Lancelot Andrewes

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LANCELOT ANDREWES is an important name in Anglicanism. As a bishop and scholar he believed in a certain and settled church authority built on the primary authority of Holy Scripture: One Bible (canon), two testaments, three creeds (Apostles', Nicene, Athanasian), four councils, and five centuries (Church Fathers). He died September 25, 1626, having held influential positions in the church during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. He is best remembered for overseeing and substantially contributing to the translation of the King James Version of the Bible (commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611). Kurt Vonnegut (1969, Slaughterhouse Five) suggested that Andrewes was "the greatest writer in the English language," citing the first few verses of Psalm 23 KJV as proof. Poet T. S. Eliot described Andrewes' ability with language this way: "He takes a word and delivers the world from it. Squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning, which we should never have supposed any word to possess." He is remembered as a sincere, humble and devout Christian who prayed five hours a day and authored the prayer classic Private Devotions. Unfortunately he followed William Laud’s lead into the high church, anti-Calvinism trend of his day (away from the Anglican formularies), but according to Bishop Fitzsimons Allison in The Rise of Moralism, Andrewes never left the anchor of Reformation Anglicanism - justification by grace through faith alone - that many of the other Caroline Divines departed from in their journey towards moralism (that awful Jeremy Taylor!). Andrewes, who was Laudian Arminian in his theology, still believed that the righteousness that saves is not self-righteousness (or infused/inherent righteousness), but the righteousness of Christ credited to the account of undeserving sinners (Allison p. 28-30).

Chuck Collins

Chuck is the Director for the Center for Reformation Anglicanism

https://anglicanism.info
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