A heritage that almost no one has been able to read in Spanish
Anyone who calls themselves an Anglican in the Spanish-speaking world usually receives the tradition second-hand: a liturgy, an episcopal structure, a sensibility. They rarely receive the reasons. They are told that Anglicanism is a “via media”, but they are almost never told, with any reasoning, between which extremes, or why, or at what cost. The middle way appears as a temperament rather than as a theological conviction born of Scripture, with people who died for it.
That is the first reason to recover the reformers. Anglicanism was not born of a political compromise, even though politics surrounded it on every side. It was born of a generation of theologians who read the Bible, the Fathers and their contemporaries on the Continent, and reached definite conclusions about the authority of Scripture, justification by faith, the nature of the church and the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. Those conclusions are found in the Thirty-Nine Articles, in the Homilies and in the Book of Common Prayer. An Anglican who uses those texts without knowing the theology that produced them inherits the building without the plans. They will not know what can be moved and what holds up the roof.
A liturgy that teaches theology
Cranmer understood something that later Protestants sometimes forgot: people believe what they pray. That is why the Prayer Book is not an aesthetic ornament on top of a doctrine that lives somewhere else. It is doctrine placed on the lips of the people. The confession of sins, the prayer of humble access, the collects and the form of the Supper teach justification by grace through faith, the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice and the spiritual presence of the Lord among his people. They do so every Sunday, in the language of the people, with Scripture read aloud in a tongue everyone understands.
This should provoke an uncomfortable question in any evangelical Anglican: do we pray what we believe, or believe what we pray? When the liturgy is used without being understood, it ends up saying things that the congregation no longer holds. When it is discarded as “insufficiently spontaneous”, the very instrument by which the English Reformation catechised a whole kingdom is lost. Knowing the reformers is the only way to recover the liturgy without falling into ritualism or into contempt for form.
A Protestantism with roots, not only with trenches
For the rest of the Protestant people there is a second reason, and it is no less important. Hispanic evangelical churches generally know Luther and Calvin, sometimes only through summaries. Of the English Reformation they know, at most, a king with marital difficulties. An entire branch of the tree is thus lost, and precisely one that offers something rare: a Reformed theology that kept ecclesial order, common liturgy and the reading of the Fathers without giving up justification by faith alone or the supreme authority of Scripture.
The English reformers moved within a tension that any serious church must recognise. They wanted to be radically biblical and at the same time continuous with the ancient church. They wanted to renew without fragmenting. They wanted a people who knew what they believed, and a church broad enough to hold that people. They did not always succeed, and the seventeenth century shows it painfully. But their attempts and their failures teach more than many systematic syntheses, because they were written while the price was being paid.
They also serve as an antidote to two present-day temptations. One is an evangelicalism without memory, which believes it was born yesterday and changes its model every decade. The other is a confessionalism without a pastoral heart, which defends formulas but has forgotten that they were written to console and encourage consciences. The English reformers were pastors and martyrs before they were polemicists. Reading them corrects both extremes.
A task that must be done in our own language
There is a more practical and urgent reason. In English there are critical editions, biographies and monographs on each of these figures. In Spanish, almost nothing. That means a pastor in Santiago, a seminarian in Bogotá or a layperson in Madrid has no access to the source of their own tradition unless they read academic English. A church that cannot read its founders depends on intermediaries, and intermediaries always choose to show what suits them.
This is where a general book fulfils its function, and also where something larger begins. A volume of synthesis can show the system: how Scripture, grace, the church and the sacraments relate to one another in the thought of an entire generation. But a synthesis cannot dwell on each author long enough to let him speak. Hence the idea of a series. A study devoted to Vermigli would make it possible to follow his doctrine of the sacraments and his Reformed scholastic method in a detail that a single chapter does not allow. And others could follow: Tyndale and the Bible in the language of the people, Cranmer and the art of reforming without breaking, Bucer and his passion for unity, Latimer and Ridley in the pulpit and at the stake, Hooper and the limits of reform, Jewel and the public defence of the Reformed church, Hooker and the question of reason and law, Whitgift against Cartwright, Perkins and theology as the care of souls. We would then have voices, each with its own accent, and together a map that today does not exist in Spanish.
The responsibility of writing with an identity
One last thing. This series will not be neutral, and it should not pretend to be. To write it from an evangelical and conservative Anglican identity is not a bias that needs to be excused; it is the place from which these figures are best read, because it is the place from which they wrote. What it does demand is honesty: letting the authors say what they said, even when it is uncomfortable; acknowledging when a figure does not fit the mould that the tradition has given him; and admitting the real disagreements among them, which were many. A book with a clear identity and intellectual honesty is more useful, to Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike, than one that pretends to speak from nowhere. Recovering these authors for our Spanish-speaking people is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is to give back to the Spanish-speaking Anglican churches something that belongs to them: a theology that united the open Bible, common prayer and lived faith, and did so in a language the people understood. If they translated Scripture and the liturgy for their people, it falls to us to translate them for ours.
