Authority to Teach in Classical Anglicanism

Abstract Anglicanism currently finds itself embroiled in a variety of ‘controversies of Faith’ that individually and together threaten to split the Communion - and most of these concern questions of teaching and authority: who within Anglicanism has authority to teach what, and why? In this situation one naturally looks back on the tradition to seek how an understanding of the past may inform the present. The following paper does so by considering the concept of authority in the foundational period of ‘Anglicanism’, namely from the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England to the denominational ‘invention’ of Anglicanism after 1829. It discovers there three interrelated principles of an Anglican understanding of authority, which are briefly summarized after some remarks about how to use conclusions of papers such as this - and how not to.