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My point here is not to be contentious, rather the opposite.

I think it is one thing to say sacramentalism is the highest and best, most authentic to early Christian Catholicism, but another to say it is the only form of Christianity. One can think one is right—but not set the standard of who is part of Christ’ body as simultaneous to your theology.

It gets confusing to use “catholic” for “Church universal” AND a particular historic form of worship and belief. The Roman Catholics of course refer to “Catholic” as only those their denomination, however if “catholic” is to recover its original meaning of “church universal” we should use it only in that way.

Also, I’d wager that 99% of persons using the word “Protestant” today use it like those who coined it did, simply to distinguish those western Christians who were not in communion with the Bishop of Rome. No one I know of—and I think historically this is true from at least the 17th, if not the 16th Century itself, use “protestant” to mean people protesting anything. All the magisterial protestants and most of the more radical protestants too, regard themselves as part of the universal church, catholic...even while being not in communion with Rome, using the shorthand word for that concept, “Protestant.”

The world wide Anglican Communion includes many (many) evangelicals, many who vow every Sunday fidelity to the “holy Catholic Church” who also believe that scripture is the final and only inerrant authority (this doesn’t deny other authorities, like Tradition). To doubt that they are part of the Church universal I think is a serious problem.

The sacramentalist wing of the Anglican Communion needs to accept evangelicals as fellow Christians, even though they have disagreements with them...so should, and I think they do, the evangelicals to the Anglo-Catholics.

It is important to draw a distinction between one's true theology and the theology that was expressed in the face of politics. Cranmer was a great liturgist, but his theology tended to shift at different stages of his career, sometimes on both sides of political pressures. While Luther's theology was probably not influenced by politics, per se, the opportunistic intervention of the German princes concurrent with Muslim incursions into the Holy Roman Empire ultimately precluded reconciliation and the possiblity for an ecumenical resolution of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

Augustine? Surely you gest!