The Church: Her Books and Her SacramentsHolmes, E. E. (Ernest Edward)
Religion
The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments
Holmes, E. E. (Ernest Edward)
Church of England; Sacraments -- Church of England
But, being national (being, for example, in England), it is, obviously,
subject to the dangers, as well as the privileges, of national
character, national temperament--and, in our case, national insularity.
The national presentment of the Catholic Church may err, and may err
without losing its Catholicity. The Church of England, "as also the
Church of Rome, hath erred";[11] it has needed, it needs, it will need,
reforming. Hence we come to our fifth name:--
(V) THE REFORMED CHURCH.
The name is very suggestive. It suggests two things--life and
continuity.
First, _life_. A reforming Church is a living Church. Reformation is
a sign of animation, for a dead organism cannot reform itself. Then,
_continuity_. The reformed man, must be the same man, or he would not
be a reformed man but somebody else. So with the Church of England.
It would have been quite possible, however ludicrous, to have
established a new Church in the sixteenth century, but that would not
have been a reformed Church, it would have been {15} another
Church--the very last thing the Reformers contemplated.
A Reformed Church, then, is not the formation of a new Church, but the
re-formation of the old Church.
How did the old Church of England reform itself? Roughly speaking, the
English Reformation did two things. It affirmed something, and it
denied something.
First, it affirmed something. For instance, the Church of England
affirmed that the Church in this country in the sixteenth century was
one with the Church of the sixth century. It affirmed that it was the
very same Church that had been established in Palestine on the Day of
Pentecost, and in this realm by Augustine in 597. It reaffirmed its
old national independence in things local just as it had affirmed it in
the days of Pope Gregory, It re-affirmed its adherence to every
doctrine[12] held by the undivided Church, without adding thereto, or
taking therefrom.
{16}
Then, it denied something. It denied the right of foreigners to
interfere in purely English affairs; it denied the right of the Bishop
of one National Church to exercise his power in another National
Church; it denied the claim of the Bishop of Rome to exercise
jurisdiction over the Archbishop of Canterbury; it denied the power of
any one part of the Church to impose local decisions, or local dogmas,
upon any other part of the Church.
Thus, the Reformation both affirmed and denied. It affirmed the
constitutional rights of the Church as against the unconstitutional
claims of the Pope, and it denied the unconstitutional claims of the
State as against the constitutional rights of the Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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