keepers; not
the masters, but the scholars. Touching the substance of religion, we
believe what the ancient Catholike learned Fathers believed: we do what they did: we say what they said. And marvel not, in what side soever ye see them, if ye see us
join unto the same. It is our great comfort that we see their
faith and our faith to agree in one.”
– John Jewel
(1522-1571), An Answer to M. Harding’s Conclusion
“We declare
aloud that we are Catholic, but not Roman, the last of which words destroys the
meaning of the first. We will never confine words of so wide an import within
the narrow limits of one city or one man’s breast. The more that a man refuses
to do that, the more Catholic is he.”
– Lancelot
Andrewes (1555-1626), Response to Cardinal Bellarmine
After writing
appreciatively of both Luther and Calvin, John Cosin goes on to write, “We are
no more followers of Luther or Calvin than of the Pope, where either they or he
fall away from Holy Scripture, or cease to walk in the footsteps of the old
Fathers who consent in the Catholic Faith. It is clear from all this that we
have introduced no new religion into the world or into the Church. On our
principles none such could be introduced, but the faith must remain in its
completeness and unaltered. It is also clear that we retain in all essentials
the Christian and Catholic Faith, which existed formerly, by which we, as well
as our ancestors, were brought into the bosom of the Church, and which alone
could save us.”
– John Cosin
(1594-1672), The Religion, Discipline and Rites of the Church of England
“I die in the
Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith, professed by the whole Church, before the
disunion of East and West: more particularly I die in the communion of the
Church of England, as it stands distinguished from all Papal and Puritan
Innovations.”
– Thomas Ken
(1627-1711), an epitaph provided in his will
Reflecting on
the 39 Articles of Religion, F. D. Maurice wrote, “The principles of the
Reformation are asserted in the one division, not as necessary qualifications,
but as indispensable conditions of the great Catholic truths which had been
asserted in the other. And so to whatever cause we owe it, this has been the
result of these articles; they have been thorns in the side of those who have
wished to establish an English theological system, either fashioned out of the
materials which Romanism or Calvinism supplies; they have encouraged persons of
all sects and schools to hope that their principles, in some sense or other,
might be contained in them, or by some process or other extracted out of them .
. .”
– Frederick
Denison Maurice (1805-1872), The Kingdom of Christ
“In 1868
Bishop [Jackson] Kemper referred to the plans for organizing the Diocese of
Fond du Lac in the following words: ‘The example of zeal and true Christian
faith would be so beneficial, and so
encouraging to
the whole of the Reformed Catholic Church, throughout the world, that I hereby
pledge my cordial support’.”
– ‘Bishop
Grafton', a Commemorative Volume by Reginald H. Weller, James O. S. Huntington
OHC, William Walter Webb, William Harman van Allen, George McClellan Fiske,
Erving Winslow (1913)
“Our special
character and, as we believe, our peculiar contribution to the Universal
Church, arises from the fact that owing to historic circumstances, we have been
enabled to combine in our one fellowship the traditional Faith and Order of the
Catholic Church with that immediacy of approach to God through Christ to which
the Evangelical Churches especially bear witness, and freedom of intellectual
inquiry, whereby the correlation of the Christian revelation and advancing
knowledge is constantly effected.”
– Bishops’
Encyclical, 1930 Lambeth Conference
“The Anglican
churches have received and hold the faith of Catholic Christendom, but they
have exhibited a rich variety of methods both of approach and of
interpretation. They are heirs of the Reformation as well as the Catholic
tradition; and they hold together in a single fellowship of worship and witness
those whose chief attachment is to each of these, and also those whose attitude
to the distinctively Christian tradition of a free and liberal culture which is
historically the bequest of the Greek spirit and which was recovered for
Western Europe at the Renaissance.”
– William
Temple (1881-1944), Introduction to Doctrine in the Church of England, The
Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine, 1938
“First, there
are two very definite schools of thought in the Church of England, one of which
tends to emphasise that she is a branch of the Catholic Church and the other,
that she is a Protestant Church; and secondly, that in spite of acute
differences both in ceremonial and in actual doctrine, there are certain points
on which all Anglicans would agree together, as against Rome on the one hand
and Geneva on the other. She would, for example, agree with Geneva against Rome
in repudiating certain Papal claims and certain pronouncements about doctrine
which she does not hold to be oecumenical; she would agree with Rome against
Geneva in upholding the Apostolic Succession and the formal theology of the
Creeds.”
– Dorothy L.
Sayers (1893-1957), Worship in the Anglican Church
“The Anglican
Tradition . . . has its strong Catholic element – which emphasizes the historic
continuity and organized life of the Church as the appointed channel of the
Divine grace through creed, ministry, and sacraments. It has its strong
Evangelical element, which emphasizes Gospel before Church, personal conversion
before corporate expression of it, spiritual immediacy, the direct response to
the Holy Spirit wherever He may breathe. It has its third strong element, not
easy to give a name to, which acts as a watchdog of both the other elements,
and brings into our tradition a special element of intellectual integrity, of
sobriety and moderation of judgment, of moral earnestness – an element which is
as aware of what we do not know as of what we do, which does not wish to go
beyond the evidence but to judge all things with a large and reasonable
charity.
No Anglican
should be without something of these elements.”
– Geoffrey
Fisher (1887-1972), Archbishop of Canterbury, Address Delivered to the Joint
Session of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal in the United
States of America, Sept. 12, 1946
“While the New
Testament emphasises the Catholic truth that the church is the extension of the
Incarnation, it stresses also the vital importance of that Faith which is
associated with the word Evangelical; for the Indwelling of Christ, which makes
possible the Church, is linked to Faith in Him ‘Who loved me and gave Himself
for me.’”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Body of Christ - An
Appeal to Anglo-Catholics, The English Catholic: the Quarterly Gazette of the
Anglican Society (Summer 1928)
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7. Centered in Worship and Prayer
