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The terms  Low Church and High Church refer to parties within the Church of England and the Anglican communion worldwide (Anglicanism) that represent either a “low” or a “high” perspective on the Church as an institution. The term Low Church first appeared in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the new Whig government appointed  latitudinarian bishops. These bishops emphasized reason and moderation instead of the authority of the apostolic tradition, as their predecessors had, and made efforts to bring about reconciliation…

1. Definition and backgroundThe Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) are the culmination of a series of doctrinal documents in which the newly independent Church of England sought to define its interpretation of the Bible with reference to current theological controversies. Until well into the 20th century, they remained the official doctrinal statement of Anglicanism; at that point, they were declared to be merely one element of its ongoing development.After the breach with Rome (1534), the Church of England defined its faith in a series of doctrinal statements. T…

1. Historical survey 1.1. Terminology and early modern interpretationSince the mid-19th century,  Reformation (from Latin  reformatio, “restoration,” “transformation”) has been a specialized term for one side of the 16th-century events that tore Western Christendom apart into mutually antagonistic confessional churches; its antonym, denoting the other side, is  Counter-Reformation.Previously the term had carried the general meaning of “reform.” In the ecclesiastical and political reform movements of the late Middle Ages, we find both  reformatio and the verb  reform…

1. Significance The  Book of Common Prayer is the church order of the Church of England (Anglicanism). It contains the services of daily Morning and Evening prayer, the Sunday Eucharist (or Lord’s Supper), baptism, ordination, and additional rites. Composed originally by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549, the prayer book together with the Book of Homilies (which he also composed) and the  Articles of Religion (Thirty-Nine Articles) insured the Protestant character of the Reformation in England. The Book of Common Prayer proved to be the most influential of the three,…

1. Definition First used by John Henry Newman in 1838, the term Anglicanism refers to the theological and liturgical tradition of the Church of  England ( Ecclesia Anglicana). This tradition, which goes back to the official church texts of the Reformation period and has been shaped by later historical developments, is shared by a worldwide communion of independent churches, which are summoned to a conference every ten years by the archbishop of Canterbury.In a narrower sense, the term also denotes the specific assessment of that tradition that views the ecclesiasti…