The Anglican viewpoint on the Council of Trent holds that the Council's decrees represent a fateful hardening of Roman Catholic doctrine against legitimate reform, and that Trent's definitions - particularly on justification, Scripture and tradition, the sacraments, and papal authority - rendered reunion between Rome and the reformed churches of England practically impossible. Anglicans have historically regarded Trent not as a genuine ecumenical council in the full sense but as a partisan assembly that codified late medieval corruptions rather than returning the Western church to patristic and scriptural norms. This position is held across much of the Anglican Communion, though it has softened considerably in ecumenical contexts since the twentieth century.

Scripture and Tradition

Anglican theologians contend that Trent's fourth session (1546) erred by placing unwritten apostolic traditions on equal footing with Scripture as sources of revealed truth. The Anglican position, articulated in the Thirty-Nine Articles (Article VI), holds that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” - a principle sometimes described as sola scriptura in its Anglican form, though the label itself is contested within Anglicanism. Many Anglican theologians, particularly in the Catholic wing, actively resist the term, and those who accept it typically qualify it as Scripture interpreted through the lens of patristic consensus rather than private judgment alone. Trent's elevation of the Vulgate as the authoritative biblical text is held to have subordinated the Word of God to ecclesiastical tradition in a manner incompatible with genuine reform.

Justification

The Council's decree on justification (Session VI, 1547) is regarded by Anglican theologians as a direct repudiation of the doctrine recovered by the Reformers from Pauline and Augustinian sources. The Thirty-Nine Articles (Article XI) affirm that justification is “by faith only” - understood as the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer - while Trent anathematized this teaching explicitly. Anglican divines such as Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker held that Trent's doctrine of justification by infused righteousness, operating through merit and the sacramental system, obscured the gratuity of grace and the sufficiency of Christ's atoning work.

The Sacraments

Trent's sacramental decrees - affirming seven sacraments, transubstantiation, the sacrificial character of the Mass, and the necessity of auricular confession - are rejected by Anglican theology as departures from Scripture and the practice of the primitive church. The Thirty-Nine Articles (Articles XXV-XXXI) reduce the sacraments to two dominically instituted rites - Baptism and the Lord's Supper - and explicitly condemn transubstantiation as an overthrow of “the nature of a Sacrament.” The notion of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice is held to impugn the “one oblation of himself once offered” affirmed in Article XXXI.

Papal Authority

Trent's implicit reinforcement of Roman primacy - and the manner in which the Council operated under papal direction rather than as a truly free council - is seen as confirming the Anglican rejection of universal papal jurisdiction. Article XXXVII asserts that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England,” and Anglican ecclesiology regards the papacy as a human institution that exceeded its legitimate authority. That Trent never seriously entertained Protestant participation or Protestant objections is taken as evidence that it was not a genuinely ecumenical council seeking the unity of Christendom.

Purgatory, Indulgences, and Popular Devotion

Trent's defense of purgatory, indulgences, the veneration of saints and images, and the withholding of the chalice from the laity (all addressed in the Council's later sessions) is held by Anglicans to have ratified the very abuses that had provoked reforming calls for a council in the first place. Rather than purging corruptions that even Catholic humanists such as Erasmus had identified, Trent is seen as having entrenched them with dogmatic authority.

The Anglican response to Trent developed across several phases. During the reign of Edward VI, English reformers including Cranmer were broadly sympathetic to continental Protestant criticisms of Trent and shaped the 1552 Book of Common Prayer and the Articles in conscious opposition to Tridentine positions. Under Elizabeth I, the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, revised 1571) gave those positions their definitive formulary form.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean divines - Jewel, Hooker, Andrews, and others - engaged Trent's decrees with sustained theological argument. John Jewel's Apology of the Church of England (1562) and his subsequent controversy with Thomas Harding constituted the first systematic Anglican response to the Tridentine settlement, arguing that the Church of England had returned to the faith of the primitive church while Rome had innovated. Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity offered a more philosophically nuanced engagement, distinguishing between Roman errors that were merely regrettable and those that were church-dividing.

In the seventeenth century, the Caroline divines developed a distinctively Anglican patristic approach that was neither straightforwardly Protestant nor Roman, appealing to the Fathers and the undivided church rather than to the Reformers alone. This trajectory produced a style of Anglican criticism of Trent grounded in historical and patristic scholarship rather than confessional polemic - though the material rejection of Tridentine definitions remained consistent.

The twentieth century brought significant shifts. Anglican participation in the ecumenical movement, and particularly the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) dialogues - formally begun in 1970, following the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 - produced agreed statements on justification, the Eucharist, and ministry that both sides acknowledged as moving beyond the mutual anathemas of the sixteenth century. Some Anglican theologians argue that the Tridentine decree on justification, properly interpreted, is not irreconcilable with Anglican teaching; others maintain that the surface agreements of ARCIC have papered over genuine doctrinal differences that Trent made permanent.

John Jewel (1522-1571) - Bishop of Salisbury and the principal Elizabethan apologist for the Church of England. His Apology of the Church of England and Defence of the Apology set the terms of Anglican anti-Tridentine argument for a generation, contending that it was Rome, not England, that had departed from the catholicity of the ancient church.

Richard Hooker (c. 1554-1600) - Author of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker distinguished Anglican from both Puritan and Roman positions, arguing that Trent had confirmed Rome in errors incompatible with Christian antiquity while defending an understanding of church authority and sacramental theology grounded in reason and Scripture together.

Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) - Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the Book of Common Prayer and the Forty-Two Articles (precursor to the Thirty-Nine). Cranmer's eucharistic theology was shaped in direct opposition to the Tridentine definition of transubstantiation, developing a doctrine of real spiritual presence received by faith rather than a corporeal presence effected by priestly consecration.

E.J. Bicknell (1882-1934) - Author of A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles, a standard twentieth-century Anglican commentary that engages Tridentine decrees systematically and represents the mainstream Anglican judgment that Trent answered the wrong questions in the wrong way.

Alister McGrath (b. 1953) - Theologian and historian of doctrine, ordained as an Anglican deacon and writing from within the evangelical Protestant tradition, whose work on the history of the doctrine of justification provides detailed scholarly grounding for the Anglican critique of the Tridentine decree on justification, arguing that Trent misread both Augustine and the medieval tradition it claimed to be defending.

Degree of Error

Anglicans disagree about whether Trent's definitions constitute heresy, serious error, or merely an inadequate and polemically skewed account of truths the Roman church genuinely holds. High-church and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have tended toward the latter assessment, while evangelical Anglicans have been more willing to use the language of doctrinal error. This maps roughly onto differing assessments of the Reformation itself within Anglicanism.

Ecumenical Reassessment

Since ARCIC and the Porvoo process, a significant strand of Anglican opinion holds that many Tridentine anathemas were directed at caricatures of Protestant teaching rather than at what the best Protestant theologians actually held, and that careful dialogue can identify a common faith beneath the sixteenth-century polemics. Critics of this view within Anglicanism argue that it involves reading Trent more charitably than its text warrants, and that genuine doctrinal differences on justification, papal authority, and the Marian dogmas remain unresolved.

The Status of Anglican Orders

The 1896 papal bull Apostolicae Curae, declaring Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void,” is read by some Anglicans as a belated consequence of the Tridentine settlement's narrow definition of valid sacramental intention and form - a definition Anglican theologians argue was itself historically tendentious. Anglo-Catholics in particular have invested heavily in contesting this judgment, while some evangelical Anglicans regard the dispute as of secondary importance.

Trent and the “Branch Theory”

Some Anglican theologians, particularly in the Catholic wing, have held that the Roman Catholic Church remains a true branch of the one holy catholic and apostolic church despite its errors, which would imply that Trent, however mistaken, was a council of a genuine church rather than a conventicle of schismatics. Others, following a more Protestant Anglican ecclesiology, are less willing to concede Rome's ecclesial status.

• Council of Trent - Main Topic
• Council of Trent - Roman Catholic Viewpoint
• Council of Trent - Lutheran Viewpoint
• Council of Trent - Reformed Viewpoint
• Council of Trent - History
• Council of Trent - Debate
• Thirty-Nine Articles
• Justification - Theological Debate
• Anglican-Roman Catholic Relations - History
• Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC)

1. Jewel, John. An Apology of the Church of England. Translated by Lady Ann Bacon, 1564. Ed. J.E. Booty. Ithaca: Cornell University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1963.
2. Hooker, Richard. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Books I-IV, 1594; Book V, 1597. Ed. W. Speed Hill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Folger Library Edition), 1977.
3. Bicknell, E.J. A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. 3rd ed., revised by H.J. Carpenter. London: Longmans, 1955.
4. McGrath, Alister E. Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Chapters 4-5 address the Tridentine decree and its Anglican reception.
5. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571). In The Book of Common Prayer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, standard edition.
6. Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. Salvation and the Church (ARCIC II, 1987). London: Church House Publishing/Catholic Truth Society, 1987.
7. Cranmer, Thomas. A Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Bloude of our Saviour Christ. London, 1550. Reprinted in The Works of Thomas Cranmer. Ed. J.E. Cox. Parker Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844.
8. Tavard, George H. The Quest for Catholicity: A Study in Anglicanism. New York: Herder and Herder, 1964. Offers a Roman Catholic scholarly account of the Anglican tradition's engagement with Tridentine theology; Tavard later became a significant contributor to the ARCIC dialogues himself.
9. Cross, F.L., and E.A. Livingstone, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Articles on “Trent, Council of,” “Thirty-Nine Articles,” and “Anglicanism.”