Thirty-Nine Articles
The confessional settlement of the English Reformation, Reformed in its articles on Scripture, sin, and grace, deliberately broad elsewhere, and the standard that defined Anglican identity for centuries.
Overview
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion are the confessional standard of the Church of England, authorized in 1571 under Elizabeth I. Their history reaches back to Thomas Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles of 1553, drafted under Edward VI and never formally implemented before Edward’s death. Under Elizabeth, Archbishop Matthew Parker revised and reduced Cranmer’s articles to thirty-nine, which Parliament authorized as the doctrinal standard of the established church. Clergy were required to subscribe to them from 1571 onward.
The thirty-nine articles cover Scripture, the Trinity, Christology, soteriology, the church, the sacraments, and the relationship between church and state. They are notably briefer and less developed than the Westminster or the 1689, they were designed as a minimal standard sufficient to exclude Rome and the more radical Anabaptists while leaving room for a broad range of Protestant opinion within the established church.
Historical Context
Elizabeth I inherited a church that had lurched from Catholicism (Henry VIII, in practice) to Protestantism (Edward VI) to Catholicism (Mary I) and now back to Protestantism. Her religious settlement was driven as much by political necessity as by theological conviction. She needed a church broad enough to hold most of her subjects, Reformed Protestants, Lutherans, and moderate Catholics, while clearly rejecting Rome’s authority.
The Articles reflect this political context. On justification, predestination, and Scripture they read as Reformed documents. On episcopacy, the sacraments, and church-state relations they are carefully worded to avoid forcing a single position. The ambiguity was not accidental, it was the price of a national settlement. It would eventually prove insufficient: the Puritans, who wanted a fully Reformed church, found the Articles inadequate, and the conflict between them and the episcopal establishment eventually contributed to the Civil War.
Theological Distinctives
Scripture and authority. Article 6 affirms that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation and that nothing not read in it nor provable by it is to be required as an article of faith. This is a clear statement of sola scriptura against Roman appeals to tradition and the Apocrypha.
Justification. Article 11 is unmistakably Reformed: “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.” The language of imputation and faith alone is present, though less developed than in Westminster or the 1689.
Predestination. Article 17 affirms predestination to life as “the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind.” The article does not treat reprobation with the same explicitness, reflecting the Articles’ characteristic reticence.
The sacraments. Articles 25–31 navigate between Rome, Luther, and the Zwinglian memorialists. The Articles reject transubstantiation and the mass as sacrifice but affirm a genuine spiritual presence in the Lord’s Supper. They are broadly compatible with the Reformed view, though they also accommodate the Lutheran reading, intentionally so.
A Key Passage
“Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”
Article 6
Full Text
The full text of the Thirty-Nine Articles is available at the Church of England.