The Anglican View of Rome

THE ANGLICAN POSITION TOWARDS
ROME AND THE PAPACY
Church Association Tract 429

The question of re-union with Rome having now been brought to the front by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s belated disclosure of the secret confabulations at Malines, there seems good reason for stating a strong argument against such rapprochement. If the English Reformers are to be believed, and the official language of the Church of England for a couple of generations at least after the Reformation is to be accepted, the Church of Rome is the Apocalyptic “Babylon the Great,” and the Pope that “Man of Sin” delineated by the Apostle, as one of the manifestations of Anti-Christ.

The Archbishop desired that the Anglican position “as set forward by the great theologians of the XVI. and XVII. centuries” should be “unmistakeably set forward” (the emphatic repetition is used by his Grace) at the conferences with the Romanists. Is it fair to ask whether the judgment of the Church of England concerning the Church of Rome, as recorded in the Homilies and attested by all the Reformers and by the first half-dozen Archbishops of Canterbury after the Reformation, was even hinted at, not to say “set forward” at the Malines confabulations?

Whether this interpretation of Prophecy is correct is of course open to legitimate question, and since the XVII century many good and sincere Protestants have been led to accept the varying
expositions which the Jesuits for the most part devised in order to exculpate Rome from this fearful charge. Yet it is to be doubted whether anything that has been written on the subject has really refuted the main contention of such men as Joseph Mede, Robert Fleming, Richard Hurd, and George Stanley Faber, to say nothing of such later writers as Professor Birks, E. B. Elliott, Dr. Grattan Guinness and Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, the last great leader of the historic High Church party.

However this may be, we think that even staunch Protestants often are hardly aware of how deeply our Reformed Church is committed to this indictment of Rome and the Papacy. Thus Bishop Harold Browne, commenting on Article XIX. says that “Some might expect the Article to have denounced the Church of Rome, not as a Church in error, but as the synagogue of Anti-christian assembly, not an erring Church. No doubt at times such is the language of the
Reformers, who in their strong opposition to Romanist errors, often use the most severe terms in denouncing them. But in their most sober and guarded language, not only our own, but Luther, Calvin, and other Continental Reformers speak of the Church of Rome as a Church, though a fallen and corrupt Church.” (Exposition, p. 455; sixth edition.)

The Reformers would have been surprised at the ingenuity which could find any contradiction of their unvarying assertion of the proper Antichristian of Popery in their concurrent insistence that Rome is in a sense a Christian Church. In their mind the utterly damning circumstance in the guilt of Rome consists precisely in this, that she is outwardly a Christian Church, which insults and blasphemes the God she pretends to serve, and compasses the ruin of the souls of men whom she professes to save. The idolatry and superstition of the heathen who have never known God are venial in comparison to the wilful apostacy of a Church having the Gospel of God, professing all the articles of the Christian Faith, and retaining the Sacraments though woefully perverted.

For the full article, see:
www.churchsociety.org/publications/tracts/CAT429_Anglican-Rome.pdf