Monday, January 02, 2006

What do Anglicans believe? Part 1

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The Most Rev'd and Rt Hon. Lord Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of Canterbury

I thought I might begin a series of posts with comments from prominent Anglican sources about our identity in terms of faith and practice. We begin with this popular quote from Dr. Fisher:

"We have no doctrine of our own. We only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church, enshrined within the Catholic Creeds--and those Creeds we hold without addition or diminution. We stand firm on that rock."


Here is a further note on the same theme from the 1922 Doctrine Commission of the Church of England:
"There is not, and the majority of us do not desire that there should be, a system of distinctly Anglican Theology. The Anglican Churches have received and hold the faith of Catholic Christendom, but they have exhibited a rich variety in methods both of approach and interpretation. They are heirs of the Reformation as well as of the Catholic tradition; and they hold together in a single fellowship of worship and witness those whose chief attachment is to each of these, and also those whose attitude to the distinctively Christian tradition is most deeply affected by the tradition of a free and liberal culture which is historically the bequest of the Greek spirit."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am really looking forward to this series.

Fr Timothy Matkin said...

A note on the last sentence from the Doctrine Commission. It is a reference to the one church sharing the same faith, but including High, Low, and Broad church traditions within it's outlook and praxis.

Fr. Christopher Cantrell SSC said...

Thank you for lifting these passages back up!

Texanglican (R.W. Foster+) said...

Thanks, Father. Keep em coming!

Anonymous said...

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