At the core, Anglicans hold the same central Christian beliefs shared across the wider Church: belief in one God in three persons — the Trinity — and in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These beliefs are confessed corporately in worship through the historic Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed, both of which predate the Anglican tradition itself and are shared with Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians.
Anglican doctrine was historically given more specific definition in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571), which set out the Church of England's position on Scripture, salvation, the sacraments, and church order during the controversies of the Reformation. These Articles remain printed in the Book of Common Prayer and continue to inform Anglican theology, though how binding they are on clergy and churches varies across the modern Communion.
In 1888, the Lambeth Conference of bishops summarised what it considered the essential basis of Anglican identity in the Lambeth Quadrilateral: the Holy Scriptures as the ultimate standard of faith; the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds; the two sacraments instituted by Christ, Baptism and the Eucharist; and the historic Episcopate — the order of bishops standing in a line of succession from the apostles.
Beyond this shared core, Anglicans differ in emphasis. Anglo-Catholic Anglicans place particular weight on the sacraments and continuity with pre-Reformation Christianity; Evangelical Anglicans place particular weight on Scripture, personal conversion, and preaching. Both understand themselves to be within the same Anglican theological boundaries, which is part of what makes describing a single Anglican belief system, beyond this shared core, genuinely difficult.