Thirty-nine Articles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion were finalised in 1571. But one of their most contested clauses had spent eight years deliberately omitted. Article 29 declares that the wicked do not eat the Body of Christ. Elizabeth I had removed it from the 1563 draft to avoid provoking Catholic subjects. Then Pope Pius V excommunicated her in 1570. That ended any prospect of reconciliation with Rome. Within the year, despite the objections of Bishop Edmund Gheast, Article 29 was restored.

  From Henry VIII's excommunication in 1533 to the 1571 finalisation, the Church of England revised its foundational doctrines at least five times. Historians have called one version confusing. Another represented what scholars described as the zenith of Calvinist influence in English church history. A third swung back toward traditional Catholic practice on nearly every point.

  How did a church arrive at one settled statement of faith after so many rewrites? And how did a document so bitterly contested at its birth become the defining confession of a global communion?

• 2. A Contested Inheritance

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  Edward Foxe, Nicholas Heath, and Robert Barnes negotiated England's first post-papal doctrinal statement in Germany. Those discussions with Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon produced the Wittenberg Articles. Those drew on the Augsburg Confession of 1530. England needed a political alliance with the German Lutheran princes. Theological agreement was part of the price.

  The clerical Convocation adopted the result, the Ten Articles, in July 1536. Historians have described the document simultaneously as a Lutheran victory and a Catholic success. Its core teaching affirmed faith as central to salvation but surrounded that affirmation with qualifications. Good works were "necessarily required to the attaining of everlasting life." Only three of the traditional seven sacraments were even mentioned.

  The failure of the Ten Articles to resolve controversy led Thomas Cromwell to convene a national synod of bishops in February 1537. The resulting Bishops' Book restored four missing sacraments, placing them in a separate section to mark "a difference in dignity and necessity." Its commentary on the Ten Commandments broke with Catholic tradition by separating the prohibition on graven images as a standalone commandment. That teaching encouraged iconoclasm, which would become a feature of the English Reformation.

  Franz Burchard, vice-chancellor of Saxony, arrived in London in May 1538 with two colleagues for a fresh round of negotiations. Georg von Boineburg held a doctorate in law. Friedrich Myconius was superintendent of the church in Gotha. They conferred at Lambeth Palace through September. Conservative bishops refused to concede on private masses for the dead, compulsory clerical celibacy, and communion wine for the laity. All three Germans had left England by the 1st of October.

  The Six Articles followed in June 1539. Denial of transubstantiation was now punishable by burning, with no opportunity to recant. Bishops Latimer and Shaxton, outspoken opponents of the measure, were forced to resign their dioceses. When Parliament reconvened in April 1540, a committee began work on yet another revision. The King's Book, approved at a special meeting of nobility on the 6th of May 1543, bore Henry's own revisions and his personal authority. It rejected justification by faith alone. Archbishop Cranmer argued that faith was still the sole cause of justification even when accompanied by good works. Henry would not be persuaded. The text read that faith justified "neither only nor alone."

  Edward VI succeeded his father in 1547. Under Archbishop Cranmer, a Calvinist-influenced doctrinal statement took shape. The Forty-five Articles Cranmer submitted for comment were reduced to forty-two. Issued by Royal Mandate on the 19th of June 1553, they required subscription from all clergy, schoolmasters, and members of the universities. Their theology has been described as a "restrained" Calvinism. Edward died in 1553. Mary I restored the Catholic Church, and the Forty-two Articles were set aside without ever being enforced. In 1563, Convocation met under Archbishop Matthew Parker to revise them. The Thirty-nine Articles were incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer in 1571, and all bishops and clergy were required to assent.

• 3. Between Rome and Geneva

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  According to theologian Henry Chadwick, the Thirty-nine Articles navigate a via media between Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Via media is Latin for middle path. Unlike other confessional standards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Articles do not begin with Scripture. The Helvetic Confessions and the Westminster Confession both open with revelation. The Thirty-nine Articles begin instead with the doctrine of God, a choice that distinguishes the document from its Protestant contemporaries.

  Article 17 articulates the doctrine of predestination with deliberate restraint. It states that "Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God." The Articles endorse the election of believers to salvation. They say nothing about double predestination, the belief that God has also predestined some to reprobation. That silence left the question open for ongoing debate.

  The Articles recognise only two sacraments: baptism and the Lord's Supper. The five rites the Catholic Church calls sacraments are treated differently. Three of them, confirmation, penance, and extreme unction, are described as "corrupted imitations of the Apostles." Holy orders and marriage are classified as "states of life allowed in the Scriptures." The doctrine of transubstantiation is condemned as "repugnant to the plain words of Scripture." But the Articles reject the purely symbolic view as well. Participants are said to be fed the body of Christ through faith and the Holy Spirit.

  Article 37 affirms the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and rejects all claims to papal jurisdiction in England. The Articles defend the state's right to use capital punishment and declare that Christians may serve in the military. General councils of the church, the Articles state, can only be called with the permission of civil authority. More striking still, they declare that church councils can reach wrong decisions.

• 4. Statute and Subscription

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  The Test Act of 1672 made adherence to the Thirty-nine Articles a legal requirement for holding civil office in England. That requirement stood for more than a century and a half, until its repeal in 1828. At Oxford University, students were expected to sign the Articles until the passage of the Oxford University Act of 1854.

  Starting in 1865, clergy in the Church of England affirmed that the Articles' doctrine was agreeable to Scripture. The affirmation included the Book of Common Prayer alongside the Articles. Since 1975, the obligation has shifted. Clergy now acknowledge the Articles as one of the church's historic formularies, documents that bear witness to the faith revealed in Scripture. The Church of Ireland maintains a similar declaration for its clergy. The US Episcopal Church never required subscription to the Articles at all.

  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, adapted the Thirty-nine Articles for use by American Methodists in the eighteenth century. The resulting Articles of Religion remain an official doctrinal statement of the United Methodist Church. In 1801, the US Episcopal Church adopted its own revised version, deleting the Athanasian Creed. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which articulates fundamental Anglican identity, draws on Articles VI, VIII, XXV, and XXXVI.

  Each of the 44 member churches in the Anglican Communion is free to adopt its own official documents. The Articles are not officially normative across all Anglican churches. The only doctrinal documents agreed upon throughout the Communion are the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed of AD 325, and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.

• 5. A Living Argument

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  In 1628, Charles I prefixed a royal declaration to the Articles. It forbade printing or preaching designed "to draw the Article aside any way." Subscribers were to take each article "in the literal and grammatical sense." That directive did not settle the argument.

  During Elizabeth I's reign, a Calvinist consensus formed within the church, with most bishops privately holding to double predestination. Archbishop Whitgift issued the Lambeth Articles in 1595 to align Article 17 with that explicit position. These were not intended to replace the Thirty-nine but to clarify them. The queen refused to assent. Her religious settlement would not be altered.

  The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century brought the sharpest challenge. John Henry Newman's Tract 90 argued that the Thirty-nine Articles could be read in an Anglo-Catholic manner. The evangelical wing of the church contested that reading. In 2003, the evangelical Anglican clergyman Chris Pierce wrote that the Articles "define the biblically derived summations of precise Christian doctrine." He agreed with the assessment that the Church of England, judged by the Articles, "must be ranked among the Protestant Churches of Europe." Archbishop of Armagh John Bramhall had offered a different view in 1643. He argued that some articles were "practical truths," and others merely "pious opinions or inferior truths." Only a few were essentials of faith necessary to all Christians.

  Some Anglican scholars have labelled the Articles an early example of "Reformed Catholicism." Articles VI, XX, XXIII, XXVI, and XXXIV are cited in ongoing Anglican debates over homosexual activity and episcopal authority. The last of the thirty-nine, Article 39, defends the morality of taking an oath for civic purposes. That subject places the Articles firmly in the world of English courts and parliaments as well as English churches.