ABSTRACT
Any evaluation of the Reformation’s impact on Anglicanism must be conducted over the dead body of the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement. One of this movement’s most enduring legacies is the belief that Anglicanism’s foundational characteristic rests not on the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation, but on the teachings of the early Church. The followers of this view, known as Tractarians, sought to distance the Anglican Church from its Reformation heritage, insisting that Anglicanism was the inheritor and defender of the true ancient catholic orthodoxy.1 Although they accused the Roman Catholics of later adding corruptions to this ancient orthodoxy, they also claimed that Protestantism had allowed private, individual, biblical interpretation to supplant the orthodox teachings of the early Church. Anglicanism alone had maintained the true and undistorted doctrines of Christian antiquity.
