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Episcopal 101: Anglican and Episcopal History by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy After the death and resurrection of Jesus, missionary activity of the infant Church was limited to the Jewish/Christian synagogues as the disciples awaited the imminent return of Christ. After the martyrdom of St. Stephen in about 35 A.D. and even more so, after the destruction of the Temple by Roman troops in 70 A.D., the Gentile and Jewish-Christian sects split which in turn led to the scattering of the Gentile mission and the spread of the Gospel beyond Palestine. That history is reflected in the missionary journeys of St. Paul recorded in the Book of Acts and in other New Testament writings. Popular legend suggests that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Gospel to Glastonbury, England along with the Holy Grail. More likely, the Gospel came with traders from Gaul in the 2nd century. With the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain in 401, successive invasions of barbarians (Angles, Saxons and Picts) drove the church to the west end of England, to Wales and to Ireland. There were two major missionary efforts to reconvert Britain: St. Columba from Celtic Ireland and Iona in the North and in 597 Pope Gregory's Catholic missionary, St. Augustine, from the South. At the Council of Whitby in 664, the Celtic Church acknowledged the primacy of the Church of Rome. This story is imaginatively told in the murder mystery Absolution by Murder by Peter Tremayne. Due to geographical isolation, however, this imposition of Roman rule had a greater impact in England than in other isles. Henry the VIII appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1532. Cranmer translated the Bible into the vernacular and under Edward the VI, produced in 1549, one of the greatest literary achievements in the English language, the Book of Common Prayer Over the subsequent generations, greater domination of the Church of England by Rome caused the English Parliament to restrict the Pope's authority more and more and in 1554, the parliament declared that the Bishop of Rome had no authority over the Church of England. "Bloody Mary", who succeeded Edward, returned the Church to Rome and had Cranmer put to death. She was succeeded by Elizabeth who restored the Church of England and continued the reforms. Her greatest success, known as the Elizabethan Settlement, mandated in effect that the Church of England was to be both Protestant and Catholic in nature and identity. In 1570, she was excommunicated by Rome which marks the formal withdrawal of the Roman Church from the Church of England. Anglicans thus would claim that Rome left us, rather than the other way around. Extreme English Protestants who could not accept the ethos of the English Church, known as Puritans, eventually lost the battle for the control of the English Church and sailed for the New World, settling primarily in New England. The Puritan worldview would find a home in American Protestantism and later Evangelicalism. Under Elizabeth, Sir Francis Drake sailed to the New World, landing at Golden Gate Bay in 1579. His chaplain led Anglican services there, marking the first Prayer Book services in this the New World. Anglicans primarily settled in Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. The first permanent English settlement was in Jamestown in 1607. Bruton Parish can be visited today in Williamsburg, Virginia. There you will see boxed pews with the names of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and other prominent leaders. By the revolutionary war, the Church of England was in all 13 colonies but under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. The fact that those who were seeking confirmation had to make a perilous trip to England led to the election of Dr. Samuel Seabury in Connecticut as the first American Bishop. As he was unwilling to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England, Seabury was ordained a Bishop in Scotland in 1784. Despite the fact that the majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were Anglicans, the Anglican Church lost prestige after the War of Independence as most church members had remained loyal to England in that conflict. "Church of England" was not a desired church affiliation in 1776. The first General Convention of an independent American Church was held in Philadelphia in 1789. The bicameral structure of the new American government, divided into a House of Representatives and a Senate mirrors the structure of the Episcopal Church made up of two houses of General Convention, a House of Delegates and a House of Bishops. This is not surprising as Samuel Seabury was the principle architect of the structure of the American Church and also served as the chaplain to the Continental Congress. During the great Western expansion in America, the Episcopal Church initially engaged in little missionary activity. (It was said, jokingly, that whereas the Baptists went forth on horseback and the Methodists by stagecoach, the Anglicans were awaiting the invention of the passenger train.) Following the Great Awakening of the 18th century, and especially the work of the Anglican brothers John and Charles Wesley in the 1740's, greater missionary zeal was evidenced. The American Church was incorporated as the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society" in 1820 and General Convention declared all church members to be members of this Society by effect of their baptism. Officially then, this church sees itself as a missionary church and all of its members are, by definition, missionaries. By the end of the 19th century, convents and monasteries were established in America, industrial and mission schools were begun and colleges and hospitals were built. The Women's Auxiliary to the Board of Missions (later known as the Episcopal Church Women or E.C.W.) was begun in 1872. Today the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church U.S.A. is a part, lists some 80 million members in 31 self-governing churches in some 500 dioceses, 94,000 congregations in 164 counties. The American Church has some 2.5 million members in 7,400 congregations. Our diocese of Los Angeles reports some 85,000 members in 147 congregations. Character of Celtic Christianity: Until the 16th century reformation, Ireland, Wales and Scotland were strongholds of an older, heroic and tribal Celtic Christian culture. In these places and to a lesser extent in Britain as well, the Christian faith was remote enough from Continental Europe to remain somewhat indigenous. Two essential characteristics of the primitive Celtic Church were:
There is a danger in romantizing Celtic culture − we know so little − but these characteristics of the mystical journey and what we today might call "spiritual ecology" are well documented. Character of the Anglican Church: The Anglican Church is characterized by a unique way of looking at, and making sense of, the experience of God. That ethos is grounded in the history of the British people. The two most crucial things to understand about Anglicanism are these:
Catholic and Protestant Church History: We mistakenly believe that Christianity developed in a linear time line, continuous from the time of the apostles − the original witnesses − to our own day. History is ever more complicated and vastly more intriguing than we acknowledge in our imagination or our mythology. In the ancient world, there quickly developed five great apostolic centers of authority or Sees (from the Latin "Sedes" or "Seat." These areas, known as "patriarchates" were Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria and Rome. Each was governed by a Patriarch or chief Bishop, who was responsible for the governance of his realm, the apportionment of lesser Bishops and presbyters and for teaching the true faith. (The word "Episcopos", from which we get the word "Bishop," means "overseer.") As Byzantium began to crumble and eventually fall to a succession of invasions from the Turkish and later Arab world, only Rome, due to its geographical and temporal power, thrived. The break between the Latin (or Roman Catholic Church) and the Eastern Churches, building for centuries over the use of unleavened bread, Roman changes to the traditional language of the Nicene Creed, the dating of Easter and papal claims to supremacy, occurred formally in 1054 with the excommunication of the Orthodox Christians by the Bishop of Rome. The enmity between the Latin Church and the Orthodox Churches remains strong to this day. The Bishops of Rome, beginning in the 5th century, began to claim to be "supreme pontiffs", a title formerly held by the Roman Emperors and to take the name Pope, from the Greek "papas", meaning "Father." By the middle ages, the title "Vicar of Christ" was added, from the Latin "vicarius" or in English "vicarious", which meant that the Pope saw himself as the vicarious presence of Christ on the earth. The doctrine of papal infallibility, which assets that authority rests solely in the Bishop of Rome rather than in the ecumenical councils of the church, was legislated on July 18, 1870 by Pius IX, at the First Vatican Council. This doctrine states that the Pope cannot err in matters of faith and morals and that such teachings "ex cathedra" (from the Bishop's chair), are binding for all time. What led to this novel doctrine was the slow but steady lost of temporal power in the break up of the papal estates seized by emerging secular governments. Thus it can be said that the Pope's lost of secular power was replaced by unprecedented ecclesial power. In 1929, Fascist Italy recognized Vatican City as a separate nation state within the borders of Italy. The abuses of power, such as the selling of indulgences to finance armies and the purchase of lands, would lead directly to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. The Protestant churches all share a common heritage of having originated in Protest of Roman Catholic abuse. Pentecostals are second generation churches which grew out of those original protestant churches. The Anglican Church, which had an indigenous identity growing out of the Celtic spirituality of the lands of Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, more accurately should be described as a Reformed Catholic Church rather than a Protestant Church. The Reformation in England − and more so in Ireland, Scotland and Wales - was brutal and traumatic and marked a conflict between a Celtic/Anglican Church which affirmed the blessedness and goodness of Creation and which honored the intuitive and the mystical life and the Roman and Protestant Churches which were world-rejecting, anti-intellectual, harsh and violently antagonistic to liberalism. In Scotland alone, for example, over 5,000 people - who may have been "mystics" − were burned alive for witchcraft. Summary: To summarize then, the Church of Jesus Christ spread throughout the known world and took root in various cultures and was shaped by that culture and history and by the gifted thinkers of those cultures and times on down throughout the centuries. As an American Episcopal community, we inherit a mixed legacy of a church that is Catholic and Reformed. It is a church which was shaped by a Celtic/ Anglican Church that uniquely developed separately from the experience of Roman Catholicism, at least for the first 4-5 centuries, and from European (and later American) Protestantism. It is a church which, in style and culture, is closer to the Eastern Churches whose early traders likely planted it. And it continues to evolve and change as it encounters the challenge of authentic witness in today's diverse world as it seeks to minister among various cultures and languages and histories and traditions. Copyright © 2008 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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