38250


Does the Hellsing Organization belong to the Anglican Church or the Protestant
Church? Or is it a secular organization?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-01-03T09:13:22.180
38230
2017-01-04T05:21:03.467
30114
question
hellsing
Hellsing Organization: Is it Anglican or Protestant?


The Hellsing organization is part of the Anglican Church. Whether the Anglican
Church is Catholic or Protestant is a bit of a complicated question.

To start with, while there is a "Catholic church" (it's the common short name
for the Roman Catholic Church in English), there's no corresponding
"Protestant church". There are multiple Protestant denominations, many of
which have sub-denominations, many of these having multiple churches within
them: Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, and lots of
others. All of these groups have their roots in Martin Luther's Protestant
Reformation, which began in the early 16th Century in Western Europe in
response to perceived corruption and doctrinal inconsistency in the dominant
Roman Catholic Church. All the early Protestant churches had certain Roman
Catholic practices they objected to;
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism#Theology) has a good
summary, but in general the Protestants thought religion should be less
focused on worldly matters and more focused on faith and prayer. They also
rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic pope and focused on the Bible as
the single defining document of Christian belief, whereas the Roman Catholic
Church had elevated various commentaries by popes and other prominent figures.

Anglicanism existed as the English branch of the Roman Catholic Church [until
1534](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Supremacy), when the English
parliament declared Henry VIII, the King of England, as head of the church.
This split the leadership from the Roman Catholic Church, but theologically,
the Anglicans continued to keep the Eucharist, which most Protestant churches
had abandoned. Whether this makes them Protestant or not is a bit hard to say.
They are often considered Protestant because they split from the Roman
Catholic Church in the same period when the Protestant Reformation was going
on, but the split had no real connection to Luther's movement; it was a
political maneuver by the English government to weaken the power of the Roman
Catholic pope. Theologically, they're more similar to the Roman Catholics than
most Protestant churches are (though as we see in Hellsing, they still find
enough differences to keep them arguing).

As a point of interest, there are Christian churches which are neither
Catholic nor Protestant: for example, the [Eastern Orthodox
churches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church), which
include the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox; Ethiopian; Coptic; and
various modern movements such as [the Jehovah's
Witnesses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses). So you could
argue that Anglicanism is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but something
distinct, like these other churches.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-01-04T05:21:03.467
38250
2017-01-04T05:21:03.467
7579
38230
answer