Veritate - Christianity "Anglicanism" and the Questions

I told you last week we were doing the Methodists. We are not. Not yet. Because before John Wesley makes any sense, you have to understand what he was standing in. And that means going back to 1534, to a king who once held the title Defender of the Faith and then severed his nation from Rome not over doctrine, not over Scripture, not over any question Luther or Calvin had raised, but over a marriage annulment the Pope would not grant. Henry VIII did not reform the Church. He replaced its authority with himself. And when a king can make himself the head of the Church, the Reformation principle has reached its final and most honest expression.

What Elizabeth I built from that break was called the via media. The middle way. Catholic structure, Protestant theology, and a deliberate silence on every question that might divide the country. History has treated it as a pragmatic masterpiece. It was not. It was a refusal to answer dressed as diplomacy. John Fisher, the only bishop in England who would not take the Oath of Supremacy, understood that. He paid for that understanding with his life. There is no middle position between the truth and a lie. There is no neutral ground. I know that personally. I spent years as an atheist telling myself that not choosing was the rational position. It was not. It was just a slower kind of failure. That is what the via media was too. And the fractures it produced are still multiplying today.