Peter Nockles on "Anglican" and "Anglo-Catholic"

Excerpted from his book The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857, pp. 38-43. (Review here):

The labels 'Anglican' and 'Anglo-Catholic', so familiar in current theological discourse, also underwent a modification of their original weaning in the Tractarian era. The term 'Anglican' is of relatively modern origin. In the seventeenth century, it was mainly used in its Latin forms of `Anglicanus' or `Anglicanae' as a description of the reformed and established church in England. Early examples of its usage to denote individual membership of that church, i.e. an `Anglican', can be dated to Edmund Burke in 1797, and to George Stanley Faber in 1804. . . . 

'Anglican' took a long time to acquire an '-ism'. Its earliest modern use as denoting a particular theological tradition was by Newman in his formulation of the via media in 1837. Yet even as late as 1846, its use in this sense was of sufficiently recent date for Edward Churton to refer to 'what is now called Anglicanism' when describing the Orthodox tradition bequeathed by Hooker and the Caroline Divines. In the Tractarian controversies, 'Anglican' acquired party connotations. The term now denoted a particular understanding of the Church of England_, rather than simple membership of that Church itself. Thus William Gresley applied the title as a substitute for a 'High Churchman' and in direct contradiction to 'Evangelical' which he used interchangeably with `Puritan'.  Certainly, the term 'Anglican' acquired sufficiently unacceptable 'High Church' resonances in Evangelical eyes for it to become suspect and almost synonymous with 'Puseyite'.

On the other hand for the Tractarians, the term 'Anglican' came to denote a 'High and Dry' form of attachment to the Church of England. Thus, Palmer, Hook and Edward Churton were dubbed `mere Anglicans',' <sup>79</sup> to distinguish them from those whom the Tractarian leaders regarded as unequivocal followers of 'apostolical' principles. Only old High Churchmen took pride in the 'Anglican' label and increasingly criticised the Tractarians for being 'essentially un-Anglican'.' Significantly, in his famous article on church parties in the Edinburgh Review in 1853, W. J. Conybeare distinguished an 'Anglican' or 'normal type' of High Churchman from the ‘High and Dry' as well as from a `Tractarian' or 'exaggerated type' of High Churchman.

The label 'Anglo-Catholic' also underwent transmutation.  The original meaning of Anglo-Catholic, like that of that of 'Anglican', had been a descriptive term for mere membership of the Church of England, and was of seventeenth-century lineage.  The term could be used interchangeably with ‘Anglican’.  The non-party meaning of the term endured well into the nineteenth century as was witnessed by Newman's use of the phrase 'Anglo-Catholic Church' in his Lectures the Prophetical Office of the Church.  The same usage was employed in the very title Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology by its Tractarian editors. Similarly, William Palmer of Worcester used the term interchangeably with the 'orthodox Church of England position' in his Treatise on the Church of Christ (1838), and William Gesley adopted the same meaning in his theological manual, Anglo-Catholicism (1844).

The addition of the '-ism' symbolised a new degree of theological 'vision in the title. For Gresley, 'Anglo-Catholicism', like Anglicanism', represented a distinctive theological tradition; a reinvigorated version of traditional High Churchmanship. Yet the label increasingly was appropriated by the Tractarian party. In short, 'Anglo-Catholic'_ceased to he a merely descriptive term for the Church of England as a whole and instead became a particular sub-division of the Church of England itself.

Later generations of the Movement's followers, including the `Ritualists', would claim the term 'Anglo-Catholic' exclusively for themselves. Old High Churchmen objected to this hijacking of a once neutral, unequivocal terminology. They strove to reclaim the term for supporters of what they deemed Orthodox Church of England principles. As a writer in the Church of England Quarterly Review put it in 1843, 'because the writers of the Tracts choose to call themselves Anglo-Catholics, surely we are not to give up our own claim to the title, nor yet to concede to those individuals, a designation which they have assumed, but which belongs to all sound members of the Anglican Church'.  G. S. Faber, who had proclaimed himself an 'Anglican' as early as 1804, maintained in 1842 that his opposition to `Tractarian principles' was based 'on the real principles of our Reformed Anglo-Catholic Church .¹⁸⁶ Some old. High Churchmen even appropriated the term exclusively for themselves. George Ayliffe Poole, a 'Z', and friend and ally of W. F. Hook in Leeds, in 1842 distinguished three separate parties in the Church of England; the 'Evangelical or Low Church', the ‘moderate churchmen or Anglo-Catholics', and the 'ultra-churchmen of Oxford school'. Likewise, the elder Christopher Wordsworth in 1845 asked his son, Christopher junior, whether he might induce the editor of the English Churchman, an avowedly Tractarian publication, to make it 'a really Anglo-Catholic paper'.  It was a conscious throw-back to an older meaning, when Charles Wordsworth in his Annals (1891) made his indictment of the Oxford Movement that it had so soon ceased to be "bona fides" Anglo-Catholic'.  As late as 1877, Anglo-Catholic principles' were defended as synonymous with the 'old historic High Church school'.

The history of changing nomenclature points to that divergence of Tractarianism from old High Churchmanship which will be a theme this study. It illustrates a common perception among contemporaries of the divergence of a Tractarian minority from a High Church majority, in contrast to later historical assumptions that many distinctive features of the High Church tradition were attributable to the Oxford Movement alone. 

I believe the the terms "Anglican" and "Anglo-Catholic" have undergone additional transmutations since then.  Instead of "Anglican" meaning "the reformed and established church in England", whose Protestant faith was inherited by its daughter churches around the globe, it is to many today a reference to the English Church from its beginning until now, encompassing the whole range of theological beliefs (and unbelief) now held in tension: Reformed, Arminian, Wesleyan, Old High Church, Anglo-Catholic, Anglo-Papalist, Charismatic, and Liberal.

I sense as well that many today who refer to themselves as "Anglo-Catholics" are really just Old High Churchmen who, like their predecessors, believe in justification by faith alone and value the 39 Articles.  My sympathies to all you who are new to Anglicanism and trying to make sense of it all.