Members only: Provided That the Sub­stance of the Faith be Kept Entire

The content of this unifying doctrine was spelled out largely though not exhaustively in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, as adopted in 1570. Though unambiguously Protestant in character, they are nonetheless a rather conservative in their content, building on the ancient catholic doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and revising the Augustinian doctrines of salvation, sin, grace, the church, and the sacraments, only so far as they considered necessary to bring them into line with the sufficiency of Scripture and of Christ as Mediator. Together with the Prayer Book, the Catechism, and the official Homilies they supplied classical Anglicanism with a doctrinal frame neither Calvinist nor Lutheran, but Augustinian and Reformed, and comprehensive of a range of emphases, “low”, “broad”, and “high”. When the Church of England in the American colonies found itself cut off from the mother church after the American Revolution, and organized itself as the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA, both Prayer Book and Articles were adopted with very conservative modifications, chiefly in the prayers and articles that reflected the change from monarchy to republic. The principles of this revision are set out in the Preface to the first American Prayer Book:

“Provided that the substance of the faith be kept entire”, outward forms may be adapted according to circumstances. In actuality, in the first three American Prayer Books (up to and including 1928) this liberty in outward forms of worship was exercised with a sober conservatism and self-restraint that contemporary liturgists tend to deplore. Yet just what it meant for “the substance of the faith” to be “kept entire” was a question right from the beginning. The first proposal of 1786 for an American revision of the Prayer Book eliminated both the Nicene and the Athanasian Creed, while the Articles of Religion were condensed from thirty-nine to twenty. The claim was made, that these eliminations could be made “consistently with piety, faith and charity” – a reflection of Enlightenment confidence that what they assumed was the substance of doctrine could be extracted from the traditional forms without substantial loss.