How Reformed is the Anglican Church?
INTRODUCTION The answer one receives to the question “What is Anglicanism [1] ?” depends largely on which of the world’s 85 million Anglicans [2] responds to the question. Nineteenth century “Tractarians” [3] tended to focus on the 17 th century as the beginning of the “specific genius of Anglicanism”. On the other hand, the Parker Society [4] saw those particularly Reformed aspects of the 16 th -century Reformation as being normative for English Protestantism. Some have even claimed that Puritanism [5] was the real English Reformation. The problem is that each of these approaches assumes that there is a distinctive orthodox English Protestant position in the years before 1662 which can be identified and its adherents traced; however, Anthony Milton insists in his introduction to the first of the 5-volume series The Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017-2019) that no such thing ever existed. [6] Granted the absence of a distinctive orthodox English Prote