Confessional (Self-)Identification of the Church of England and Calvinism

Abstract

The most difficult aspect of the problem of the Church of England’s identity is constituted by a lack of specific confessional orthodoxy in the reformed English Church forming the core of her identity. One of many reasons for it lies in the fact that there are no explicit doctrinal sources. The Church of England’s doctrine is dispersed over several documents, called “historical formularies”, that are either political, like the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, or liturgical, like the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, in nature, but are neither discursive nor analytical in character. In this article, the author attempts to verify and falsify the validity of the claim that the Church of England’s hamartiology and soteriology are fundamentally Calvinistic. To achieve that goal, he turns to “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” by Richard Hooker, a prominent 16th-century English theologian, who played a pivotal role as the primary apologist of the “Elizabethan settlement” and a “Founding Father” of the Church of England’s orthodoxy, in order to analyse his hamartiological and soteriological views. Taking into consideration Richard Hooker’s “place of honour” in the political and religious history of the reformed English Church, the author concludes that the doctrine of the Established Church in England used by the Crown as a litmus test of political loyalty, was not Calvinistic either in its form or content, but preserving continuity with the pre-Reformation Latin theology, on the one hand, and, in the spirit of Christian Humanism, receiving and adopting Eastern Christian theological thought, on the other, it, somewhat unsuccessfully, tended towards a via media between Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and radical reformers, i.e. was used as a negative identification tool marking the Christians of England along the “us — them” line.