Elizabethan Anglicanism and the Reformed Tradition

“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.

Read the full article here on Ben Crosby’s Substack