**COMPREhensiveness** (Comprehensiveness). - A characteristic of the Anglican Church, consisting in its “comprehending” within its membership faithful of diverse religious doctrines. The official Church of England outwardly displays a certain unity that may be misleading. Indeed, it presents this outward unity, which results from its being the Church of the State, without whose approval it cannot alter either its doctrines, prayers, or rites as set forth in the official book; moreover, it seems to form a single united bloc through its use of a common book, the *Book of Common Prayer*, through the common bond of the same 39 Articles of Religion, and also through the existence of an episcopate recognized throughout the Anglican Communion, which every ten years demonstrates its unity at the Lambeth Conferences, presided over by the primate of the Anglican Church. But if one examines the matter carefully, one discovers that the reality is quite different, for within the Anglican Church there thrives such a variety of doctrines, often contradictory, as perhaps is not found in any other Church or Protestant sect.
This phenomenon, called comprehensiveness, is not only acknowledged, confessed, and accepted by Anglicans, but one might almost say it is incorporated into the Church itself as an essential element for its existence. The Anglican Church “comprehends” indifferently within its fold faithful to whom it leaves the freedom to profess contradictory doctrines or to doubt fundamental truths. Thus, within the Anglican Church and considered good Anglicans are those who believe or deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, those who accept or reject the miracles of the Gospel, those who affirm or doubt the historicity of the Fourth Gospel, those who admit that Jesus Christ erred in His teachings or those who believe in the truth of all that He said. Comprehensiveness is nothing other than the natural consequence of Anglican principles, namely, the denial of any infallible doctrinal authority and the free interpretation of the Bible. Even the 39 Articles of Religion are so worded that they can be interpreted in different ways, and there is no authority whatsoever that can determine what their authentic meaning is. When a controversy arises over some point of revealed doctrine, Anglicanism attempts to mask this inability with the convenient theory of comprehensiveness, which in practice means leaving to the faithful the faculty of determining their own creed, or, as the Anglican bishop Knox put it, “to teach what I believe to be false, provided I can also teach what others believe to be not true”; in other words, the Church of England is called comprehensive because it embraces both errors and truths, and since it cannot decide which is error and which is truth, it “comprehends” both.
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(1st. Enc. Cat. 1)