Anglicans characteristically affirm the via media, the "middle way", understanding their tradition as a path between Roman Catholicism and continental Protestantism that retains the catholic heritage of creed, sacrament, and threefold ministry while embracing Reformation principles such as the primacy of scripture and worship in the vernacular. The idea, developed from the Elizabethan settlement and articulated by later Anglican divines, presents Anglicanism as both catholic and reformed rather than as a compromise, drawing on scripture, tradition, and reason together.
The idea has roots in Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594 to 1597), which defended the Elizabethan settlement against both Roman claims and Puritan biblicism by appeal to scripture, reason, and tradition together. The phrase and the project were pushed furthest by John Henry Newman in Tract 90 (1841), part of the Oxford Movement's Tracts for the Times, which argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles could be read in a sense compatible with Catholic doctrine; the tract provoked such controversy that Newman's own confidence in the via media collapsed, and he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, an outcome later Anglo-Catholics took as a cautionary tale rather than a refutation of the middle way itself.