THIS book is offered to members of the Anglican Communion in the conviction that there is a great need within our Church for more teaching manuals which will present the dogmatic principles of Anglicanism in an easily assimilated form.  In many parts of the world members of our Communion are subject to persistent efforts to undermine their faith and loyalty to the Church.  quite apart from the spread of humanism and secularized systems of education which foster a purely materialistic outlook on life, and must be met with informed Christian opinion, the activities of the sects often present the Church with a challenge which cannot be ignored.  Even as early as 1536 when the Ten Articles were published, the crop of heresies which sprang from the religious licence accompanying the Reformation, and then known under the general name of Anabaptism, had begun to infect the Church of England.  This fact has an important bearing on the contents of the Thirty-nine Articles, more than half of which deal with ‘the pestilent and heinous heresies of the sects’, as Ridley described them, rather than with the corruptions of the Roman Church.  Anabaptism revived the whole gamut of erroneous doctrines which vexed the early Church, besides introducing novelties of its own, and demanded a fairly full restatement of orthodox teaching in reply.

The Commission on Evangelism appointed by the Arch­bishops of Canterbury and York emphasized the fundamental importance of dogma in any really effective presentation of the Gospel.  ‘Dogma is the core of every system of faith and worship; without it, religion would dissolve into mere sentiment and would, in a few generations, perish altogether’.  Out of dogma emerges Christian doctrine, which is ‘the formulation of revealed truth in current terms, together with the deductions implicit within it’.  The Commission considered that ‘a grasp of doctrine, derived from the Bible as the Word of God, is the essential equipment of an evangelist, and one that has never been more needed than to-day’.  The revival of interest in theology amongst university students, the increasing emphasis on Adult Religious Education, and the growing recognition of the layman’s place in Evangelism, all underline the need for more authoritative teaching manuals.  We believe that a study of the Thirty-nine Articles in relation to the teaching of the Bible can do much to meet this need.  On the basic Christian beliefs the Articles contain a careful, well-balanced statement of the historic Church's interpretation of the revelation of God in Christ, with which modern thought is more in sympathy than is usually supposed.  ‘The times call urgently for the Anglican witness to Scripture, tradition and reason-alike for meeting the problems which Biblical theology is creating, for serving the reintegration of the Church, and for presenting the faith as at once supernatural and related to contemporary man.  This witness demands a costly devotion to truth and a conviction that theology is not merely a hand­maid to administration, but a prime activity of the Church.’^[1]