Parker Society Publications

Matthew Parker played a large role in defining the newly formed Church of England. He was the first of three Archbishops of  Canterbury under Elizabeth I (followed by Grindal and Whitgift), and served as the construction manager for the "Elizabethan Settlement.” The Elizabethan Settlement landed the Church of England once-and-for-all into an expression of Protestantism that is thoroughly biblical, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful. Parker died May 16, 1575 at Lambeth Palace. Among the many accomplishments of his 16 years as Archbishop, Parker saw to it that Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1552) was fully preserved in the 1559 version (that became the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the recognized standard for the Anglican Communion). With the help of John Jewel, he slightly revised Cranmer’s 42 Articles and adopted the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion as the church's official confession of belief (1571). When the Tractarians (the Oxford Movement) of the 1830-40s threatened to ambush the church with their "mostly" Roman Catholic ideas of theology and churchmanship, a group of (mostly) evangelicals in the Church of England countered the attempted coup by publishing 54 volumes of writings from the early English reformers (1841-1853). This included many of the letters, sermons, and writings of Bale, Bullinger, Coverdale, Cranmer, Hooper, Jewel, Latimer, Tyndale and others. They named it after Matthew Parker whose brand of Protestantism defined the Church of England, and who was a world-renowned collector of early church manuscripts. The Parker Society Publications are available on-line for everyone to read the inside thinking of the bishops and leaders who were behind the English Reformation (https://reformedbooksonline.com/parker-society-publications/). I don’t remember any of my Episcopal seminary professors ever mentioned this important collection, and it was a happy day when I discovered them tucked away in a dusty corner of the seminary library.