The Vocation of Anglicanism 9780567664624, 9780567665096, 9780567664631

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The Vocation of Anglicanism

The Vocation of Anglicanism Paul Avis

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Paul Avis, 2016 Paul Avis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image © Alena Brozova/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Avis, Paul D. L., author. Title: The vocation of Anglicanism / by Paul Avis. Description: New York : Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000566 (print) | LCCN 2016014874 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567664624 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567664631 (epdf) | ISBN 9780567664648 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Anglican Communion–Doctrines. | Vocation, Ecclesiastical. | Pastoral theology–Anglican Communion. Classification: LCC BX5005 .A96 2016 (print) | LCC BX5005 (ebook) | DDC 283–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000566 ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-462-4 PB: 978-0-56768-449-3 ePDF: 978-0-56766-463-1 ePub: 978-0-56766-464-8 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface Part 1  The Vocation of Anglicanism 1 A Theological Vocation 2 An Ecclesial Vocation 3 A Missional Vocation 4 A Covenantal Vocation 5 A Peaceable Vocation Part 2  Three-Dimensional Anglicanism 6 The Claims of Catholicity 7 The Legacy of the Reformation 8 The Critical Imperative 9 Catholic and Reformed – And Something More?

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3 23 39 61 81

101 115 129 145

Conclusion 10 The Vocation of Anglicanism

171

Index of Names

189

Preface In this book I aim to address directly the Anglican predicament in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I will be speaking out of the Anglican Angst of our time. I will be speaking to the Anglican Angst of our time. But I will also be speaking out of the depth and strength of Anglican theology as it has developed and flourished over the centuries, and I will be accessing the riches, available to us from modern ecumenical ecclesiology, of theological reflection on the nature and mission of the Church. I am very conscious, as we all must be, of the demographic shift from North to South within the Anglican Communion over recent decades and I am also acutely aware that, as Anglicans, we live in a post-colonial age. But I remain convinced that our ‘inheritance of faith’, embodied in the theology, liturgy and spirituality of the Anglican tradition, still has much to offer that can help us through our present difficulties.1 So my goal is to offer a guiding thread through our troubles and dilemmas, drawn from the resources of the Anglican theological tradition and ecumenical theology. I hope also to propose a way in which we, as Anglicans, can move beyond our present disagreements and divisions in order to work together, if we are so minded and motivated, for a more united, more harmonious future for the Anglican Communion, one in which our witness as a particular ‘community of missionary disciples’ in the midst of the world will be more credible.2 We should not be so fixated on the present difficulties as to become deaf to the continuous great melody of salvation history – God’s saving initiative, presence and action in the history of Israel, in the person and work of Jesus Christ and in the Church as his body – which can never be stifled or suppressed. I think, pray and write as one ‘hearing secret harmonies’ and I trust that my readers, as they work through the successive chapters of this Ian T. Douglas and Kwok Pui-Lan (eds), Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Church Publishing Inc., 2001). 2 The resonant phrase ‘community of missionary disciples’ is taken from Pope Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (Rome: Vatican Press, November 2013). 1

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book, will hear them anew also.3 The following words of the Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky, who perished in Auschwitz, express my theological hope and vision for ‘a sense of growing coherence, like the beginning of a symphony, when the astonished listener hears the first notes of a leitmotif, then loses them and, disappointed, seeks them out once more; then suddenly the theme returns and this time you understand that it will never be lost again, that it is of a different order, more beautiful, more intense, and you listen, reassured and confident as the life-giving tempest crashes against your ears in waves’.4 Anglican arguments may be tempestuous – that is fine by me – but they should always be sure to be in the cause of ultimate harmony. To any potential readers who may be tempted to assume that they already know what line I will take, because they have heard it all before, I would like to say: ‘Bear with me. My answer may not be what you expect.’5 My conclusions and recommendations are not cast in the form of an exclusive Anglican ideology, which I would find as distasteful as the next person, nor in the form of ecclesiastical politics, its nostrums and tactics, but in the form of a profound ecclesiological truth, one that belongs to the whole Church. I write primarily as an exponent of Christian ecclesiology, albeit tinged with the mystical, not as an advocate of a supposed exclusively Anglican way of being the Church. Nevertheless, on the way to an infinitely challenging ecclesiological conclusion, there is a good deal to be discovered and considered with regard to the wealth of the Anglican tradition, heritage and mission. The Anglican Communion is currently in a state of uncertainty, confusion and turbulence. As everyone knows, there are strains and tensions, mainly between the geographically northern and culturally ‘western’ churches of the

Cf. Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies (vol. 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time; London: Heinemann, 1975; Fontana, 1977). I am drawn to W. B. Yeats’s phrase, the ‘great melody’, which he used of Edmund Burke’s lifelong crusade against the abuse of power and the oppression of subject peoples, especially in the American colonies, Ireland, France under the Revolution, and India and his championing of freedom under the law of justice and equity (‘… Burke’s great melody …’). See Yeats, ‘The Seven Sages’, in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 147–8. Conor Cruise O’Brien adopted it as the title and coordinating theme of his estimable study of Burke’s career, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commentated Anthology of Edmund Burke (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1992; Minerva, 1993). See also Chapter 9 of the present work. 4 Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude, trans. Sandra Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), p. 248. 5 Cf. P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Identity (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008). 3

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Communion and those from the ‘global South’, the industrially developing world. Bitter divisions exist over issues of sexuality and gender, conservatism and liberalism, authority and freedom, biblical interpretation and attitudes to modernity. There are also serious divisions of conviction within the member churches, including outright schisms in some of them. These centrifugal forces of pluralism are thus both inter-Anglican and intra-Anglican. Of course, this predicament is not unique to Anglicanism. The very same challenges of divergence and cohesion face other Christian world communions and the churches within them. The Reformed family of churches, notwithstanding the glories of its theological tradition (John Calvin, Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, etc.) is notoriously fissiparous and many Reformed theologians and leaders are deeply troubled by this phenomenon, wondering what it is in the Reformed heritage and outlook that can account for its schismatic tendency.6 The Lutheran World Federation, which significantly styles itself ‘A Communion of Churches’, is undergoing similar difficulties to Anglicanism. Not all Lutheran churches are even members of the LWF. Needless to say, modern issues of sex and gender are not addressed in the writings of Luther himself or in the Lutheran confessional documents gathered together in The Book of Concord, by which Lutherans tend to set such store.7 World Methodism, with all its sanctified energy and activism, is divided unequally between episcopal and non-episcopal branches and remains incorrigibly pragmatic, perhaps one of the least ecclesiologically self-conscious of the world Christian families. Orthodoxy, for all the beauty of its liturgy and its rhetoric of being the one and only Church and the same Church since the age of the apostles, is marred by similar competitiveness and rivalry in questions of authority and jurisdiction as the Anglican Communion – the difficult, century-long passage to the ‘Great and Holy Synod’ of 2016 is sufficient evidence of that. Orthodoxy also prefers to pretend officially that modern issues of gender-roles and sexual orientation do not exist for the Church. The Roman Catholic Church is seriously conflicted about genderroles in the Church and about morals and modern western mores with regard Eduardus Van der Borght (ed.), The Unity of the Church: A Theological State of the Art and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 7 Theodore G. Tappert (ed.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1959). 6

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to sex, marriage and the family. At the time of writing, it is still unclear which direction the Church’s pastoral discipline will take in this area following the Synod of Bishops in 2015. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church, for all its riches and glories and its enduring strengths, remains deeply morally compromised and discredited in the eyes of many people as a result of the endemic clerical abuse scandals and their handling by elements of the hierarchy and all the unfinished business in that respect – more so, I am afraid, than other Christian communions and churches, such as my own, that are themselves not innocent of such defilement. But the fact that other major Christian communions are similarly fraught with the dilemmas of pluralism and diversity is no excuse for Anglican complacency. If the problems that Anglicanism faces are not unique, but run through all the major Christian churches, they are not unprecedented either. Anglican history is no stranger to trauma. The Reformation itself was only the beginning of troubles. Every century of Anglican history since then has been filled with controversy and conflict. The ‘long Reformation’ continued through civil war and the actual abolition of the Church of England and its institutions for a time, until 1662 when there was a partial resolution at the price of the separation of many good and worthy ministers and people in the Great Ejection. Towards the end of the same seventeenth century there was an internal schism in the Church of England, with the separation of the Nonjurors, including an archbishop of Canterbury and a number of other bishops. In the eighteenth century the cry was often raised: ‘The Church in danger!’ Christianity itself was said to be under threat of extinction under the onslaught of rationalists, scoffers and libertines. In the 1830s, state intervention – actually much-needed reform – in the united Church of England and Ireland triggered the Tractarian Movement, with its rallying cry of ‘National Apostasy’. Space would fail to tell of the subsequent nineteenthcentury traumas, including the departure of Newman and others for Rome, the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Essays and Reviews, the Colenso affair, campaigns for disestablishment, Lux Mundi, conflicts over ‘ritualism’, and so on. We have been here before – many times.8 But that sense

The ecclesiological aspects are traced in P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective, 2nd edn (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2002).

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of déjà vu does not make the present situation any more comfortable or suggest an answer to our current problems. The outcome of the current difficulties is uncertain. The proposed Anglican Communion Covenant has not gathered the broad support that its designers and backers hoped for, but there is nothing coherent to put in its place. (I will argue that there is an inherent ‘covenantal’ dimension to all relationships of ecclesial communion, such as that among Anglican churches, regardless of the eventual fate of the Anglican Communion Covenant.) Our theological position as Anglicans appears rather hazy to many and our ecclesiology seems more than a little vague, even to ourselves. Do we know who we are and what we stand for as a Communion? Do our ecumenical partner churches know who we are and what we stand for as a Communion? Does the world around know who we are and what we stand for as a Communion? I believe that a fresh look at the Anglican tradition can help us to answer the question of the ecclesial identity of Anglicanism and the Anglican Communion. But this book is not designed as an exercise in ecclesiastical nostalgia, nor is it the product of a kind of introspective, navel-gazing preoccupation with Anglican identity, which would be merely pathetic, or even pathological. The present study aims to take a broad, long-term perspective on current issues, to address them in the context of a wider sweep of history and in some ecclesiological depth, and to look for solutions from our Anglican and ecumenical theological resources. The expression ‘The Vocation of Anglicanism’ was not invented by me, but I first used it twenty years ago in some material that I offered at the General Theological Seminary, New York City, in January 1995, and I have worked on the theme in various ways and contexts since then. I take note in Chapter 1 of the recent volume The Vocation of Anglican Theology, which is very much on my wavelength.9 Most chapters of this book have been developed from embryonic ideas in various lectures and articles in different parts of the Anglican Communion; these are noted in their place. But I would particularly like to mention that ‘Three-Dimensional Anglicanism’, the topic of three chapters (plus a further overall reflection and summing up) in the second half of the book, was the title of my Paddock Lectures, given at the General Theological Seminary in October 2011. I am grateful to the Seminary for the Ralph McMichael (ed.), The Vocation of Anglican Theology (London: SCM Press, 2014).

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invitation and to my audience for its courteous attention and I am glad to be able to publish them at last, in a worked-up version, in accordance with the terms of the lectureship. Because of its origins in conference papers and public lectures, and also because of it aims to address topics of wide concern, this book is intended for an intelligent and informed general audience – more ‘accessible’, as the jargon has it, and written with a slightly lighter touch than some of its predecessors. But for those readers who wish to pursue the argument more deeply or to follow up some of its ramifications in my other work or elsewhere, there are ample supplies of footnotes, which also serve to substantiate points that can only be made rather generally in the main text. I also wish to thank Anna Turton, Miriam Cantwell and the production staff at Bloomsbury for another very happy piece of collaboration in what is now becoming quite a long line. Without the loving practical support of my wife Susan this book, like its many predecessors, would simply not have been possible. I am very grateful. Paul Avis November 2015

Part One

The Vocation of Anglicanism

1

A Theological Vocation

Speaking personally Unusually for me, I begin this book in a personal vein. I think that this is the first time that I have spoken autobiographically at any length in one of my books. But if we are talking about vocation, and the vocation of Anglican theology in particular, it seems to me to be not at all out of place to adopt the first person singular for a moment and even to offer a brief confessio fidei. I take my cue in this chapter from a passing comment by Stanley Hauerwas, a truism that should not, but I think probably does, need to be repeated: ‘Theology is not a matter of being liberal or conservative but a matter of truth.’1 The stance that I seek to develop here is one that attempts to move beyond all ‘-isms’, such as conservatism and liberalism, and indeed beyond all parochial theological loyalties with their labels and slogans, to seek the common good of the Anglican Communion and indeed of the whole Christian Church, in so far as one ordinary person and one workaday theologian can hope to influence that even a little. In the present polarized global climate within Anglicanism and other major Christian traditions, it seems that one needs either to play along with the labels ‘orthodox’ and ‘liberal’ and nail one’s colours to one mast or the other; or much better, to deconstruct, transcend and abolish such labels (even if we cannot avoid using them occasionally, when others have done so). I must say that I wholeheartedly detest all forms of theological stereotyping and putting people and their views into little boxes. It is not true to life or history.

Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), p. xviii.

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For more than forty years I have not identified myself with any ecclesiastical party within the Anglican spectrum, not even a non-party party! I learned many years ago from the writings and example of Frederick Denison Maurice how invidious and harmful ecclesiastical parties and politicized theological positions can be.2 In my work as a theological writer, as the editor of an academic journal, as the facilitator and editor of the work of other scholars, and as a senior church executive in the field of Christian unity and ecumenical theology for more than a dozen years, I have always aimed to be non-partisan and to work in harmony and friendship as far as possible with those of different views to my own and to be trusted by them for straight talking and fair dealing. I have seen myself as a mediating and reconciling theologian. My intention as a working theologian is to stand four-square on the faith and order of the Church catholic: a faith that is revealed in the Scriptures and encapsulated in the ecumenical creeds, and an order that is reflected in the fabric of catholic polity derived from the early Church. But if I must choose a contemporary school of thought to which I feel drawn, I can say that I feel a strong, though not complete, affinity to the Radical Orthodoxy theological initiative, especially in its recent, less strident, more qualified expressions. I understand orthodoxy not as a static, entrenched position, where nothing can ever change, but in a dynamic sense, as classically suggested by Newman’s concept of the development of doctrine, which as Newman put it in the quintessence of paradox, evolves in order to remain essentially the same.3 Orthodoxy has to be continually rearticulated; in being restated it will be subtly redefined. As Stephen Sykes wrote, ‘To be orthodox is not a matter of lazily repeating the decisions and arguments of the past to meet each new critical proposal. The transformational dynamic of orthodoxy is only in evidence where theologians fully accept the contemporary task of uncovering Frederick Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1884). See also Jeremy Morris, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). A useful selection of Maurice’s writings is Jeremy Morris (ed.), To Build Christ’s Kingdom: F. D. Maurice and his Writings (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007). A fine older introduction to Maurice’s theology is A. M. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). On parties and partisanship see the excellent contribution by Andrew Atherstone, ‘Identities and Parties’, in Mark M. Chapman, Sathianathan Clarke and Martyn Percy (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Ch. 5. 3 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, edition of 1845, ed. and intro. J. M. Cameron (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). 2



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presuppositions, analysing arguments and engaging in vigorous dialogue.’4 When they do that, I would add, their orthodoxy acquires certain traits that are often associated with liberalism, or at least liberality.5 Although my own theological work, like that of most Christian theologians, draws its life from the Scriptures and the Church’s rich and varied traditions of theological reflection and argument, I regard myself as in no way qualified to sit in judgement de haut en bas on either Scripture or the theological giants of the past. Rather I aim to go to school continually with the Bible and to sit at the feet again and again of such theological luminaries as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Hooker, Butler, Schleiermacher, Coleridge, Maurice, Newman, Gore, Temple, Barth, Hoskyns, Ramsey, Tillich, Rahner, Torrance, Macquarrie, Pannenberg and Zizioulas, to name but a few whose work has entered the canon of Christian theology and who have particularly shaped my thinking. Each day, as we turn to our theological tasks, we form afresh the intention to put ourselves to learn in the school of Christ. Given that stance, I have to say that I do not see myself as a liberal theologian, in any ‘card-carrying’, party sense. I have recently been called a (modified) ‘Liberal Protestant’ in print by one Anglo-Catholic, though also, a while ago, a ‘Prayer Book Catholic’ by another. I do not endorse these labels, nor do I think it appropriate for anyone to apply straitjacket identities, even anachronistic ones, to others. I would not entirely repudiate any of the terms ‘orthodox’, ‘liberal’, ‘Protestant’, ‘Prayer Book’, ‘Reformed’, ‘Catholic’ or ‘radical’, applied to my theological stance, and I identify to some varying degree with them all. But I find such labels crude and distorting as far as the theological identity of any theologian is concerned, including myself. If we have been shaped, intellectually and spiritually, by many different influences in the history of theology and if we have responded with empathy and gratitude to them, we cannot disdain any one of them, though we can and should respond to them with discrimination and never uncritically. Suspicion and deconstruction have their place; but cynicism always comes amiss. As Karl Barth points out, no matter who our parents may be or what they are Stephen Sykes, ‘“Orthodoxy” and “Liberalism”’, in David F. Ford and Dennis L. Stamps (eds), Essentials of Christian Community: Essays for Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 76–90, at pp. 76–7. 5 Alec Vidler, Essays in Liberality (London: SCM Press, 1957). 4

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like, we relate to them in the first place not with suspicion and mistrust, but with respect and a willingness to learn – and the same applies to our forebears in the faith.6 Similarly, we cannot expect to understand any text if we immediately apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to it. We start not from a position of scepticism and disdain, like some over-scrupulous Christians who cannot find a church that meets their exacting requirements, that matches their image of the ideal church, and have been known in some cases even to baptize themselves; ‘se-baptists’ are found even today. Baptism is not a bad metaphor for hermeneutics: we immerse ourselves in the world of the text; we receive it, we do not make it; we then appropriate it and live it; it becomes part of our mental and spiritual resources; it is tried and tested in experience. A true humility, empathy and receptivity – a teachable spirit – are needed to understand any text from another world of discourse. What we need for the right interpretation of a theological text, just as with a poem, a novel, a play or a biography, is ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’, as S. T. Coleridge (frequently echoed by T. S. Eliot) called it.7 Allow me at this point to put a few more personal cards on the table about my main theological influences before I return to those overused and much abused terms ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘liberalism’. Before studying theology academically, I was helped more than anything else as a very keen young Christian (like countless others) by the apologetic writings of C. S. Lewis. He understood doubt and struggle; what he offered in response was a sober regime of Christian virtue, prayer and worship, tinged with emotional, almost mystical experience. Although Lewis did not direct me to the sacraments, which would have been even more helpful in the long term, I found his characteristic approach hugely steadying and heartening. So imagine my shock and dismay when I picked up the Sunday newspaper on 24 November 1963 and read that my mentor and the mainstay of my budding faith had just died (in fact two days before). But I followed in Lewis’s footsteps when soon my imagination was ‘baptized’ into a realm of mystery (just as his had been, as Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–), II/1, p. 590. 7 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1965 [Everyman edn]), Ch. XIV. 6



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he recalled in Surprised by Joy) by George MacDonald’s weird supernatural fantasies of the unconscious, Phantastes and Lilith.8 At about the same time Lewis’s space-fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra [= Voyage to Venus] and That Hideous Strength) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (which should not be patronized by literary snobs, even after the film version!) evoked a sense of the numinous and stimulated my developing imaginative world-view. Beyond the beauty of nature, literature and music, which already enthralled me, there was a further realm of mystery, to which imagination held the key. G. K. Chesterton, whom Lewis found deeply impressive, even before his own conversion to Christianity, put his finger on this point in Orthodoxy, which I read at about the same time. ‘I am concerned’, wrote Chesterton in one of his downbeat, knock-out paradoxes, ‘with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.’9 It was Lewis and Chesterton who first showed me that there was actually a satisfying intellectual content to Christian faith. But theologically and spiritually I still had (and still have, of course!) a long way to go. I confess with shame that when, as a teenager, I first read Thomas à Kempis, the eucharistic devotions of Book Four of The Imitation of Christ were almost meaningless to me, terra incognita. The evangelical church where my youthful faith had been kindled had, at best, a memorialist understanding of ‘the breaking of bread’; although it was a sacred, indeed solemn moment, there was no sense of the real presence or of being caught up into the movement of Christ’s self-offering to the Father.10 And I would not say that there was any theology there, only biblically formed but inchoate intuitions. I was soon captivated by the Confessions of St Augustine in an antique translation, though I did not understand the philosophy in his narrative.11 Later I responded intuitively to the centrality of Jesus Christ, the one Word of God to us, of Karl Barth’s Evangelical Theology, without really understanding ‘where George MacDonald, Phantastes and Lilith, with an introduction by C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964). Lewis refers to his imagination being ‘baptised’ by his reading of Phantastes in that introduction and in Surprised by Joy (London: Fontana, 1959 [1955]), pp. 144–6. What Lewis found in MacDonald was ‘holiness’ and ‘goodness’. 9 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Fontana, 1961 [1908]), p. 49. 10 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952). 11 St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Sir Tobie Matthew (London: Fontana, 1959; first published 1620). 8

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he was coming from’.12 I was already hungry for theology, but I did not yet really know where to find it. As a theological student, my initial theological formation (apart from biblical studies in the original languages) came through the study of patristic theology, a taste of Aquinas, Luther, Calvin (at the age of twenty I read through the Institutes in the Beveridge translation) and Hooker. I moved on, without ever leaving the great triumvirate of Luther, Calvin and Hooker behind, to modern Anglican theology, especially S. T. Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, Charles Gore (on whom I wrote my doctoral thesis), William Temple and Michael Ramsey. Gore and Temple, their lives as well as their writings, showed me the way out of a narrow biblicism: to be faithful to Scripture you did not need to cling to inerrancy. Freed from the shackles of literalistic biblicism, I was eager to devour course after course of a jumbled theological banquet consisting mainly of Schleiermacher, Tillich, Newman, Barth and Torrance. Stephen Sykes and Michael Ramsey were my personal mentors in the study of Anglicanism. A bit later I was rather captivated by Karl Rahner’s subtle ‘immanent’ theological logic, which often led from unimpeachably orthodox premises to ecclesiastically subversive conclusions. My current daily reading (which I began in Lent, though certainly not by way of penance, and then wanted to continue) is Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics – awesome in its scope, depth and power. My aim in my ecclesiological work is to focus steadily on what the Church is – and might become – in the saving purposes of God (missio Dei). I am guided by an intuitive sense of the catholicity or wholeness of the Church, in which all the essentials of sacraments, ministry and polity are given and embedded, and by an equally strong sense of the transforming power of the gospel. For me, the gospel and the catholic Church (to use Michael Ramsey’s phrase) are one thought, not two. I doubt whether there can be a liberal ecclesiology, because liberals sit light to the institutional forms and structures that embody the mind and life of a community through time and these are an ecclesiological matter. A catholic, on the other hand, is a person with a governing sense of the continuity of the Church through history. An overriding concern for the truth of the gospel and for the moral and theological integrity of the Christian Church, means aiming to recover a controlling awareness of the Church – its Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, trans. Grover Foley (London: Fontana, 1965).

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historical embodiment as a moral community, grounded in determinative events, sustained by distinctive values, upholding key doctrines, ordered in its life and ministry by an authority that belongs to the whole body, and united by bonds of communion. It adds up to a whole-person commitment to serve the Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Putting all that together hardly makes for a very liberal CV! But, it is in the application of biblical revelation and credal faith to changing circumstances and cultures that the challenge lies. As the Preface to the Church of England’s Declaration of Assent says, it is precisely ‘the faith uniquely revealed in the holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds’ that ‘the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation’.13 Can the challenge of freshness be met without being radically open and receptive to the information and insights of the surrounding culture and other relevant disciplines? If this is ‘liberal’, so be it. As John Habgood noted, a constant feature of liberalism is the intention ‘to take seriously the intellectual climate in which faith has to be lived’.14 That is hardly a sin! To hold dear that ecclesiological vision is not at all the same, in my book, as advocating a polity of the gathered church, or one that needs to draw membership lines that individuals cannot be left to draw for themselves, or one that revels in its difference from the surrounding society. Those ideas, identified with elements in the writings of Stanley Hauerwas, I find deeply theologically unsympathetic as well as counterproductive for the task of mission.15 I am on the track of that elusive notion of a church that fulfils its divine commission by being a church for the whole community, both local and national, and from which no one who wishes in sincerity to receive its ministrations should feel excluded or unwelcome. I am still convinced that the social, public face of the Church, not its ideological purity, is the key operative factor in mission.16 A church that understands its mission in that way will Canon C 15. John Habgood, Making Sense (London: SPCK, 1993), Ch. 16 (‘Reflections on the Liberal Position’), pp. 197–207, at p. 202. 15 See Paul Fiddes, ‘Versions of Ecclesiology: Stanley Hauerwas and Nicholas Healy’, Ecclesiology 12.3 (2016), and Victoria Lorrimar, ‘Church and Christ in the work of Stanley Hauerwas’, Ecclesiology 11.3 (2015), pp. 306–26. 16 See Peter Sedgwick, ‘On Anglican Polity’, in David F. Ford and Dennis L. Stamps (eds), Essentials of Christian Community: Essays for Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), Ch. 13; Philip Sheldrake, ‘Distinctive or All-Embracing? Retrieving the Foundations of Anglican Spirituality in a Postmodern Era’, Anglican Theological Review LXXXIV.4 (2002): 839–52. 13 14

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make it its first priority, even at some cost, to maintain a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral care in every significant community of the land. It will recognize the power of sacred symbol and ensure that it has its sacred places as well as persons (churches as well as clergy) comprehensively deployed in order to provide publicly identifiable points of access to its message and its ministry. At the same time, such a church will value those arrangements and structures (forms of ‘establishment’ or de facto approximations to it), where they are available, that provide it with a platform and recognized channels for making its contribution to vital national issues. This kind of church will make an effective contribution to public doctrine, underpinned by a belief in the credibility of its message as ‘public truth’. It will be committed to a nationwide ministry of the gospel, in the form of word and sacrament, combined with a nationwide service to the community, especially to those in greatest need. The conventional label for this model of ecclesiology is ‘national church’. In the United Kingdom both the Church of England and the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland tend to describe themselves as national churches. While they are also both ‘established’ churches, albeit established in different ways, they are not the only churches that aspire to a national witness. The term ‘national church’ is still helpful and probably irreplaceable, provided that connotations of nationalism (the church supports the nation, right or wrong) or exclusivism (as the national church we have a stronger right or legitimation than other churches) are avoided. What I want to develop at this point, then, is a theology geared to the Church and an ecclesiology geared to mission. Now any ecclesiology, as a necessarily theological discipline, requires the input of theologians and depends on institutions dedicated to theological research, teaching and publication. Any church that reflects critically on its ecclesiology and missiology (missional ecclesiology) will honour theologians, resource them and use their services. But an ecclesiology specifically driven by mission will need theologians (and, for that matter, practitioners of other disciplines) to resource its engagement with the mission context: human pastoral needs, dynamic cultural shifts, changing social structures, and significant political and economic developments. Since the essential task of a missional ecclesiology is to connect – to bring the Christian gospel into effective, creative engagement with human existence at a given moment – it will need theologians with acutely sensitive antennae to



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the signals of transcendence, the indicators of hunger for God, in any given context, not those who are deaf to such signs or find them uninteresting. What overall theological stance on my part does this suggest? I think it points to a commitment in principle – though it remains far beyond the ability and time of any one person – to engage seriously with contemporary culture and advancing knowledge, including dialogue with other faiths. If that is ‘liberalism’, then theology cannot but be ‘liberal’. Christian theology has always been conducted in dialogue with the prevailing culture. There is nothing controversial about that thesis. I cannot think of a notable theologian in the past who did not so engage, or a reputable theologian today who does not do so. Committed engagement is a truism; it is what the gospel calls for. The issue at stake in the polarization of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘liberalism’ is not engagement, but the principles and presuppositions that we bring to that engagement.

A theological vocation Attempting, to the best of our ability, any concentrated piece of theological work over time becomes inescapably a matter of vocation. Although theology demands that we devote our best intellectual powers to its tasks, it is never merely a cerebral activity, a mental exercise. Theology involves the whole person, body, mind and spirit; it is an existential activity, a controlling ethic. We theologize with the imagination and the conscience as much as we do with the analytical intellect. We cannot theologize apart from our bodies and our daily regimen or ‘rule of life’. To pray and worship and meditate on Scripture, in fellowship with others so engaged, are the primary means of doing theology. Every question, challenge and fresh opportunity in life comes to us through the prism of our theological dedication. The theologian is engaged day and night (like the Psalmist) because the unity of his or her life, as an unfolding meaningful whole, from birth to death and beyond, is at stake. Also at stake is the struggle to make sense of God’s good purposes for the whole world, the faith that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’ (Rom. 8.28). To strive for that wholeness of theological vision, with its light and shade, is the burden that is thrust upon

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the theologian, a burden that one finds fulfilment and, as Karl Barth insists, also happiness, in bearing.17 Notwithstanding Alfred North Whitehead’s famous dictum, ‘Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness’, theology is not a solitary activity, even when the theologian feels that they are ploughing a lonely furrow and that those who are listening are few.18 Karl Barth pinpoints solitude as a threat to the theological task; it can sap our energy and resolution. Like the ultimate loneliness of the pastor in the midst of their Christian flock, the theologian can feel isolated from sympathetic and supportive fellow workers. ‘Whoever takes up the subject of theology’, Barth writes, ‘discovers himself [sic] immediately, recurrently, and inevitably banished into a strange and notoriously oppressive solitude.’19 We cannot live by the theological ethic as theologians in isolation, because the theological ethic, like all Christian ethics, is a social ethic.20 Nevertheless, Barth would not deny that theology involves the theologian in a community of scholarship, reflection and argument, both past and present. That community is a never-failing source of theological nourishment and stimulus. Texts, liturgies, art, the lives of the saints and hymnody form the theological matrix. Without the resources, insights and explorations of the theological community that extends before us in time and around us in space we would be attempting to make bricks without straw; in fact we would not know what a brick was. As Barth affirms, the faith of the Christian community is what makes a person a theologian.21 So we cannot be theologians unless we are committed, dedicated and given over to our task and goal, which is to come to know, understand, explain and articulate ‘the truth as it is in Jesus’ (Eph. 4.21). To be committed is to obey an imperative and to follow an inner calling in spite of opposition and discouragement. While much the same could be said of other scholarly disciplines, in theology we are, almost uniquely, engaged with what Paul Tillich called ‘our ultimate concern’ and that overriding factor lifts theology to a higher level. As Barth writes, ‘Since the concern which claims the theologian even in his Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 18 passim. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 16. 19 Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 105. 20 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 96. 21 Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 111. 17 18



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private life is total, his commitment is also total. Commitment begins with the theologian’s wonder and is directly related to his concern. It comprehends, indeed, his whole existence.’22 There is a vocation involved in all intensive, consistent, ongoing theological work.23 But there can also be a vocation to pursue one’s theological endeavours within a particular tradition, to explore its hidden riches and to bring out its relevance to the questions with which we wrestle in the Church today. As well as a vocation to serve Roman Catholic or Orthodox or Lutheran or Reformed or Methodist or Pentecostal theology, there is surely room for a vocation to serve Anglican theology. The recent symposium of essays and selected texts The Vocation of Anglican Theology is described by the editor Ralph McMichael as an ‘invitation to inhabit the Anglican theological imagination’.24 There are few things more to be desired than that Anglicans today should re-enter and learn to inhabit and be at home in the ‘theological imagination’ of their tradition in order to draw sustenance and inspiration from it. Anglican theology is presented in The Vocation of Anglican Theology as a search for truth that embraces a disciplined formation of life and devotion – ‘living theologically in an enduring, patient, habituated and disciplined way’.25 This tradition of theological method, that seems particularly characteristic of Anglicanism, did not begin in the sixteenth century, as some uninstructed people tend to assume, but takes its tendency already from Anselm’s method of ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum; cf. his credo ut intelligam) in the eleventh century and indeed from Augustine of Hippo’s crede, ut intelligas, ‘believe so that you may understand’. Jeremy Taylor similarly speaks of a life of holiness as ‘the way of understanding’, the path to truth. Theology, for this seventeenth-century divine and bishop, ‘is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge’.26 In the same way, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the greatest lay theologian of the Anglican tradition (who, incredibly, is not even mentioned in the book), brought out the educative, formative role of method – a method that

Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 83. For a more recent example of reflection on the theological vocation, see Tom Greggs, Rachel Muers and Simeon Zahl (eds), The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013), especially the editors’ Introduction. 24 Ralph McMichael (ed.), The Vocation of Anglican Theology (London: SCM Press, 2014), p. xi. 25 McMichael (ed.), Vocation of Anglican Theology, p. 1. 26 McMichael (ed.), Vocation of Anglican Theology, pp. 8, 25–7. 22 23

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involves the whole person and life – in Aids to Reflection. For Coleridge the apprehension of truth is grounded in the practical, not the speculative reason and therefore belongs to the moral orientation and controlling vocation of the theologian. While John Henry Newman accused Coleridge of indulging in ‘a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate’, which led him to advocate ‘conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian’, Coleridge in fact deplored ‘the shifting sand-wastes and mirages of speculative theology’ and sought the path of practical, pastoral and spiritual theology.27 I think that perhaps Coleridge was at heart first a metaphysician and secondly an epistemologist, whereas for Newman how we come to know was really more interesting than what we know – epistemology trumped metaphysics. Newman was fascinated by what he discovered within himself and tended to absorb everything into the experiencing subject, while Coleridge was enthralled not only by the life of the imagination (‘the shaping spirit’) but also by what he came to know of the world without, including the world of theories, ideas and texts, which is in an important sense external to us (as Karl Popper brought out).28 In Aids to Reflection Coleridge wanted to teach reflexive selfknowledge, the connection between prudence, morals and religion, and the understanding of words and of the power of words – never put more forcefully by Coleridge than here: ‘words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.’29 In his Preface Coleridge quotes Augustine: ‘For faith ought to precede understanding, so that understanding may be the reward of faith.’ Coleridge was fascinated by the Septuagint (Greek) translation of Isaiah 7.9: ‘Unless you believe you will not understand’ (which lay behind Augustine’s dictum), and returned to it again and again.30 This is precisely the approach expounded by the contributors to The Vocation of Anglican Theology and the J. H. Newman, ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, Essays Critical and Historical (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1895), vol. 1, p. 268 (originally published in The British Critic, 1841); S.  T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 9 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge, 1993), p. 172 (Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion B, Aphorism II). The full title is indicative of Coleridge’s purpose: Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from our Elder Divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton. 28 Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 29 Coleridge, Aids, p. 10 (Preface). 30 Coleridge, Aids, p. 9 and n. 27



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authors that they select from the repertoire of Anglican theology. In the study of theology heart and head must be transformed together, side by side. As Coleridge puts it: Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word (by whom light, as well as immortality, was brought into the world) which did not expand the intellect, while it purified the heart: which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions.31

We may pause for a moment to note a remarkable convergence of theological methods between the nineteenth-century Anglican theologians Coleridge and Maurice and the twentieth-century Reformed theologians Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance, relating to the vocation of the theologian. The conjunction of trajectories, both deriving from Augustine and Anselm, is epitomized in Barth’s Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (‘Faith Seeking Understanding’, 1958, ET 1960). Barth described the method expounded in this work as ‘a vital key, if not the key, to an understanding of that whole process of thought that has impressed me more and more in my Church Dogmatics as the only one proper to theology’.32 There is a community of authentic theological intention and method to be discerned here, drawing together Anglican and Reformed theologians on the basis of patristic insights. It suggests that, were Anglican and Reformed theologians to recover the Augustinian-Anselmian impulse of theological method (‘faith seeking understanding’), they would find themselves drawing closer to each other. As the McMichael symposium suggests, Anglican theology originated and was defined in the idiom of argument, apologetic or polemic, especially in the Reformation period and the seventeenth century with its civil war and the abolition of the Church of England for the time being. But Anglican Coleridge, Aids, pp. 18–19 (Introductory Aphorisms, XIII). Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. Ian Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 11. Fortunately the central point here about the theological method of Barth (and others) as ‘faith seeking understanding’ is not affected by the intense debate within Barth-scholarship on the relation between the dialectical and the analogical aspects of his theology or by the uncertainty surrounding the chronology of this development (if there was one). See H. U. von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Communio Books, Ignatius Press, 1992 [German 1951]); Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Timothy Stanley, ‘Returning Barth to Anselm’, Modern Theology, 24.3 (2008), pp. 413–37; Stephen D. Wigley, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 138–47 (a discussion of Barth’s and von Balthasar’s respective interpretations of Anselm and of his significance for their theologies).

31 32

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theology moved beyond the polemical and reactive to achieve more contemplative, more God-focused moments, without succumbing to the illusion that theology can be prosecuted in abstraction from the human condition, personal, social and political, that forms its inescapable milieu. Anglican theology (distinctively but not uniquely) has sought to be faithful to the catholic inheritance of faith, not promoting eccentric doctrines of its own (which is not to say that there are no doctrines – especially in the area of ecclesiology – that are distinctively Anglican; there are). Its tendency (again, distinctive but not unique) has been to home in on the essential truths of biblical revelation, always seeking the centre, the core of faith, rather than building superstructures of speculative theology. McMichael highlights the method that Michael Ramsey learned from the writings of Frederick Denison Maurice, of digging deep for truth, sounding the depths, touching the foundation, ‘a theological sensibility characterized more by exploration than by speculation’.33 To the term ‘exploration’ I would add ‘excavation’ – digging down to what Scripture and the Christian theological, liturgical and spiritual traditions will yield to the receptivity of faith. Excavation and exploration, leading to discovery and interpretation, within the world of revelation, are both needed. Ramsey wrote of Maurice: ‘Things that we commonly grasp in one-sided antitheses, Maurice saw in their undivided oneness.’34 Maurice felt a compulsion to seek for unity, integration and wholeness. ‘The desire for Unity has haunted me all my life through’, he confessed.35 Anglican theology, as exemplified by Coleridge, Maurice and Ramsey, is vocational in that it seeks a unity and wholeness of theology, life and world. It is infused with worship, in tune with the liturgy, and sensitive to its social, political and cultural context; not set apart, defensive or merely reactive. Spirituality and theological exploration, prayer and theological reflection, have gone hand in hand. Anglican theology has no need to keep justifying the Church as an institution – it is not answerable to a central magisterium with executive power – nor does it exist to promote a particular theological identity or school of thought, which would be merely a human ideology. It McMichael (ed.), Vocation of Anglican Theology, p. 12. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice, p. 114. As I intend to write extensively elsewhere about Maurice’s theological method and its significance for Anglican theology, I will not elaborate the point here. 35 Frederick Maurice (ed.), Life of Maurice, vol. 1, p. 41. 33 34



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follows the lure of God’s truth. What the McMichael symposium abundantly shows is that the centrality of Jesus Christ, and our loving relationship to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, in him, forms the golden thread that runs through Anglican theology. When they do theology, Anglicans (though not of course only Anglicans) seek Christ and truth – Christ the Truth, in fact. Beyond all ecclesiastical allegiances, party spirit and academic in-fighting, it is to this that we are called. Identity must give way to vocation, which takes its cue not primarily from the social structure of a church or a communion, but from divine, scriptural revelation as that impacts on the life and work of the theologian within the community.36 I think, on reflection, that I have been committed to this pathway – at once practical, pastoral, liturgical, ethical and spiritual – for a long time. In one of my first books, in the early 1980s, I wrote: ‘The Church’s apprehension of truth is given, not through steadily more precise and accurate interpretations of its doctrinal formulae, but through its life of worship, prayer, fellowship, service and suffering.’37

Anglican liberality ‘Liberal’ has recently become a pejorative term in Anglican discourse and is almost unusable. If asked to give examples of recent liberal bishops, some Anglicans or Episcopalians might name John Selby Spong, formerly of Newark, New Jersey, and David Jenkins, formerly of Durham, though their theologies were very different in both content and intellectual weight. However, it is instructive to recall that Charles Gore, the most powerful Anglican bishop-theologian of the early twentieth century and without a doubt a bastion of credal orthodoxy, rejoiced in the designation ‘liberal catholic’. The term ‘liberal catholicism’ came to distinguish the school that produced Lux Mundi under Gore’s leadership in 1889 and opened a new chapter in Anglican theology with its synthesis between doctrinal orthodoxy and openness to new movements in science, philosophy and social thought. Gore once described ‘liberal catholicism’ as the ‘maintenance of the ancient

McMichael (ed.), Vocation of Anglican Theology, p. 19. P. Avis, Ecumenical Theology and the Elusiveness of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1986), p. 43.

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tradition and the ancient system which insists at the same time on expecting the individual member to do much for himself, which curbs the excesses of sacerdotalism and authority, which is scriptural and historical and a religion for free men’.38 The word liberal was already attracting pejorative overtones at the time of the First World War. John Neville Figgis of the Community of the Resurrection (founded by Gore), preaching in 1917 in Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair, London, exhorted his congregation of rather upper-class Anglo-Catholics: ‘Let us not be afraid to claim for ourselves as Catholic Christians the name of liberal.’ The term liberal, Figgis pointed out, was not the exclusive property of persons with negative and heterodox views like the egregious Bishop Hoadly in the eighteenth century.39 Major wars concentrate the mind. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, Alec Vidler acknowledged that liberalism in the nineteenthcentury sense – the liberalism of which John Morley, the biographer of Voltaire and Gladstone, who resigned from the Cabinet when Britain declared war in 1914, was a pre-eminent exponent – had had its day. The liberal agenda with its lofty tolerance, its exaltation of conscience above all external authorities, its faith in the ideal of a principled but by no means equal society, was not (Vidler asserted) what was needed now. What the world needed to hear from the Church was the voice of prophecy and a message of full conviction. Freedom to believe and say what you think has been won; nobody minds what you believe or say; we are no longer shocked. In such a world the Liberal has lost his bearings. Original and independent minds are no longer attracted to his ranks. For Liberalism has ceased to be original. We can be as independent as we please.40

But if Liberalism as an ideology was defunct, the liberal qualities of mind and character – Vidler prefers to call it ‘liberality’ – were needed more than ever: Charles Gore, Dominant Ideas and Corrective Principles (London: Mowbray, 1918), p. 94. On Gore’s liberal catholicism see James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960) and Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing: Churchman, 1988). A selection of his writings with a fine introduction is Peter Waddell (ed.), Charles Gore: Radical Anglican (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2014). 39 John Neville Figgis, Hopes for English Religion (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1919), p. 10. 40 Vidler, Essays in Liberality, p. 18. Cf. John Viscount Morley, Recollections, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1917); id., On Compromise (London: Macmillan, 1886). 38



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The word ‘liberal’ [Vidler argued] denotes not a creed or a set of philosophical assumptions or any ’ism, but a frame of mind, a quality of character, which it is easier no doubt to discern than to define. A liberal-minded man [sic] is free from narrow prejudice, generous in his judgement of others, open-minded, especially to the reception of new ideas or proposals for reform. Liberal is the opposite not of conservative but of fanatical or bigoted or intransigent. It points to the esprit large and away from the idée fixe.41

The former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, described himself as a ‘conservative liberal’. ‘Liberal’, he observes, is used by some as a term of abuse: ‘The General Synod has heard liberalism described as “a cancer in the Church of England”, and there are those who seem to imagine that any faith short of fundamentalism is really a form of apostasy.’42 But for Habgood the word liberal represents an openness in the search for truth which is essential to the health of religion. ‘We grow in knowledge only insofar as we are prepared to criticise what we think we know already. True knowledge is tested knowledge … That is why an illiberal faith must in the end be untrue to a gospel which promises abundant life and growth.’43

An integrated theological method What is it like to think as an Anglican? How can we define the ethos of the Anglican theological tradition? What is the character or temper of Anglican theology? Anglicans generally hold that Anglicanism aspires to be both a reformed and a reasonable expression of the catholic faith. The impact of the Reformation and the claims of rationality are acknowledged by Anglicans of different persuasions and traditions, though the interpretation and emphasis that they put on these qualifying clauses varies. The reformed or evangelical quality stems from the emphasis on personal trust in Christ, the centre of our devotion, for salvation and from the centrality of the Bible in worship, preaching and doctrine. The liberality lies in the scope given to scholarly research and intellectual enquiry and debate. Vidler, Essays in Liberality, pp. 21–2. John Habgood, Confessions of a Conservative Liberal (London: SPCK, 1988), p. 2. 43 Habgood, Confessions of a Conservative Liberal, p. 2. 41 42

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Anglicanism aims at a tradition-orientated catholicism that is reformed in the light of intellectual argument based on sound research, including the findings of biblical scholarship and their theological interpretation. In Anglicanism the well-founded conclusions of theological scholarship are allowed to act critically on ecclesiastical tradition over time. With whatever admixture of less worthy motives – political, economic and personal – that was precisely the essence of the Reformers’ approach both in England and on the Continent: they were almost all trained in Renaissance Humanist scholarly disciplines.44 It is an ideal that has been reiterated and reinforced by such modern interpreters of Anglicanism as Mandell Creighton, Charles Gore, Hensley Henson, William Temple and Michael Ramsey. Though this interpretation of Anglicanism may seem to invite a good deal of qualification, and may even seem provocative to some, my central point is the uncontroversial one that Anglicanism is a particular form or expression of catholicism, one that binds together the biblical message, the historical continuity of the Church, and reasoned enquiry and debate. Only by affirming Anglican catholicity as it has been shaped in history and as it is today – a catholicism qualified by liberality and the witness of the Reformation – can we connect the Church in the creed with the Church as we know it. However, it is still not enough to affirm the catholic character of Anglicanism, or to qualify that catholicism with the attributes ‘reasonable and reformed’ or ‘liberal and evangelical’. Looked at in the perspective of history, catholicism is not monolithic, it is not one thing. In the history of the western Church, two fundamental and generic forms or types of the polity of the Church – its distribution of authority, the way it is governed and decisions are taken – may be broadly discerned and can be briefly designated the monarchical and the conciliar. The monarchical polity stand for the hierarchical concentration of authority and the conciliar polity for its corporate distribution. Modern Anglicanism, with its polity of ‘the bishop in synod’, is an expression of conciliar catholicism in which authority is grounded in the body of Christ as a whole, and comes to expression, or into focus, when the people of God, bishops, clergy and laity, come together, normally through their elected representatives, in order to confer, discuss and decide on matters affecting the life See further P. Avis, In Search of Authority, Chs 1 and 2.

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and mission of the Church. As Karl Barth puts it, ‘Church law is not content with anything less than a total common and reciprocal responsibility’.45 In order to work as it should, conciliarity demands certain moral and personal qualities in its participants: mutual respect, willingness to listen to others and to be persuaded by sound argument, openness to criticism, and reasonableness and courtesy in handling disagreement. I cannot help it if these attributes are often associated with liberalism, or at least liberality. I began this chapter by setting up the ostensibly opposed notions ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘liberalism’. Although I cannot include a deeper study of these concepts here, I can say that my aim is to move beyond such labels as ‘liberal’ and ‘orthodox’. Neither will pass muster as manifesto mastheads for internal Anglican arguments and debates. They are invidious terms when they are used to divide Christians from each other. What is called for is much more subtle and nuanced. Michael Ramsey identified it as the ‘binding together’ of the biblical gospel, the catholic Church and sound learning.46 However we may choose to label the ingredients, we are certainly looking at a threefold theological allegiance: first, a loyalty to the Church catholic and its central tradition, rooted in the New Testament, the Fathers, the early ecumenical councils, and continuously unfolding through the Christian centuries; second, a passionate dedication to the biblical gospel of God’s free and unmerited grace in Jesus Christ, as it was rediscovered by the Reformers and enshrined in the historic Anglican formularies, especially the Book of Common Prayer, 1662; and third, a wholehearted commitment to the continual pursuit of truth in company with others, however demanding, however costly that may prove to be. Empathy is not painless and charity is not cheap. These issues will be explored in greater depth in the rest of this book, but such, it seems to me, in merest outline, is the theological vocation of Anglicanism.

Barth, CD, IV/2, p. 724. A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936).

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An Ecclesial Vocation1

I take my initial cue in this chapter from two benchmark publications of the brilliant twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1919, Keynes – then in his mid-thirties – made his mark publicly with the timely tract, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Disgusted by the political posturing at the post-World War I conference that led to the Treaty of Versailles and alarmed at the impossible scale of the reparations exacted on a defeated Germany, Keynes pilloried the leading politicians – the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Lloyd George, the president of France, Georges Clemenceau, and the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson – and foretold dire consequences for the world economy.2 Then in 1925 Keynes echoed the title of his earlier book when he attacked Winston Churchill’s decision, as chancellor of the exchequer in the UK government, to revert to the gold standard for sterling at parity with pre-war values that Keynes believed the country could ill afford. He blamed not Churchill personally, but his incompetent advisers, and he and Churchill did not fall out. The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill began as a series of articles and was published in book form by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.3 By analogy with Keynes’s work, I want to This is an expanded and revised version of part of a paper given at a conference on the Anglican Covenant at Wycliffe College, Toronto, in May 2012. It also includes some material from my paper ‘The Ecumenical Consequences of the Anglican Communion’, given at Trinity College, Dublin under the auspices of the Irish School of Ecumenics in May 2011 and published in One in Christ, 45.1 (2011): 95–110. 2 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919], Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (29 vols, London: Macmillan, 1971–83, vol. 2 [1971]). Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1983), Ch. 16. 3 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, ed. Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925)]; idem., Collected Writings, vol. 19, part 1 [1981], pp. 357–453. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 187–207, esp. pp. 202–3; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume 5, 1922–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1976), Ch. 5. 1

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ask: What ecclesiological consequences, or implications, should we draw from the fact, the phenomenon, of the Anglican Communion? Or to put it slightly differently: What ecclesiological consequences follow from being Anglicans in communion?

The ecclesiological consequences of the Anglican Communion So let us begin by trying to pin down what exactly the Anglican Communion of thirty-eight self-governing churches around the world is, ecclesiologically speaking. How should we describe and define it theologically? The fact that this question is often neither asked, nor (therefore) answered, hampers much of the discussion of Anglican Communion issues. Ignorance and uncertainty about what the Anglican Communion is, or aims to be, is particularly unhelpful at the present time. It affects our conversation within the Communion about the urgent matters facing us – matters concerned with unity, communion, authority, autonomy and mutual accountability, and it has an impact on our ecumenical relations and dialogues. So what kind of ecclesiological ‘animal’ is the Anglican Communion? Is it perhaps merely an outdated relic of empire, the residue of a now almost disappeared British Empire, and therefore fatally compromised by its aggressive imperialist and colonialist origins? Without in any way playing down the fact that in many parts of the world Anglicanism and the spread of the Communion was carried on the back of the expanding British Empire, it would be absurd as well as insulting to all its member churches to say that it is now no more than that – that it has in no way transcended its contingent, compromised historical origins. Is it then perhaps an international organization, a kind of Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), that aims to do useful work throughout the world and brings people together in a common cause, but whose reason for existing is essentially pragmatic and temporary, rather than constitutive and enduring? The Anglican Communion has seen itself as much more than that! Is it then perhaps simply a loose federation of churches that find it convenient to keep in touch, but which have no deep sense of unity and little mutual commitment? That is the spectre that haunts



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us at the present time – a reduction to federalism. But such a model would do scant justice to how the Anglican Communion has seen itself up to now and would fly in the face of the theology of communion (koinonia, communio) that has been developed in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican traditions – in dialogue with each other – on the basis of biblical theology and has been inscribed in many key texts, from Vatican II to ecumenical agreements involving the Anglican Communion. We search in vain for exact comparisons for the Anglican Communion.4 Although we often hear the expression, even from Anglican leaders, ‘the Anglican Church worldwide’, or something similar, the Anglican Communion is definitely not a single, global church. Its constitution, organization and structure are not that of a global church. It is a much looser, more dispersed, more ad hoc entity than a church could ever be. Worldwide Anglicanism lacks the attributes of a single church: there is no universal canon law of the Anglican Communion, no central legislative organ or synod, no comprehensive, integrated oversight, no overall disciplinary framework, no common policy-making body.5 Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion is not a global church. It is not a church as such at all. That is the first premise of the answer to our question in this chapter and I will return to this crucial point below. On the other hand, however, the Anglican Communion is much more than a mere ad hoc collection of churches. It is not simply a concatenation or even a confederation of separate churches, with diverse ecclesiologies and not in sacramental communion with each other, that might meet from time to time to consult and confer and even to strengthen their ties. That would approximate to the model of the ‘ecumenical instruments’, notably the World Council of Churches, but also the Conference of European Churches, the National Cf. Norman Doe, An Anglican Covenant: Theological and Legal Considerations for a Global Debate (London: Canterbury Press, 2008), pp. 47–51. A helpful analysis of recent Anglican history is provided by Bruce Kaye, Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books; Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2011). See also Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 5 There is, however, a substantial body of canonical principles that can be drawn from the corpus of the canon law of the Anglican churches and which is held in common: The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2008). See also the discussion by Christopher Hill, ‘Ecclesiological and Canonical Observations on The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 14 (2012): 400–7. 4

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Council of Churches of the USA, Churches Together in England, etc. No, the life of the Anglican Communion is different to that loose model – stronger and more coherent. The key difference is that worldwide Anglicanism has a common fundamental ecclesiology, inscribed in its liturgies, ordinals, historic formularies and codes of canon law. So it is not even the same sort of animal as the Lutheran World Federation or the World Methodist Council, both of which contain churches with significantly different ecclesiologies; in particular, both contain episcopally and non-episcopally ordered churches. Within the Anglican Communion there is a shared ecclesiology, though there is some variation of polity between the member churches, especially with regard to the distribution and exercise of authority. That is to say, the fundamental ecclesiological principles of the member churches are held in common, though their practice of governance is not everywhere identical.6

Anglican and Orthodox ecclesiologies In some ways the ecclesial profile of the Anglican Communion is closest to that of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The affinity between certain aspects of Anglican and Orthodox ecclesiology and polity has often been noted.7 Just like Orthodoxy, with its concept of autonomy and autocephaly, and its lack of a centralized organization, the Anglican Communion consists of selfgoverning churches that are in communion with one another and consult and confer from time to time and recognize a common bond.8 Just like Orthodoxy, Cf. Colin Podmore, ‘A Tale of Two Churches: The Ecclesiologies of The Episcopal Church and the Church of England Compared’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 10 (2008): 34–70; reprinted in International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 8.2 (2008): 124–54. At least some of what Dr Podmore calls differences of ecclesiology, I would understand as differences of polity, though of course polity should always be grounded in ecclesiology and always has ecclesiological implications, so it is not always clear where the dividing line between ecclesiology and polity lies. See further Paul Avis, ‘Polity and Polemics: The Function of Ecclesiastical Polity in Theology and Practice’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 18.1 (2016): 2–13. 7 Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue: The Dublin Agreed Statement 1984 (London: SPCK, 1985), §28 (p. 18): ‘even though the seniority ascribed to the Archbishop of Canterbury is not identical with that given to the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Anglican Communion has developed on the Orthodox rather than the Roman Catholic pattern, as a fellowship of self-governing national or regional Churches.’ Cf. Methodios Fouyas, Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). 8 Autocephalous Orthodox churches are those whose head bishop does not report to any higherranking bishop; but the highest-ranking bishops of the autonomous churches have to be approved by the patriarch of an autocephalous church. 6



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Anglicanism is united by a shared faith, shared sacraments and a shared interchangeable ministry focused in the episcopate. And, just as in Orthodoxy, the Anglican experience of communion is sometimes damaged by disagreements about leadership, disputes about jurisdiction, breaches of communion and even isolated actions that amount to internal schism. Although the Orthodox themselves often speak of ‘the Orthodox Church’ in the singular, meaning the historic communion of Orthodoxy, the fact that the familiar face of Orthodoxy includes the phenomena mentioned immediately above – disputes about leadership and jurisdiction, broken communion and internal schism – does call the appellation ‘Church’ (singular) somewhat into question. The Orthodox are in reality very much like the Anglicans – a family of churches, with all the blessings and troubles that are attendant on family life. The parallels between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy are rather striking and ecclesiologically suggestive, but they are not complete. In reality, the Anglican Communion has a more structured, organized global polity and common life than Orthodoxy has. Orthodoxy does not have the equivalent of all of our Instruments of Communion. Although the role of the Ecumenical Patriarch, whose seat is Constantinople (Istanbul), is comparable in some ways to the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as primus inter pares among the bishops and metropolitans, there is no exact parallel in Orthodoxy to the Lambeth Conference, the Primates Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council, in all of which the Archbishop of Canterbury presides (though a pan-Orthodox ‘Great and Holy Synod’, the first for more than a millennium and the fruit of a century of preparation, is scheduled to take place in Constantinople in 2016).

A communion of churches So it seems that the polity – if not quite the ecclesiology – of the Anglican Communion is unique, sui generis; there is nothing quite like it in Christendom. The Communion has consistently described itself as a Communion of Churches. The Lambeth Conference 1930 classically defined the Communion as ‘a fellowship, within the one, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted dioceses, provinces, or regional Churches in communion

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with the see of Canterbury, which … uphold and propagate the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order’.9 The Anglican Communion is made up of churches. That may seem a stupidly superfluous statement, an underlining of the glaringly obvious, but in my view it needs to be said, clearly and repeatedly. We cannot keep insisting that the member bodies of the Communion are autonomous churches and at the same time speak of ‘the Anglican Church’ worldwide. In the Communion, we often refer to the member churches as ‘provinces’ and there is some authority for that in our documents, including in the key definition of Lambeth 1930 that I have just quoted. The term ‘province’ has its uses and is inscribed in the legal title of some member churches. But ‘province’ is ultimately an unsatisfactory word to describe the member bodies of the Communion. Confusingly, some Anglican Churches consist of more than one province and some ‘provinces’ consist of more than one (national) church. That seems to me to be a sufficient reason why the term ‘province’ is unhelpful to refer to the member bodies of the Communion. But perhaps more importantly, the semantics of ‘province’ are inappropriate. The term ‘province’ can suggest subliminally that the member churches of the Communion are outposts of some central body, rather like branch offices that report back to head office. In common parlance, at least in Britain, the adjective ‘provincial’ implies ‘removed from the capital, out in the sticks’. A provincial mentality is thought to be a limited, rustic and uncultured one. There is the slightly old-fashioned expression, ‘to go down to the provinces’. ‘Provincial’ implies ‘at a lower level’ or ‘removed from the action’. Perhaps it is these connotations of the term ‘province’ that lie behind the common assumption that, because the Anglican Covenant has stalled in the Church of England, that is the end of the story for the Covenant. That is not necessarily so, and definitely should not be the case. The Church of England is one Anglican church out of thirty-eight. All of those churches are in the process of deciding about the Covenant. They should not be unduly swayed by what has happened in the Church of England: they should consider the Covenant on its merits. There is still much to play for. If sufficient support

Lambeth Conference 1930, Resolution 49: Roger Coleman (ed.), Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences 1867–1988 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992), pp. 83–4.

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develops throughout the Communion in favour of the Covenant, the Church of England will not want to be left on the sidelines and its General Synod (and diocesan synods, if the General Synod so decides) may wish to take a second look at the Covenant.10 Thus the constellation of meanings surrounding the word ‘province’ seems to me to be inappropriate for the member churches of the Communion. There is no hierarchy of churches in Anglicanism; there is no inner circle or outer circle; there is no ‘head office’. Each church is on the same level of importance as every other church. It is not the case that all are equal, but some are more equal than others, like the inhabitants of George Orwell’s Animal Farm! In the ecclesiology of communion each church is equidistant from every other church. All are equally self-governing. There cannot be degrees of autonomy: either you are responsible for your own affairs or you are not. The truth that the member bodies of the Communion are churches underlines their responsibility for their own affairs, under God. But it points to other responsibilities also.

A communion of churches A church not only has a responsibility for its own life and mission: it has a responsibility towards the wider Church, the Church catholic, as well. That twofold responsibility is part of what it means to be a church. No single church is the whole Church; therefore no church can be self-sufficient. No church lives to itself. A church that tries to live to itself alone, without attending to its relationships – relationships of communion or of something less than communion – with other churches, cannot be a church, by definition. To adapt the famous words of John Donne, the poet of passion who became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in the seventeenth century: ‘No church is an island, entire of itself .’ The churches of the Anglican Communion are connected, not by an overarching organization, not by any kind of universal jurisdiction, but essentially by mutual recognition and commitment that has been formed over See further Andrew Goddard, ‘The Anglican Communion Covenant and the Church of England: Ramifications’: http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/articles/the-anglican-communion-covenantand-the-church-of-england-ramifications/ [accessed 23 November 2015].

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time through missionary activity, leading to practical forms of consultation and cooperation. As the Lambeth Conference of 1930 put it, the member bodies of the Communion ‘are bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority but by mutual loyalty sustained by the common counsel of the bishops in conference’.11 Many churches of the Anglican Communion define themselves in relation to the Church catholic as a whole or in relation to the wider Communion, particularly the Church of England, or both together. Thus the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia defines it as ‘a part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ’, but also notes that, ‘being derived from the Church of England, [it] retains and approves the doctrine and principles of the Church of England embodied in the Book of Common Prayer’, together with the Ordinal and the Thirty-nine Articles.12 It also affirms: ‘This Church will remain and be in communion with the Church of England in England and with churches in communion therewith so long as communion is consistent with the Fundamental Declarations contained in this Constitution.’13 The Anglican Church of Canada declares that it is ‘an integral portion of the one Body of Christ composed of Churches which [are] united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’.14 The Episcopal Church, echoing the Lambeth 1930 statement, defines itself as ‘a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set

Coleman, Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences, p. 84. Constitution and Canons of the Anglican Church of Australia (The Green Book). The Constitution immediately goes on to affirm the autonomy of the Church within certain limits of faith and order: ‘but has plenary authority at its own discretion to make statements as to the faith ritual ceremonial or discipline of this Church and to order its forms of worship and rules of discipline and to alter or revise such statements, forms and rules, provided that all such statements, forms, rules or alteration or revision thereof are consistent with the Fundamental Declarations contained herein and are made as prescribed by this Constitution. Provided, and it is hereby further declared, that the above-named Book of Common Prayer, together with the Thirty-nine Articles, be regarded as the authorised standard of worship and doctrine in this Church, and no alteration in or permitted variations from the services or Articles therein contained shall contravene any principle of doctrine or worship laid down in such standard.’ 13 Constitution I, 1, 1–6. The Constitution Canons and Rules of the Anglican Church of Australia 2010. 14 Statement of Principles within the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Canada. 11 12



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forth in the Book of Common Prayer’.15 The Church of England affirms in the first of its Canons that it ‘belongs to the true and apostolic Church of Christ’.16 And in the Preface to the Declaration of Assent it affirms that ‘the Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.17 Clearly, to be a church is not simply to be a ‘particular church’ (to use the language of the Thirty-nine Articles) and that is all there is to it. To be a church is to be placed in relation to the Church universal, the Church that is the Mother of us all (cf. Gal. 4.26). Particular churches and the universal Church cannot exist without each other. They are mutually constitutive, holding each other in being simultaneously.18 So the more we emphasize that we – Australian Anglicans, Nigerian Anglicans, Canadian Anglicans, Korean Anglicans, American Episcopalians, Mexican Anglicans, Church of England people and all the other varieties of Anglicans around the world – are each a church, indeed an autonomous church, the more we actually underline the truth that we exist only within the Church as a whole. Without the Church catholic we do not exist. It is only in living relationship with the universal Church that we can know the reality of catholic faith and order within our own community. The Holy Spirit and all the means of grace that the Spirit employs are given to the Body of Christ, which is a Spirit-bearing Body. As we indwell the Body we share in the Spirit and the Spirit’s gifts. Each local eucharistic assembly, gathered by its bishop, receives the fullness of the Church only as long as it remains in communion with other local churches – and, in intention, with them all. When churches are in communion they partake of catholicity. That cannot be said of churches that choose to exist in isolation.19 So what is the Anglican Communion after all? As we have noted above, the Anglican Communion is sometimes referred to as a ‘church’. In England we frequently hear the expression ‘the Anglican Church’. Sometimes there Constitution of the Episcopal Church: Preamble. Canon A 1: ‘The Church of England, established according to the laws of this realm under the Queen’s Majesty, belongs to the true and apostolic Church of Christ; and, as our duty to the said Church of England requires, we do constitute and ordain that no member thereof shall be at liberty to maintain or hold the contrary.’ 17 Canon C 15. 18 Cf. Paul McPartlan, ‘The Local Church and the Universal Church: Zizioulas and the KasperRatzinger Debate’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 4 (2004): 21–33. 19 Radu Bordeianu, Dumitru Staniloe: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology (Ecclesiological Investigations 13; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011), p. 215. 15 16

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is a journalistic ploy going on here: the British media in particular love to conflate the Church of England and the whole Communion and to play on the tensions and conflicts of both. While the Church of England itself is clear that it is simply one church among others (that is, among the ‘provinces’ or ‘regional churches’, as they are called, of the worldwide Anglican family), the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is both Primate of All England and president of the (other) Instruments of Communion lends itself to this kind of deliberate journalistic confusion. When we read a headline such as ‘Split looms in Anglican Church over X, Y or Z’, we are unsure at first whether it refers to the Church of England or to the Anglican Communion as a whole – and the ambiguity is often intentional, I suspect. Sometimes those speaking officially for Anglicanism also refer to the Communion as a church, so endorsing the journalistic phrase ‘the Anglican Church’. The tendency to do this is understandable. When there is a strong sense of ecclesial density, as there is especially at the ten-yearly Lambeth Conferences of all Anglican bishops from around the world, for example, it is easy to slip into the language of ‘church’. There is a powerful sense of ‘being the church’ together – and that is not an illusion, because the Anglican Communion contains strong elements of church character, of ecclesiality; it has an ecclesial vocation.

An ecclesial vocation So is the Anglican Communion itself a church or not? First of all it is important to emphasize that the Anglican Communion has a certain ecclesial character, indeed a pronounced ecclesial character. It is made up of churches – ‘local churches’ (by which we mean dioceses) and ‘particular churches’ (by which we mean national or regional groupings of dioceses, with an wider ecclesial infrastructure). When churches come together to carry out their essential activities as churches – proclaiming the gospel, teaching the faith, celebrating the sacraments, exercising pastoral care and oversight, engaging in conciliar consultation – these activities impart an ecclesial character – a character that belongs to the Church – to their common life. What precisely are these ecclesial characteristics? The Anglican Communion has a common faith, grounded in Scripture,



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inscribed in the ecumenical creeds and supported by the formularies of each member church. It has a common ordained ministry in the historic threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons. It has a common sacramental life with mutual eucharistic hospitality and interchangeable eucharistic presidency. It has conciliar structures for collective deliberation about its common life. The ecclesial character of Anglicanism is manifest and is what is theologically significant about the Anglican Communion. Nevertheless, those various ingredients of ecclesial character – word, sacraments, ministry, conciliarity – are not sufficient to make the Anglican Communion a single church. Strictly speaking, the Anglican Communion is not a church. The term ‘the Anglican Church’ is a misnomer. There is no such entity as ‘the Anglican Church’, unless that phrase is being used to refer to a church in the Anglican tradition in a particular country (e.g. the ‘Anglican Church’ in Ireland is the Church of Ireland). The Anglican Communion is not formally constituted as a church. A church requires a unified structure of oversight, embedded in the common discipline or law of that church, which is legally enforceable as a last resort. A church also requires a coherent overall policy with regard to its liturgy, its doctrinal and ethical teaching, and its practice of ordination. These conditions do not exist in the Anglican Communion. There is no single law, liturgy, doctrine or discipline across the Communion. Each member church of the Anglican Communion has its own canons (though there are significant areas of overlap between them).20 Each church has its own liturgy (though frequently with a common root in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, and much family resemblance). Moreover, each church is responsible for its own doctrinal and moral teaching (though there is of course a common focus in the Anglican and broader Christian tradition, as well as through ecumenical engagement). And each church decides what sort of person it will ordain or not ordain. A church must maintain discipline on the basis of its canons, a discipline that is carried into effect through its structures of oversight. But the Anglican Communion does not have any way of ensuring that a policy arrived at in a consensual way by the

See The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion; Norman Doe, Canon Law in the Anglican Communion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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Lambeth Conference or the Primates’ Meeting, for example, and commended to the churches will then be carried out by all the member churches. The differences of policy that have emerged within the Communion since 2003, over the consecration of bishops living in same-gender unions, over the blessing of similar unions and over episcopal incursions into churches that have adopted these policies, could not be tolerated in a body that was constituted as one church. If the Anglican Communion were indeed a single church, it would be a seriously dysfunctional one, a church undergoing serious internal dissension, a church that was falling apart. So if the Anglican Communion has a profoundly ecclesial character, yet is not a church, what is it? The Anglican Communion today is precisely what it has often defined itself to be, that is to say a communion or fellowship of churches. It is made up of churches that are in a particular relationship to each other, a relationship of ecclesial communion. As neither a global church nor a federation of completely separate churches, the Anglican Communion is a communion of churches, no more and no less, and that is – I have to say – the beauty of it. The churches of the Anglican Communion subsist in a relationship of communion with each other. They are at the same time self-governing and inter-related. Anglican churches are called to walk the tightrope between autonomy and interdependence. But what does that imply in theology and practice?

Koinonia and ecclesial communion By calling our world family a ‘communion’ we Anglicans are intentionally positioning ourselves in relation to the key New Testament Greek word koinonia (Latin communio) which is translated in English-language Bibles as ‘communion’, ‘fellowship’, ‘sharing’ or ‘partnership’. Koinonia speaks of sharing together in something greater than ourselves.21 Karl Barth brings out the dynamic of koinonia: it is grounded in a pre-existing unity, a union that is already given in Christ, and moves towards the deepening of that union. But see the critical examination of this interpretation in Andrew T. Lincoln, ‘Communion: Some Pauline Foundations’, Ecclesiology 5 (2009): 135–60 and my Editorial in the same issue ‘A Challenge to Communion Ecclesiology’, pp. 132–4. A comprehesive account is Lorelei F. Fuchs, Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

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It takes place in the union (what Barth calls the ‘completion’) from which it originates and to which it moves.22 Christians have been placed by the Holy Spirit within that event of koinonia-communio by baptism. Through faith and the sacraments, the Holy Spirit has made us ontologically one in the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12.13). Communion (koinonia) is our fellowship with the Father and the Son and with each other (1 Jn 1.3). It is our sacramental communion in the body and blood of Christ (1 Cor. 10.16). It is our solidarity with the apostolic community and its faith (Acts 2.42). It is our practical partnership in proclaiming the gospel (Phil. 1.5). Koinonia points to our joint participation in the life of grace, our lived unity with God the Holy Trinity and with all the baptized (2 Cor. 13.13). To be united with baptized believers in the body of Christ is to be united with Christ himself. Koinonia is at the same time mystical and practical, profoundly spiritual and down to earth. When we map this theological reality of communion (koinonia) empirically on to the actual relationships between churches, as set out in numerous ecumenical agreements, we can see that communion involves three dimensions: recognition, commitment and participation. First, it involves recognition of one another, on the basis of apostolic faith and order, as sister churches belonging to the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. Secondly, it entails mutual commitment to live and act together in fellowship and to do this through appropriate conciliar channels. Thirdly, it implies unrestricted mutual participation in the sacramental life of the Church, that is to say, a common baptism and a shared Eucharist celebrated by a common ordained ministry. These three dimensions of mutual recognition, mutual commitment and mutual participation are, I suggest, the key components of ecclesial communion. And because they are also the key markers of what it means to be Anglicans within the Anglican Communion and yet always need to be secured, renewed and reframed, we can be assured that the vocation of Anglicanism includes an ecclesial vocation.

Barth, CD IV/2, §67, pp. 641–2.

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The cost of communion Communion is at the heart of God’s loving, just and good purpose for the creation. Leonardo Boff affirms that communion is ‘the deepest and most foundational reality that exists’23 and that ‘the universe exists in order to manifest the abundance of divine communion’.24 To work for communion in every context and in every way is to be in tune with God’s plan. We are called to maintain communion and to build communion.25 To be in communion brings privileges and it brings responsibilities. Our duty to the Body is to uphold and strengthen its communion. For us this is not a grim duty, but the overflowing of charity – agape, caritas – without which, as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book says, ‘all our doings are nothing worth’. Charity is, as the same collect puts it, ‘the very bond of peace and of all virtues’. It is a supreme expression of charity when we do all we can to remain in communion with our fellow Christians, who themselves are in communion with God the Holy Trinity through faith and the sacraments. It is our communion with God and with our brothers and sisters in Christ’s Church that constitutes us as Christians. Communion in charity is our very life-blood as Christians in the Church; without it, as the collect says, we are counted dead before God.26 We can settle for a cheap kind of communion with our fellow Anglicans, a fellowship of those like ourselves, those with whom we can rub along comfortably; this is to seek what we may call ‘the communion of congeniality’. It costs us little and merely reinforces our prejudices. Cheap communion is communion without the cross and without paying the price of love. But there is also a costly form of communion, which is the fellowship of those who are different. To maintain and celebrate communion with those who are different to ourselves within the Anglican Communion, some of whose views we may find difficult to stomach, is painful. It takes enormous effort and is only made Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Community, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), p. 4. 24 Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), p. 237. 25 The Eames Commission stressed that all concerned in disagreements over the ordination of women should endeavour to live in the highest degree of communion possible: The Eames Commission: The Official Reports (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1994). 26 Paul Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology: The Church Made Whole? (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010), Ch. 10. 23



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possible by grace in the strength that comes through prayer. But that is what costly Christian discipleship involves.27 One of the sources of the Collect for Quinquagesima from the Book of Common Prayer, 1662, from which I have been drawing, is Ephesians 4.1-3. It resonates strongly with 1 Corinthians 13 and is a benchmark biblical statement of communion in charity: I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.

In the Anglican Communion much play has been made of ‘the bonds of affection’ and these are the bonds that are often appealed to in times of tension.28 There is indeed much genuine affection shared between Anglicans from one member church to another, from one end of the world to the other, and between the Old World and the New, the North and the South. But is the expression ‘bonds of affection’ robust enough for our needs at the present time, when relationships are strained and in some cases severed? It is not affection but charity that can take the strain. It is charity that draws us together as Christians and as churches. As Newman beautifully puts it, the Holy Spirit lives in the heart of Christians ‘as the never-failing fount of charity, which is the very sweetness of the living waters’.29 As the power, the virtue, that makes communion possible, charity is not an easy ride; it comes at a cost. It is not painless to exercise patience and kindness; to eschew envy and arrogance; to be willing to give way to others; to bear all things, believe all things and endure all things (1 Cor. 13.4-7). That is asking a good deal, but if we are not willing to go down that road, can we call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ,

Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (London: SCM, 1959), pp. 35–7. E.g. The Lambeth Commission on Communion, The Windsor Report 2004 (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2004), Foreword by the Most Revd Dr Robin Eames, Archbishop of Armagh, Chairman, p. 11: ‘The “bonds of affection”, so often quoted as a precious attribute of Anglican Communion life.’ 29 John Henry Newman, Parochial Sermons, vol. 2 (London: Rivington, 1835), p. 254 (Sermon XIX, Whit-Sunday: ‘The Indwelling Spirit’). 27 28

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committed to the imitatio Christi? To paraphrase 1 Corinthians 13, it is love alone that counts.30 Out of his experience over many years of offering unconditional love to handicapped people, Jean Vanier has written: ‘Communion means accepting people just as they are, with their limits and inner pain, but also with their gifts and their beauty and their capacity to grow; to see the beauty inside of all the pain.’ Vanier continues: We can only truly love people who are different; we can only discover that difference is a treasure and not a threat, if in some way our hearts are becoming enfolded in the heart of the Father, if somehow God is putting into our broken hearts the love that is in God’s own heart for each and every human being.31

Communion infused with charity is the most to be desired consequence and implication of Anglican ecclesiology.

So Barth, CD, IV/2, §68, p. 825. Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), cited in Stanley Hauerwas, Learning to Speak Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), p. 76. See also A. E. Harvey, ‘Schizophrenia in Young People and the nekrosis of Christ’, Theology 115.2 (2012): 92–8.

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A Missional Vocation1

Can the Anglican Communion have a special vocation to mission? Can this worldwide family of national and provincial churches define itself primarily in relation to God’s call to mission and evangelization? To put the question in such a way brings together two pivotal theological terms in contemporary ecclesiology: ‘communion’ and ‘mission’. Taken together, ‘communion’ and ‘mission’ sum up the meaning of the Church. Between them, they define what the Church of Jesus Christ is and what it is here for on this planet.2 ‘Communion’ and ‘mission’ take us to the heart of the Christian revelation and lead us into the mystery of God and the mystery of the world. The key term of modern missiology, missio dei, speaks of the expression of the divine trinitarian communion in God’s loving and just purposes for the world. So what would it mean for the Anglican Communion to see itself as ‘a community of missionary disciples’ (to borrow Pope Francis’s phrase in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelium Gaudii, ‘The Joy of the Gospel’).3 Communion and mission are awesome words to a Christian, both luminous and numinous. Their roots are biblical, in the New Testament Greek terms koinonia and apostello respectively. Their practical expression is A short, compressed version of this chapter was prepared for the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) in 2015. I am grateful to Bishop Stephen Pickard for some stimulating comments. 2 A succinct ecumenical exposition of the Church in terms of communion and mission is provided in The Nature and Mission of the Church (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2005; Faith and Order Paper 198), pp. 21–8, and more extensively in The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013; Faith and Order Paper 214). 3 Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (Rome: Vatican Press, November 2013). See the exposition of this by Stephen Bevans, ‘Beyond the New Evangelization: Toward a Missionary Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century Church’, in Richard P. Gaillardetz and Edward P. Hahnenberg (eds), A Church With Open Doors: Catholic Ecclesiology for the Third Millennium (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), Ch. 1. Issue 12.1 (January 2016) of Ecclesiology is devoted to discussion of Evangelii Gaudium; see http://www.brill.com/ecso. 1

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fundamentally liturgical, because the life and action of the Church is grounded in worship (leiturgia). With all their biblical and liturgical associations, these words carry an aura of mystery and transcendence. They point to a depth within the Church of Christ that will always exceed our grasp, reminding us that the Church participates in the mystery that is God and is therefore essentially a mystery itself. We can never plumb the depths of the Church as the mystical body of Christ. There is no bottom to the mystery of the Church. We can never reach the seabed. The Church reveals Christ to the world by proclaiming the Gospel, by celebrating the sacraments (which are themselves called ‘mysteries’ in the Christian tradition) in as public a way as possible and as little behind closed doors as possible, and by manifesting in pastoral care and loving service the life and love that come to us in the world from God.4 These three ways – gospel, sacraments and service – are how the mystery is principally manifested in the world and comprise the mission to which the Church is called. They are the golden threads that run through the life and work of the Church and have done so for two millennia. They are common to the communion-life of the Church and to its outreach or mission. So mission flows from communion and communion finds expression in mission. But mission and communion are not always held together and seen as inseparable. In this chapter I attempt to give a brief biblical and theological account of communion and of mission, and try to show how they are related and interconnected. I illustrate the argument by reference to two major gatherings of the twentieth-century Church: the first one Anglican (the Lambeth Conference of 1920 and its benchmark Appeal to All Christian People), the other one ecumenical (the great conference at Oxford in July 1937, on Church, Community, and State). Both of these pivotal events of twentieth-century Church history obviously took place between the two world wars and before the formation of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948.

Cf. Church and World: The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1990), Ch. III, §21, p. 27, cited in The Church: Towards a Common Vision, §59, p. 33.

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Only connect Communion and mission are widely recognized as the twin imperatives for the Church of Christ. They have been affirmed as such by the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion and the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, to look no further. The Second Vatican Council of 1962–5 expounded a theology of the Church as communio, a reality of communion. But at the same time the Council insisted that, by its very nature the Church is a missionary Church, sent into the world to proclaim the gospel. The Council saw no tension, and certainly no contradiction, between mission and communion; they were mutually implicated aspects of the God-given reality of the Church. A communion, both mystical and visible, a communion orientated to mission in the world, a communion in mission, is how Vatican II envisioned the Church of Christ.5 It is true that in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II, communio ecclesiology has sometimes been invoked to bolster a centralized, hierarchical and authoritarian view of the Church, but it is also the case that the central insights of communio theology retain the power to refresh our ecclesiology and can be reclaimed and reshaped in a missiological and eschatological way.6 Anglican–Roman Catholic theological dialogue has also affirmed the inseparable connection between communion and mission. The Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) report Church as Communion (1990) integrated mission into communion, insisting that communion ‘necessarily’ finds expression in mission.7 In a similar way, ecclesiological reflection in the Anglican Communion (for example, in The Virginia Report, 1997) has Ad Gentes 2: W. M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), p. 585. 6 See Scott MacDougall, More Than Communion: Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology (Ecclesiological Investigations 20; London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015). 7 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, Church as Communion (London: CTS/ SPCK, 1990), §45. The statement went on: ‘It is a life of shared concern for one another in mutual forbearance, submission, gentleness and love; in the placing of the interests of others above the interests of self; in making room for each other in the body of Christ; in solidarity with the poor and the powerless; and in the sharing of gifts both material and spiritual (cf. Acts 2.44). Also constitutive of life in communion is acceptance of the same basic moral values, the sharing of the same vision of humanity created in the image of God and recreated in Christ and the common confession of the one hope in the final consummation of the Kingdom of God’: http://www.vatican. va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/angl-comm-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_19900906_ church-communion_en.html [accessed 23 November 2015]. 5

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identified communion and mission as two vital, complementary themes. So we may say that the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion – again, to look no further – are in step on this matter. In essence, the word ‘communion’ speaks of an intimate relationship of mutual indwelling – the indwelling of the believer in God the Holy Trinity and at the same time, the union or fellowship of Christians with each other in God. It points to the community of life with God and with one another in the Church. The Collect for All Saints’ Day in the Book of Common Prayer, 1662, begins: ‘O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord.’ As Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked in his little book Life Together, What is our life with God if it is not at the same time a life lived with others? And what is our fellowship with others if it is not grounded in our common life in God?8 In John 15.1-17 the extended image of the vine and the branches suggests that, by being joined to the true vine, the branches are inseparably connected to each other, and that is why the command, ‘Love one another as I have loved you’, immediately follows in that chapter. In this passage from John, Jesus embraces his disciples as his ‘friends’: those who are not only loved, but respond with willing obedience based on intimate understanding (‘to know’ in the sense of the Hebrew Bible) and so love him and each other in return. Like Abraham, Moses and David in the Old Testament, they are ‘friends of God’ into whom holy Wisdom has entered (Wis. 7.27). Can they be friends of Christ and of God while being distant or alienated from each other? Are they not addressed by Christ as his brothers and sisters in the resurrection appearances (Jn 20.17)? And brotherhood and sisterhood are, if anything, relationships closer than friendship.9 The Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (London: SCM Press, 1954), Ch. 1, ‘Community’. 9 See further Steve Summers, Friendship: Exploring its Implications for the Church in Postmodernity (Ecclesiological Investigations 7; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009). Summers discusses the treatment of John 15.15 in a selection of biblical commentaries: pp. 11–18. I would add two further commentaries. First, E. C. Hoskyns, ed. F. N. Davey, The Fourth Gospel (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), p. 478: ‘Thus the disciples are initiated into the mystery of the life and death of Jesus, and into the fellowship of His sufferings and of His love. This initiation is the dividing line between slavery and friendship.’ Second, Andrew T. Lincoln, The Gospel According to St John (Black’s New Testament Commentaries; London: Continuum, 2005), p. 406: because love and obedience are equated here, ‘loving Jesus and being his friends are synonymous’. See also Victor Paul Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1973), esp. pp. 139–43. Furnish points out that, in the Johannine theology, ‘Friendship is not conditional upon obedience … but 8



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relationship of Jesus with ‘the disciple whom Jesus [especially] loved’ takes friendship to a higher level; the ‘Beloved Disciple’ is the paragon of discipleship, the ideal or model disciple. Here discipleship eventuates in being especially beloved. Disciples – servants – friends – brothers and sisters – beloved: this is the ladder of relationship to Christ, of promotion by grace to his heart (breast) in the Gospels. When we speak of ecclesial communion, the word resonates immediately with the sacrament of ‘Holy Communion’, the Eucharist, which is the moment that, Sunday by Sunday and day by day (if we are so blessed), we come closest to the Lord and are strengthened in our unity with him.10 The link, which is not fortuitous, between the theology of communion and the Church’s principal act of worship suggests that all communion between Christians and between churches should be seen as holy, set apart for God in the context of worship, and therefore to be treated by us with reverence and sensitivity; not easily denied to one another, or wilfully severed except in extreme circumstances. The promise – the reality – of community, both with God and with one another, through Jesus Christ, is the heart of the gospel. The word ‘mission’, on the other hand, points primarily to the outworking of God’s just and loving purpose for the world and for all God’s children – a purpose to draw all humankind into community with God. By the same token it points also and necessarily to the human instrumentality that God chooses to employ to carry out that purpose. As the Latin equivalent of the Greek apostello, ‘I send’, mitto/missio words have apostolic connotations and echo the commission of Christ to the apostles, especially in the resurrection narratives (Mt. 28.18-20; Mk 16.15, longer ending; Lk. 24.46-49; Jn 20.21). They refer to being ‘sent’ by the Lord to fulfil a task. It is this ‘sending’ to complete a job of work, just as Jesus devoted himself to complete the work that the Father

upon the Father’s prior love: by abiding in his love one is both sustained and commanded’ (p. 141). Friendship is used as the controlling paradigm for Anglicanism in John B. Thompson, Sharing Friendship: Exploring Anglican Character, Vocation, Witness and Mission (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). 10 Cf. the recent WCC text The Church: Towards a Common Vision, §67, p. 39: ‘In the liturgy, the people of God experience communion with God and fellowship with Christians of all times and places.’ Interestingly, this statement uses the terms ‘communion’ and ‘fellowship’, as though they were not synonymous, whereas in English-language Bibles they are interchangeable translations of koinonia.

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had given him to do (Jn 4.34, 17.4), that gives coherence and meaning to the Christian life as a life of discipleship and witness. At first glance the terms ‘communion’ and ‘mission’ may seem to refer to the inward and outward dimensions of the Church’s life – communion being something that the Church enjoys within itself and mission being its outreach to those beyond – as though they were two separate, discrete, activities. The terms are often used in ‘church speak’ somewhat uncritically in this sense. There is some element of truth in such an apportionment between the inward and the outward dimensions, but I want to argue that a hard and fast division of communion and mission into inward and outward aspects would be both simplistic and reductionist.11 The communion that constitutes the Church of Jesus Christ and permeates its life is not a private, closed communion, turned in upon itself (incurvatus in se, to borrow Luther’s phrase, suggested by Augustine, for fallen human nature and drawn from the woman in the Gospel according to St Luke who was bent double, Lk. 13.11).12 It is, au contraire, an open, receptive, welcoming and hospitable communion, turned towards the world. The borders of the Church are not hard-drawn and impervious, but are radically porous to enable the Church to welcome all who are called by God to receive Christ in faith and to progress through the journey of Christian initiation into the life of grace, which is the life of communion. The boundary must be defined in a way that does not repel or deter seekers, but rather positively invites persons to cross it. Through the process of Christian initiation, adult converts travel through instruction in the faith (catechesis) through baptism and confirmation to full participation in the Eucharist. Infants and young children receive baptism first, being upheld by the faith of the Church and the undertakings of their sponsors or Godparents, and subsequently (we trust) progress through instruction to confirmation and first communion (alternatively, communion followed by confirmation). Thus adults and children alike are being drawn, step by step, from one degree of glory to another, deeper into communion

Daniel W. Hardy’s terms ‘extensity’ and ‘intensity’ point in the same direction, but in my view are not quite identical with ‘internal and ‘external’: Hardy, Finding the Church (London: SCM Press, 2001), pp. 109–12. 12 Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, ed. Hilton C. Oswald, Luther’s Works, vol. 25 (St Louis, Missouri: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), pp. 291, 313. 11



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with God and the Church.13 This calling, drawing, leading and impelling towards communion with God and one another in the body of Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit.14 The word ‘mission’ is thus often used colloquially as shorthand for evangelization/evangelism – outreach to the unchurched and the unconverted. In a literal sense, it refers to the Church being ‘sent’ into the world to bring Christ’s message of salvation to those who have not yet embraced it, in a word, to preach the gospel.15 Even where there is a richer, more adequate understanding of evangelization, incorporating Christian education and instruction (catechesis), the task of apologetics, and service to the poor, the sick, the hungry and the dispossessed, the focus of the word ‘mission’ is generally on the unchurched. But while this remains a central, indeed vital aspect of mission, it is certainly not the whole of it. To identify mission with evangelism, without remainder, seems to me to be an unnecessarily restrictive and incomplete understanding of mission. In its full scope mission must include all that the Church is sent or commissioned to do, including activities that, on the face of it, seem to belong to its ‘internal’ life. If we ask, ‘What is the Church placed by God here on earth to do?’, the answer must surely include (though it is not limited to) such notions as these: ‘To offer praise and worship to God; to celebrate the sacraments that Christ instituted; to pray for the needs of the world’. Worship in spirit and in truth is what God desires (Jn 4.23-24), because God knows that to be brought into a relationship of adoration of God’s grace and glory and obedience to God’s will is our greatest good – in Thomas Aquinas’s phrase, the summum bonum.16 Or in Dante’s well-known words, ‘In his will is our peace.’17 Christian worship includes – in fact comprises – a ministry of word and sacrament, inseparably connected. To teach the faith from the Scriptures and so to help to form disciples, baptizing them into the body of Christ (Mt. 28.19-20), brings together word and sacrament and is at the core of the See further P. Avis (ed.), The Journey of Christian Initiation: Theological and Pastoral Perspectives (London: Church House Publishing, 2011). 14 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), IV/2, p. 778. 15 This is the general thrust of the account of mission in The Nature and Mission of the Church. 16 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, Qn 2 (‘Of those things in which human happiness consists’), 1. 17 Dante, La Divina Commedia: Paradiso, Canto III, l. 85. 13

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Church’s mission. Thus to celebrate the liturgy, which is filled with the word and structured by the sacraments, and in doing so to sanctify the faithful through their participation in worship, belongs to the Church’s mission and forms a vital part of it. The mission, in one major aspect, is liturgical. Seeking to bring individuals to faith and baptism and to lead them through confirmation to full participation in the life of grace in the Church is a liturgical matter. Christian initiation, sacramental through and through, and culminating in the Eucharist, is infused with worship, just as it is infused with faith. So I suggest that it is something of an impoverishment to think of mission purely as an activity of the Church vis-à-vis those outside and for the sake of those outside, or even to regard it as simply the outward-facing aspect of the Church. What goes on at the heart of the Church’s life – the celebration of the Eucharist with all its elements of praise, prayer, penitence, ministry of the word, confession of faith, intercession, sacrifice of thanksgiving, communion and dedication – belongs to the mission that God has entrusted to the Church.18 The ‘outreach’ aspect of mission can only be the expression of the deepest meaning of the Church as mystery. It must spring from the eucharistic centre, for the Paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of the Son of God, shown forth or proclaimed in the Eucharist (1 Cor. 11.26), is the essence of the message. In the light of these preliminary comments, let us look a little more closely and more concretely at what we mean by the key terms ‘communion’ and ‘mission’, taking our cue first of all from the great ecumenical initiative of the Lambeth Conference of 1920.

Communion The centenary of the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1920, with its Appeal to All Christian People, that benchmark declaration of the ecumenical movement, is now not far off. The Appeal has stood the test of time and remains a foundational document of the Anglican Communion, Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder include liturgy, prayer and – interestingly – contemplation in the elements of mission: Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), p. 4.

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not least because it includes an authoritative restatement and exposition of the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886–8, as the minimum basis for Christian unity.19 Communion was the major theme of the Appeal, though the word that was used was not ‘communion’ but ‘fellowship’. Here it was echoing English translations of 1 Corinthians 1.9: ‘God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship (eis koinonian) of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord’, and of 1 John 1.3: ‘we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship (koinonia) with us; and truly our fellowship (koinonia) is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.’ There is no significant difference in the meaning of the two English words ‘fellowship’ and ‘communion’, though ‘communion’ has more mystical overtones and ‘fellowship’ is used in secular as well as in religious contexts. The key New Testament Greek term koinonia essentially refers to sharing together in a valued reality that is greater than ourselves. I am aware that the meaning of koinonia is somewhat contested among scholars, but I think this interpretation can stand: sharing together in a valued reality greater than ourselves. Koinonia is translated almost arbitrarily in English Bibles as ‘fellowship’, ‘communion’ or ‘sharing’. We only have to compare the King James Bible and the New Revised Standard Version translations of koinonia in such texts as Acts 2.42, 1 Corinthians 10.16, 2 Corinthians 13.13 and Philippians 1.5 to see that.20 As we have already noted, the Collect for All Saints’ Day in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 uses ‘communion’ and ‘fellowship’ synonymously, as does the hymn that is sung particularly on that day, ‘For all the saints, whom from their labours rest’, as it speaks of the unity of Christians in Christ: ‘O blest communion, fellowship divine! / We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; / Yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. / Alleluia!’ The Quadrilateral has been reaffirmed many times by the Lambeth Conference since 1920. It is included in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. 20 Further on koinonia see (selectively) Lorelei F. Fuchs, Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); MacDougall, More Than Communion; John Zizioulas, Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Foreword John Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997 [1985]); id., Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006); Dennis M. Doyle, Communion Ecclesiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); Nicholas Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins and the Practice of Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Reumann, ‘Koinonia in Scripture: Survey of Biblical Texts’, in Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann (eds), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the fifth World Conference on Faith and Order (Faith and Order Paper no. 166, Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994), pp. 37–69; P. Avis, Christians in Communion (London: Mowbray, 1990). 19

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The Appeal to All Christian People of the 1920 Lambeth Conference noted that human beings long for fellowship; we need it and we hunger for it. The Appeal took as its fundamental theological premise the truth that ‘God wills fellowship’. In full it stated: We believe that God wills fellowship. By God’s own act this fellowship was made in and through Jesus Christ, and its life is in his Spirit. We believe that it is God’s purpose to manifest this fellowship, so far as this world is concerned, in an outward, visible, and united society, holding one faith, having its own recognized officers, using God-given means of grace, and inspiring all its members to the world-wide service of the Kingdom of God. This is what we mean by the Catholic Church.21

In these words of the Appeal we have a compressed trinitarian theology of the Church. The triune God calls us into fellowship or communion with Godself and with each other. God’s action in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has created the possibility of such fellowship and made it a reality. The life-giving Holy Spirit vivifies this fellowship with divine energy. But, the Appeal insists, it is God’s will that this community should not remain a purely inward, hidden or amorphous entity, but that it should take form in time and space – it should be embodied in a single, universal, visible society, a society that is formed in a unity of faith, ministry, sacraments and service. Its raison d’être in the world is to serve the coming of God’s Kingdom of justice, peace and love. The theological vision of the 1920 Lambeth Conference Appeal is essentially the same as that of contemporary ecumenical statements. The WCC statement The Church: Towards a Common Vision says: ‘The Kingdom of God, which Jesus preached by revealing the word of God in parables and inaugurated by his mighty deeds, especially by the paschal mystery of his death and resurrection, is the final destiny of the whole universe.’22 Yes, the Kingdom of God must be the definitive theological horizon of the Church’s mission because the Kingdom is made present in the coming and the work of Jesus Christ, personified and embodied in him and in his ministry. As Origen

Resolution 9, paragraph 1 http://www.lambethconference.org/resolutions/1920/1920-9.cfm [accessed 23 November 2015]. The Church: Towards a Common Vision, §58, p. 33.

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first put it in the third century and Karl Barth later affirmed, Jesus Christ is autobasileia, the Kingdom itself, the Kingdom in person.23 The Appeal went on to envisage a united yet diverse Church in terms of fellowship: The vision which rises before us is that of a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all truth, and gathering into its fellowship all ‘who profess and call themselves Christians’, within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common, and made serviceable to the whole Body of Christ. Within this unity Christian Communions now separated from one another would retain much that has long been distinctive in their methods of worship and service. It is through a rich diversity of life and devotion that the unity of the whole fellowship will be fulfilled.24

The combination of intense communion and abundant diversity is what the Lambeth Conference understood by catholicity. To be ‘catholic’ was to be in communion with a richly diverse universal Church. But issues of diversity have become much more pressing, indeed sometimes apparently intractable, nearly a century later, underlining the imperative of seeking to understand one another, to interpret the meaning of differences – the challenge of ecclesial hermeneutics. A recent Anglican Communion report, Communion, Conflict and Hope, has explored the dynamics of communion in diverse cultural contexts and in situations of conflict, both political-ideological and intra-Anglican: The … process of listening, responding, reflecting and questioning, points to the dynamic aspect of communion in the body of Christ. Communion is not a steady state reality that one either has or does not have. It has to be nurtured through open and persistent conversation where there is mutual trust and forbearance, always thinking the best of the other, always hoping and praying for new ways of sharing in the riches of the Gospel. Sustaining communion is in fact a continual consultative process.25 ‘just as he is wisdom itself and righteousness itself and truth itself, so too he is also the kingdom itself ’: Hans Urs von Balthasar (ed.), Origen, Spirit and Fire, A Thematic Anthology, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984 [Gn 1938, rev. 1956]), §1017, p. 362; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2 §67, pp. 656, 658. 24 Lambeth Conference 1920, Resolution 9, paragraph IV. 25 Communion, Conflict and Hope: The Kuala Lumpur Report of the third Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (London: The Anglican Communion Office, 2008), §114. 23

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In these comments the report helpfully relates communion to the reflective, consultative, deliberative and ultimately legislative activity of the Church – that is to say, to the vital dimension of conciliarity, the conciliar life of the Church. The missional church is, by virtue of that fact, called to the practice of conciliarity.

Mission In speaking of God’s Kingdom, the Lambeth Conference Appeal to All Christian People is inevitably speaking of mission. To address the question of mission in terms of the Kingdom immediately tells us that the mission does not belong to the Church and is not its possession. Mission does not belong to the Church at all. In mission the Church is not serving itself, but the Kingdom or Reign of God. Strictly speaking, the phrase ‘the mission of the Church’ is inept – merely a piece of useful shorthand. It is God, not the Church, who has the mission. The mission belongs to the triune God. It is the mission that God has to gather the whole created order into unity in Christ (Eph. 1.10). The Church is called to serve that mission as a privileged instrument, and more than an instrument, a sign and foretaste of what God’s mission in the world intends to accomplish.26 So we should speak, not of ‘the Church’s mission’, but rather of the Church’s calling or role in the mission of God (missio dei). Furthermore, the mission of God is a trinitarian event of sending. The Father sends the Son; the Father and Son together send the Spirit. Father, Son and Holy Spirit send the Church, and in sending the Church empower it for its task (Jn 14.26, 15.26, 16.7, 20.21-22).27 The mission of God is focused decisively in the coming of Christ; it is concentrated in the whole Christ event. For Christian faith, Jesus Christ, that is to say his identity and destiny, is the focal point, the culmination and the criterion of God’s mission and purpose. Christ has come for the salvation of the world. But will the world accept and ‘receive’ him (cf. Jn 1.10-11)? This is the great imponderable factor, the unanswerable question and the element Cf. Gennadios Limouris (ed.), Church, Kingdom, World: The Church as Mystery and Prophetic Sign (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986; Faith and Order Paper 130). David Bosch, Transforming Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), p. 390.

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of genuine contingency in salvation history. How will it turn out? We do not know (though we do know what we have to do meanwhile). Christ’s mission cannot be fulfilled unless he is ‘received’ in faith. But this will not happen, the world will not be able to make the response of faith, unless his own people are united. This statement may seem over-bold, if not somewhat sacrilegious, but let the words of the Johannine text that has been the guiding star of the ecumenical movement throughout its history sink in: I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be [one] in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (Jn 17.20-23)

This passage from the Lord’s ‘High Priestly Prayer’, as he consecrates himself as a sacrifice on behalf of his own, has inspired and motivated efforts for greater Christian unity for the past century. It is over-familiar to us – ‘that they may all be one’ is now a hackneyed phrase – to such an extent that we may well miss its astounding message. In the context of the prayer as a whole, these verses seem to be saying that the fulfilment – we might even say the ‘success’ – of Christ’s God-given mission is dependent on the unity and consequent credibility of the Church. There is no guarantee that Christ’s mission will be fulfilled, successfully completed; it is contingent on human response. Clearly, Jesus cannot fulfil his destiny as the Christ unless he is recognized as such.28 The logic goes something like this. Christ’s saving mission requires that its message is met with faith in the hearers. The possibility of faith is conditioned in this-worldly terms by the credibility of the messenger, the Church, his ‘own’. Why is credibility important? Because it has to do with trust in the messenger, which is a prerequisite of faith. Credibility is not some shallow politically correct concern, equivalent to the notorious ecumenical slogan from the 1960s, ‘Let the world set the agenda’. Credibility, derived of course from credo, I believe, relates to the capacity of others to believe. Credibility is Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (combined volume; Welwyn, Herts: James Nisbet, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 112–14.

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concerned with the conditions that are required for the message to commend itself to the mind, heart and conscience of the hearer as true and worthy of credence. It is a pivotal factor in mission. The credibility of the message (the proclamation: kerygma) is strong when his own are ‘one’, but it is seriously compromised when his own are divided. When the Church is visibly split up it cannot speak with one voice and its divisive actions belie its message of reconciliation, unity and communion. As the storm clouds of war massed over Europe – and indeed over much of the rest of the world as well – in the summer of 1937, a galaxy of church leaders and eminent theologians met in Oxford to take stock of the challenge and to ‘survey their task’. The theme of the conference was ‘the life and death struggle between Christian faith and the secular and pagan tendencies’ of the time – code for the Nazi and probably also Stalinist ideologies.29 The outlook for humanity was grim, but the conference recognized that the Church was almost powerless to do anything about it on account of own failures. It was compelled to confess that its ‘prophetic message to the world’ was ‘discredited in advance’ by its deep divisions: What reason … has the Church given the world to believe that it has the secret of true community in Him whom it preaches and professes to serve? The life of the Church is deeply infected with the very ills from which humanity suffers. The divisions and conflicts of mankind have been reproduced and even justified within its borders. Again and again Christian groups have persecuted and sought to destroy one another, and with equal guilt have persecuted men of other faiths – and this is still happening today. Thus a Satanic element has entered the life of the Church.30

Significantly, the conference’s message to the churches echoed the Lambeth Appeal of 1920 by focusing on fellowship or communion. ‘On every side’, it said, ‘we see men seeking for the life of fellowship in which they experience their dependence on one another.’ The Church is called by God to be that fellowship which ‘binds men together in their common dependence on Joseph H. Oldham (ed.), The Churches Survey Their Task: The Report of the Conference at Oxford, July 1937, on Church, Community, and State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937), p. 10 (Oldham). ‘Longer Report on Church and Community’, in ibid., p. 197 (cf. p. 69 for the shorter version); cited in part by Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), p. 114. As Radner shows, this indictment also applies to the failure of the German churches to stand united against the Nazi tyranny and in defence of the Jews – a failure that was replicated in the massacres in Burundi in the early 1980s and Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

29

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God and overleaps all barriers of social status, race, or nationality’.31 The missionary task was urgent: ‘The Christian Church is called upon to fulfil its mission today amidst a distraught and disunited mankind … the foundations themselves are shaken.’32 The conference believed that the deep wound at the heart of the Church’s life would not be healed until communion and mission were brought together in a united mission, a mission in communion that could commend the gospel effectively by the churches acting and speaking as one. Therefore its first word to the churches was a call to repentance, so that a spirit of penitence might come to permeate both the churches as institutions and the hearts of all their members.33 In common with other voices at this time – notably those of Karl Barth and of Archbishop William Temple – the conference struck the note of judgement: ‘Judgement must begin with the house of God.’34

Called to missional communion The above brief exposition of the terms ‘communion’ and ‘mission’, illustrated by two major events of the twentieth-century Church, inevitably raises the question of the relation, the biblical and theological connection, between them. What have communion and mission to do with each other and what would it mean for a ‘Communion’ to see its vocation as a ‘missional’ one? As St Paul says in another connection, ‘Much in every way’ (Rom. 3.2). Once again we can take our cue from St John’s Gospel.35 In ch. 10 we have the extended metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep, the flock and the fold. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep … I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. (Jn 10.11, 14-16) Oldham (ed.), The Churches Survey Their Task, pp. 58–9. Ibid., p. 67 (Report 1, ‘On Church and Community’). Ibid., p. 80. 34 Ibid. 35 The paragraphs that follow are expanded and developed from P. Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology: The Church Made Whole? (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010), Ch. 10, ‘Forging Communion in the Face of Difference’. 31 32 33

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This passage foreshadows the High Priestly Prayer of ch. 17. The sense of impending sacrifice, the terms ‘my own’ and ‘to know’, and the mention of ‘others’ in the future who will believe, resonate with ch. 17. Christ will sacrifice his life for his own, who are those who hear his voice and follow his call. Between the Shepherd and his flock there is an intimate bond of trust and devotion: they ‘know’ each other (just as in ch. 17 the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father). Besides those gathered around him now, there are those, already known to God, who are to become disciples in the future: ‘other sheep that do not belong to this fold’. The Good Shepherd will seek to gather them also and they will respond to his call as they recognize his voice. He longs to have all the sheep together in one flock, enclosed in one sheepfold: ‘they shall become one flock’. This outcome is characterized above all by singularity. There is only one gate (vv. 2, 7, 9), only one flock and only one shepherd. It is for this united flock – not for a plurality of all sorts of various flocks – that he will lay down his life. He will die to gather the sheep. The purpose of his death will not be completely fulfilled until they are one. The Good Shepherd’s mission is to unite his sheep in one flock. There are strong cross currents between John 10 and John 11. In John 11.50-52 Caiaphas cynically proposes that it is better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed. The Fourth Evangelist comments that as High Priest Caiaphas spoke more than he knew: ‘He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.’ Christ would die ‘to gather into one’. He would go to the cross for the unity of his people. Just as in John 10 the Good Shepherd would ‘bring’ the other sheep and form one flock, one fold, so here Jesus would ‘gather’ God’s scattered children from the four corners of the earth into one. His mission was unity. His goal must be our goal: a united mission to the world, mission in communion. What does mission in communion look like; what attributes does it have? To find an answer we may turn again to Jesus’ prayer at the end of the ‘Farewell Discourses’ of St John’s Gospel. In John 17.20-23 Jesus prays to the Father for the unity of his disciples. Just as in John 10, they are described as his ‘own’. His own are those whom the Father has given him, those whom he is sending into the world. And, just as in John 10 the Good Shepherd has a concern for his



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‘other sheep’, and just as in John 11 Christ is said to die to gather together the scattered children of God, so here Jesus prays ‘not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one’ (vv. 20–21). So what sort of unity is Jesus praying for here? I suggest that is mystical, visible, missional, ethical and eschatological – five facets of unity in the prayer of Jesus. First, the unity or communion for which Jesus prays in John 17 is a mystical communion and unity. It is grounded in the mutual indwelling or ‘abiding’ of the Father and the Son and of believers with the Father and the Son. It is, therefore, intrinsically unfathomable, a profound mystery. The unity of the Church as mystery partakes of that character. The unity or communion of Christians participates in that mutual abiding or indwelling that enfolds Father, Son and disciples in one through the Spirit. According to John, to abide in Christ is to abide in his word and in his love. In the Gospel of John, Christ’s person, his words and his love are virtually synonymous: three ways of expressing the same reality. But of these three key Johannine ideas, love is pivotal to all that Jesus speaks of here. The union of which this prayer speaks is a union of love, whether it is the mutual love of Father and Son, or the love that they bear towards humankind, or the love that disciples have for the Lord and for one another in return (‘We love because he first loved us’: 1 John 4.19). But the destiny of the Church to realize the love of God lies solely with the grace of God, since in this Gospel the verb to perfect is almost a technical term for a mighty act of the Father or the Son.36 Christ’s prayer is then for a mystical work of God to take place that will unite God and God’s people: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one’ (Greek: teleioun, ‘may be perfected into one’). The communion that issues in evangelistic outreach is motivated, built and sustained by the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5.5). We may see here how the love that comes from God, the love that is God (1 Jn 4.8, 16), is expressed and fulfilled in the communion that forms the Church. The love of Christians for each other and for their neighbour is the reflection, imitation and embodiment on earth of the love of God.37 To strive Hoskyns, ed. Davey,The Fourth Gospel, p. 505. Barth, CD, IV/1, §68, passim. See also Sjef van Tilborg, Imaginative Love in John, BIS 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1993); Johns Varghese, The Imagery of Love in the Gospel of John (Rome: Gregorian & Biblical

36 37

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to be in communion with our fellow baptized Christians and to remain in communion with them is a basic expression of the disposition and steadfast intention of love that we should have toward them. True love is shown in practice in many ways, but it always involves commitment to the other and a willingness to give of oneself sacrificially for the sake of the other – to set self aside. Love desires to be united with the beloved. In the context of the Church, love takes the form of communion. Communion is not achieved by our own efforts, it is not a human construction or a work of our own hands, but at the same time it needs some human, institutional structures to enable it to flourish. To do all that we can to realize and to maintain communion or unity is an expression of Christian love. If we are not doing that, can it be said of us that we are filled with the love of God, or even that we have been barely touched by it? Secondly, the unity and communion for which Jesus prays in John 17 is unquestionably a visible communion and unity, a unity that is apparent to all: ‘that the world may believe that you have sent me’; ‘so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (vv. 21, 23). When the Church dwells in communion with the Father and the Son it manifests God’s glory to the world. It is a world-facing unity as well as a God-facing unity. The unity that is God’s will for the Church has its face turned towards the world. The unity that Christ desires for his Church must be unambiguously visible to the world in such a way that the world becomes convinced of the truth of his mission (cf. Jn 16.8-11). Visible unity lends credibility to the gospel message. Unity must be visible, concrete and practical. It must do work in the world. Unity or communion is no mere ‘spiritual’ reality, if the spiritual is equated – as, regrettably, it often is – with the invisible. If our unity does not hit people between the eyes and point them to a loving and just God, we have to ask ourselves: Is it the unity for which Christ prayed? Thirdly, the unity and communion for which Christ prays in John 17 is a missional communion and unity. To have a mission is to be sent with a purpose. Both Jesus and his disciples are sent: ‘As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world’ (v. 18). This key missiological Press, 2009); Francis J. Moloney, Love in the Gospel of John: An Exegetical, Theological, and Literary Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013); Richard Bauckham, Gospel of Glory: Major Themes in Johannine Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), pp. 64–72.



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sentence is placed between two statements that together speak of both Jesus himself and his disciples being made holy in God’s truth: ‘Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth’ and ‘for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth’ (vv. 17, 19). In the Fourth Gospel it is said repeatedly that the purpose for which Jesus was sent and has come into the world is to ‘bear witness to the truth’. Before Pontius Pilate, Jesus bears witness: ‘For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.’ And in an echo of the Good Shepherd discourse in John 10, he adds: ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’ (Jn 18.37). The expression ‘the truth’ in John, as elsewhere in the New Testament, refers to God’s revelation made known in Jesus Christ – in his coming, life, teaching, actions, death and resurrection. The incarnate one is ‘full of grace and truth’, for grace and truth came into the world through him (1.14, 18).38 If our communion as Christians does not result in missionary outreach to the world, specifically evangelization, through giving united public testimony by word and deed to the truth of God’s revelation and saving action in Jesus Christ, is it the unity for which Christ prayed? Fourthly, the unity and communion for which Christ prays in John 17 is an ethical communion and unity. Unity must bring forth visibly the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5.22-23). Love is the first of these, for without love the other fruits either cannot be present (joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness) or, like self-control, will be grim and joyless duties. Communion will manifest a moral or virtuous quality and character. To be committed to unity, to avoid unnecessary separation, to support one another in solidarity, to bear one another’s burdens, to reach out the hand of friendship that Christ has extended to us – all these are the fruit of a steadfastly virtuous and charitable disposition and frame of mind and heart. But the great fire of love, kindled by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Christians, transcends even these.39 To strive for communion is not merely the response of sheer obedience to the revealed will of God for unity, harmony and like-mindedness, which are C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (London: SPCK, 1955), p. 426; C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 170–8. 39 The inextricable role of ethical witness in mission is stressed in Andy Draycott and Jonathan Rowe (eds), Living Witness: Explorations in Missional Ethics (Nottingham: Apollos, 2012). 38

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inculcated over and over again in the Scriptures, but evinces a vision of what is good for humankind, a way of living in which we find the fulfilment of our created nature and at the same time ‘fulfil the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6.2). The moral character of Christ as the embodiment of the love of God is reflected and mirrored in the community that is his body.40 Consequently, the moral character of the Church becomes more important ecclesiologically and a more effective witness in the world than its rules, organization and – to those outside – bizarre ways of going about its business.41 If in our lives and communities we are not revealing the moral strength and loving attractiveness that mark the character of Christ, are we part of the answer to his High-Priestly prayer? Finally, the unity and communion for which Christ prays in John 17 is an eschatological communion and unity. It is manifested ‘already’, but its completion is ‘not yet’. It is experienced tensively: as Christians in the Church we find ourselves stretched out, extended and expanded, between what we know now of that ‘blest communion, fellowship divine’ and what in our aching need and lack we know is promised and is still to come. Jesus speaks in John 17 of what, in the mercy and providence of God, may come to pass in the dispensation of the Church on earth, which is the dispensation of missional communion: that his own may be manifestly one with himself and the Father and that, as a consequence, the world may be enabled to believe. This is a communion that, in the nature of the case, must be manifested in history, in this world and in this life, precisely where the mission entrusted to the Church takes place. But as a unity that participates in the unity between the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, that mirrors and reflects the divine, triune unity, it cannot be fully realized in this world. It is present already, but not yet complete.42 It is our responsibility and task right now to appropriate the communion that is in Christ with all our strength, but it remains the gift of God and of grace, and will be perfected in God’s own time and way. So Barth, CD, IV/2, p. 779. Cf. Summers, Friendship, p. 193, drawing on Gerard Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), p. 220, which in turn draws on the work of Alastair MacIntyre. See also John B. Thomson, Sharing Friendship: Exploring Anglican Character, Vocation, Witness and Mission (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), where, drawing on the work of Stanley Hauerwas, love, friendship and character are shown to be bound together in the Christian calling. 42 See further MacDougall, More Than Communion. 40 41



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How is what we know and experience now, as a foretaste of things to come, welded firmly together to its future fulfilment? What is the connection, the link? What is it that now participates in the eternal divine life and will not be superseded in the eschaton? Only one thing: love. For, according to Paul in 1  Cor.  13, love never comes to an end, but always endures. While faith and hope point to their fulfilment and will not be needed in the visio dei, love will be fulfilled more and more without end. Love ‘prefigures’, as Barth puts it, what will arrive with the parousia of Jesus Christ (whatever form that may take, which is hidden from our eyes). Love is, as Barth says, ‘the promise fulfilled already in the present’ and ‘the future eternal light’ already shining in our midst.43 Communion (koinonia) is the embodiment of love; mission in all its forms, ‘internal’ as well as ‘external’, is the practice of that love. So if we are not part of the ‘already’, here and now, of loving Christian communion, can we expect to share in the perfect communion that is ‘not yet’ fully revealed?

Conclusion The inseparable biblical connection between communion and mission is revealed particularly clearly in the Fourth Gospel. There Jesus is portrayed as coming to unite and as dying to make one. He embraces his disciples in bonds of communion with the Father and with himself. The communion of the saints, communio sanctorum, belongs to the faith of the Church; it is part of the Church’s confession and of what we say in worship that we believe (Credo). Communion and mission are the twin imperatives for the Church, two sides of a coin. They should never be divorced. There has probably never been a time in the life of the Church when mission and communion were not top priority, but they have never been more urgent than today when fellowship or communion is at a premium in the individualistic, atomistic culture of the developed world and when militant secularism and aggressive atheism would like to bury the Christian faith once and for all. The best hope for the Church of Christ in this abrasive climate is to hold communion and mission

Barth, CD, IV/2, §68, pp. 836–7, 840.

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together in a single reality, as missional communion.44 In the daily life and practice of the Church, effected wherever possible and as much as possible ecumenically, what is needed is mission in communion, acting as one body in carrying out Christ’s command, to ‘go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation’ (Mk 16.15, longer ending). Just as an experience of communion that does not eventuate in evangelistic outreach to those who know not Christ and as yet love him not is not the kind of communion that Jesus Christ prayed for to his Father on the eve of his passion, a mission that is not mission in communion is not what Christ prayed for either and not what he wants for his disciples today. So we might do well to ask ourselves: How is Christ’s prayer for the communion of his disciples – a communion that is mystical, visible and missional, and also ethical and eschatological – being answered in us and in the churches to which we belong and seek to serve?

I think that theological study should also reflect their inseparability: the theological disciplines of ecclesiology and missiology are simply two complementary ways of looking at the one reality of the Church, its nature and mission respectively.

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A Covenantal Vocation1

First of all, let me say that my key contention in this chapter does not depend on whether the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant is eventually broadly accepted by the member churches of the Communion or instead simply fizzles out. The Covenant process may end with ‘a bang’ or with ‘a whimper’, but neither of those possible scenarios affects my main argument and conclusion in the discussion that follows here. I contend fundamentally that any relationship of ‘communion’ under God, whether ecumenical or intra-Anglican, entails and involves a covenantal dimension. I argue, in other words, that a covenant relationship is inherent in the God-given reality of ecclesial communion. I also make a case that there is a robust biblical basis, in the study of the covenant in both Testaments, for this claim. Finally, I draw out some practical implications of this position for the stance of the churches of the Anglican Communion towards each other. In essence, my point is that the fact that an Anglican Communion Covenant has been proposed and that member churches of the Communion have been asked to study and respond to it, alerts us to the truth – previously largely dormant – that covenantal commitments and obligations are entailed in the mere fact of our being a Communion. The Covenant has sharply divided people of equal integrity and comparable wisdom who have the good of the Anglican Communion at heart. It has not achieved consensus support during the past few years and the process of reception and response has now slowed right down. In the view This chapter is an expanded and revised version of part of a paper given at a conference on the Covenant at Wycliffe College, Toronto, in May 2012 and subsequently published as Paul Avis, ‘Anglican Ecclesiology and the Anglican Covenant’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 12.1 (May 2014): 112–32.

1

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of some commentators, the Covenant remains the best hope of holding the Communion together, an expression for today of what historic Anglicanism has stood for ecclesiologically.2 For other observers, the Covenant is a pernicious proposal that is intrinsically un-Anglican and, if implemented, will wreck the Communion once and for all.3 The Covenant tends to be seen in a binary way, in rather black and white terms, either as a necessary development of Anglican ecclesiology, or as a serious deviation from it. Individual informed Anglicans who see eye to eye on many things find themselves divided over the Covenant. How can we explain this puzzling phenomenon? The division of opinion among Anglicans over the Covenant raises several questions which call for some analysis. We need to ask why the Covenant has been thought necessary; what provisions it contains; whether we have understood the terms of the Covenant correctly; and whether biblical covenant language is appropriate in this context. I will consider these questions in order, weighing up the pros and cons of the Covenant and trying to avoid either/or oppositions. Any discussion of the Covenant at this stage has to face the question of whether the Covenant process has aborted and the Anglican Communion has moved on – though to where is not clear. In taking another look at the Covenant, are we merely digging up a corpse? My view at the present time (2015) is that the process has not terminated – certainly not officially – and that the Covenant is not dead. At the very least, the questions that it deals with remain to be addressed. As Simon Oliver has commented, ‘Some, particularly within the Church of England, now regard the Covenant as history. It is not. Numerous Provinces across the Communion are yet to decide whether to adopt the Covenant and the Church of England may vote again. The key issue, namely how to understand and resolve disputes between Anglican provinces, remains.’4 However, I have a larger, more long-term aim in view and that is to argue that, quite apart from the actual Covenant and whatever its eventual fate Cf. Archbishop Rowan Williams’s video address, 5 March 2012: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CbjqyMa8TvA; text: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2380/; see further http://www.yestothecovenant.org/index.html; and http://www.anglicancommunion. org/commission/covenant/ [all accessed 24 November 2015]. 3 Cf. Diarmaid MacCulloch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3U1uQh184Q; see further http:// noanglicancovenant.org/ [both accessed 24 November 2015]. 4 Simon Oliver, review of Benjamin M. Guyer (ed.), Pro Communione: Theological Essays on the Anglican Covenant (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012) in Ecclesiology 11.1 (2015): 98–101, at p. 100. 2



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may be, the relationship that rightly belongs to Anglicans and ought to pertain between them is a covenantal one.

Why the Covenant? In Chapter 2 we explored the theological character of the Anglican Communion, its ecclesiology, noting that it has formally described itself on many occasions as a ‘communion of churches’. In that description, ‘a communion of churches’, both terms – ‘churches’ and ‘communion’ – are load-bearing. The member bodies of the Communion are churches in their own right, but they are not churches on their own. Anglican churches are bound together, not only by many informal links of history, tradition, theology, liturgy, friendship and joint action, but also in a particular form of visible unity, that of ecclesial communion. As we noted, ecclesial communion involves a threefold relationship between the churches concerned: first, mutual recognition as churches belonging to the one Church of Jesus Christ; second, mutual commitment to consult one another and to work together; and third, mutual participation in sacramental life, including an interchangeable ordained ministry. Against these three ecclesiological principles we may go on to ask: Why the Covenant? Why was the Covenant proposed, what does it contain, and is it helpful? Two sets of issues, both of which came to a head in 2003, led to the Covenant being proposed. First, issues concerning human sexuality: the election and consecration to the episcopate of a priest living in a same-gender union in the Episcopal Church of the USA, and public rites of blessing of such unions in the Diocese of New Westminster within the Anglican Church of Canada. Second, issues concerning cross-border interventions by bishops of Anglican churches in the global South within dioceses where some parishes or congregations were disaffected by these developments and were looking for outside support. The phenomenon of intrusion into another bishop’s jurisdiction was not new in 2003, but was intensified by the developments concerning human sexuality that became critical at that time. So in summary form we may say that at the present time the Anglican Communion is under stress because of disagreements about Christian morals and disagreements

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about what kind of mutual obligation is involved in membership of the Communion. The Anglican Communion remains in danger of breaking apart over these two sets of issues. I don’t mind putting a few more personal cards on the table at this point. In what circumstances is it biblically and theologically justified for individuals and churches to break communion? The New Testament epistles are instructive here. There was hardly anything that was right about the Christians at Corinth. The community was riddled with what Paul in effect identifies as heresy, schism, factionalism, anarchy and immorality. Corinth was an utterly dysfunctional church. Yet Paul calls the Corinthian Christians ‘saints’ and treats them as a church in his two surviving letters to them. As for the Galatians, they had, says Paul, forsaken gospel truth and embraced ‘another gospel’ (1.6-7); yet Paul treats them as churches. Other New Testament casestudies suggest that separation is sometimes justified: it is justified and indeed required when the faith of the Incarnation – ‘Jesus Christ come in the flesh’ – is denied, and only then. As the First Epistle of John tells us, this is how we recognize the spirit of the antichrist (1 Jn 4.2-4). If we turn to the Anglican tradition, we find that the classical Anglican divines held that separation is required if we are ourselves forced to affirm teachings or actions that we believe to be wrong – in other words, when they are made conditions of church communion. The sixteenth-century Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, taught that Christians should not separate from their church as long as the ministry of word and sacrament remained. The existence of causes of scandal in a church was not sufficient justification. In fact I cannot think of one great teacher of the Christian Church whose authority could be invoked to support the view that we should separate from a church because we are scandalized in conscience by some things that go on in it.5 The Anglican Communion’s response to the crisis caused by these two sets of developments – in the areas of human sexuality and pastoral intervention – was the Lambeth Commission, which produced the Windsor Report in See further Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology, Ch. 8: ‘Building and Breaking Communion’. The teaching of various Anglican divines on questions of separation is given in Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective, rev. edn (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2002), passim.

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2004. The report made two main recommendations: first, a moratorium on the consecration of bishops in same-gender partnerships, public rites of blessing and episcopal interventions; second, a Covenant for the Anglican Communion. The moratorium has been only partly observed and the future of the Covenant is unclear at the time of writing, though to date more churches have accepted it than have rejected it. What was the Covenant intended to achieve?6 It seems highly significant to me that the Covenant does not attempt to deal with the substantive issues that triggered the crisis; they are actually bracketed out. As Timothy Sedgwick puts it, the Covenant does not attempt to answer the question, ‘Who’s right?’7 The Covenant’s focus is purely on how we relate to one another as churches in communion; what form of behaviour, one to another, is appropriate within communion; and how we discern moral truth in communion. At its most basic, the Covenant seeks to extend the courtesy, charity and sensitivity that we try to show to our fellow Christians individually and locally, to the level of inter-church relationships. It seeks to prevent such a crisis as we are now experiencing ever happening again, and it does that by making provision for consultation, mediation and restraint when controversial actions are being mooted. In my opinion, the Covenant has several strengths that make it still worthy of serious consideration. First, the Covenant is the only option that has been put forward for the future of the Communion as one body in the face of current difficulties. I am not aware of any other worked-out proposal for securing the unity of the Communion as a communion, in the ecclesiologically important sense. The future of the Anglican Communion is in jeopardy at the present time and specific measures are needed; the Covenant is the sole candidate for consideration. It seems that to set aside the Covenant means either to hope to muddle through somehow without a plan, or to opt for communion without

See further John Rees, ‘Covenant and Communion’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 14 (2012), pp. 235–55 – particularly helpful on section 4 of the Covenant; Andrew Goddard, ‘Unity and Diversity, Communion and Covenant: Theological, Ecclesiological, Political and Missional Challenges for Anglicanism’, in Mark D. Chapman (ed.), The Anglican Covenant: Unity and Diversity in the Anglican Communion (London and New York: Mowbray, 2008), pp. 47–80; Guyer (ed.), Pro Communione; Timothy F. Sedgwick, Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church: A Study of the Episcopal Church (New York: Morehouse, 2014), pp. 61–7. 7 T. Sedgwick, Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church, p. 65.

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constraints, with the resulting fallout.8 As Timothy Sedgwick points out, the Anglican Communion is in dire straits if it cannot find ‘some means of addressing differences as matters of governance’.9 The real alternative to the Covenant, it seems to me, is to allow the present sharp tensions to be worked out in the formal separation of some Churches of the Communion from others – and that means the fracture, reduction or possible break-up of the Anglican Communion. Secondly, the Covenant is certainly an embodiment of mutual commitment among the churches of the Communion. Perhaps the greatest significance of the Covenant lies in the fact that by subscribing to the Covenant, Anglican churches will signal their intention to remain together. They will signal this to themselves, to all the other Anglican churches throughout the world, and to other Christian world communions, who are watching with concern and do not want to see the Anglican Communion fail as a worldwide fellowship of churches. Such a failure would indicate a serious weakening of global Christianity and a diminishing of Christian witness on the world stage. It would undoubtedly bring grief and heartbreak to millions of Anglican Christians around the world as they became separated sacramentally from each other. The Covenant seems to me to be located in the area of moral intentionality and that points towards a covenantal vocation with or without ‘the Covenant’. Thirdly, the Covenant seems to be true to the Anglican understanding of the Church. I cannot myself see that it is in any way ‘un-Anglican’, as some have claimed. Behind their reservations lies a concern that the Covenant asks too much of member churches and fatally compromises their autonomy. I do not share that perception. I do not start from the principle of the autonomy of ‘particular churches’, but from the credal confession of one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. ‘Autonomy’ cannot be the first thing that we have to For historical examples of the juridical issues raised by ‘provincial autonomy’ see Frances Knight, ‘“A Church without Discipline is No Church at all”: Discipline and Diversity in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Anglicanism’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Discipline and Diversity: Papers read at the 2005 Summer Meeting and the 2006 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Brewer, 2007), pp. 399–418. See also Mark Chapman, ‘“By Schisms Rent Asunder, By Heresies Distrest”: Anglicanism after the Windsor Report’, in Gerard Mannion (ed.), Church and Religious ‘Other’ (Ecclesiological Investigations 4; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), Ch. 10. 9 T. Sedgwick, Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church, p. 63. 8



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say about ourselves as Anglican churches; it should be some way down the list. The attributes of the Church of Christ that we affirm in the Creed must surely come much higher up: unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. The very first thing that we want to say about our own church, whichever church that may be, is that it belongs to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. But if we belong, with others, to something much greater than ourselves, then we belong together and not in autonomous isolation. So interdependence must be a key descriptor of Anglican ecclesiology and polity – or in the Windsor Report’s phrase, ‘autonomy in communion’.10 The Covenant is an attempt to flesh out in practical terms what interdependence might mean. The Covenant can be seen as one possible outcome of a process of development within the Anglican Communion and its Instruments of Communion over the past several decades – a process not of centralization but of mutual involvement. Nevertheless, the Covenant can only be adopted by the free constitutional action of each member church of the Communion and any future consequences of the Covenant would need to be processed by each church in a similar way. Autonomy or self-government is not threatened by the Covenant, though it is placed in a broader ecclesial context. Jeffrey Driver’s close analysis of the successive drafts of the Covenant, in dialogue with his fellow Australian Bruce Kaye, shows that the tendency towards centralized jurisdiction that was present in the draft proposal appended to the Windsor Report has been progressively reduced – in fact to vanishing point. I agree with Driver’s conclusion that the final, Ridley text of the Covenant actually affirms rather than threatens the autonomy of the member churches.11 Fourthly, the Covenant is intended to be orientated to the common good of the Communion. From medieval times, through the Reformation and right up to the present day, churches have used the language of the common good and applied it not only to the wider society or commonwealth, but to the Church as an institution.12 As churches that exist in a relationship of interdependence, it seems not too much to ask of us that we consider the common good of the Christian Church as a whole and of the Anglican Communion in Paragraphs 72–86. Cf. Norman Doe, An Anglican Covenant, pp. 105–7. Jeffrey W. Driver, A Polity of Persuasion: Gift and Grief of Anglicanism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), Ch. 3. 12 See Paul Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006). 10 11

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particular, as a part of that whole. This takes us to the heart of what is meant by catholicity: kat’holou, ‘according to the whole’. To be catholic means to be deeply conscious of being part of a wider whole and to act accordingly.13 The virtues of forbearance, patience, restraint, willingness to consult and to accept a degree of accountability to others come into play here. ‘Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6.2). Fifthly, the Covenant resonates with Anglican ecumenical endeavour and achievement which has followed the ‘twin track’ of affirmation and commitment in several formal agreements. Its roots are in the work of Faith and Order in which Anglicans have played a notable part for nearly a century. The idea of covenant pervaded the ecumenical movement from the 1920s onwards. The Anglican Covenant ‘is composed of the ecumenical hopes and toils of many generations’.14 As the Covenant text itself affirms, Anglicanism’s special charism is ‘the ecumenical vocation to the full visible unity of the Church’. The ‘catholic norms’ that bring churches together ecumenically are the same as those that hold churches in being. The Anglican Covenant and the ecumenical enterprise, with all its convergences and commitments, are of a piece. Sixthly, the Covenant requires those who sign up to it to enter a process of inter-personal, communal, moral discernment and is therefore a virtuous instrument of governance for the Anglican Communion. This is the thrust of Tim Sedgwick’s searching analysis.15 In place of bitter, inconclusive arguments about ‘Who’s right’ (which will always condemn some to be forever in the wrong), Sedgwick offers a pathway dedicated to moral discernment. The Covenant is not an instrument of policing, but of education, of induction into deeper fellowship. In the Church we need to ask ourselves, ‘How do we teach?’ and ‘How do we learn?’, in the area of moral truth. This reflection on the methods of moral pedagogy itself depends on how we understand the purpose of inculcating moral awareness in the light of the gospel. Is that purpose not that we may die to self and receive Christ’s risen life in the community of the Church? In turn, our structures of moral authority in oversight (episkope) On the qualitative understanding of catholicity see Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Co., 1972), vol. 1, Ch. III: ‘The Catholicity of the Church’, pp. 37–55. 14 Guyer in Guyer (ed.) Pro Communione, p. 15. 15 T. Sedgwick, Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church. 13



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must be shaped by the purpose and pedagogy of moral insight. Are not those structures in place in order that each one of the faithful may be led to moral and spiritual maturity? The process of moral shaping is always inter-personal and communal and therefore carries with it an imperative to maintain unity. The assertion of identity in separation, by enacting schism in order to preserve purity, is self-deceiving, because identity is always identity-in-difference and presupposes a living relationship, albeit in tension. Concentrating our energies on the New Testament call to holiness, where to our Creator, Redeemer and Judge we stand or fall, will put the current strife in a fresh perspective, where differences are not allowed to divide. As Sedgwick wisely observes, in its divided state the Church is not a place of welcome for a spiritual journey of trust and love. ‘You can’t trust or love what is divided’ (p. 1). Mission is undermined and the Church fails in its God-given task. Tim Sedgwick’s account of the Anglican Covenant usefully brings out its reconciling, mediating purpose. The Covenant aims to create a space for reflecting and taking counsel together. In affirming the ultimate responsibility of the member churches of the Communion to adjudicate before action can be taken, the Covenant seeks to involve the whole body, ensuring that it consults within itself, as it were. The Covenant, Sedgwick writes, ‘structures teaching authority, governance, like no other communion of churches. It is strongly conciliar in the way it structures discipline.’16 But as he astutely points out, for all its virtue, ‘No process of governance at the level of the Communion will ensure that individual churches remain in communion. Processes carry with them unintended consequences.’17 Though not a guarantee of future togetherness, the path of conciliar reflection, inter-personal moral discernment and collective responsibility offers the best – indeed, the only – hope for the future of the Anglican Communion. Finally, it is important to note that the Covenant is not set in stone, but may be amended by due process (4.4.2). Teething troubles can be ironed out. It can be improved and made to work better once it is up and running. The Covenant text may not be perfect and it does not have to be perfect in order to deserve our support. But what does the text commit the churches to?

T. Sedgwick, Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church, p. 64. T. Sedgwick, Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church, p. 64.

16 17

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What does the Covenant say and what does it not say? It seems to me hugely significant that the Covenant does not directly address the substantive issues, with regard to sexuality, that triggered the crisis in the Communion.18 Moreover – and this may surprise some people – it does not propose any doctrinal or ethical tests for the Communion or create new Communion structures. The doctrinal material that it contains is purely descriptive and is taken from existing texts. It draws on the Chicago– Lambeth Quadrilateral as it developed between 1886/88 and 1920 and has been repeatedly affirmed by Lambeth Conferences and by many member churches of the Communion individually; for example, it is included in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, 1979.19 The Quadrilateral states a minimum ecclesiology – Scriptures, creeds, dominical sacraments and historic episcopate – as a basis for unity conversations with non-episcopal churches. It is the very bottom line of Anglican ecumenical theology. So much more could be and has been said, not least in theological dialogue between Anglicans and the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist and Baptist traditions respectively. But it is a core that all Anglican churches already accept and affirm. The Covenant text supplements the Quadrilateral with an extract from the Church of England’s Preface to the Declaration of Assent, which describes what the Church of England professes doctrinally in a way that could be endorsed by any Anglican church (‘the catholic and apostolic faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation’). The Covenant affirms at this point that the ‘historic formularies’ of the Church of England (the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, 1662, and the Ordinal), which have been widely received and adapted in the Communion, bear authentic witness to this faith. The report of the For resources on the substantive issue of same-gender relationships see Philip Groves (ed.), The Anglican Communion and Homosexuality (London: SPCK, 2008). 19 J. Robert Wright (ed.), Quadrilateral at One Hundred: Essays on the Centenary of the Chicago– Lambeth Quadrilateral 1886/88–1986/88 (Anglican Theological Review, March 1988, Supplement Series, Number Ten; Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Publications; London and Oxford: Mowbray, 1988); R. William Franklin, ‘The Episcopal Church in the USA and the Covenant: The Place of the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral’, in Chapman (ed.), The Anglican Covenant, pp. 101–22. 18



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Church of England’s Doctrine Commission that led to the present form of the Declaration of Assent was considered by the Lambeth Conference 1968 and its main recommendation was adopted by the Conference.20 So this is not the Windsor Report telling the Communion that it should believe exactly what the Church of England believes, or anything else, for that matter. The Covenant is not doctrinally prescriptive. But the Covenant does not propose any ethical tests for the Communion either. There are no rules concerning Christian morals in it. No one is being asked, within the terms of the Covenant, to sign up to any particular ethical or moral position. What is profoundly ethical about the Covenant is that as Anglicans we are being asked to behave in a Christian way towards each other. It functions crucially in the realm of behaviour: how we should act towards one another when we are in a relationship of ecclesial communion. It is concerned with the virtues that belong to relationality. I think it is difficult to argue against the Covenant on this score, unless anyone thinks that the virtues of patience, forbearance and the sharing of responsibility, while applicable to individuals, are inappropriate for Christian churches. Furthermore, the Covenant does not create any new structures for the Communion. It calls for each member church to appoint a means of relating to the Covenant. But for the Communion itself, the existing Standing Committee will act on behalf of the Instruments of Communion. The Standing Committee’s role will be to monitor the progress of the Covenant, to consult and to take advice and then to make any necessary recommendations. If the Standing Committee sees that a church is not observing the Covenant by consulting about divisive proposals – or if its attention is drawn to such a circumstance – it will request the church in question to delay while consultation or mediation takes place. If the church declines to co-operate, the Standing Committee may recommend ‘relational consequences’ to the Instruments of Communion and to the member churches (4.2.5). What these consequences are is not spelt out and remains slightly vague in the Covenant text, but they seem to imply degrees of participation in the common life of the Communion, including participation in the Instruments of Communion Coleman (ed.), Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences, p. 165: Resolutions of 1968, Resolution 43: ‘The Conference accepts the main conclusion of the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine entitled Subscription and Assent to the Thirty-nine Articles …’

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(the Lambeth Conference, the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council). It is quite clear that the ‘relational consequences’ do not include the option of expelling a member church from the Anglican Communion. In response to the fears of some, we might ask: ‘How will the Covenant, if generally accepted, change the constitution and complexion of the Communion?’ It seems to me that it will not alter the constitution of the Communion or of the member churches; both will continue to govern themselves in the same way as they do now. But the Covenant will certainly enhance our mutual commitment and intensify our engagement with one another as Anglicans and in that way it will change the complexion of the Communion – and who would claim that that would be a bad thing? I think it is a serious misunderstanding of the Covenant, to view it as some do, as a form of legal mechanism. One recent commentator, quite irresponsibly in my opinion, retails, without analysis, the ‘common view’ that the Covenant represents a ‘legalistic, structural, instrumental response to a relational problem’, generating ‘exasperation and demoralization on all sides’.21 In truth the mechanics are the least explicit aspect of the Covenant text and there is nothing legalistic about it. Such process as there is, in Part 4, is quite long-range, step-by-step and subject to the decisions of the self-governing structures of each member church (4.2.7). The Covenant text is emphatic about this: ‘Nothing in this Covenant of itself shall be deemed to alter any provision of the Constitution and Canons of any Church of the Communion, or to limit its autonomy of governance. The Covenant does not grant to any one Church or any agency of the Communion control or direction over any Church of the Anglican Communion’ (4.1.3). On the contrary, the Covenant can be seen as essentially an expression of what we always owe one another as Christians and as churches: to listen, to consider advice, to show restraint, not to give offence, to accept accountability. In my estimation, these are covenantal qualities. It is precisely because we are already in communion that we need to specify ways of relating to each other that will protect that communion. As we have seen in Chapter 2 (‘An Ecclesial

Scott MacDougall, More Than Communion: Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), p. 263.

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Vocation’), while the member churches of the Communion are self-governing, the Communion itself has a basic polity already, in the form of the four Instruments of Communion. I see the Covenant not as a way of changing the polity of the Communion (it eschews that aim), but as a way of working that will enable the Instruments, that already constitute the Communion’s polity, to function more effectively. Altogether, I locate the Covenant in the area of moral and spiritual discernment and commitment in Christ and I think that that was the intention of its framers also.22

Is covenant language appropriate? The use of covenant language to describe the relation between churches of the Anglican Communion has been challenged by some as inappropriate and unhelpful. Professor John Barton of the University of Oxford, for one, has claimed that the extension of the covenant between Yahweh and his people to their relationship with each other cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible. Barton argues that, while ‘covenant’ is sometimes used for the relationship between individuals in the Old Testament (human–human covenants), there is nowhere in the Bible where the two usages are combined in such a way that the covenant between God and Israel means that Israelites are bound ‘covenantally’ to each other.23 However, I think there is something more that can be said on this score and that a coherent biblical basis for applying the language of covenant to internal church relations can be constructed in several steps. First, we may note the absolutely fundamental, dynamic character of covenant in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). ‘Covenant’ is, according to Eichrodt, ‘the characteristic description of a living process’, bestowed by Yahweh, ‘in order to reveal a divine reality’ and is ‘unique in the whole history of religion’.24 It is in the concept of the covenant that Israel’s fundamental See also Peter Doll, ‘Autonomy or Communion? The passion of the Episcopal Church’, Theology, 115.6 (2012): 427–35. 23 John Barton, ‘Covenant in the Bible and Today’ in Chapman (ed.), The Anglican Covenant, pp. 193–203, at p. 202. 24 Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. John Baker (London: SCM Press, 1961), vol. 1, p. 14. 22

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conviction of its unique relationship with Yahweh is concentrated.25 For Hafemann, the relationship between Yahweh and his people, within the framework of salvation history, is ‘expressed in and defined by the interrelated covenants that exist throughout the history of redemption’.26 As Rendtorff points out, the word for covenant, bĕrît, does not occur in the plural in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Although there are covenants with Noah, Abraham and David, plus the covenants of Sinai and Deuteronomy, and the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah, there is an underlying coherent theme of the singularity and constancy of God’s covenant relationship with his people, a relationship grounded in the character and sovereign rule of God, expressed in the election of a people for a task of worship, service and witness – a universal mission in fact – and creating an intimate bond between God and his people. The truth and reality of the covenant is pervasive and is present much more often than the use of the actual word bĕrît would suggest. It is summed up and crystallized in the formula, used more than thirty times in the Old Testament: ‘I will be your God, you shall be my people.’27 This formula, found in several different strands of Old Testament material and constantly reiterated, unites the various economies or ‘dispensations’ of the covenant into a single all-embracing fundamental concept for God’s relationship with Israel. The same formula points forward in Jeremiah 31.33 to the making of a ‘new covenant’, but precisely because the formula is used here too, the new covenant is placed firmly in continuity with the old. In a much-quoted definition, Hugenberger defines a covenant as ‘an elected … relationship of obligation established under divine sanction’.28 Hugenberger’s study concerns the connection between marriage and covenant in the Hebrew Bible, taking its cue from Malachi 2.14. The concept in Malachi is not unprecedented. In Ezekiel 16.8, 32 we have marriage as an image of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, the divine initiative and grace being stressed; cf. Proverbs 2.17. It is at least implied in Genesis 2.23-24, 1 Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, vol. 1, p. 13. Scott J. Hafemann, ‘The Covenant Relationship’, in id. and Paul R. House (eds), Central Themes in Biblical Theology: Mapping Unity in Diversity (Nottingham: Apollos [IVP], 2007), p. 21. 27 Rolf Rendtorff, The Covenant Formula, trans. Margaret Kohl (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998). 28 G. P. Hugenberger, Marriage as Covenant: A Study of the Biblical Law and Ethics Governing Marriage, Developed from the Perspective of Malachi (supplement to Vetus Testamentum, vol. 52; Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 171; more discursively: ‘A covenant, in its normal sense, is an elected, as opposed to natural, relationship of obligation under oath’ (p. 11; and see his Ch. 6). 25 26



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Samuel chs 18–20 (narrative comparison between David and Jonathan and between David and Michal respectively) and Hosea 2.16-20. In marriage we have a pre-eminent example of a human–human relationship that is formed with divine blessing and under divine sanction. The verba solemnia serve the purpose of the covenant oath and the marriage is ratified by sexual union.29 The God of Israel is the witness to marriage, involved and concerned in marriage as conceived in the Old Testament. Husband and wife are to relate and behave towards each other in a covenantal way, in the sight and with the blessing of the covenant-making God. Secondly, in the Old Testament, the notion of covenant already flows into the idea of communion. Communion with God is not an idea that is foreign to the Old Testament. In fact communion with God could be said to be the central theme of the Hebrew Bible. In salvation history Yahweh enters into communion with humankind; they are invited to ‘walk with God’ in a loving, trusting relationship, to know God’s fatherhood and friendship and even, in exceptional cases, to ‘speak with God’. It was precisely through the covenant that Yahweh entered into communion with Israel. ‘Covenant’ (berith) can be interpreted as ‘bond of communion’ and is so used by some Old Testament scholars.30 Thirdly, God’s covenant assures his people of God’s consistency and dependability, evoking trust and security on the part of the people and calling for the personal qualities of love and loyalty in response.31 Promises are at the heart of the covenant; a covenant is often seen as an exchange of promises. The covenant shows what sort of people the covenant people should be. The relationship that the people have with each other cannot remain unaffected by God’s covenant with them collectively. Fourthly, the many covenants between individuals in the Old Testament, such as the mutual pledge of David and Jonathan (1 Sam. 20.16-17), are not ‘secular’ agreements (to see them as such would be anachronistic), but have Hugenberger, Marriage as Covenant, pp. 342–3. Th. C. Vriezen, An Outline of Old Testament Theology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp. 166–70; Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, vol. 1, pp. 36–69; Edmond Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. A. W. Heathcote and P. J. Allcock (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), p. 211; Ephraim Radner, ‘Foreword: The Covenant Way’, in Guyer (ed.), Pro Communione, pp. xvii– xxvii. The expression ‘bond of communion’ for God’s covenant with Israel is used by both Vriezen and Jacob. 31 Eichrodt, Theology, pp. 38, 52. 29 30

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religious significance. They are not something separate from the individuals’ relationship with God and God’s people. These covenants are accompanied by sacrifices and very often appeal is made to God to witness and to guarantee the bond. As we have noted, covenant and marriage are linked together as images of God’s relation to Israel. Through the making of a covenant, whether with God or with fellow humans, the parties belong to each other.32 Fifthly, it is through the covenant that Israel is constituted as a people, as the people of God. ‘Covenant theology is through and through a theology of “the people of Yahweh”.’33 It is always God who initiates and makes the covenant; it is not made jointly by God and Israel, though of course it evokes a commitment in response.34 It is made with the people corporately.35 The essence of the covenant is: ‘I will take you as my people, and I will be your God’ (Exod. 6.7) or ‘I will be their God, and they shall be my people’ (Jer. 31.33). The covenant makes the people to be a people. It is what has bound them together. They are to live and act as God’s covenant people in relation to each other as well as in relation to their God. The vertical plane and the horizontal plane intersect. Moving briefly to the New Testament, we note firstly that though the covenant relationship with Israel is sometimes spoken of in the plural (Rom. 9.4; Eph. 2.12), the unity of the covenant relationship between God and his people is, if anything, strengthened and intensified in the New Covenant given in and through Jesus Christ. That New Covenant is made through the sacrificial death of Christ, represented proleptically and sacramentally at the Last Supper in bread and wine, as his body and blood (Mk 14.22-24; Mt. 26.26-29; Lk. 22.14-20; 1 Cor. 11.25). Jesus gave his body and shed his blood ‘for many’. God’s action in Christ is precisely the fulfilment of the promises contained in the covenant with Israel (Eph. 2.12). Although there are comparatively few explicit references to the covenant in the New Testament, the allusions are many. The coming of Christ is heralded as the fulfilment of God’s ancient covenant with his people (Lk. 1.72-75). The covenant, with its themes of the Jacob, Theology, p. 211. Ernest Nicholson, God and his People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 209. 34 Nicholson, God and his People, pp. 210–16. 35 Ludwig Koehler, Old Testament Theology, trans. A. S. Todd (London: Lutterworth Press, 1957), pp. 60–71. 32 33



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law written on the heart, the intimate relationship between God and God’s people, the knowledge of God and the forgiveness of sins, forms a strong subtext throughout.36 Moreover, the title ‘the people of God (ho laos tou theou) is now applied to the Church (1 Pet. 2.10; Tit. 2.14; cf. Heb. 11.25). It is not fortuitous that in the New Testament the Church is called the body of Christ: there are strong sacramental resonances here. By virtue of the New Covenant Christians are brought into a corporate solidarity with each other through baptism into Christ’s crucified, risen and glorified body that he had given in covenant at the Last Supper (1 Cor. 12.12-13; Rom. 6.3-14; Gal. 3.27-28). Crucially, the New Covenant is the basis of the unity of the Church, about which Paul has much to say, the means by which the unity of the Church is established. In Paul unity is the visible expression of that heartfelt obedience to the meaning of the Law that marks the New Covenant.37 On all these cumulative exegetical grounds it seems to me completely acceptable, and indeed perfectly fitting, for covenant language to be applied by extension from the relation of God to the Church to the relation of Christians and indeed component parts of the Church to each other.38 This is not an illegitimate transfer and it is not merely an analogy. God’s covenant takes effect not only on the transcendent plane, but also at the immanent level. God’s promises to us inform and shape our promises to each other. That is of course what we find in certain Christian traditions, where the bond between members is described as a covenant,39 and in a number of ecumenical agreements, such as the Covenant between the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain.40 Not all historical appropriations of biblical covenant language to ecclesiastical purposes are palatable to us today (e.g. the ‘Solemn League

C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Substructure of New Testament Theology (London: Nisbet, 1952), pp. 44–6: ‘Although … there is only one place where the prophecy of the New Covenant is expressly cited as from scripture [Hebrews 8.8-12], it seems clear that it was widely influential in the Church from an early date, since it has not only influenced Paul, Hebrews and the Synoptic tradition, and possibly the Johannine tradition too, but probably had a place in primitive liturgical forms’ (p. 46). 37 Scott J. Hafemann, Paul’s Message and Ministry in Covenant Perspective: Selected Essays (Eugene, OR: Cascade and Cambridge: James Clarke, 2015), Ch. 11: ‘Paul’s Concern for the Unity of the Church: An Embodiment of His New Covenant Theology’. 38 See the discussion in Norman Doe, An Anglican Covenant, Chs 2 and 3. 39 See Paul Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), Ch. 2. 40 An Anglican-Methodist Covenant (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House; London: Church House Publishing, 2001). 36

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and Covenant’ for the extirpation of episcopacy during the period of the English Civil War); nevertheless, ‘covenant’ remains the strongest metaphor that we can find for the commitment that we owe to each other within our communion in the body of Christ. If this is the case ecumenically, how much more should it apply within our own Anglican Communion?

A final word Finally, we probably need to ask, ‘Does all this really matter? Is the Anglican Communion sufficiently important to be worth keeping together? Have we not always said that it was provisional? Would it not be simpler to settle for some kind of federal model where the churches of the (so-called) Anglican Communion would relate to each other like ecumenical partners, in a state that fell somewhat short of all that the catholic faith and modern ecclesiology have understood by ecclesial communion?’ My answer to that question is an unequivocal ‘Yes, it is worth holding together’, and ‘There is no substitute for communion’. That response is not merely sentimental – there are profound theological reasons for saying so. The first reason for my affirmative answer is that Anglicanism has indeed been said by some to be provisional, perhaps particularly provisional. But that was generally said in the context of ecumenical advance, with a view to the churches of the Anglican Communion uniting with, or being taken up into, a larger whole. As I have argued elsewhere, all churches, all historical, contingent, imperfect and incomplete expressions of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, are and must be provisional. This is the eschatological proviso that must be added to whatever we say about the Church as it now is. Anglicanism cannot be more provisional than other churches, all of which are diminished and impaired by their separation from each other, their lack of communion. The provisionality of Anglicanism, if we want to use that term, is not a reason for complacency about our lack of unity or for letting centrifugal tendencies in the Communion go unchecked.41

See P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), Ch. 1: ‘Keeping Faith with Anglicanism’.

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My second reason concerns the theology of communion. Koinonia (communio) is not a human arrangement or construction – it is not ‘man-made’ at all – but rather a creation of the Holy Spirit. Koinonia is not at our disposal, to accept or discard, to do what we will with it. Communion – whether between individual Christians or between particular churches within the universal Church – is something given in the realm of grace. In the realm of koinonia we stand on holy ground. It is intimately connected to the sacraments of the gospel. In baptism we are brought into a relationship of communion with the Triune God and with one another in the body of Christ. In the Eucharist we are continually sustained and strengthened in the life of communion that is already a given reality. Communion is God’s greatest gift to us in this life and will be perfected in heaven. Any relationship of communion is a precious gift to be treated with great respect and care. It is an imperative of Christian love to seek communion with our fellow Christians. We are called, by virtue of our union with Christ, to seek, to maintain and enlarge the reality of communion. To do that we are inspired by the Holy Spirit, who is sometimes conceived, in Christian theology, as the bond of communion between the Father and the Son. Ultimately, then, the question of the integrity and cohesion of the Anglican Communion as a communion has a profoundly mystical dimension in its connection to the divine life of the Holy Trinity. Individual Anglicans, as well the member churches, will continue to discern whether the integrity and cohesion that belong to communion are likely to be enhanced by the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Covenant is not widely accepted by the churches of the Communion and becomes merely a footnote to the history of Anglicanism. I hope I have been able to show that, in that case, the relationship of communion in which we stand, as individual Anglicans and as member churches, is nothing less than covenantal and requires that we treat one another accordingly, following our covenantal vocation and being guided by covenantal virtues.

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A Peaceable Vocation

In the face of the discord, hatred and violence generated by the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, the statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke protested: ‘No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.’1 The voice of Jesus Christ, that as Christians we seek to hear and follow, is the voice of the Good Shepherd – the beautiful (Greek: kalos) Shepherd. It is the voice of an unconditional love that makes us whole, however challenging, however transforming or remaking, from the inside out, that word of Christ to us may be at the time. Martin Luther defined the Church as the flock that hears the voice of its Shepherd. Even a seven-year-old child knows that, he said.2 Karl Barth, addressing the Second World Conference on Faith and Order in Edinburgh in 1937, said: ‘If we listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd, then the question of the unity of the Church will most surely become for us a burning question.’3 If Christ speaks to his people in the healing voice of love, how do his people, his Anglican people, speak to each other? Is it the peaceable, healing voice of Christian caritas, agape, that we hear Anglicans transmitting across the world? What messages is the Anglican Communion sending to the wider Christian family, the oecumene, and the so-called secular world? What is the dominant ethos of the Communion as others see it? Many people of goodwill, on the fringes of the Church as well as securely within it, are troubled and distressed by Christian conflicts generally and intra-Anglican disputes in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dent; New York: Dutton [Everyman], 1910), p. 10. 2 Martin Luther, Smalkald Articles, XII, in Theodore G. Tappert (ed.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1959), p. 315. 3 Karl Barth, The Church and the Churches, Foreword by William G. Rusch (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005 [1936]), p. 16. 1

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particular. Members and leaders of our ecumenical partner churches are dismayed by our divisions. Those listening in to Anglican discourse expect to catch the echoes of Christian charity as Anglicans speak one to another across the globe. But, to borrow a phrase from the Anglican poet R. S. Thomas, ‘the echoes return slow’, if at all.4 What the audience overhears consists, all too often, of the reverberations of mutual incomprehension and contempt. Some of what has been said in exchanges between Anglicans in Africa and Episcopalians in America is simply too shameful to quote.5 The theme of this chapter is the ethical and political ethos of the Anglican Communion. I note the serious challenge to the existing form of Anglican polity from elements within the Communion, notably the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GFCA). Then I touch on the ecumenical implications of recent developments and end by presenting a view of the Anglican way of resolving disputes that emphasizes its resources of generosity, tolerance and courtesy, in the spirit of Edmund Burke’s axiom quoted above.6 If the Kingdom of God, that the Church is called into being to serve in the missio dei, is ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ that Stanley Hauerwas for one describes, should not the Church itself exhibit the same kingdom quality of peaceableness?7

The Anglican polity rejected In earlier chapters of this book I have defended the basic principles of Anglican ecclesiology and the existing Anglican political structures, particularly the four Instruments of Communion: the Lambeth Conference, the

R. S. Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow (London: Macmillan, 1988). Christopher Craig Brittain, A Plague on Both Their Houses: Liberal vs. Conservative Christians and the Divorce of the Episcopal Church USA (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015) is an attempt to explore common ground and to overcome polarization by means of reflection on empirical research. 6 For more on Burke’s Anglican political philosophy see Paul Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 326–39. For a brief synopsis of his views on church and state see Paul Avis, Church, State and Establishment (London: SPCK, 2001), pp. 47–50. A useful introduction to the themes of Burke’s career is Connor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commentated Anthology of Edmund Burke (London: Minerva, 1993). 7 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983). Hauerwas’s title is borrowed from the title of the famous paintings by Edward Hicks (1780–1849) inspired by Isaiah 11.6-8. 4 5



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Primates’ Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council and the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But that does not mean that those structures always work as effectively as they might or that they do not need to be reformed and renewed. Accordingly, the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) has been working on the reform and renewal of the Instruments, seeking to show that the Instruments need to be understood as expressions of inter-personal involvement, rather than being objectified or reified, as though they could do their job irrespective of the attitude and commitment of their members. They are best seen as extensions of the personal skills and aptitudes of those who make them up – more like musical instruments that are meant for harmony, than like mechanical ones that are merely tools for a job.8 However, some Anglicans seem to take the view that the Instruments in their present form have comprehensively failed. They maintain that the Instruments have not risen to the challenge of the current crisis and need to be replaced by fresh structures. To this fundamental challenge to the present polity of the Anglican Communion I now turn. The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GFCA) has issued what amounts to a manifesto for an alternative Anglican Communion with alternative Instruments of Communion to lead it. The report The Truth Shall Set You Free consists of material produced for the leaders’ conference in 2012, preparatory to the second GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) in Nairobi, 2013.9 GFCA is a movement of protest, dissent and regrouping among conservative, mainly Evangelical Anglicans, with its centre of gravity in the global South. Some contributors to the report are avowedly ‘disaffiliated’ clergy, who have either left or been expelled from what they see as intolerant, persecuting, liberal churches and their tone is understandably rather strident. On the other hand, the Jerusalem Statement, the foundation document of the movement, which is reproduced in the report, is generally moderate, sound and in fact altogether unexceptionable. There is, however, a strange short piece included in the report which arouses my concern. ‘What See the report of IASCUFO to the ACC, November 2013, especially the last section (pp. 21–88), which reflects the work of Bishop Stephen Pickard: http://www.anglicancommunion.org/ media/39744/iascufo-complete-report-to-acc.pdf [accessed 12 February 2016]. 9 Charles Raven (ed.), The Truth Shall Set You Free: Global Anglicans in the 21st Century (London: The Latimer Trust, 2013). The following paragraphs reflect my review of the report in the Church Times, ‘Deciding and dividing’, 27 June 2014. 8

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is the Gospel?’ deals in a biblical way with atonement and conversion, and I am not questioning that. But this article’s understanding of salvation is entirely individualistic. The Church is mentioned only as a witness to the gospel. The sacraments are not referred to, not even baptism in connection with repentance, where we might expect to find it in this context. I find it difficult to recognize authentic Anglican theology here, even the theology of The Book of Common Prayer, 1662, which the authors might be expected to uphold. The presenting issues within the report are church policies regarding human sexuality and – bound up with that – the ‘liberal theology’ attributed to the Episcopal Church and parts of the Anglican Church of Canada, which are accused of preaching a ‘different’ or ‘false’ gospel (cf. Gal. 1.6-8). As these documents point out, the underlying issue is the authority of Scripture. What they do not explicitly admit is that behind the question of the authority of Scripture is the question of the interpretation of Scripture (hermeneutics). The hermeneutical question is not addressed here, except for one unfortunate remark by the editor (Charles Raven) which takes a swipe at ‘biblical criticism’, as though ‘criticism’ were meant in a negative, destructive way, rather than by analogy with the established disciplines of ‘literary criticism’, ‘musical criticism’ and ‘drama criticism’, that is to say the understanding, explanation and appreciation of texts and performances. A rigidly conservative and unscholarly stance on the Bible is equated in the report with ‘orthodoxy’, with the implication that those who do not share it are unorthodox, and that is to set up a criterion of true belief that neither the Bible nor the creeds nor the ‘historic formularies’ explicitly endorse. The authors also talk about ‘God’s just and holy wrath’ and ‘the awful reality of hell’. For whom? Presumably not themselves. The writers sit in judgement on their fellow members of the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada are the prime culprits, but the Church of England does not escape entirely and the office of Archbishop of Canterbury is castigated. There is also a rather paranoid conspiracy theory about the Anglican Communion Office, which is characterized incorrectly as merely an arm of the Lambeth Palace ‘bureaucracy’ which has ‘marginalised the Primates and sought to supplant their decision-making role’. Although the main targets are the North American



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churches, the report also shamelessly plays the ‘colonialist’ card from time to time, as though Rowan Williams or Justin Welby could be seen as imperialist adventurers, or the Anglican Communion Office, whose senior staff is mainly non-British, as a colonialist threat! But the central accusation is that ‘the troubles of the Anglican Communion flow from a rejection of the uniqueness and sufficiency of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Mike Ovey). This accusation, that Anglican Christians in the West generally do not accept Christ as the only Saviour and Lord, is completely unjustified, except perhaps (and I emphasize ‘perhaps’) in the case of a small number in North America who may have bought into radical theological relativism. The broad-brush depiction of western Anglicans as those who do not fully honour Christ in their belief and lives is worse than a caricature; it is a calumny. The authors of this report repeatedly protest that they have no intention of departing from the Anglican Communion; their aim, they say, is simply to restructure its conciliar polity. They argue that the Instruments of Communion (the Lambeth Conference, the Primates Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council and the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury) have failed to rise to current challenges and have become dysfunctional. These authors tend to assume that the Instruments have powers that they have never had – powers of decision-making. As I mentioned above, they tend to reify the Instruments of Communion, treating them as objects, things ‘out there’, that can function irrespective of who is present and taking part. But the Instruments are made up of people; they are personal, relational and organic entities. They have no existence without their members. Like musical or surgical instruments they need skill, dedication, practice and intuitive wisdom to enable them to do their job effectively. As the significant boycott of the Lambeth Conference 2008 by bishops of the global South showed, the GFCA constituency feels so strongly in conscience about what it regards as the errors of some western churches with regard to sex and the Bible that they are not willing even to talk, to confer, with them in a Lambeth Conference. In that case, how can the Instruments be expected to do their work? Except to a limited extent, with regard to the constitutional role of the Anglican Consultative Council, the Instruments are not decision-making bodies. They are instruments of consultation with the capacity to offer guidance and to make recommendations to the member churches of the Communion,

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who must then consider that advice through their own synodical-episcopal channels. The GFCA will discover for itself the limits of central, global ‘decision-making’ if it ever attempts to legislate for its member churches and groups. It will, it says, bring into being alternative structures of consultation and oversight, beginning with its own Primates’ Council and the GAFCON gatherings. The claim not to wish to leave the Communion is a smokescreen for subversive action: what seems to be intended is a an alternative, parallel, ‘real’ Communion of those who claim the name Anglican – even a takeover. The lack of momentum of the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant is not regretted in the report and the Covenant itself is assimilated to despised ‘managerial and organisational strategies’ (p. 21). The Covenant is dismissed as ‘institutional’ rather than ‘spiritual’. In fact (as we have seen in the previous chapter) the Covenant is designed as an instrument of mediation and reconciliation, requiring ongoing spiritual conversion of the participants if it is to realize its potential.10 But what is clear in terms of Anglican polity is that this GFCA report negates the existing Instruments of Communion, setting them aside as broken-backed structures and evincing an unwillingness to try, by commitment and engagement, to make them work better. Not only disaffected Anglicans from conservative churches, but also our ecumenical partner churches, look to the Instruments of Communion and wonder whether they have the capacity to reunite the Anglican Communion. As far back as 1983 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later of course Pope Benedict XVI) criticized the statements on authority in the Church in the Final Report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) for lack of attention to the actual structures of authority in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. The text, he said, ‘left one completely in the dark as to the concrete structure of authority in the Anglican community [sic]’. He asked with regard to the Lambeth Conference, ‘what sort of teaching authority belongs or does not belong to this assembly of bishops?’11 The recent difficulties of the Anglican Communion have intensified this sort of anxiety among those ecumenical partner churches that take the trouble to See further Paul Avis, ‘Anglican Ecclesiology and the Anglican Covenant’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 12.1 (May 2014): 112–32. 11 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Anglican-Catholic Dialogue: Its Problems and Hopes’, Insight, 1.3 (March 1983): 2–11, at p. 2. 10



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concern themselves with the matter. It is abundantly clear that the Anglican Communion’s ecumenical partner churches wish it well and want it to hold together. They recognize that the global profile of Christianity would be seriously weakened if the Anglican Communion failed to resolve its problems, that is to say, if it became structurally dysfunctional or split. The concern of ecumenical partner churches lends additional force to what I and others have been saying about the potential that the conciliar dimension of Anglicanism may hold for reconciliation.12

Models of moderation ‘No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.’13 Burke’s dictum applies as much to the political dimension of the Church as to the pastoral dimension. There are still persuasive voices within the Anglican Communion that speak up for the peaceable virtues of charity and courtesy in our dealings with one another. The authors of two recent studies set out a pathway for Anglicanism that is one of virtuous disposition and behaviour – in fact, virtue ethics applied to ecclesiology, a powerful formula.14 As Rowan Williams says in his Foreword to one of these volumes, A Point of Balance, Anglicanism at its best has tried to practise the Benedictine values of courtesy, hospitality, generosity and a reflective, balanced, practical faith. (Of course, ‘at its best’ is a huge, discriminating value judgement, verging on the invidious, though nonetheless a necessary qualification.) In the same volume, Robert Boak Slocum holds up an attractive model of Anglican theology that leans to the pragmatic and responsive, rather than the systematic and speculative, and that is flexible, not rigorist, in its practical and ethical application, because it has been developed in relation to urgent pastoral and social needs and challenges. It is incarnational in its approach, recognizing that creation is good, with sacramental potential, and that God chooses to work through human agency. Because Anglicanism is embodied See Avis, Beyond the Reformation?; Valliere, Conciliarism. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 10. 14 Percy and Slocum (eds), A Point of Balance; Martyn Percy, Anglicanism: Confidence, Commitment and Communion (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). 12 13

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in practice, Slocum argues, especially in prayer, Eucharist and compassionate action, Anglicans can live with certain loose ends and unresolved questions, making a particular point of respect for the conscience of those of other views. Anglicanism, Slocum concludes, is inhospitable to theories of infallibility, the dogmatic mentality, wherever located. It is resistant to party spirit and a sectarian mindset.15 (Once again, this is Anglicanism ‘at its best’ or ‘as we see it’, not as everyone sees it.) Within the same collection, Philip Sheldrake provides a concise but profound systematic theology of reconciliation, showing how we tend to demonize the ‘other’ in fear and anger and how reconciliation involves the healing of memories, particularly of ‘belittlement, rejection, and denial’. The process involves painful moments of ‘unknowing or dispossession’, leading to the art of listening and holding back comment or judgement (echoing the Rule of St Benedict again). Reconciliation leads through common prayer to its culmination in eucharistic communion. Each one must come as a needy, sinful, incomplete person – not looking down on others – in order to be radically remade by the transforming presence of Christ in the Eucharist. What radically inhibits this remaking, this reconstructing of Christian identity, is an intolerant, dogmatic spirit, that claims to see as God sees – and that is idolatry.16 Martyn Percy’s chapter and postscript in A Point of Balance and his Anglicanism: Confidence, Commitment and Communion explore a way, a method, of holding things together for Anglicanism that is not merely a collapse into some kind of spongy middle ground.17 The centre is not the same as the middle, Percy insists: it is a value judgement. To hold the centre is now a radical stance and it is, paradoxically, where the cutting edge lies. It is where opposites meet and engage. The Church must have the capacity to soak up angst while issues are thrashed out in dialogue over time. This is what the great councils of the Church achieved. The history of Christianity can be described Robert Boak Slocum, ‘Introduction: A Practical and Balanced Faith’ and Ch. 1: ‘The Bonds and Limits of Communion: Fidelity, Diversity, and Conscience in Contemporary Anglicanism’, in Percy and Slocum (eds), A Point of Balance. See now at greater length his The Anglican Imagination: Portraits and Sketches of Modern Anglican Theologians (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). 16 Philip Sheldrake, ‘A Spirituality of Reconciliation for the Anglican Communion’, in Percy and Slocum (eds), A Point of Balance, Ch. 5. 17 Percy, Anglicanism: Confidence, Commitment and Communion. 15



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as an ongoing, tension-filled conversation about what we as Christians hold dear. To preserve the possibility of such conversation by means of basically democratic, representative governance is an ethical imperative; to stifle it is immoral.18 Echoing Alasdair MacIntyre’s view that a living tradition is a ongoing internal argument about the goods prized by the community,19 Percy does not fall into the trap of thinking that argument and controversy are always toxic for the Church. Debates, dissension and disagreement never indicate that denominations are in their death-throes, he points out. So ‘the point of balance’, of equipoise or equilibrium, lies in the mutual, respectful comprehension of otherness. Poise, we may say, is not a resting place, but – as for a high-diver – a springboard for signal achievement.20 Percy’s term ‘equilibrium’ is an initially attractive attribute to be applied to the Anglican ethos. Who wants to be eccentric, unbalanced or wobbly? In the American philosopher Paul Elmer More’s essay ‘The Spirit of Anglicanism’, which prefaced the classic anthology Anglicanism of 1935, More identified as the special contribution of the seventeenth-century divines ‘that love of balance, restraint, moderation, measure, which from sources beyond our reckoning appears to be innate in the English temper’.21 So the contemporary Episcopal theologian Ellen T. Charry is not the first to suggest that the character of Anglicanism owes something to the steadiness, the ‘thoughtful practicality’ (as she puts it) of the traditional English temperament. In the English literature of earlier centuries, that temperament was often said to be phlegmatic – cool, stolid, laid-back. Charry puts it more kindly: Anglican theology takes its point of departure from the English temperament that is reasonable, moderate, practical, aesthetically perceptive and committed to both the rule of law and the dedication of the spirit. It is Augustinian and Benedictine and warmly devotional rather than logically scholastic.22 See Luca Badini Confalonieri, Democracy in the Christian Church, esp. pp. 121–3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1985). Elizabeth Hoare, ‘The Spirituality of the Anglican Communion’, in Ian S. Markham, J. Barney Hawkins IV, Justyn Terry and Leslie Nuñez Steffensen (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), pp. 714–25, similarly describes Anglican spirituality as balanced, integrated, earthed and diverse. 21 Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (eds), Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: SPCK, 1935; reprinted 1962), p. xxii. 22 Ellen T. Charry, ‘The Beauty of Holiness: Practical Divinity’, in Ralph McMichael (ed.), The Vocation of Anglican Theology (London: SCM Press, 2014), pp. 196–243, at p. 196. 18 19 20

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It is easy to mock this kind of stereotyping of the supposed English character, even of the past; it is calculated to enrage persons who despise patriotism and sneer at all that has gone to give them the freedom to do so. It is also a simple matter to expose the limitations of such traits as coolness (unless it be ‘passionate coolness’), steadiness (unless it be the proverbial ‘steadiness under fire’) and moderation (unless contrasted with that simplistic bête noire of the modern media ‘extremism’). But we should be thankful for such small mercies as these when it comes to engaging with those of very different views to our own within our Anglican family or in wider ecumenical dialogue, offering an attractive, peaceable face to the other. A welcome group of voices from the evangelical stable has mapped out the path of Good Disagreement.23 Taking its title from a comment by Archbishop Justin Welby, this set of essays is concerned with the ethical integrity of intraAnglican debate and questions of unity and communion; it refrains from entering into the substantive issues within the culture of modernity that are generating tensions in the Anglican Communion, particularly gender roles in the Church and same-sex unions. In the keynote first chapter, Andrew Atherstone and Andrew Goddard, historian and ethicist respectively, explore the notion of ‘disagreeing with grace’. They recognize that we are dealing fundamentally with divergent interpretations of Scripture, even of what the call to truth and holiness means in practice. Atherstone and Goddard explicitly countenance ‘some form of separation among professing Christians’ in extreme circumstances.24 But Michael B. Thompson’s careful study of ‘Division and Discipline in the New Testament Church’ (Chapter 3) significantly finds no New Testament authority for churches breaking away from each other: ‘every case of discipline in the New Testament concerns the failings of individuals who profess the faith – there are no examples of the apostles excluding entire congregations.’25 He could have driven the point home by adding that there is no support whatever in the New Testament for disaffected groups breaking away and setting up their Andrew Atherstone and Andrew Goddard (eds), Good Disagreement: Grace and Truth in a Divided Church (Oxford: Lion, 2015). 24 Atherstone and Goddard, Good Disagreement, p. 19. 25 Atherstone and Goddard, Good Disagreement, p. 60. 23



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own church, however serious the problems they believed they faced (could anything be worse than the situation at Corinth?). Ian Paul’s discussion of reconciliation in the New Testament concludes that ‘it is not possible to argue that the only thing which matters is the truth’.26 Jesus not only proclaimed the truth of the gospel, but also devoted himself to the restoration and rebuilding of relationships, through a relationship with himself. Reconciliation still comes through attending together to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, now embodied for us in the Scriptures. In his exposition of ‘things indifferent’ in Paul (later called adiaphora), Tom Wright highlights Paul’s use of ‘the strong and the weak’, where conscience must be the arbiter. This Pauline argument suggests that Anglicans need to learn the wisdom of holding back if their proposed action is likely to prove a stumbling block (skandalon) in conscience to the faith of others ‘for whom Christ died’. The problem in working with the concept of adiaphora is that, in the Anglican Communion, same-sex unions are not regarded as ‘things indifferent’ either by progressives, who see them as matters of love and justice, or by conservatives, for whom they are forbidden by divine law. So who are ‘the strong’ and who are ‘the weak’ in this case? Is this not in the eye of the beholder? Ashley Null surveys attempts at conciliation in the sixteenth century – between the various Protestant Reformers themselves and between Protestants and Roman Catholics. For the Reformers, ‘things indifferent’ were theological tenets or liturgical practices that made no difference to salvation. For the reconciler Martin Bucer and for some others, such as Tyndale and Frith, the mode of Christ’s presence in the sacramental elements was an adiaphoron. But for Martin Luther, the words of Christ at the Last Supper, ‘This is my body’, were the pledge and the means of salvation and therefore there could be no compromise over the mode of Christ’s sacramental presence. Null could have added that the Reformers were adamant that separation was never justified, even by serious scandal in a church, but only when the way of salvation was at stake. What the Reformers were looking for was agreement with integrity. Null sets out some principles that enabled genuine, though fragmentary, accord to come about in the midst of sixteenth-century controversy. All those concerned recognized that (1) division in the church was a scandal; (2) theological truth Atherstone and Goddard, Good Disagreement, p. 40.

26

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deserved concentrated attention and debate; (3) the Bible was the source of doctrinal authority; (4) not all theological issues were equally important; (5) personal interaction to build trust and respect was essential. Andrew Atherstone and Martin Davie show that modern ecumenical dialogue has much to teach us, but they overlook the key concept of ‘differentiated consensus’ in recent ecumenical method, whereby convergence is sought by carefully distinguishing points of agreement and disagreement and moving from that to what can be said together – a method that bore significant fruit in the Lutheran–Roman Catholic ‘Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification’ (1999).27 Christians engaged in controversy have often dipped their pens in vitriol. To disagree graciously, as the book advocates, would be a major step forward. But Anglicans need to move beyond ‘good disagreement’ to find ways to narrow the gap between opposing sides – the theological gap, the emotional gap and the relational gap – on the way to deeper convergence on those points where that is possible. The method of ‘Differentiated consensus’, borrowed from ecumenical dialogue, can be a useful tool. But for that to happen, Anglican church leaders need to be willing to talk to each other.

The character of Christ and the attractiveness (or not) of the Church Forty years ago I read Richard Hanson’s book The Attractiveness of God 28 and the motif of attractiveness has stayed with me. What is it that has magnetic power and compelling authority at the heart of the Christian faith? What draws us through doubt and struggle to the cross of Christ? What keeps us in the Church when many have deserted it on account of its failings and sins? Burke’s saying that the only sound that befits the Church is ‘the healing voice of Christian charity’ holds great attraction for me, resonating as it does Toby Howarth’s contribution on inter-religious dialogue, grounded in personal and communal interaction within civil society, has much practical wisdom to offer, as do other chapters, not discussed here. 28 R. P. C. Hanson, The Attractiveness of God: Essays in Christian Doctrine (London: SPCK; Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1973). The same theme is expounded in relation to ecclesiology in Pickard, Seeking the Church, Ch. 1. 27



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with St Paul’s hymn to love, to agape, in 1 Corinthions 13 and with the living Christian memory, derived directly from the Gospels, of the character of Christ and the power of his word and touch ‘to make the wounded whole … to cure a sin-sick soul’. Let us take the character of Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, as our standard and measure of all that is said and done in the Church today. Let it shape and judge our interactions with those of different convictions across the Anglican Communion. The Four Evangelists’ portrait of Jesus is a theologically motivated and theologically designed portrait certainly, in each case, but it is also one shaped by the indelible impression that Jesus made on those who interacted with him, positively or negatively, especially those whose hearts he won and who followed him in discipleship. In church we stand to hear the Gospel read, to hear again the saving words and saving deeds of Jesus the Christ. But behind the words and the deeds stands the character of the one who spoke the words and performed the deeds. It is the character of Christ that forms the bedrock of the ‘Christ-event’. His character refers to what kind of person Jesus was and is deep down and through and through. But it also points to the impress of Jesus on the hearts, minds and lives of those who encounter him, in the New Testament, in history and today.29 The character of Christ that shines out from the pages of Scripture is marked by both tension and consistency. The first word that springs to mind is probably ‘goodness’, because we know that goodness relates to tension and consistency, in that it comes at a price and is not episodic but enduring. In the figure of the Gospels, we certainly see conflict, both internal and external, ‘fightings within and fears without’, a life-and-death struggle to embrace the will of God unreservedly (in the Temptations, in solitary prayer through the night and in Gethsemane). But we also see consistency, because the inner struggle eventuates in the complete self-dedication of Jesus to the cause of God’s kingdom. Then we see truthfulness, wisdom, integrity and purity – unwavering adherence to the truth, sharp engagement with those who refuse S. W. Sykes, Christian Theology Today (London and Oxford: Mowbrays, 1971), Ch. 8, expounds ‘the character or spirit of Christ’ as the ‘essence of Christianity’, but Sykes does not develop the concept in the way that I do here, that is in terms of ethics, narrative, character-formation and the impact of Christ’s character as portrayed in the Gospels. Interestingly, Sykes did not return to this concept in his later work on the essence of Christianity: Stephen Sykes, The Identity of Christianity (London: SPCK, 1984).

29

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it and patient suffering on its account. With regard to those whom Jesus encountered on the way or intentionally sought out, the character of Christ evinces commanding authority (‘Follow me!’, exorcisms, command of the raging elements, absolution, and teaching ‘not as the scribes’). But it also reveals empathy, understanding, compassion, non-judgementalism (except of hypocrisy), embrace of the excluded and despised, hospitality and welcome. We see also, remarkably, an honouring of women, their worth, dignity and due place, and taking them into his confidence, together with loving care of children, who are lifted up as a paradigm of the Kingdom. We find willingness to engage in risky dialogue with adversaries; self-giving and depletion in acts of healing; and the affirming, strengthening and bracing of weak and wavering disciples. Character is as infinitely diverse as humankind itself. But what all kinds of admirable, noble and appealing character have in common is that they are formed in relationship and in community, enriched by the impact of significant others as ‘iron sharpeneth iron’ (Prov. 27.17, KJB) and deepened and softened by dedicated service to others: family, friends, neighbours, community and disadvantaged groups in society. Character draws strength from the nourishment provided by moral traditions and value-laden worldviews; it is infused with purpose and self-restraint. ‘To know who you are is to be orientated in moral space.’30 Character is carved out of experience and the vicissitudes of life. It has a narrative structure that reflects its formation over time, giving it the shape of a story – in MacIntyre’s phrase, ‘a narrative quest’ – involving oneself and others.31 A noble character is the most attractive, persuasive and influential thing in the world and there is no character in the history of the world more attractive, more winning, more compelling, than that of Jesus of Nazareth – the Jesus who is believed in as the Christ of God. The ultimate theological Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 28. 31 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1985); Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1975); id., A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (London: SPCK, 1991); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); David Brooks, The Road to Character (London: Penguin, 2015). 30



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significance of the character of Christ is that it is revelatory, mirroring, revealing and making present the eternal character of God as that is disclosed in scriptural revelation. As the biblical scholar Scott Hafemann writes: ‘At its most fundamental level, the subject matter of biblical theology is the Bible’s understanding of God’s character and purpose.’32 The Bible is not interested in elaborating a metaphysical account of the nature of the divine; what it presents is the character of the one made known in the history of salvation as the Creator-Redeemer-Sanctifier. Biblical salvation history is ‘focused on God’s self-revelation of his righteous character in and through his relationship with his people, the nations and the world’.33 The hub of that relationship is the covenant. But the character of God, as revealed in salvation history up to the witness of John the Baptist, is definitively mirrored in the character of Jesus Christ for he is ‘the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’ (Heb. 1.3). ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ – known, that is, not only in words and deeds, but also and indispensably in his character as it shines out in the Gospels, ‘full of grace and truth’ (Jn 1.18). Because it is said, ‘God is light and in him is no darkness at all’, Jesus can say in John, ‘I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life’ (1 Jn 1.5; Jn 8.12). The character of Christ is theologically radiant, an epiphany, bringing clarity and hope wherever it shines out. When the character of Christ leaves its imprint on our theology, when it pervades the life of the Church, an attractive and desirable version of Christianity is being presented to the world. When he is ‘lifted up’ in this way he will ‘draw all people’ to himself (Jn 12.32). But, tragically, all too often the character of Christ is eclipsed in the Church by the failings, sins and even crimes of its members and leaders. Then it is the character of Christ that judges us and, by grace, can transform us. The character of Christ also provides the template for the ideal of intra-Anglican relations: peaceable, courteous, empathetic and kind; an Anglicanism that remembers its manners Scott J. Hafemann, ‘The Covenant Relationship’, in id. and Paul R. House (eds), Central Themes in Biblical Theology: Mapping Unity in Diversity (Nottingham: Apollos [IVP], 2007), p. 20 (original italics removed). 33 Hafemann, ‘The Covenant Relationship’, p. 21. 32

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and knows how to debate respectfully – even when that posture is not reciprocated. As Hauerwas says: ‘the very grammar of Christian speech presumes that those who use the language have a character commensurate with it.’34 Indeed. If speech and character do not tally in us, we are condemned out of our own mouths. In recently reading the life of a great pastoral bishop of an earlier era, Edward Stuart Talbot, Bishop of Southwark, a successor of the Tractarians, who died in 1934, I was struck by his perception of what Anglicanism stood for. Talbot’s personal characteristics were those of balance, humility, optimism and hope. These qualities were also those that he looked for and found in the Church of England: ‘breadth, freedom, fearlessness’. But Talbot was not engaging in effortless Anglican superiority or triumphalism – he detested ‘supercilious Anglicanism’. He acknowledged that his Church was flawed and imperfect, but he believed that we should stick loyally to ‘that part of the Church in which God has placed us, battered, disfigured, stormtossed in past and present though it be’. Talbot found in Anglicanism ‘a positive and consistent representation of Christianity with definite principles of its own’.35 ‘Anglicanism, at its best,’ writes Percy, ‘is a community of civilised disagreement.’36 It seems that we cannot avoid ‘at its best’ language, and that is acceptable provided that we acknowledge that it is as much prescriptive as descriptive. Hauerwas even suggests that ‘Anglicanism can be understood as an ecclesial expression of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of traditionconstituted rationality’.37 Of course, we all know that I and the authors I have cited are captivated by an ideal model and that history provides numerous examples of Anglicans exhibiting the very antithesis of these attractive virtues – sometimes lethally so – not only to other Christians, but also to fellow Anglicans.38 The historian Ethan H. Shagan has provided an historical deconstruction of the ideal of ‘moderation’ in Reformation and post-Reformation

Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), p. 42. Gwendolen Stephenson, Edward Stuart Talbot 1844–1934 (London: SPCK, 1936), pp. 103, 219, 291; Talbot ascribed that last phrase to E. G. Sewyn, the Dean of Winchester and Editor of Theology. 36 Percy, Anglicanism, p. 138. 37 Hauerwas, Approaching the End, p. 115. 38 Unsparingly exposed in Radner, A Brutal Unity. 34

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England.39 Acknowledging its roots in the classical, Aristotelian ‘golden mean’, Shagan has shown how the concept of moderation was actually a major battleground on which the issues of Anglican theology were fought out. Conformists and Puritans contended for the middle ground, asserting their own moderation and disdaining the extremes. ‘Moderation’ was a postulated state of affairs that supposedly did not threaten the stability of the realm, the commonwealth. The moderate man and the moderate state were the microcosm and macrocosm respectively of a reality in equilibrium. But the ideal of peaceableness and tranquillity was enforced by violence on the part of church and state, as a means to a greater end, though coercion itself had to be moderate in its expression. Moderation is patently an ideological construction, but that does not mean that it has no merit. The model of reasonable argument is also a very western and perhaps male paradigm; it takes confidence and poise. The colourful, eccentric Thomas Gilbey, op, used to say that ‘Civilization is formed by men locked together in argument’ – and I think he meant men. The embattled pre-Vatican II reformer of Roman Catholic teaching on church–state relations and on the nature of governance, the place of democracy, etc., John Courtney Murray, sj, took comfort from this saying of Gilbey as he struggled to get his views accepted.40 The Christian Church would not be the Church as we know it if it were not a continual hotbed of argument. As the historian Karl Morrison has written – and somewhat understated: ‘From the age of the Apostles until our day, the character and goals of the Church have been the subject of almost continuous debate.’41 Morrison adds: ‘Out of these problems have come the reforms, schisms, and heresies which mark the history of the Church as a history of dissent and estrangement.’42 My question is not whether argument and debate can be brought to an end, but whether it can be conducted in a peaceable, courteous and charitable manner, without the odium theologicum of the past. Could we ever, this side of the eschaton, reach the point where these words

Ethan H. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Barry Hudock, Struggle, Condemnation, Vindication: John Courtney Murray’s Journey to Vatican II (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), p. ix. 41 Karl F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church 300–1140 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 349. 42 Morrison, Tradition and Authority, p. 349. 39

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would come true: ‘Hark the songs of peaceful Sion / Thunder like a mighty flood; / Jesus out of every nation, / Hath redeemed us by his blood.’43 There are parts of the Anglican Communion today – and indeed of the Church of England – where such generous values as courteous, reasoned discussion and debate are little esteemed and where party spirit and a sectarian mentality flourish, where we define our own identity in an ‘over against’, adversarial fashion and where the ‘other’ is demeaned, and even demonized. As Rowan Williams puts it, we need to ‘turn away from the lethal temptation to talk always about others when our backs are turned to them (and to God)’.44 But, when courteous and charitable overtures are indignantly or aggressively refused or contemptuously ignored, should we not be looking first of all and before we respond with blame, for the occasions of ‘belittlement, rejection, and denial’ that may have triggered that retreat into fear, anger and blame, with a view to trying to heal such wounds by deeper mutual understanding and the empathy that only humility can attain? That kind of penitent self-searching – the antithesis of all self-justification – is perhaps the biggest challenge facing the moderate, tolerant, courteous paradigm of Anglican polity, that many of us find deeply compelling.

W. Chatterton Dix, ‘Alleluya, sing to Jesus’; my emphasis. Rowan Williams, ‘Foreword to the Series’, A Point of Balance, p. x.

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Part Two

Three-Dimensional Anglicanism

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The Claims of Catholicity

Introduction: Three dimensions Classical exponents of the Anglican tradition have identified three strands in its make-up: in shorthand – and the choice of words is mine – the catholic, the reformed and the critical. Bishop Charles Gore, the leading Anglo-Catholic bishop and theologian in the Church of England in the first two decades of the twentieth century (he died in 1932), put it like this: The characteristic of the Anglican Church has been from the first that of combining steadfast adherence to the structure and chief formulas of the Church Catholic with the ‘return to Scripture’ which was the central religious motive of the Reformation.1

Anglicanism, therefore, according to Charles Gore, bears witness to a scriptural catholicism, a catholicism in which Scripture holds the highest place of controlling authority in the Church. However, that is to mention only two of the three key elements in Anglicanism. Gore also pointed out that the revival of the study of literature of antiquity in the sixteenth century had added a third component, the appeal to scholarship: It is the glory of the Anglican Church that at the Reformation she repudiated neither the ancient structure of Catholicism, nor the new and freer movement. Upon the ancient structure – the creeds, the canon, the hierarchy, the sacraments – she retained her hold while she opened her arms to the new learning, the new appeal to Scripture, the freedom of historical criticism and the duty of private judgement.2 Charles Gore, Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 196. 2 Charles Gore, The Mission of the Church (London: Murray, 1892), pp. 36–7. See also James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholicism (London: Faith Press, 1960), pp. 42ff. 1

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Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey characteristically summarized the three components as the gospel, the catholic Church and sound learning – note the change of order: the gospel, that is to say the Reformation witness, comes first, before the Church and its tradition; and sound learning brings up the rear.3 In summary, then, we have the catholic tradition, the witness of the Reformation and the affirmation of intellectual enquiry: three dimensions of Anglicanism in theology and in practice. The way that I describe them for our present purpose is: the claims of catholicity, the legacy of the Reformation and the critical imperative. In this chapter we focus particularly on the claims of catholicity.

What do we mean by catholicity? It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that the title of this chapter, ‘The Claims of Catholicity’, is ambiguous. It could be taken as meaning the catholicity that we claim for ourselves – which, as Anglicans, we do, for Anglicanism is nothing if it is not catholic. Or it could be read as the claim, that is to say the obligation, that the catholicity of the Church makes on us – which it certainly must if it is true. It is the second meaning that is uppermost in my mind: the claim to our allegiance, our obedience, that the catholicity of the Church lays upon us as a part of that Church. The Churches of the Anglican Communion affirm that they belong to the Church catholic, that they are catholic churches. As Anglicans/Episcopalians we rejoice in our catholicity and celebrate it. But it is salutary to remember that catholicity is not something that we own or possess as a church, but rather something that we have received from the wider Church – the Church that is one, holy, catholic and apostolic – because the catholic Church was there before we were and will continue after we are forgotten. And, because we have received the grace of catholicity, that is to say the gift of belonging to the wholeness of the Church, it places an obligation on us, to pray, to think and to act as those who belong to the whole Church of Jesus Christ. A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936).

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To be a catholic Christian means to belong to the visible community of believing Christians (fideles, ‘the faithful’), which is continuous in time and extended in space, united in the confession of the apostolic faith and in the celebration of the sacraments and ordered under the care and oversight of its pastors. As we have had cause to mention before, the word ‘catholic’ derives from the Greek kat’holou, ‘according to the whole’. So to be catholic means to be steadily orientated to the whole Church, to have a profound sense of the fullness of the Christian tradition and of the full orbit of Christian revelation. It means to live, as churches and as individual believers, in the light of that reality; to allow that sense of belonging to the whole Church to direct and guide our thinking, praying and acting. Anglicans could never give up the word ‘catholic’. We cannot be Christian without being catholic. If a person were to say, ‘I am a Christian, but I would not call myself a catholic’, that would mean logically that he or she did not want to be part of the whole Church, but wanted to stand apart from the Church, as an isolated believer. An isolated believer could not be part of the Church because they could not receive the sacraments of Christian initiation: baptism, confirmation and first communion. The sacraments of Christian initiation cannot be self-administered. You cannot, for example, baptize yourself, as the so-called se-baptists (self-baptizers) of the sixteenth century did because they could not find any clergy worthy enough, in their opinion, to perform the sacrament (there are some today who hold the same self-righteous prejudice and have baptized themselves – and have even done so more than once!). But we receive baptism, confirmation and first communion from the Church that has been entrusted with these means of grace, and therefore we receive them not as consumers of a product from an impersonal provider with whom we have no connection, but as recipients of a gift from a community that has – in a manner of speaking – a personality. A person who wanted to baptize themselves would be an extreme caricature of modern individualism and we would probably want to say to such a person that they had misunderstood the meaning of the word catholic. We would be inclined to point out that being catholic is not essentially about styles of worship, a sacramental focus, an emphasis on priesthood and the episcopate, vestments, candles, incense, etc., but refers to the truth that to be a Christian is to belong to the whole Church and that means, by definition, to be catholic.

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The same logic applies to churches as to individuals. Any church that sees itself as part of the whole Church will describe itself as catholic, as belonging to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Miroslav Volf comments: ‘All churches want to be catholic, though each in its own way … No church is catholic purely and simply; each church is catholic in a certain way.’4 And that is true of the churches of the Anglican Communion. They affirm their catholicity, both in their canons and other formularies and in the fact that, corporately, they affirm the catholicity of the Church every time that they say the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople in their liturgy. In affirming the catholicity of the Church in the Creed, they identify themselves with that Church and say that they belong to it. A church that was not catholic would be a contradiction in terms. As Karl Barth said, the Church is ‘catholic, or it is not the church’.5 A church that knows itself to be part of the whole and is deeply conscious of that fact, will live according to that vision. It will not be inward-looking, narrowly concerned with its own affairs and problems, taken up with a domestic agenda, but will have broader horizons. It will orientate itself in its policy-making to the Church catholic and will seek the common good of the universal Church. That is a tall order: it is all too easy and all too common for us to be so preoccupied with the politics of our own church that we fail to consider the common good of the Church as a whole. The claims of catholicity challenge us all to have wider horizons.

Unity, continuity and sacramentality One possible way of opening up the theme of catholicity would be to explore the idea of tradition: to show how our lives are immersed in tradition and how all that we have has been received; how we identify and own the tradition that has made us what we are and therefore has a particular claim on us; how we evaluate its authority and its relationship to the development of doctrine and Miroslav Volf, After our Likeness: The Church as an Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 259. 5 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh and London: T&T Clark, 1957–), IV/1, p. 702. 4



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practice; how, on the other hand, we can become hidebound by tradition and how we can flout tradition. But to do that would open up a vast area of study and reflection. That it must remain a topic for another occasion. I am going to take a different route into catholicity. My thesis is that catholicity centres on the three concepts of the unity, continuity and sacramentality of the Church. As catholic Christians in catholic churches we will be powerfully motivated to build unity, to maintain continuity and to celebrate sacramentality. I want in the remainder of this chapter to explore these three themes – unity, continuity and sacramentality – not separately, but in an interconnected way. They form a golden thread in all that follows. The unity, continuity and sacramentality of the Church is expressed in the ecclesial forms or structures that emerged between the New Testament writings and the first Ecumenical Councils, that is to say broadly in the second and third centuries. Building on what we might call the raw material of the Gospels and Epistles and also drawing on what the experience of the early Church suggested about the structural and organizational needs of the Church in the face of heresy, schism and failures of ethical behaviour, the Church gradually and by trial and error evolved certain forms that gave shape to catholicity. These forms were the canon of Holy Scripture, the ecumenical Creeds, the threefold ordained ministry with an episcopate in ordered succession, and the liturgical structure of the Eucharist. These ecclesial forms, deriving from the early Church, are the backbone of Anglicanism and are briefly summed up in the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral in its various forms of 1886, 1888 and 1920. Anglicans hold these forms in common with Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, both Eastern and Oriental, though these churches do not acknowledge that we have them in their fullness or totality. Nevertheless these forms are the basis of ecumenical agreements – the ‘bottom line’ of unity – and have enabled Anglicans to enter into ecclesial communion with a range of Christian Churches: the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht, the Mar Thoma Church of India, the Philippine Independent Church and certain Lutheran Churches in Northern Europe and North America.

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What did Jesus want? Sometimes, faced with a dilemma, people ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’, and the simplistic way in which this question is often asked makes us smile. I want to ask a slightly different question: ‘What did Jesus want?’ Is the institutional church what Jesus wanted? Is it not rather far-fetched to suggest that Jesus planned the Church as we know it, a complex, diverse institution – if it can be said to be a single institution at all? What were Jesus’ intentions for his followers? Alfred Loisy famously said, at the turn of the nineteenth century: ‘Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom and it was the Church that came.’6 Loisy’s dictum has been interpreted as a cynical verdict on the institutional church: ‘We were hoping to see the Kingdom of God come in power, but all we got instead was the Church with all its human weaknesses and failings – what a let-down!’ But I think that Loisy spoke without irony and without sarcasm. Jesus indeed proclaimed the nearness of the Kingdom of God, but then he sent out apostles to preach the message of the Kingdom. What the apostles did, after the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was to found communities of Christian disciples, that is to say the first churches. The apostles held the churches together, uniting them in a common faith and sacramental communion, though not without difficulty, conflict and struggle. However, there is a subtle difference between the preaching of Jesus himself and the message of the apostles. After the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost the apostles did not proclaim the Kingdom of God as such, in the way that Jesus did. They proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Christ. As Rudolf Bultmann memorably put it, ‘The proclaimer became the proclaimed’.7 The one who sent them to preach became the subject and content of their preaching. They proclaimed Christ crucified and risen. The disciples of Jesus, gathered in churches by the apostles and other missionaries, began as a learning community, because that is what disciples are – learners or followers. But they also became a witnessing community. Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (London: Isbister & Co., 1903), p. 166. 7 Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1952), I, p. 33: ‘He who formerly had been the bearer of the message was drawn into it and became its essential content. The proclaimer became the proclaimed.’ 6



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Through the apostles Christ created a community that was ordered by a God-given purpose and a common life. He gave it all that it needed to continue until he should come again. He provided teaching through the ministry of the word, strength through the ministry of the sacraments, and pastors in the persons of the apostles and others. Under the so-called ‘Old’ Covenant, it was Israel that was God’s people, God’s Church – an ordered community, a structured society and one that was coterminous with the nation. Jesus Christ, the new Moses who called twelve apostles for the twelve tribes of Israel and gave his teaching from a mountain-top, reconstituted the people of God and re-founded the Church. We do not need to suppose that Jesus envisaged or foresaw the Church as we know it – a highly complex, differentiated and fragmented organization, but it is important to believe that Jesus intended there to be an ordered community that would continue his mission. It was the apostolic mission, in continuity and development from the mission of Jesus himself, that brought churches into being throughout the known world. Sometimes I have said ‘Church’ and sometimes I have said ‘churches’. The alternating language of Church and churches is probably unavoidable, but it is also instructive. The Church is made up of churches and it is part of the catholic understanding of the Church that the Church is to be found in the churches and that catholicity resides in the local community of word and sacrament, gathered around its bishop, who is the teacher of the apostolic faith and the principal minister of the sacraments. But that construction of the relation between the Church and churches, a relation of mutuality or coinherence, is an ideal one. It ceased to be fully the case very early in the history of the Christian Church. The reality that Christians have lived with almost since the beginning is that some churches do not recognize others as belonging to the Church in the same way that they do themselves, and as result they are not united with them in the one Church through ecclesial communion. The Church has subsisted in a state of fragmentation and of internal alienation since early in its history. Certainly, a Church that is divided into many parts, some churches alienated from each other, and many not in sacramental communion with each other, is far from what Jesus or the apostles intended – indeed, it is the antithesis of Jesus’ prayer in John 17. The idea that the body of Christ

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could be divided into separate bits is intolerable. Hence the Apostle Paul’s rhetorical question: ‘Is Christ divided?’8 There can only be one answer to that: ‘Impossible!’ The thought that there could be a split in the body of Christ, that his body could be alienated from itself is enough to induce theological vertigo. It is something that I cannot get my head around. What we are looking at here is the ‘impossible possibility’. The shock and scandal of the fact of division among Christians who have all been baptized into one body9 becomes unbearably acute when we consider how Christians have often persecuted and destroyed one another, subjecting one another to torture and death – and this in the name of Jesus Christ and for the sake of the Church! This thought must haunt us; it should dog our footsteps. It poses the question of what I call ecclesiological theodicy, that is to say the problem of evil in the Church, of the Church going horribly wrong, departing radically from Jesus’ intention. I must confess that I find this one of the most deeply disturbing issues in the sphere of ecclesiology.10 A catholic Christian is one who believes that Jesus Christ did not come just to offer salvation to individuals, a salvation with no social implications or corporate dimension; and that he did not die merely to provide a moral example; and that he did not simply teach inspiring ideas that could wash freely around the world. A catholic Christian is someone who does not think that individuals at whim should be free to club together to form little churches according to their own preferences. Rather, I think, a catholic Christian is someone who believes that Jesus came to found a single concrete and enduring community. The credal confession of ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’ means that Jesus Christ instituted in himself, through his death and resurrection, a structured community, a divinely ordained society, to which he gave authority to continue his mission until the end of the age. That is the essence of catholicism. Christ’s clear intention that his Church should continue his mission has 1 Corinthians 1.13: memeristai, divided up, apportioned out, cut in pieces. 1 Corinthians 12.13: ‘in [or by] the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body’. 10 For a sombre, if not quite despairing discussion of Christian disunity see Ephraim Radner, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). For an alternative, if not actually convincing perspective, one that sees nothing much wrong with division in the Church, see W. C. Ingle-Gillis, The Trinity and Ecumenical Church Thought (Aldershot, Hants. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) and my review in Ecclesiology 5 (2009): 362–5. 8 9



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been fulfilled, though very imperfectly and along with much that Christ must weep over and judge – and therein lies the acute challenge that ecumenical ecclesiology wrestles with. But his clear intention that the Church which is charged to carry forward his mission should be visibly one has not been fulfilled – and therein lies the deep perplexity that ecumenical ecclesiology wrestles with. This too Christ must weep over and judge.

The Eucharistic and catholicity To lead us deeper in our reflection on the themes of unity, continuity and sacramentality, let us reflect for a moment on the place of the Eucharist and the ministry of the Eucharist in the life of the Church. One of the criteria of visible church unity, as anyone with any experience of the Ecumenical Movement knows, is a united, interchangeable ordained ministry. Other essential criteria of unity, particularly agreement in the apostolic faith and mutual recognition of baptism, may be met, but until there is an interchangeable ordained ministry, full visible communion between churches is not possible. Communion between churches cannot exist without an interchangeable ordained ministry. But what exactly is meant by interchangeability? I borrow a definition from the Joint Implementation Commission of the Anglican–Methodist Covenant in Britain: The expression ‘interchangeability of ministries’ usually refers to a situation in relations between churches whereby the ordained ministers of one church are eligible to be appointed to ministerial offices in the other without undergoing re-ordination. The ministerial orders or ordinations of each of the churches concerned are mutually recognised as meeting all the requirements of the other for its own ministry.11

But why is the interchangeability of ordained ministers so important? To answer this question we need to touch on the place of the Eucharist in the worship and mission of the Church. I contend that the fullest expression of the unity of the Church is to be found in the celebration of the Eucharist. That is In the Spirit of the Covenant: Interim Report (2005) of the Joint Implementation Commission under the Covenant between the Methodist Church of Great Britain and the Church of England (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2005), p. 90 [7.3.1].

11

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where the nature of the Church as the body of Christ is most clearly revealed. As the Second Vatican Council said, the Eucharist is ‘the source and summit’ of the Christian life and of the Church’s worship (LG 11). ‘Holy Communion’, the culmination of the eucharistic celebration, is a communion with God the Holy Trinity and with the redeemed people of God in the Body of Christ. It is the highest expression and the most intense realization of that communion (koinonia) with God and with one another that makes the Church the Church. Because they regard the Eucharist as so important, all churches are very particular about whom they allow to preside at this service. In many, if not most, churches this role is reserved to presbyters and bishops. In almost all churches, deacons are not ordained to eucharistic presidency; their eucharistic role is to assist the priest and the people in the celebration. Those churches that allow lay or diaconal presidency do so under strict conditions. All churches see eucharistic presidency as one of the highest privileges and greatest responsibilities of the ordained ministry. While it is perfectly true to say that the sacrament is celebrated by the whole community gathered for worship (there is no other ‘celebrant’), the role of the president at the Eucharist remains crucial. The one who presides at the celebration of the Eucharist has the responsibility of oversight, to ensure that the celebration follows the Lord’s institution and the teaching and rules of the Church which interpret and apply the Lord’s institution. All ministry in the Church, whether lay or ordained, is the ministry of Christ in and through his Body – ministry cannot be a matter of human effort or achievement; it must mean the risen, glorified Christ coming to his people in word and sacrament and pastoral care. The ministry of the Eucharist – ministry at the Eucharist – is therefore the ministry of Christ. It is the president who has the principal role in this ministry – bringing God’s word to God’s people, presiding at the table that is the Lord’s, leading the people in their sacrifice of praise and thanks to the Father, through the Son (in union with Christ’s self-offering to the Father) in the power of the Spirit. The president acts not only in persona ecclesiae, but also in persona Christi. One of the most acute signs of division and separation in the Church is where ministers of one church are not allowed to preside at a celebration of the Eucharist in another church: there is no interchangeable eucharistic presidency. This all-too-familiar situation brings home to us once again the



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intolerable notion of division within the body of Christ – the division of the ecclesial body reflected in the division of the sacramental body. But when mutual interchangeability of eucharistic presidency becomes possible, it is clear that a high degree of visible unity has been achieved. Interchangeable eucharistic presidency is a touchstone of ecclesial communion. Interchangeable eucharistic presidency is also a precondition of unity in oversight that is one of the widely recognized requirements for the full visible unity of the Church. The pastors of the churches preside both at the Eucharist and in the community: they are called (in John Wesley’s beautiful phrase) to ‘watch over the people in love’. Presidency at the Eucharist and presidency in the community – which both belong to pastoral oversight, episkope – cannot be divorced. Pastors cannot be united in oversight if they are not united in eucharistic presidency.12 The inseparable connection between unity in the Eucharist and unity in oversight is particularly clear in ordination. The sacramental and pastoral aspects of oversight come together in the act of ordaining. Ordination is an expression of oversight and united ordination is an expression of united oversight. When ministers of more than one church ordain new ministers together, with the laying on of hands and prayer, they express a high degree of unity. Churches normally allow only ministers of churches with whom their own church is ‘in communion’ – sister churches, one might say – to participate in ordinations, and this is the Anglican norm.13 A particularly significant form of unity in ordination (holy order) is when bishops from various churches that are in communion with each other come together to consecrate and ordain a new bishop, incorporating that bishop into the historic episcopate. This is ecclesiologically significant because it brings out the unity of the Church, as represented by the bishops, in space and time: bishops in communion across the oecumene and through the centuries of Christian history.14 Anglican churches allow only ministers of episcopal churches with whom they are in communion to take part in the laying on Church of England House of Bishops statement, Eucharistic Presidency (London: Church House Publishing, 1997). 13 Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations, Resolution 1.04: Ecumenical Participation in Ordinations. 14 See further P. Avis, Becoming a Bishop: A Theological Handbook of Episcopal Ministry (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), Ch. 8: ‘The Bishop and the Historic Episcopate’. 12

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of hands – bishops for the consecration of bishops, bishops and priests (presbyters) for the ordination of priests, and bishops only for the ordination of deacons. Why is this? Why do Anglicans insist on ordination within ‘the historic episcopate’?

The historic episcopate In all the Churches of the Anglican Communion only ministers ordained by bishops standing within ‘the historic episcopate’ may hold the office of bishop, priest or deacon. The expression ‘the historic episcopate’ points to the formal intention of Anglican and other churches that there should be visible historical continuity between the Church of today and the Church of the apostles – a visible historical continuity that is particularly embodied in the ministry of the senior pastors. The historic episcopate entails that authority is transmitted through regular, visible and recognized channels from one generation to another in the Church. It does not, I think, require that there should be an empirically verifiable manual transmission of ordination, going back to the apostles, in every case. The emphasis is on the formal intention of a church not to make a new church or to ordain ministers merely for its own church, but to preserve the visible historical continuity of the Church from the beginning, in the belief that the Lord Jesus Christ instituted and intended that an ordered community – a body of people with certain tasks and structures – should continue his mission until the end of the age (Mt. 28.16ff). Against this background, we may ask: What are the reasons why, in ecumenical conversations, Anglicans maintain what sometimes comes across as an intransigent insistence on the sign of the historic episcopate as an element in full visible communion? In maintaining this discipline, Anglican churches believe that they are being faithful to the pattern of the early Church. They hold that this pattern comes down to the Church of today from apostolic and early post-apostolic times and carries the authority of the early tradition and significant ecumenical support and consensus.15 Anglicans are

Preface to 1662 Ordinal; Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982).

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also very conscious that they have been party to agreed statements with the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches in which agreement on the historic episcopate is integral. However, in affirming the necessity of the historic episcopate for their own churches and for full visible communion with other churches, Anglicans are following what they believe to be right and do not intend to pass judgement on the integrity of churches that are not ordered in the historic episcopate.16

Conclusion We have touched on the themes of unity, continuity and sacramentality. Taken together, they imply that the Church is a given, an existing whole. For all its failings and faults, sometimes iniquities, the Church was called into being by God, commissioned by the risen Christ, endued with supernatural power by the Holy Spirit. We do not make the Church; we do not give something to the Church to make it more than it already is. We receive from the Church and we minister within the Church – or rather Christ ministers within his own body to us and through us. As individuals we must align ourselves with the one Church, being incorporated into the body. We must learn to see ourselves as held within the communion of saints. We are not solo Christians; we have a corporate existence. As churches too we must continually align ourselves with the whole Church, as far as we can in its divided state. The Church catholic is bigger than any particular expression of it. In all our actions we aim and intend to do what the Church does. Still less can anyone ‘start’ a church, though people have been doing that for centuries and there is evidence on every street corner. Whenever there is disagreement or conflict, the cry goes up, ‘Well then, we’ll darned well start our own church.’ But to start one’s own church is a contradiction in terms. No one can start a church, not even the apostles. There is only one Church and one foundation of the Church. Through no effort of our own, we have been placed by the Holy Spirit within the Church through baptism. We must act as those who have been so placed. Every church must ask itself: How are we In the Spirit of the Covenant, p. 97 [7.6.3-4].

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connected in time and space to the one Church? How are we plugged in to the Church of the apostles? What are the historical lines of continuity and connection? How and from whom did we receive the faith and the gifts of ministry and sacraments? To whom do we owe an obligation? Who looks for an answer from us? In summary, catholic Christians are Christians who are deeply conscious of belonging to the whole, as members of an ordered community that has given them all that they have received. Catholic Christians are those who build unity and maintain continuity as the essential conditions of celebrating sacramentality. Catholic Christians are those to whom communion with their fellow Christians in the body of Christ is more precious than gold.

7

The Legacy of the Reformation

In the second part of this book, we are trying to look at the Anglican tradition in a fresh way. Three-dimensional Anglicanism is our overall theme. The three dimensions that I suggest make up the distinctive character of Anglicanism are the claims of catholicity (which was the subject of the previous chapter), the legacy of the Reformation (the subject of this chapter) and the imperative of criticism (to which we will come in the next chapter). I have suggested that the claims of catholicity focus around the three themes of the unity, continuity and sacramentality of the Church. Similarly, I am going to suggest – though I am going to postpone the discussion to a later chapter to avoid this one becoming overloaded – that the legacy of the Reformation clusters around three themes: the relation between the gospel and the Church, the authority of Scripture, and the royal priesthood of the baptized. But before we come to those three Reformation themes, it would make sense to ask ourselves the question, ‘To what extent does Anglicanism identify itself with the Protestant Reformation? How far does it recognize the Reformation as part of its patrimony?’, and then go on to examine the vexed question of the Church ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’, and finally to assess some strengths and weaknesses of Reformation ecclesiology.

Anglicanism and Protestantism1 In the mid-sixteenth century the Church of England acquired all the hallmarks, both theological and pastoral, of the Protestant Reformation as it manifested For further details see Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspectives, 2nd edn (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2002); id., In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014).

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itself across Europe: the doctrine of justification by grace, received through faith without regard to works or merit; an open Bible in the vernacular and the centrality of the Scriptures in worship; a liturgy also in the vernacular with the active participation of the laity in worship; an ordained ministry that was primarily pastoral, rather than sacerdotal, and that was encouraged to marry; Holy Communion in which the real presence of Christ was affirmed but the doctrine of Transubstantiation was rejected, the elements administered to the laity in both kinds (the wine as well as the bread); the involvement of lay people in church governance, nationally in the form of the Sovereign and Parliament, locally in the office of churchwarden and the role of lay patrons; and finally (though this is nothing to be proud of and has since been reversed) the abolition of religious orders, foundations and communities. In the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I (that is to say, the second half of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth) Calvinist theology was dominant in the Church of England. By Calvinist theology I mean Calvinist doctrines of grace (including predestination), not Calvinist Presbyterian polity, though that also had its advocates in the Church of England at this time. As a result of the Civil War and Commonwealth period in the mid-seventeenth century and the execution of King Charles I, Calvinism had become tainted with revolt, regicide and republicanism. Consequently Lutheranism became the most favoured overseas Protestant communion for the next 150 years, though Reformed theology retained its vigour until the end of the seventeenth century. The Anglican tradition has clearly been shaped by the Reformation and still has much in common with the Lutheran and Reformed churches. But that does not mean that Anglicanism can be defined solely by reference to the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church, in its official statements, likes to label us as one of the ‘ecclesial communities’ (as they put it) of the Reformation, or that stem from the Reformation. But as Anglicans we can never entirely accept that label and we should take every opportunity to try to correct the description. Shaped by the Reformation, yes; a church of the Reformation or deriving from the Reformation, no. There is much more to Anglicanism than the legacy of the Reformation, vital though that is. Notwithstanding strong affinities with the Continental Reformation churches, Lutheran and Reformed, Anglicans have always insisted on the



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antiquity and catholicity of their church. The Anglican Reformers were clear that they were not starting a new church in England and Wales, but rather reforming the one Church that went back through the Celtic missionaries and the spread of Christianity across western Europe, to the Fathers, the early martyrs and ultimately to the apostles. There was an apostolic succession of the gospel, of true doctrine, from the beginning of the church to their own time. That is how the English Reformers understood apostolic succession – in terms of true doctrine. In the heat of anti-Roman polemic – indeed, we must name it as paranoia – the English Reformers were desperate to find an alternative origin for Christianity in England to the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury at the turn of the sixth century (ad 596–7), since Augustine had been sent by their great enemy, the pope, in the person of Gregory I (Gregory the Great). Augustine was sometimes abused for having imported Roman superstitions into a pure form of English Christianity. The Reformers looked to other origins for their church including, interestingly, Joseph of Arimathea, who was believed, according to the Glastonbury legend, to have been the first to bring the Christian faith to those shores.2 The Reformers also knew that the British church had been represented at certain early councils long before Augustine arrived. In fact, apart from visiting traders, it was probably Roman soldiers, or at least their camp-followers, who were the first Christians in Britain. No doubt they needed their faith to cheer them up as they patrolled Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland, surrounded by bleak and barren hills and amid swirling mist and rain! The British media always like to get in a jibe about the Church of England being founded in the sixteenth century by King Henry VIII to satisfy his lusts – or to put it more politely, to suit his matrimonial requirements. The birth of the Church of England is presented as a cynical act of political expediency for dubious motives. Some Anglicans, taking their cue from the secular media, talk about their church as though it had come into being a mere 500 years ago. They are not aware that the ecclesia anglicana stretches back through the Reformation to the beginnings of organized Christianity in England. The Reformation was not an act de novo – how could a re-formation be entirely

See further Jack P. Cunningham, ‘“A Little World Without the World”: Ecclesiastical Foundation Myths in English Reformation Thought’, Journal of Anglican Studies 9 (2011): 198–222.

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new? In fact, the English Reformation preserved much continuity. You only have to go into an ancient English parish church or cathedral to see that. Apart from the architecture and church furnishings, particularly the font which is often extremely ancient, the lists of rectors and vicars often go back to the Middle Ages and show no break of continuity in the mid-sixteenth century. The ancient structures of catholicism survived the upheavals of the Reformation. The holy orders of bishop, priest and deacon were maintained, with episcopal succession in the ancient sees and continuity of pastoral and sacramental ministry in the parishes. Uniquely in Europe, cathedral foundations were not dissolved but continued to function; much medieval canon law continued in force; and traditional liturgical symbols, including some vestments, the sign of the cross at baptism and the giving of a ring in marriage were retained. The sense of catholic continuity was kept alive by the High Church tradition within the Church of England in the seventeenth century and beyond – though not, until the Oxford Movement, at the expense of affinity with the Reformation inheritance. For two centuries following the Reformation, the Church of England saw itself as a sister church of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. Anglican divines, however High Church they were, recognized non-episcopal Protestant ministries on the Continent, though they condemned Dissenters and Separatists in England for committing schism. After 1662 the Church of England required episcopal ordination for all her clergy, but that did not mean that she unchurched the Protestant churches on the Continent. The influence of the Nonjurors (from 1688) and then of the Oxford Movement (from 1833) soured the Anglican view of non-episcopal churches until Anglican ecclesiology came back into balance in the late twentieth century when the Porvoo, Called to Common Mission and Waterloo Agreements brought about ecclesial communion between Anglican and Lutheran churches in Europe and North America. Unlike Lutheranism, Anglicanism does not have a strong sense of confessional identity. The sense of historical continuity that runs through the Reformation means that Anglicanism lacks the sense that Lutherans and Methodists have of being a family of churches that were providentially raised up by God at a particular time to bear witness to vital truths. Anglicans (like some other Christians, I suspect) simply take their church for granted. For



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them it is just the ordinary way of being Christian – the right way, a good way (and who can say that they are wrong?). No one figure, not even Thomas Cranmer or Richard Hooker, has the place in Anglicanism that Martin Luther has in Lutheranism, John Calvin in the Reformed tradition or John Wesley in Methodism. Nevertheless, in recent decades Anglicans have become more aware of their inheritance and more appreciative of its riches. The challenges of ecumenical dialogue and of religious pluralism have prompted a modest revival of self-consciously Anglican theology, and a critical reappropriation of the tradition. It is clear that Anglicans did not and do not see themselves as Protestant without remainder. They have tended to describe themselves over the centuries as ‘catholic and reformed’ (with a lower-case ‘r’) or as ‘reformed catholics’. In the past Anglicans were proud to call themselves Protestants (without in any way implying that they were not also catholics), but the term Protestant has gone out of fashion, except for some Anglican evangelicals, and I think understandably so. For example, the Episcopal Church dropped the word ‘Protestant’ from its title some time ago. It would be tempting to say that the Reformation ‘protest’ was of its time and completed its work, while the need for reform is ongoing, of enduring validity.3 But that would be to make too simplistic a dichotomy between protest and reform. The day of protest is not yet over. The Lambeth Conference has from time to time protested against certain aspects of the Roman Catholic Church. The Appeal to All Christian People of 1920 defined what it meant by ‘the Catholic Church’. It was fundamentally ‘a fellowship’, created by God’s action in and through Jesus Christ and given life by his Spirit. It was ‘an outward, visible and united society, holding one faith, having its own recognized officers, using God-given means of grace, and inspiring all its members to the world-wide service of the Kingdom of God.’ While acknowledging that the Churches of the Anglican Communion were ‘bound by many ties of common faith and tradition’ to ‘other ancient episcopal communions in East and West’, the 1920 Lambeth Conference pointedly stated: ‘This united fellowship is not visible in the world today.’4 The term ‘Protestant’ originated at the Diet of Speyer in 1529 when Lutherans formally ‘protested’ against the imposition of imperial sanctions against them. 4 Roger Coleman (ed.), Introduction Owen Chadwick, Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences 1867–1988 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992), pp. 45–58, at p. 46 (Resolution 9). 3

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This statement of the Lambeth Conference was almost certainly a coded way of saying that it did not accept that the Roman Catholic Church held the key to Christian unity. Rome did not embody catholicity in a definitive way. How far is this still the typical Anglican stance with regard to the Roman Catholic Church? Although Anglicans today warmly welcome the radical change of tone in the Roman Catholic Church since the election of Pope Francis in 2013 and hope for further reform under his papacy, they remain unable to accept the exclusive claims that the Roman Catholic Church has made historically and still makes, at the expense of other churches: the claim to enjoy a ‘fullness’ of the sacramental means of grace that other churches (or so called ‘ecclesial communities’) lack; the claim for the papacy, of universal, ordinary and immediate jurisdiction over all Christians and churches; and the claim to make infallible, binding statements about Christian beliefs and morals, as exemplified in the Marian dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, that go beyond the Creeds, and are held to be de fide and as such necessary for salvation. Anglicans have consistently seen Roman centralization and authoritarianism as a distortion of true catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church stands or falls to its own Master, Jesus Christ, but in so far as it passes judgement on Anglicans and other non-Roman Christians, which it regularly does and believes that it has the right to do, the Anglican protest, together with that of the Orthodox and Protestant churches, is still called for. But that stance implies that as Anglicans we should seek to demonstrate ‘a more excellent way’ with regard to authority claims and ensure that we too pursue an agenda of ongoing reform and renewal. In the sixteenth century the Lutheran and Reformed Churches indeed protested against the errors, corruptions and abuses of the late medieval Roman Church, but they did not see themselves as inventing a new brand of Christianity, labelled ‘Protestant’. The word ‘Protestant’ is little more than an accident of history. The Reformers and their followers saw themselves, not as a protest movement, but as the Church pure and simple, the Church purified, reformed and renewed in the light of the gospel, close to the Church as it was in the beginning and therefore as the true church, over against the false church which had perverted the gospel and its ordinances. ‘To renew the face of the Church’ was how John Calvin expressed his mission. Although the elements of



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discontinuity were vividly apparent, the elements of continuity were stronger. The Reformers did not see themselves as creating a new church. Indeed, that would have been a meaningless idea to them. I have deliberately used the expression, in the title of this chapter, ‘the legacy of the Reformation’. To acknowledge a legacy or an inheritance is to own something significant that comes from elsewhere, but now belongs to you, keeping it in some kind of wider perspective and so holding on to a degree of objectivity. The major English Reformers drew extensively from the writings of their continental peers and the English Reformation would not have happened without that debt. But theirs was a critical, discriminating appropriation of Reformation theology. They were careful to distance themselves from Martin Luther’s aberrations and excesses, both personal and theological; they did not see themselves as Luther’s disciples. Richard Hooker put some clear blue water between the Church of England and the theology of John Calvin in the Preface to his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, mocking those Puritans who slavishly emulated the French Reformer: Calvin was not infallible and was not always right.5 If Anglicans have affirmed the legacy of the Protestant Reformation without embracing a Lutheran or Reformed identity, we must ask: What are the essentials of that legacy? What can we affirm, as Anglicans, of the Reformation concept of the Church? What ecclesiological insights of the Reformers have abiding validity? I will take up those questions again in Chapter 9 ‘Catholic and Reformed – And Something More?’, but for the moment I will confine myself to a brief clarification and assessment of Reformation ecclesiology.

The Reformation and the Church6 In essence, we may say, the Reformers rediscovered the immediacy of the living Christ within his Church, a Christ who communicates himself to his people See further Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 21–3, 41–5. See further P. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1982; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), Part 1; id., ‘The Church and the Ministry’ in David Whitford (ed.), The T&T Clark Companion to the Reformation (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2012). For the methodological presuppositions of the ecclesiology of the Reformers see Paul Avis, In Search of Authority, Chs 1 and 2. The primary and secondary sources that underlie my discussion here are set out in those writings.

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through word and sacrament. They recovered the gospel of the free, justifying grace of God, received by faith through the sacraments and without regard to human merit. That grace was received within the Church, not outside it. So, along with the gospel message, the Reformers rediscovered the reality of the living Christ in the community of faith. The message of the gospel does not exist outside the Church; it has no disembodied existence. The gospel does not float about in the world looking for a spot on which to alight, like Noah’s raven. It is given to the Church, treasured by the Church and proclaimed by and in the Church. The gospel is embedded and embodied in the community which is where Christ is found and known. As the great Methodist historian of the Reformation, Gordon Rupp, put it: the Reformers concentrated singlemindedly on the christological centre of the Church – on what makes the Church the Church.7 They were comparatively unconcerned about who was in the Church and who was not; they were not obsessed with patrolling the boundary. The churches of the ‘magisterial’ Reformation (magisterial because the reform was allied to and reinforced by the civil ruler, the ‘magistrate’) were folk churches, or national churches, churches for all, not gathered churches of élite Christians. The first-generation Reformers, such as Luther, Zwingli and Melanchthon, were generally relaxed about church structures. They adopted a fairly pragmatic approach: the structures were given and were primarily the responsibility of the magistrate, the civil (not ‘secular’ – that would be anachronistic) ruler, whether prince or city council; they were the framework within which the gospel could get to work. It was the presbyterian insistence on rule by elders that provoked higher claims and a more cogent rationale for episcopacy toward the end of the sixteenth century in England. But ‘ecclesiastical polity’ existed, not to mark separation from those beyond the pale, but as we see in Hooker’s great work of that title, to serve and enable our saving participation in Christ through the sacramental means of grace in his Church. The centre of gravity of Hooker’s work on polity is an exposition of Christology and sacramental theology. In the sixteenth century Christians in Europe agonized over the question, ‘Where can I find the true Church?’ Their assumption was that one church was true and another false; in one salvation was to be found, in another E. G. Rupp, The Righteousness of God: Luther Studies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), p. 310.

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not. This was the burning existential question of personal salvation. But the answer could not be found on an individual basis. The Reformers upheld, as much as their predecessors and opponents, the axiom Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Therefore one needed to find the church that had the means of eternal salvation. Luther and Calvin found the marks of the true church in word and sacrament, truly taught and practised according to Christ’s institution (Luther sometimes included penance or sacramental confession, again as an embodiment of the gospel). Word and sacrament embodied and expressed the power of the gospel. But the second generation of Reformers tended to add the mark of discipline (effective oversight) to word and sacrament. Some on the radical wing of the Reformation took an obsessive interest in the doctrinal and moral purity of the congregation and revelled in the power of excommunication. But for the mainstream Reformers word and sacrament, served by an ordered ministry, are the heart of the Church because they make the living Christ present. At the turn of the sixteenth century Richard Hooker and Richard Field placed more emphasis than the Reformers themselves did on the universal visible Church and on the profession of baptismal faith taken at face value. It was a more inclusive approach to the identity of the Church. Hooker controversially affirmed that pre-Reformation Christians had been saved; medieval Christians were ‘our fathers’ in the faith, he said. Richard Field saw the Council of Trent as the watershed when the Roman Catholic Church, at least in its hierarchy, decisively rejected the reform and canonized false doctrine. The popular rhetoric of the Reformation and thereafter condemned the Roman Catholic Church, in its unreformed state, as the Antichrist. While Luther himself used this language, applying it also to the Anabaptists and the Turks, Melanchthon and Calvin were more ambivalent and cautious. The papacy, as a centralized political institution, was one thing – it persecuted the reform and was the enemy of the gospel – but the community of the baptized but wrongly instructed faithful within the Roman fold was another matter. In the providence and faithfulness of God, true Christians were to be found in every time and place. The Roman Church contained, as Calvin put it, vestiges (vestigia) of the Church. Certain reforms that, at the time, were resisted and condemned by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (though it made its own,

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mainly pastoral, reforms), such as the vernacular liturgy, holy communion in both kinds, and promoting the study of the Scriptures throughout the Church, were implemented four centuries later by the Second Vatican Council on the basis of the biblical and Reformation doctrine of the royal priesthood of the baptized. Other contentious Reformation issues have been partly resolved or at least clarified by ecumenical dialogue, notably the doctrines of justification and the Eucharist and some aspects of universal primacy. In all these areas the witness of the Reformers, expressed unsparingly and often intemperately at the time, has been vindicated. Other sixteenth-century reforms, such as a priesthood that is allowed to marry and the participation of the laity in church governance, have not yet been implemented in the Roman Catholic Church.

Visible and invisible However, some readers may be thinking: ‘Didn’t I read that the sixteenthcentury Reformers believed that the Church was essentially invisible, that the real church was not the church as we experience it, in institutional form, but the unseen company of the elect, of the predestined?’ The visible Church, with its structures of ministry, liturgy, sacraments and authority is, therefore, merely the reflection of the real Church that is known only to God. This common objection, from a ‘catholic’ point of view, to the Reformation concept of the Church would – if true – undermine its integrity completely. The misunderstanding was abroad at the time and the Lutheran Reformers had to rebut the accusation that for them the Church was a sort of Platonic republic or Utopia (a word recently invented by Thomas More) that had no existence in the real world. Contrary to what is often assumed, the Reformers did not teach that the true Church was invisible. What they needed to be able to affirm was that the late medieval church, with all its failings, did not present a true picture of the Church of Christ. There was more to the Church than met the eye. True, Luther believed that the true Church was often hidden from human gaze, but he believed that it was manifested in the ministry of word and sacrament – and word and sacrament are necessarily visible events. For Luther the Church was a mystery (‘a high, deep, hidden thing’) concealed from profane view and that



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could be glimpsed only by the eyes of faith. Calvin also stressed the mystical dimension of the Church and located it in the union of believers with Christ through the Holy Spirit, by means of the instrumentality of faith, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Richard Hooker astutely avoided the term ‘invisible church’. Hooker spoke instead of ‘the church visible’ and ‘the church mystical’. There are not – there cannot be – two churches, one visible and one invisible, but there are and must be two interdependent aspects or dimensions of the one Church founded by and on Jesus Christ. The Church is, at one and the same time, Christ’s mystical body and an institution that endures through time and space. The Church is a spiritual society, but it is also a structured society and necessarily has an institutional form. That is the Church that we are obliged to relate to; the Church as we know it is our proper business. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, put it like this: the institutional Church and the mystical body of Christ ‘are not to be considered as two different realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things.’ ‘Rather,’ the Second Vatican Council continued, ‘they form one interlocked reality which is comprised of a divine and a human element.’8 So is it ever right to speak of the ‘invisible church? Is there an invisible church? No, there can be no ‘invisible church’ – that would be a contradiction in terms – but there is a dimension of the Church that escapes visibility. There remains a depth in the Church, as the mystical body of Christ, that is not open to human perception or scrutiny. The Church is a mystery hidden with God in Christ. All Christian traditions agree that the mystery of the Church as the Body of Christ transcends its visible earthly expression. The bounds of the Church are known to God alone. ‘The Lord knows those who are his.’ But rather than use the unhelpful, misleading word ‘invisible’ to describe this ‘excess’ of the Church, we do better to speak of a transcendent or mystical dimension of the Church.

W. M. Abbott, SJ (trans. and ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), p. 22 (LG 8).

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Strength and weakness The Protestant traditions of ecclesiology are marked by a critical principle that catholic Christians – Anglican or Roman or any other stripe of catholic – need to take to heart: the gospel is more important than the institution, because where the gospel is proclaimed and lived, Christ is present to save, and that is what matters above all. Spirit is superior to structure, because the Holy Spirit vivifies the Church, and when push comes to shove, structures must give way to the force of the Spirit of Christ.9 It is the gospel that gives life to the institution through the Holy Spirit and the institution therefore has no life if it has lost its grip on the gospel. Where the gospel is proclaimed, received and lived, Christ is present to save. Sometimes structures may even need to be sacrificed in order to hold on to the gospel. What brings us into communion with the Holy Trinity and with our sisters and brothers in Christ is what matters supremely. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses put it like this: ‘The true treasure of the Church is the holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.’ I do not think that any Anglican is going to disagree with Luther there! But it doesn’t follow from that axiom that the gospel can function without structures. Catholic ecclesiology, whether Anglican or Roman, stresses that an appropriate structure is necessary for the spirit to work and holds that the Church corporately, the historical institution, is the indispensable vehicle of the gospel. God has given ordered means of grace, embedded in ministerial, sacramental and conciliar structures. In my view, this is not quite Protestant; at least, it is not where Luther stood, though Calvin took church structures more seriously. It is Protestant shorthand to say that the gospel – and only the gospel – constitutes the Church. What this slogan means is that Christ constitutes and builds the Church as his mystical body through the power of the gospel which is tangibly embodied in the word and the sacraments. These two concrete instantiations of the gospel, word and sacrament, make Christ present in the community. Protestant ecclesiology has centred therefore around the twin foci of word and sacrament. And these are necessarily visible Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, Obedient Rebels: Catholic Substance and Protestant Principle in Luther’s Reformation (London: SCM Press, 1964); id., Spirit Versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church (London: Collins, 1968); John Witte, Jr, Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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entities and activities. In this sense, the gospel is the radical critical principle of Protestant ecclesiology and critiques and relativizes every historically contingent institutional structure of ministry and oversight. But the weakness of Protestant ecclesiology from time to time has been the tendency to equate the spiritual with the invisible and the worldly with the visible. In the early Reformation, Luther and Melanchthon had to defend themselves against the charge that they were postulating a purely Platonic church, one removed from concrete reality. That was certainly not their intention, but their theology could give that impression. In modern theology Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth played off, in a highly dualistic way, the unchanging inward essence of the Church against the changing outward form. This seems to me to be a rather dangerous gambit: institutional structures of ministry and oversight are needed in every properly constituted church; it cannot fulfil its gospel mission without them. The Church does not come into being kerygmatically, so to speak, from moment to moment as the gospel is preached and the Eucharist is celebrated. The Church is not merely, as Barth put it in his commentary on Romans, the crater formed by the explosion of the gospel.10 It is the Church that preaches the gospel and the Church that celebrates the Eucharist; they do not minister themselves. It is true that, as Henri de Lubac says, the Eucharist makes the Church – there cannot be a church without the celebration of the Eucharist. But the Eucharist does not make the Church from moment to moment, from one celebration to the next. When the Eucharist makes the Church, it makes the Church sacramental in itself, giving it sacramental substance, so to speak. The Church is not an expendable launch platform for something else.11 To use Paul Tillich’s well-known formula, catholic substance and Protestant principle are both needed and are mutually dependent.12 The continuous tension between the authenticating power of the gospel and the structures that are the necessary channels for the operation of the gospel generates much Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. from the 6th edn by E. C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 29, 36. 11 Henri de Lubac, Meditation sur l’Église, 3rd edn (Paris: Aubier, 1954), pp. 129ff. See also Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993; new edn Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2006). A recent meditation on the sacramentality of the Church is Rowan Williams, ‘The Church as Sacrament’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11 (2011): 116–22. 12 Paul Tillich. The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; London: Nisbet, 1951). 10

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of the creative energy of ecclesiology as a discipline of theological reflection and gives it its character of wrestling with truth, its agonistic quality. In every generation we need to rediscover the gospel and let it speak to us afresh as we ask Bonhoeffer’s question: ‘Who is Jesus Christ for us today?’ But the gospel itself always tells of the Church as the body of him who died and rose, and we in him.13 The resurrection life that surges through the Church brings renewal and reform to every part, including the institutional shape, the polity, of the Church. We began this chapter by thinking about the legacy of the Reformation for Anglicans and we have concluded it by recognizing the imperative of continual reform: ecclesia reformata semper reformanda. So are we Anglicans still children of the Reformation, since it remains true, as Wordsworth put it, that ‘the child is father of the man’? The Reformation historian Alec Ryrie has suggested that ‘Anglicanism’s relationship with the Reformation is that of an adult with his or her own adolescent rebellions’.14 There are episodes in our youth of which we may be ashamed and others of which we may be proud. Generally, adolescence is a time of excess, of going too far, and that is certainly true of aspects of the Reformation in England – the breach of unity, the destruction of the monastic life, the persecutions, the weakening of sacramental consciousness under Edward VI. But the essential point is that, when we look back to our formative beginnings, we know that we are still the same person, though changed. We see continuity and discontinuity, sameness and difference, and that is the mystery of identity. ‘To live is to change’, said Newman. Anglicanism gradually came back into balance and is still seeking equilibrium. If there is a ‘shadow side’ to the past, we need to own it, indeed embrace it, to be whole persons. But we can avoid being trapped into endlessly recycling past experiences and repeating past mistakes if, as individual Christians and as churches, our sights are set on the future and the salutary goals that, by God’s grace, we hope to achieve. We can transcend the Reformation without ever leaving it behind. It has helped to make us what we are as Anglicans today and therefore is always with us. The prime Anglican statement of this principle is A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936). 14 Alec Ryrie, ‘The Reformation in Anglicanism’, in Mark D. Chapman, Sathianathan Clarke and Martyn Percy (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 34–45, at p. 34. 13

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The Critical Imperative

We come now to the last of our three dimensions of Anglican ecclesial identity. In the first of these three chapters on ‘Three-Dimensional Anglicanism’ we considered ‘the claims of catholicity’ and took on board the key Anglican sense of belonging to the one Church of Jesus Christ, the whole church, because ‘wholeness’ is the core meaning of the word ‘catholic’ – ‘according to the whole’. We were guided in exploring the claims of catholicity by the interconnected themes of the unity, continuity and sacramentality of the Church. We reminded ourselves of Anglicanism’s loyalty to the inheritance of both faith and order that it receives from the early Church, namely the canon of Scripture, the ecumenical creeds, the dominical sacraments and the threefold apostolic ministry (as they are summed up concisely in the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886/88/1920). As catholic Christians we are called and obliged to practise our faith in a certain way, a way that is corporate rather than individualistic. Anglicans are ecclesial Christians (as are adherents of other Christian traditions). I could put it like this: Anglicans (like other Christians) are called to indwell the wholeness of the reality of the Church. In the second of these three chapters we reflected on the legacy of the Reformation, noting that a legacy is something that initially you receive from elsewhere, but because it’s meant for you as the legatee, it becomes your own, part of your make-up. But a legacy does not normally take over your life; a certain detachment and objectivity remains; you are conscious of it as something that you have received and that you must appropriate in your own way. We made it clear that it is not appropriate for Anglican churches to be labelled ‘churches of the Reformation’ (and even less, as in official Roman Catholic statements, ‘ecclesial communities’ of the Reformation, where something less than ‘churches in the proper sense’ seems to be meant). The

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British and Irish Anglican Churches go back to the beginnings of Christianity in their lands; and the other member Churches of the Anglican Communion go back in unbroken continuity through the Church of England or (in the case of the Episcopal Church through the Scottish Episcopal Church also) to the beginnings of Christianity itself. Anglican Churches are catholic churches, shaped indeed by the Reformation, but not shaped by the Reformation alone. They are committed to the Reformation’s ecclesiological principles, but these are not the only principles that they are committed to. We mentioned three enduring strands of the Reformation legacy: (1) the relation between the gospel and the church (the Church as the creation of the word and subject to the word, as embodying the gospel and answerable to the gospel); (2) the paramount authority of Scripture as showing the way of salvation and sanctification; (3) the doctrine of the royal, prophetic priesthood of the baptized and the implications of this for the role and responsibility of lay people in the Church, including its governance. We parked those three points for the time being (and will consider them properly in the next chapter) in order to explore the influence of Reformation ecclesiology on Anglicanism. But what does the third dimension of Anglicanism, which I have called ‘the critical imperative’, involve?

Into the third dimension Exponents of the Anglican tradition have described this third dimension in various ways. Richard Hooker and the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists invoked the power of reason as a human faculty with a special affinity to the divine, and we shall need to say something about reason as the key to the critical imperative. At the turn of the nineteenth century Charles Gore spoke of the Anglican debt to the humanist learning of the Renaissance and the role and authority of scholarship in the Church. Similarly, in the mid-twentieth century Michael Ramsey called the third dimension ‘sound learning’, which now sounds a little quaint, but remains a formidable concept when we are fortunate enough to avail ourselves of it. Personally, I am attracted to the more probing and dynamic expression ‘intellectual enquiry’. The critical imperative takes the form of intellectual enquiry, which not only affirms the



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vital place of theological scholarship, but also opens up theological reflections to what other relevant academic disciplines and spheres of discourse have to say. However, none of these terms quite hits the nail on the head, in my opinion, because these ideas – reason, scholarship, sound learning, intellectual enquiry – are by no means uniquely Anglican. Other Christian traditions can stake a serious claim to them. The Roman Catholic tradition has invested heavily in the capacity of reason and philosophy, especially in its Thomistic form, to underpin or support or elucidate Christian revelation – Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio of 1998 being a recent, and powerful, case in point. Many churches value scholarship: German Lutheran scholars were in the forefront of theological, biblical and historical research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Lutheran professors of theology in Germany still enjoy considerable prestige and authority and in fact exercise a certain magisterium in their churches. Several traditions, including the Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, generally give their clergy or ministers a longer and more rigorous academic training than most Anglican Churches tend to do. So we need to probe a bit deeper. I want to suggest that there is something that is characteristic and possibly unique about the way that the Anglican tradition has employed the resources of scholarship or intellectual enquiry. Notwithstanding its catholic credentials and in particular its profound respect for Scripture and tradition, Anglicanism has tended to recognize a degree of authority in the well-founded conclusions of scholarly enquiry to modify received positions. Critical study of texts within their contexts can lead us to revise our interpretation of the Bible and it can help us to have a more discriminating understanding of tradition. In other words, critical study makes a difference in practice – it can prompt the call for change in the Church. Sound learning in the Anglican tradition has been awarded a certain authority; it has a cutting edge. It is an unsafe tool in unskilled hands – hence the popular proverb, derived originally from Alexander Pope, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’ – and that is why I have chosen the term ‘the critical imperative’ to identify this third dimension; it is more than learning; it is its critical application to belief and practice.

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The critical imperative in focus Before we go any further, I think it is important to be clear about what ‘criticism’ means and also about what is being ‘criticized’. What do I mean by ‘the critical imperative’? A critic is, etymologically speaking, a judge, and criticism is an act of judgement; that is to say an act of discernment and discrimination, analysis and appraisal. Although, in colloquial speech, the words ‘critic’ and ‘criticism’ have negative, pejorative overtones, that need not and should not be the case in any context. Criticism means forming a judgement and a judgement that weighs things on their merits. A judgement in court does not always condemn; it may vindicate and acquit the accused. A judgement is a mental act, silent or expressed in words, of evaluation, of assigning the appropriate value to something. In literary, artistic or musical criticism we are not usually, of course, condemning the book, the work of art or the musical composition that is under review – though that is not unheard of (the phrase ‘panned by the critics’ comes to mind) – but rather seeking to understand it, to draw out its qualities and to evaluate it, so that other readers or listeners can enjoy it and benefit from it, if it is found worthy of their attention. Criticism in this context is an act of aesthetic appreciation, evaluation and enjoyment. Matthew Arnold said that one function of poetry was ‘the criticism of life’ – clearly not a rejection of life, but its deepest, most fulfilling, most healing interpretation. In fact Arnold says elsewhere that ‘poetry interprets life’ and he equates ‘criticism of life’ and ‘interpretation of life’ to the very practical, moral question of ‘How to live’.1 Criticism, properly speaking, is about understanding more fully, enjoying more deeply and living more humanly. So I prefer to define criticism as the art of making insightful judgements that are right and true and help us forward on our journey.2 An art is acquired Matthew Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’: ‘In poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find … as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay’ (Essays in Criticism, Second Series London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 5; originally published as the introduction to Thomas Humphry Ward (ed.), The English Poets. Selections, with critical introductions by various writers, and a general introduction by Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1880). The notion of poetry as the criticism of life recurs as a refrain throughout the essay and crops up again substantially in Arnold’s essay on ‘Wordsworth’, where it is encapsulated in the expression ‘How to live’ (ibid., pp. 122–62, at p. 144). The phrase ‘[P]oetry interprets life’ comes in the essay on Keats: ibid., pp. 100–21, at p. 105. 2 Cf. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Flamingo/ 1



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through skill and study, teaching and emulation, practice and dedication. So with the art of making true and right judgements. Making a judgement is not a flip action; it is the end product of a rigorous process of consistent application of skills and knowledge to the question in hand. In the Christian life we understand right judgement to be a skill that the Holy Spirit imparts to those of a humble, lowly and self-effacing spirit. In the English Book of Common Prayer Collect for Whitsunday (and the words are very similar in the American Book of Common Prayer, 1979) we pray: ‘God, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort.’ What then precisely, in the Anglican approach, is open to criticism, that is to say to analysis, appraisal, appreciation, discrimination and evaluation? The answer is everything; everything but everything. There is nothing in this finite, fallen world that is not subject to human judgement because everything, however holy, contains – to put it at its lowest – a human element. Karl Barth used to say that even divine revelation comes to us ‘clothed in the garments of creaturely reality’. Our appropriation of the Bible, the tradition, including the creeds, the Reformation, and modern theology since the Enlightenment, is mediated by fallible human interpretation. Those theological authorities do not arrive from some pure, uncorrupted source, some crystal fountain, unsullied by human interference. They have our grubby human fingerprints all over them. In approaching them, interpreting them in a discerning, discriminating and critical way, we are honouring them as sources of God’s truth. But unless we are extremely humble and open to criticism and correction ourselves, we will end up replacing one set of grubby fingerprints, those of the Church Fathers, the medieval Schoolmen, the Reformers, the great modern theologians, with another – our own, and the contrast will not be a pretty sight. So the critical imperative is all-embracing: it applies to the Bible and to tradition, to the Church and its teachings and practices, both past and present. Fontana, 1983, 1988), pp. 84–6: ‘Criticism has become a very difficult word, because although its predominant sense is of fault-finding, it has an underlying sense of judgement and a very confusing specialized sense, in relation to art and literature.’ Williams points out that, while the dominant stream of meaning is concerned with fault-finding, an alternative stream has flowed in the direction of taste, cultivation and culture.

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We bring all our knowledge and skills to bear on everything that comes before us for our attention and for our decision, all that our consciousness scans as it impinges on us. We are looking and listening for God’s truth. Can we know when we have grasped God’s truth, or rather when it has grasped us? We may be full of sincere conviction, but we cannot be sure that we have rightly understood. Passionate conviction is not a guarantee of truth. As a certain Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in the mid-nineteenth century said in a difficult college meeting: ‘We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest.’3 As many Anglican scholars, from Richard Hooker to John Locke and from John Keble to William Ewart Gladstone, have taught, certainty is not available to us. The best that we have is moral persuasion, conscientious conviction. Probability is always our portion in this life. So we remain open to any fresh light and truth that God will allow to break forth from his word and we continue our humble seeking in company with others, looking for a collective judgement, submitting our own judgement to those we trust, but in the end following the lead of conscience, listening for the ‘still small voice’ of God.

Reason? The shorthand term for this process is ‘reason’. Now reason can mean and has meant many things, but essentially it is concerned with perceiving, understanding, explaining and evaluating. In seeking rightly to understand, to explain and to evaluate we have to form a view, in other words to make a judgement. The Bible, the tradition and the Church all demand that treatment. The eighteenth-century Bishop Joseph Butler, one of the greatest teachers of the Anglican tradition, said that reason was ‘the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even revelation itself ’. And to quote Butler again: ‘Reason can, and it ought to judge, not only of the meaning, but also of the morality and the evidence of revelation.’4 The alternative to using one’s reason is either to depend on tradition – but which tradition, for tradition The Master of Trinity was Hepworth Thompson (d. 1886); see Noel Annan,The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 84. 4 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: Bohn, 1889), pp. 219, 229. 3



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covers a multitude of possibilities? – or to rely on one’s personal insight, and where do we think that comes from? When that insight is rashly attributed to the Holy Spirit we have Bishop Butler’s bête noire, ‘Enthusiasm’. As Butler said to John Wesley, but with reference to Wesley’s erstwhile colleague and later rival, George Whitefield: ‘Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’5 No, reason must be our guide, or severe delusion will be our fate. That claim sounds a lot more arrogant than it is. A number of Christian thinkers have severely disparaged reason. Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth attacked the arrogance, the pretensions, the hubris of reason. But their polemic was largely misdirected as far as the Anglican tradition is concerned. Anglicanism has not favoured an inflated, self-important idea of reason, but rather the consecrated reason. For Richard Hooker (d. 1600), in particular, reason was not a purely individual but a collective activity. To deploy the reason, for Hooker, was to align ourselves with the mind of the Church, to tune into tradition and to take its pulse, as it were. It was to bring all our faculties, renewed and reformed in Christ, to the service of God’s truth in making appropriate judgements about belief and practice. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge (d. 1834), not only a poet and philosopher, but one of the greatest lay theologians of Anglicanism, ‘Reason’ was the creative rational faculty that rose above sense impressions and received intuitive glimpses of the truth. The post-Enlightenment, post-critical concept of reason affirms that reason is not divorced from the creative imagination; reason is not only analytical but also intuitive. As Newman insisted, the whole person reasons.6 However, there is something that is not quite right – not at all right, I would say – about the idea that we, as Christians of the twenty-first century, should sit in judgement on the Bible, the Church and the Christian tradition on the basis of our reason. In fact, in one sense, there’s something spiritually sick about it. We need to understand this criticism, judgement, business aright and

Henry Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (London: Epworth Press, 1989), p. 209. See also P. Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 316–18. The classic study is Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with special reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951). 6 See further P. Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology (London: Routledge, 1999). 5

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not fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible, the Church and the Christian tradition are somehow beneath us, for us to look down on them and decide autonomously what is and what is not acceptable. The idea that we should sit in judgement on the Scriptures would make Karl Barth, the author of The Word of God and the Word of Man, turn in his grave. According to Barth, reason sees what is human but not what is divine. When we open ourselves to the Bible we encounter not the words of men, but the Word of God, and the Word of God judges us.7 Barth was talking about how we respond to the Bible, but in principle the situation is no different with the theological tradition and Church teaching. While we presume to judge the Scriptures for their undoubted pre-scientific cosmology, sexist anthropology and patriarchal view of authority, they inevitably judge us and expose our shortcomings. The words in the Gospel come to mind here: ‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.’8 When we get very close to the historical Christian tradition to critique it for its undoubted patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, etc., it still has the ability to make us feel very small. As we make our assessment of the Church of yesterday and today, it is we ourselves who are put under the searchlight. In the act of making a judgement, we expose ourselves to judgement. Criticism is unavoidable; it’s an imperative, but it comes at a price. Our individual acts of judgement are overshadowed by a greater Judgement. Rather than sitting in judgement, we are – to borrow the title of a book by Rowan Williams – ‘open to judgement’.9

Authority in Anglicanism It is arguable that the key to Anglican identity is its theory and practice of authority in the Church. In that theory and practice of authority, the claims of Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie), trans. Douglas Horton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), pp. 9, 43. Elsewhere Barth fully recognizes the human, inseparably alongside the divine element in the Bible. 8 Matthew 7.1-2. 9 Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994). 7



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catholicity, the legacy of the Reformation and the imperative of criticism each has its place. Historically, the Anglican tradition has been open (though not without initial resistance) to fresh movements of ideas. At the Reformation the Church of England embraced (as did the continental Reformers) the new humanist learning derived from the rediscovered texts of the Greek New Testament and the early Fathers. This shed new light on the gospel and the Church. In controversy with Roman Catholics, defenders of the reform insisted that it was nothing less than a recovery of early Christian belief and practice. The Church of England, it was claimed, conformed to the pattern of the primitive Church; it was the nearest to the church of the apostles of any church in Christendom. We do not need to endorse those romantic claims to the hilt in order to recognize that the clearer picture of the early Church, recovered with the aid of humanist study of the ancient texts, was the model and ideal for the Reformers. We do not need to deny the elements of retrospective rationalization or of less elevated political motives in order to acknowledge that critical study played a decisive part in remodelling parts of the western Church at the Reformation. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Anglican scholars were among the leaders of that movement of intellectual resurgence and critique that we call the Enlightenment. In origin that movement was not anti-Christian; Christians, or at least theists, were in the vanguard almost everywhere, except in France where the philosophes were deists or in some cases atheists. Given the supremacy of reason in the mid-eighteenth century, Anglicans were among those who claimed that Christianity was eminently reasonable, the most rational religion or philosophy of them all.10 In the next wave of intellectual renewal, in the nineteenth century, Anglicans embraced the historical movement, digging for sources, getting at the original meaning of documents, critiquing received interpretations, recreating as far as possible past societies and thought-worlds. It could be fairly said that Anglican theological method has privileged the historical and philosophical methods in theology over the dogmatic approach that we associate with the modern German theology. We may not have had a Karl Barth, a Thomas F. Torrance or a Wolfhart Pannenberg, but we have had William Temple, John Macquarrie See further Avis, In Search of Authority, Chs 8 and 9.

10

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and Henry Chadwick, to name but a few – philosophical, systematic and historical theologians respectively. I now take some further examples of critical engagement with Scripture and tradition from the Church of England (my knowledge is largely limited to my own church, but I imagine that parallels could easily be found from the history of other churches of the Anglican Communion, especially the Episcopal Church). In the second half of the nineteenth century Anglicans gradually came to terms with the scientific revolution and particularly the theory of evolution. The year after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, a group of Anglican churchmen produced Essays and Reviews. It caused an unprecedented storm, but two of the essays charted a course for future developments: the critical study of the Bible in the essay of Benjamin Jowett, and an evolutionary, developmental understanding of divine revelation in the essay by Frederick Temple, eventually to become Archbishop of Canterbury and the father of William Temple, also Archbishop. The young Charles Gore (d. 1932) was among the first to welcome Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In Lux Mundi (Light of the World), a collection of essays published in 1889, Gore and his colleagues set out to adjust the relationship between the Christian faith and modern thought. Essays and Reviews and Lux Mundi set a trend in the Church of England for publishing scholarly symposia that attempted to take modern scholarship on board and reinterpret the Christian faith accordingly. English Anglicans (together with Free Church scholars) also gradually responded to the emergence of the social sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrestling with the implications of social relativism for Christian belief. The trajectory of open exploration and the scrutiny of tradition continued with Foundations (1912), which included a controversial essay on christology by the young William Temple, Essays Catholic and Critical (1926) and Soundings (1962), the latter very much a product of the theological diffidence and almost loss of nerve of 1960s Cambridge, but a brave attempt at critique nonetheless.11 I think that it is true to say that all of these publications appeared radical Essays and Reviews (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1860); Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1889); Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1912); E. G. Selwyn (ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical (London: SPCK, 1926); A. R. Vidler (ed.), Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

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and subversive – even blasphemous – at the time. They now look very ‘old hat’. Their challenge – as in the case of evolution or of biblical criticism – has been absorbed; theology has been enriched; passing fashions, such as the Hegelian idealist metaphysical framework that underpinned the work of the early Charles Gore and William Temple, have long been superseded. Fresh challenges now confront us. But the key point that emerges from all these examples is this: within Anglicanism, scholarly enquiry has the power eventually to call in question traditional positions. Development in our understanding of faith and practice – an idea that is so contested within Roman Catholicism and anathema in Orthodoxy – is a reality in Anglicanism. As a result of a series of celebrated test cases in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury England, sometimes related to the publications that I have mentioned (and no doubt there have been similar episodes in North American history), Anglicanism in the West is now characterized by comparatively unconstrained discussion and debate of theological issues, even among the clergy, and a relatively weak central teaching authority. In practice, no theological question is closed, though if a member of the clergy openly repudiated the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the resurrection, the inspiration of Scripture and the value of the sacraments, I think (and hope) that he or she could expect censure or discipline. At the same time Anglican liturgies continue to affirm the ancient ecumenical creeds and – although the terms of clerical subscription or assent vary from one church to another within the Anglican Communion – I think it is probably fair to say that the clergy are required to assent in fairly general terms to the creeds and to the historic formularies, such as the sixteenth-century Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer or its modern derivatives, and the forms for the ordination of the clergy. The Preface to the Declaration of Assent of the Church of England first of all affirms the trinitarian faith of the Church, which it says is ‘uniquely revealed in the holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation’. It then goes on to mention, in a secondary position, those formularies that derive from the sixteenth century. ‘Led by the Holy Spirit, it [the Church of England] has borne witness to Christian truth in its historic formularies, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests

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and Deacons.’ Against that preamble, candidates for ordination or office are asked: ‘Will you affirm your loyalty to this inheritance of faith as your inspiration and guidance under God in bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation and making him known to those in your care?’ (Canon C 15). The Preamble to the Constitution of the Episcopal Church is less elaborate, more condensed, but I imagine performs a similar benchmark function, especially where it describes the Episcopal Church as ‘a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer’.12 The key point that emerges from our discussion in this chapter so far is that Anglicanism combines faithful adherence to the orthodox tradition of the Christian Church with considerable latitude and flexibility in interpreting that legacy as we strive to apply our biblical and traditional inheritance of faith to the fresh challenges and unprecedented questions of our own time. We are a ‘broad church’, a developing, dynamic family of churches, marked by theological and pastoral creativity – and that is how it should be. It would be fatal to be ‘High and Dry’, like those stolid eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury English churchmen – great lovers of the port bottle, so we are told – who were mercilessly mocked by the Tractarians. But the freedom that we enjoy in western Anglicanism carries certain responsibilities: above all to be faithful to what we have received from the Church catholic, the mother of all the faithful. The privilege of liberty lays upon us the obligation to engage in an empathetic but not uncritical appropriation of the tradition; to depart from it very cautiously, if at all; to listen in all humility to what our brothers and sisters throughout the Communion are saying to us and to recognize at all times that we may be mistaken. As Oliver Cromwell famously wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650: ‘I beseech you, in the Constitution of The Episcopal Church: Preamble: ‘The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church), is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.’

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bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ Yes, we should always think it very possible that we are mistaken. But having done all that, we should have the courage of our convictions and go forward in faith where God is leading us in making the truth of Christ known to this generation. The imperative of criticism applies first to ourselves: it means self-criticism.

Areas of challenge I suggest that we can identify three areas of challenge where we need to bring the biblical and traditional inheritance of faith into dialogue with contemporary questions and challenges: evangelization, apologetics and public doctrine. First, evangelization or evangelism – making the gospel known among those who have not yet encountered its challenge and ‘offering Christ’ to all who will receive him. There are many avenues and vehicles for evangelization and the ‘fresh expressions’ movement is exploiting new ones, but evangelization always includes preaching or proclamation (kerygma), that is to say the compelling communication of Christian truth, in a form that is adapted to the spiritual condition of the hearers, without being diluted or compromised. This challenge is not met by merely reproducing, summarizing or paraphrasing the Bible, as biblical fundamentalists tend to do, albeit in a highly selective way. Nor is the challenge of evangelization met by simply replicating, parrotfashion, what our foremothers and forefathers in the faith have believed and said in earlier ages – that would be another form of fundamentalism, a fundamentalism of tradition. The compelling communication of Christian truth takes place in a dialogical mode, engaging with and interacting with the symbols, thought-forms and existential concerns of our contemporaries, as these are embedded in the culture, however ephemeral they may seem to be. It requires what Paul Tillich called a ‘method of correlation’, building bridges between the questions that emerge from the ultimate concerns of human beings and answers drawn from biblical revelation.13 ‘Mission as prophetic

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951–; Welwyn, Herts: Nisbet, 1953–), vol. 1, pp. 67–73; vol. 2, pp. 14–18.

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dialogue’ is, I believe, the key.14 The critical imperative has a vital role in evangelization. Related to this is the second area of challenge, apologetics. Second, apologetics (apologia). This is perhaps a slightly less familiar aspect of proclamation, but one that I believe is now more necessary than ever in face of the hostile criticism and cynical mockery of Christianity by secularists and atheists and the collusion of much of the mass media with this attack, which is not confined to Britain where it has now become the dominant discourse of public doctrine. Apologetics refers to the defence and exposition of Christian belief in relation to current world-views or alternative belief systems, especially when they are hostile to Christianity or critical of it. Apologetics aims to remove prejudice, to clear up misunderstandings, to deal with stumbling blocks and to commend the Christian faith in a persuasive and attractive manner, but without watering it down or making gratuitous concessions to its critics. In Britain some of our most able theologians – Keith Ward, Alister McGrath and David Fergusson, along with philosophical allies like Roger Scruton – have recognized the priority of apologetics and have turned their energies and scholarship to it in recent years. Apologetics is an area of contemporary challenge where the critical imperative needs to be applied. As a restatement of Christian truth in the public forum, apologetics is close cousin to evangelization. Third, public doctrine. That Jesus Christ is God’s definitive and inexhaus­ tible word to humankind is a universal truth, not a private opinion. As Lesslie Newbigin constantly reminded us, Christian faith is public truth. So proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour must take place in the public square, not merely behind closed doors, among consenting adults, so to speak. And one aspect of public proclamation is contributing to the climate and content of open public debate about the aims and means of society by articulating a Christian, theologically coherent vision of the common good and of the Christian ethical principles that help to shape it. The public doctrine of any state is not theologically neutral, any more than it is ethically neutral. It shapes legislation, dictates funding priorities and conditions the life of society. See further on prophetic dialogue, Cathy Ross and Stephen Bevans (eds), Mission on the Road to Emmaus: Constants, Context and Prophetic Dialogue (London: SCM Press, 2015), especially Ch. 15: Stephen Bevans, ‘Contextual Theology and Prophetic Dialogue’; Stephen S. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue: Reflections on Christian Mission Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011).

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The battle over public doctrine at the present time particularly concerns ethical issues around the beginning and end of life. Various communities of belief compete and contend to shape public doctrine because they have a vision of how life should be ordered and because it has a direct effect on them. Here Christianity is right in the centre of the marketplace and needs to devote its best voices and skills to public witness. But the critical appropriation, interpretation and application of Scripture and tradition is an essential tool.

Summing up In these last three chapters we have been exploring three generally recognized dimensions of Anglicanism in a slightly unusual way – in a manner that is meant to speak to us and to guide us in living out our discipleship first in our own church, then in the Anglican Communion and ultimately in the universal Church of Christ. We began with ‘the claims of catholicity’ and focused there on the unity, continuity and sacramentality of the Church. We were led to reflect on the longing for wholeness as the cash value of catholicity. Next, in view of the fact that Anglicanism is both catholic and reformed, we considered the legacy of the Reformation, attempting a brief assessment of its influence on Anglicanism and weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of the Reformation’s ecclesiology. Finally, in the present chapter, we have addressed, all too briefly, the critical imperative. We have affirmed that responsible scholarship, employing all the capacities of the creative mind and drawing on what other relevant intellectual disciplines can tell us, has a crucial role in the interpretation of Scripture and the assessment of tradition. Through the faculty of imaginative indwelling we are enabled to inhabit the world of Christian truth and to proclaim it afresh in our own generation, engaging in dialogue with the urgent questions of our time. But we approach the critical imperative with enormous diffidence and profound humility, recognizing that effective selfcriticism is the greatest challenge of all. I suspect that each person tends to feel drawn to one or other of the three dimensions. We feel the strong gravitational pull of catholicity, or we are captivated by the passion and creativity of Reformation theology, or we are fired up by the challenge of criticism and are put in the mood to slaughter

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some sacred cows. The challenge lies in doing justice to all three at once. We will try to draw the threads together in the next chapter. But, to round off the discussion here, let us ask: ‘Can we achieve an integrated, holistic grasp of Anglican theological method in its fullness?’ Michael Ramsey once wrote that Anglican theology is above all ‘a method, a use and a direction’.15 I think that those words point the way ahead for us. Theological integrity is not a purely intellectual or cerebral matter. Theological integrity needs to be practised, it needs to be lived. We can live that vision if we are grounded in catholicity, especially the sacraments of the Church, which is the Mother of us all, with an upholding sense of the wholeness of the Church, which we seek to indwell. We can put the vision into practice if we are captive to the Word of God (as Luther put it), mortgaged to the Scriptures, breathing the Scriptures; and if we are alert to all that we can learn from the culture of which we are a part, especially when it critiques the failures and deficiencies of the Church. This unity of heart and mind, prayer and study, individual and community shapes the Anglican vision at its best.

A. M. Ramsey, ‘What is Anglican Theology?’, Theology, 48 (1945): 2–6.

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Catholic and Reformed – And Something More?

The formula ‘Catholic and Reformed’, with or without the initial capital letters, is frequently invoked to sum up the identity and distinctiveness of Anglicanism.1 It is sometimes thought to mark Anglicanism out from other Christian traditions, as though others might be either Catholic or Reformed, but somehow not manage to be both, while we Anglicans (it is smugly assumed) have the best of both worlds! The two questions that I want to consider in this chapter are: (a) What do ‘catholic’ and ‘reformed’, as attributes of a Christian church, stand for, and can they sit comfortably together? and (b) whether, in any case, the phrase ‘catholic and reformed’ is sufficient to distinguish Anglicanism among the Christian churches, or whether something more – je ne sais quoi, that is to say an elusive but attractive and pleasing quality, not easy to pin down – is needed to complete the picture, and if so, what that additional ‘something’ might be. First of all I want to insert a caveat. Although the terms ‘catholic’ and ‘reformed’ are frequently linked together, they are not, and cannot in fact be, equal in value, or put on the same level of significance as descriptors of the Christian Church as such or of any particular church. Catholicity is one of the credal notes or marks of the Church (notae ecclesiae), alongside the ‘notes’ of unity, holiness and apostolicity: ‘one’, ‘holy’ and ‘apostolic’. To be ‘reformed’ is not a credal attribute or ‘note’ of the Church of Jesus Christ that is the object of our faith. Because of its place in the ecumenical creeds, catholicity must have E.g. Florence Higham, Catholic and Reformed: A Study of the Anglican Church, 1559–1662 (London: SPCK, 1962); H. R. McAdoo, The Unity of Anglicanism: Catholic and Reformed (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow Co., 1983); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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a prima facie claim to be an essential, intrinsic and constitutive dimension of the Church. If that is the case, every properly constituted particular church must participate somehow and to some degree in catholicity. To be catholic is, by definition, to belong to the one, universal Church of Christ. So we cannot belong to the Church without being catholic. To be Christian is to be catholic. The same cannot be said of the other term in the equation, however crucial continual reformation may be when we are considering the integrity, vitality and authenticity of the Church (ecclesia reformata semper reformanda).

‘Catholic’ What makes a church ‘catholic’? How does it participate in catholicity? On what grounds can a church be regarded by its own adherents and by members of other churches as catholic? These are contested questions in ecclesiology and in ecumenical theological dialogue. The ecumenical dimension is not our main concern here.2 But Anglicans would tend to answer the question about the catholicity of their Communion and its member churches by pointing to the elements of universality within them and for which they look in their ecumenical partner churches. The Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886/1888/1920 and subsequently frequently re-affirmed by both the Lambeth Conference and individual member churches of the Communion) sketches them in outline: the canonical Scriptures; the dominically instituted sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist); the ecumenical creeds (Apostles’ Creed and the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople); the historic episcopate (i.e. the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, which is undoubtedly implied in the historic episcopate, since bishops are first deacons and priests and remain so). The Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral names four avenues that drive towards the universality, that is to say the catholicity, of the Church. We tap into the Church catholic through them. Anglicans regard those ecumenical partner churches that retain all four elements as maintaining catholic faith and order and can, therefore, enter

See further Paul Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology: The Church Made Whole? (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010).

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into relationships of ecclesial communion with them. By virtue of ecclesial communion, the churches concerned can share an interchangeable ordained ministry and practise episcopal co-consecration and collegiality and even joint forms of conciliarity or synodality. In these ways they can realize, in a shared life of word, sacrament and pastoral oversight, the unity and catholicity of Christ’s Church. In the case of those churches that uphold the first three elements (Scriptures, sacraments, creeds), but have not retained the threefold ministry with the historic episcopate, Anglican churches have entered into agreements that, though meaningful and fruitful, stop short of ecclesial communion and an interchangeable ordained ministry. Such agreements involve mutual acknowledgement of the authenticity of one another’s faith, sacraments and ministry and of their participation in the apostolic mission, but they do not provide for the final step of ecclesial communion to be taken because full agreement on the historic episcopate has not been reached (e.g. the Meissen Agreement between the Church of England and the German Protestant Church [EKD], the Reuilly Agreement between the British and Irish Anglican Churches and the French Protestant Churches, and the Anglican–Methodist Covenant). The Anglican position is that the historic episcopate is necessary for the unity, continuity and visibility of the Church, as the term ‘historic’ brings out – in other words, Anglicans see the historic episcopate as needed for the Church’s mission and unity. Anglicans do not see it as their business to pass adverse judgement on churches that have not retained the historic episcopate. Least of all do Anglicans presume to attribute a defectus ordinis – something lacking in their ordained ministry – to them. The ecumenical methodology of degrees of ecclesial communion, evinced in the two broad kinds of agreement mentioned above, inevitably results in a two-stage ecumenism, ‘unity by stages’: (a) relationships of ecclesial communion (or ‘full communion’, as it is termed in North America), with an interchangeable ordained ministry and episcopal co-consecration and collegiality; and (b) relationships that fall somewhat short of that and do so usually by the decision of Anglicans. Does that make Anglicans and their communion (or ‘full communion’) partners in any way superior or better churches than those churches with whom Anglicans do not enjoy ecclesial communion? Is it any cause for smugness or self-congratulation, or looking askance at others,

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or even – like the Pharisee in the parable of the Tax-collector and the Pharisee (Lk. 18.9-14) – looking down on them? God forbid! God forbid for three main reasons. (a) Whatever element (in this case the historic episcopate) any church has retained of catholicity, and which contributes to its participation in the catholicity of the whole Church, has been received and retained purely by grace and should, therefore, be regarded as a gift. ‘What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ (1 Cor. 4.7). In the turmoil of history a gift can be lost or accidentally mislaid. When churches that have retained the historic episcopate consider partner churches that have not, they should recall the words of John Bradford in the sixteenth century who reputedly said, as he watched a man going to be hanged: ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ The Church of England came close to losing the historic succession in the sixteenth century and again in the seventeenth, though not from choice. As Karl Barth puts it (he is speaking mainly of individuals, but the point applies equally to collectivities, in this case churches), ‘it happens all too easily that in the hearts and heads of Christians the spiritual riches entrusted to them are unfortunately transformed into intellectual, moral and religious riches which each can begin to handle as if he had himself created them, as if they were at his disposal, as if he could claim them as his own possession and power and glory, playing them off against others’, as if they were not a gift, given for the sake of the whole body. Barth adds rather ominously: ‘It always hangs by a hair’s breadth whether this misfortune is avoided.’3 Gifts and endowments bring responsibilities and burdens, not superiority and self-congratulation. ‘From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded’ (Lk. 12.48). (b) It is often the fault of the churches that have retained the historic episcopate that other churches have not. The German Lutheran churches lost the episcopate in their church orders not because they were opposed theologically to bishops – the confessional documents of the period, especially

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [CD], ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–), IV/2, p. 826.

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the Augsburg Confession Article XXVIII and the Apology for the Augsburg Confession Articles XIV and XXVIII, take episcopacy as given, assume that the existing episcopate will continue, and make proposals for its reform. But because the late medieval bishops were absent, or corrupt, or opposed to the reform, there were no available bishops to continue the succession.4 In recent times, as a result of ecumenical dialogue and rapprochement, some churches have seriously considered becoming ordered in the historic episcopate, but when they have looked for role models in their partner churches, they have been put off by pompous, inept or insensitive behaviour on the part of existing bishops. The Methodist Church of Great Britain, the Covenant partner of the Church of England, may be a case in point. (c) Catholicity is not the only mark of a church by which to judge a church. The other three notes – unity, holiness and apostolicity – need to be brought to bear. Accordingly we may ask: What is the state of the unity, harmony and accord within a church? Where is the evidence of holiness, of consecrated, sacrificial service and purity of heart? How is a church manifesting its continuity with the mission of the apostles in effective evangelization? To have retained the historic episcopate is no guarantee that a church belongs to the Church of the Creed, created, sustained and inspired by the Holy Spirit (‘I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy, catholic Church’). Hypothetically, such a ‘church’ may be a hollow shell, full of the dust of decay, having the outward semblance of a church, but lacking the inward spiritual vitality which is the sine qua non. What does a ‘catholic’ understanding of the Church involve? I suggest that it centres on three interconnected aspects: the unity, continuity and sacramentality of the Church. In a catholic ecclesiology, the Church of Christ is understood to be a single, visible, historical and ordered community or society, existing in time and space, enduring through the centuries. Its sustaining structures include the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and

Theodore G. Tappert (trans. and ed.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1959), pp. 81–94, 214–15, 281–5; Dorothea Wendebourg, ‘The Reformation in Germany and the Episcopal Office’, in Visible Unity and the Ministry of Oversight: The Second Theological Conference held under the Meissen Agreement between the Church of England and the Evangelical Church in Germany, West Wickham, March 1996 (London: Church House Publishing, 1997), pp. 49–78; Bruce D. Marshall, ‘Lutherans, Bishops, and the Divided Church’, Ecclesiology, 1.2 (2005): 25–42.

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deacons in historical continuity. It makes canonical provision for the practice of conciliarity or synodality in governance. Through the agency of its sacred ministry the whole Church celebrates the sacraments of the gospel, which unite the faithful to Christ and have transforming power, so to that extent the Church itself can be envisioned as a sacrament of salvation. For a catholic understanding of the Church, the Church is an objectively given fact, greater than any particular expression of it. The notion, so appallingly familiar in modern Christianity, that one can ‘start’ a new church from scratch and almost ‘at whim’, is incomprehensible to a catholic ecclesiology – more than that, almost blasphemous. There is and can be only one Church, into which we may be called by the Holy Spirit and the message of the gospel, incorporated through the sacraments of Christian initiation, and within which we are privileged to serve. The catholicity of the Church is affirmed in the Church’s confession of faith. Strangely, it is a truth (along with its unity, holiness and apostolicity) that it confesses about itself. The Church’s Creed itself thus commits us to catholicity and that involves working out what it should and does mean. Both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene (Niceno-Constantinopolitan) Creed affirm the Catholic Church as an article of faith. Anglicanism uses both creeds a great deal: usually the Apostles’ in Morning and Evening Prayer, the Nicene in the Eucharist. Thus there is no main, formal act of Anglican worship in which we do not profess our belief in the Church of Christ that is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. The creeds are also given a central place of authority in both the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral. In the Quadrilateral the catholicity of the Church is seen not only in adherence to the creeds, but also in terms of its loyalty to the Holy Scriptures, the dominical sacraments and a ministry established in the historic episcopate. It touches all main bases. Catholicity is perhaps not the very first thing that should be affirmed of the Christian Church. In the Nicene Creed the descriptor ‘catholic’ follows the descriptors ‘one’ and ‘holy’. The very first thing of all to say about the Church is that it is ‘one’, as God is one and as the Lord Jesus Christ is one. The unity of God is the very bottom of bottom lines in Christian faith and theology and must on no account be compromised, as some careless trinitarian talk, versions of the ‘social Trinity’, tends to do, especially in the eyes of intelligent



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Jews and Muslims and agnostics.5 As Jesus teaches in Mark’s Gospel, ‘The first [commandment] is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”’ (Mk 12.29). The unity of the Church is bound up with the unity of God, the unity of the person of Christ, the unity of the faith and the unity of baptism and the Eucharist. ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all’ (Eph. 4.4-6). The Church of Jesus Christ is described in the New Testament, in communal metaphors of intimacy and indwelling, as his body, people, bride and temple. The Church is essentially a mystery hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3.3) and therefore requires to be understood primarily in a christological sense and expounded with christological concentration. The Church is founded on the gospel of God which tells of Christ’s coming into the world, of his ministry, passion, death, resurrection and glorification for us humans and for our salvation. The Second Vatican Council stated that Jesus Christ founded the Church by preaching the gospel.6 The Church is born from salvation history and exists in the realm of grace. But this christological focal point of the gospel is precisely what leads us to affirm the catholicity of the Church. To look at the Church christologically is to look at it incarnationally. The incarnation is manifestly an historical, this-worldly event, wrought out of our down-toearth, common human nature, located in time and space. The idea of the Church as the mystical body of the incarnate Jesus Christ already implies that the Christian Church is a visible, historical, continuous and structured community. The catholicity of the Church is entailed in the Incarnation. Some Anglican theologians, including Charles Gore, spoke of the Church as the continuation or extension of the Incarnation. This sounds typically AngloCatholic until we realize that both the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Reformed Karl Barth taught that Christ exists as the Church.7 The catholicity or universality of the Church cannot in any way be invisible or intangible, nor can it be expressed in ways other than the social and historical, because that is Keith Ward, Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6 LG 5. 7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (Works, gen. ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996–2014, vol. 1; Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, §67. 5

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the nature of the human raw material, so to speak, of which it is made up (as, for example, Karl Rahner forcefully insisted). Hans Küng for one has suggested that catholicity should be understood in terms of fullness and completeness. It is a qualitative, as well as – perhaps even more than – a quantitative conception. Catholicity denotes an integrity that belongs to the Church by nature because it is grounded in the Church’s union with Christ through the Holy Spirit and effected through the power of his word and sacraments. That integrity enlarges the hospitality of the Church to all humanity.8 That fullness, completeness and integrity are expressed in the Church as a visible community, a divinely commissioned, though highly imperfect society. It is important to stress this point – that catholicity is concerned with completeness, universality and hospitality – because of all the notes of the Church, catholicity is the one that has been most prone to be hijacked for sectarian purposes, not least within Anglicanism. It is not long since the word catholic was appropriated by one strand of Anglicanism, and others, it seems, were content to let it go. Owen Chadwick remarked in his Bishop Gore Memorial Lecture (using what were, even then, beautifully old-fashioned images) that ‘catholic’ was a word that it was easy to misappropriate, ‘to stuff into your waistcoat’ and treat like a piece of private property, ‘like a sixpence in your trousers pocket’.9 But catholicity simply cannot be allowed to become the private prerogative of any one part of the Church because by definition it has to do with the whole. In essence, catholicism is an ecclesiological platform or tradition that understands the Church of Christ to be a continuous historical community, commissioned by the risen Christ, a universal divine society in which Christ dwells through the Holy Spirit, and which communicates the saving and sanctifying grace of God through ordered means and structures, notably sacraments and a ministry based on the principle of transmitted authority. How does Anglicanism match up to this definition? What is catholic about Anglicanism? How is the catholicity of the Church expressed in the Anglican Communion? Anglicans certainly believe that the Church is a visible universal

Hans Küng, The Church (London: Search Press, 1971), p. 303. Owen Chadwick, ‘Catholicism’, Theology, 76.634 (1973): 171–80, at p. 173.

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society of which their particular Communion is – variously expressed – a part, portion or branch. In Anglicanism, the dominically instituted sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist are fundamental, though confirmation, ordination, marriage, confession and extreme unction also have sacramental status for many Anglicans. Transmitted authority is mediated through the historic episcopate which is affirmed (for example in the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral 1886/1888/1920) as an essential component of the structural unity of the Church, though its theological rationale is not defined. But the episcopate is not unconstrained and does not enjoy absolute authority – far from it; it is set in the midst of Christ’s people gathered representatively in council and synod. So the typically Anglican concept of the bishop in synod encapsulates and binds together both of the main agencies by which authority is exercised in the Church: the bishop and the synod. Anglicanism is an expression of conciliar, reformed catholicism.

‘Reformed’ The term ‘reformed’, in contrast to ‘catholic’, is not a credal denominator of the Church and so cannot be put on the same level as the first term of the equation, ‘catholic’. However, it is not difficult to see how the imperative of reform and renewal, continually seeking to bring the Church back to her original purity, efficiency and first love (Rev. 2.4), are implied in the declaration of faith, ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’. Indeed, reform and renewal are required by the gospel’s call to continual conversion (metanoia) of individual heart and life, and equally of the Christian community, to Christ and his Church.10 Moreover, any process of reformation requires that there already be a church in existence before it can be reformed. In that sense, ‘reformed’ and ‘reformation’ are dependent on and subsidiary to ‘catholic’ and to the ‘form’ of catholicity. Reformation implies an existing church and an existing pattern to which we seek to revert; reformation involves renovation and restoration. So it would not make sense to trumpet a call to reform, or to Groupe des Dombes, For the Conversion of the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1993); John Bradbury, Perpetually Reforming: A Theology of Church Reform and Renewal (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013).

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lift up the sixteenth-century Reformation as the touchstone of what a church should be, unless in the same breath we affirmed the reality of the Church catholic as the pre-existing source and standard of what we aspire to achieve by our acts of reform. This is precisely what the magisterial Reformers such as Luther, Calvin and Cranmer did. They repudiated any intention to start a new church, but aimed simply, as Calvin put it, to renew the face of the Church – the Church that already existed. ‘All we have attempted’, he wrote in his Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto, ‘has been to renew that ancient form of the Church’ which had been so damaged under the papacy.11 However, we are not always so sure about the intentions of the Reformers’ modern and contemporary would-be (noisy) successors. What does a ‘reformed’ or ‘Reformation’ understanding of the Church necessarily and indispensably involve? I suggest that the reformed understanding of the Church clusters around three points: the relation between the gospel and the Church; the authority of Scripture; and the royal priesthood of the baptized. I hope to show (a) that they are not separate, free-standing principles, but are intertwined and mutually dependent; and (b) that the more deeply we probe these supposedly ‘reformed’ tenets, the more ‘catholic’ they appear to be – and that is simply because they are profoundly catholic.

Gospel and Church It is characteristic of the Reformation tradition that it operates with a dialectic or polarity of the word and the Church. For Catholics the Church and the word are in harmony and cannot be opposed, but for Protestants they are in always in tension; a harmony or symphony of word and Church is a rare, fleeting moment. The reformed tradition typically prioritizes ‘the word of God’ over the teaching and tradition of the Christian Church. In Reformation theology there is a hierarchy of authorities: the word stands at the top of the ladder; the Church and its traditions sit, not immediately beneath, but several rungs below. Reason and conscience have a higher place and hold greater sway

John Calvin, Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto, in Tracts and Treatises in Defense of the Reformed Faith, trans. Henry Beveridge, ed. T. F. Torrance (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), vol. 3, p. 37.

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than living church authority. The circumstances of the Reformation and the personal struggles of the Reformers determined these priorities. The work of humanist scholars, notably Erasmus of Rotterdam, had brought the basically correct Greek text of the New Testament to light (together with the writings of the early Fathers), supplanting the Latin Vulgate, the Roman Church’s official translation, in their eyes, and the printing press had made these texts more widely accessible than ever before. People in Christendom could immediately see discrepancies between the teaching and example of the New Testament and that of the (late medieval) Church as they knew it. The Reformers’ challenges to existing teaching and practice were met with opposition and persecution. The Reformers were confronted with the need to make a choice between the word and the Church and they did not hesitate over which way to go. The word of God in Scripture reigned supreme for them over the visible, institutional Church that, according to their theology, the word had actually brought into being. The Church was the creation of the word (creatura verbum) and remained subject to the word. Those early battles – and they continued for centuries – left their scars and permanently marked reformed ecclesiology. The priority of the word over the Church became an entrenched principle – almost an axiom – of the reformed understanding of the Church. However, to play off the word against the Church, as a consistent practice, methodologically, creates serious anomalies for ecclesiology. Both historically and theologically – in the ordo cognoscendi and the ordo essendi, the order of knowledge and the order of being – the Church is not separable from the word; it is at the same time the creation of the word and the matrix of the word. Catholic Christianity finds it hard to see how the Church and the word could be opposed; they belong together and should co-exist in harmony. In reality there is an indestructible symbiosis between the Church and the word of God in the Scriptures. So we need to dig a little deeper to understand what this gambit really means. I will take three instances of this Reformation stance: Luther and Jewel from the sixteenth century and Karl Barth from the twentieth, so a Lutheran, an ‘Anglican’ and a Reformed witness. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, that defining moment of the early Reformation, Luther protested that, in conscience, he could not recant, unless convinced by Scripture and right reason. The mere assertion of the authority of the church hierarchy (the magisterium, as we might now say),

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with the weight of medieval tradition behind it, was not enough. ‘Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves),’ Luther testified, ‘I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.’12 At this crucial juncture in the emergence of the reform movement, Luther identified a potential clash of principles between the authority of the Scriptures, endorsed by reasoned argument and binding in conscience, and the authority of the teaching Church, supported by the weight of tradition. It was conscience that would decide the contest. Similarly, the great apologist for the English Reformation, John Jewel, in his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, insisted that the reformed English Church had acted in obedience to ‘the Gospel of Christ’ and in so doing had ‘returned to the apostles and old catholic fathers’.13 Here we have in a nutshell the mature Reformation appeal to authority: it was to the authentic gospel, inscribed in the Scriptures, to which the primitive Church bore witness. This was the ‘pearl of great price’ of the parable (Mt. 13.46, KJB), to possess which everything else might need to be sacrificed. Only so, wrote George Downham, chaplain to King James I, can we ‘redeem the most precious jewel of the gospel, which is to be redeemed (if need be) with the loss of all outward things’.14 This was to echo Luther in the Ninety-five Theses of 1517: ‘The true treasure of the Church is the holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.’ In his Explanation of the Ninety-five Theses Luther commented that ‘the Church has nothing which is more precious and salutary’.15 In Church Dogmatics Karl Barth affirms that Jesus Christ builds his Church on the word and continually builds it up through the power of the word – the word once given to the apostles and prophets. For Barth, the word of God Martin Luther, Luther’s Works [LW], ‘American Edition’, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1955–), vol. 32, p. 112 (both friendly and hostile accounts are included: pp. 101–31). See further on the role of conscience in the Reformers, P. Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 3–7. 13 John Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England, ed. John E. Booty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1963), pp. 10, 17. 14 Norman Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 76. 15 LW, vol. 31, pp. 31, 210. 12



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in Scripture is personified as a dynamic acting subject. ‘The Word of God chooses, defines, claims and conquers the Church, as the special sphere of its effective power … The freedom of God’s word is the freedom to found for itself a Church.’16 Barth also stresses that, though this is a human word, it is divinely revelatory and therefore prior to and above the authority of the Church. ‘Because he has entrusted and commissioned his Word to his prophets and apostles, because he has made them the rock on which he builds his Church, the authority of Jesus Christ is a concrete authority. It stands over against the authority of the Church.’ The word cannot be domesticated by the Church but will always be invested with ‘a healthy strangeness’. The word and the Church can never be mutually assimilated or confused.17 Barth resists the notion of a synergy between them. The Church finds the word uncomfortably challenging and therefore continually seeks to undermine (‘attack’) the message of the apostles and prophets, watering it down, drawing its sting. Therefore, that message must always call the Church to reformation; it continually stands in need of reform to bring it back to itself.18 The word of God in Holy Scripture always and in every respect stands over the Church as its lord and judge and seeks to reform it.19 What this account amounts to, when all is said and done, is a ‘stand-off ’ in Barth’s ecclesiology between the word of God and the Church. But this antithesis is theologically unsatisfactory and ecclesiologically disfunctional. Here I think Barth is following Luther rather than Calvin. If Luther’s ecclesiology tends to be rather volatile, embattled and eschatological, Calvin’s view of the Church is considerably steadier, more firmly structured and less dialectical. I do not think that Calvin would tolerate a permanent state of opposition between the word and the Church. While there are indeed times when the Church appears to ‘attack’ the word of God as it is found in the mouths of prophets speaking from the margins, from the wilderness, and attempts to silence it (as in Luther’s case), this is simply not a true picture of the general tenor of the Church’s life and liturgy. The word of God in Scripture, in Psalms and Canticles, is recited with heartfelt involvement in daily worship, is read Barth, CD, I/2, pp. 686–7. Barth, CD, II/1, pp. 578–80, at p. 579 (Eph. 2.20; 3.5). 18 Barth, CD, II/1, p. 583. 19 Barth, CD, II/1, p. 586. 16 17

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and preached in season and out of season, and is studied with scholarly intensity and meditated on continually. What Barth has done is to extrapolate and generalize from the exceptional, dire circumstances of the embattled, persecuted Confessing Church in pre-war Nazi Germany and to construct from that a caricature of the relation between word and Church that is the norm. Pace Barth, I have to insist that the Church loves the word, for it is the word that gives it life. The Church treasures the word and shares it with all who will receive the gift. The word richly indwells the Church, imparting to it both substance and vitality. The catholic Church embraces the catholicity, that is to say the universal relevance and authority, of the word. But as the herald of the gospel, the Church is always preaching to itself, as well as to the world, calling itself to continual conversion to Christ and conversion to the gospel, summoning itself to repeated moments of renewal and reform. This relation between the Church and the word is not a stand off – Barth’s language of ‘attack’ is uncalled for – but rather an ongoing internal conversation, an inner dialogue, even an internal struggle, though a struggle of those who belong together, like that of Jacob and Esau in the womb of Rebekah (Gen. 25.22). When, at the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church encouraged the reading and study of the Bible by all the faithful and embraced for itself, after four hundred years, the language of ‘reformation’, the classical Protestant dialectic of word and Church ceased to be the exclusive prerogative of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions.20

The authority of Scripture Charles Gore, the greatest Anglican theologian and church leader of the early twentieth century, described the Anglican stance as ‘scriptural catholicism’. Gore, an Anglo-Catholic of the old school, was here articulating a catholic understanding of the Church in which the Scriptures were the paramount authority and the ultimate criterion of doctrine. Gore believed that that view Groupe des Dombes. For the Conversion of the Churches; LG 8; UR 5–6; P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006), pp. 200–3.

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of the Scriptures – though not of course that alone – made the Church of England catholic. Although Gore was not particularly sympathetic to the Reformers – they were unpalatable to him in many ways – he was compelled to recognize the vital witness of the Reformation to this central principle of Anglicanism, and to acknowledge the rediscovery of the Bible in the Church by the Reformers.21 What does this principle mean in practice? The Reformation’s ‘scriptural principle’, embraced in Anglicanism, upholds the incomparable authority of Holy Scripture for the Church – not to legislate for everything that has to be done in the life of the Church, not as prescribing how Christians should worship or how the Church should be governed, but precisely as teaching the way of salvation and the path of sanctification. In dispute with Rome, the English Reformers, like their Continental counterparts, argued that nothing that was not expressly taught by Scripture or was not an evident inference from Scripture could be required as necessary for salvation. However, the historic Anglican formularies do not give the same authority to Scripture in deciding the outward form of the Church, its worship and structure, as they do to its role in the doctrines of salvation. For the Church’s governance and worship the guidance of the early Church, of antiquity, is needed, provided nothing is enforced that is ‘repugnant’ to Scripture or oppressive to the Christian conscience. Both of these axioms – that nothing is to be required for salvation that is not explicit in Scripture and that the Church has a degree of freedom in ordering its life – are embodied in the Thirty-nine Articles.22 Outside the circumscribed area of credal doctrine, Anglicanism also recognizes – and this is another contribution of Richard Hooker – the criterion of appropriateness, of what is fitting in the circumstances, discerned by the practical reason, and this applies particularly in the areas of worship and governance. Therefore, the post-Refomation Protestant slogan sola scriptura, vague and slippery at the best of times, does not belong in the Anglican vocabulary. The Bible holds an exalted place in Anglican theology and practice, but it is not asked to do work for which it was never intended.23 Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing: Churchman Publishing, 1988), pp. 25–38. For a comprehensive account of Gore’s thought see James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholicism (London: Faith Press, 1960). 22 See especially Articles VI, XX and XXIV of the Thirty-nine Articles. 23 Further on Hooker and on sola scriptura, see Avis, In Search of Authority, pp. 102–28, 26–30. 21

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It is on the basis of early Church tradition (no less) that Anglicanism embraces the Canon of Scripture, the ecumenical creeds, the threefold ministry with the episcopal succession, the liturgical structure of the Eucharist and the practice of conciliarity. Scripture is the ultimate criterion, but Scripture does not stand alone. The Bible tests and judges the Church, but it remains the Church’s book. It needs our best resources of scholarship and spiritual insight to understand and apply it. The Reformers were the leading biblical scholars of their day, pioneering the use of the latest techniques and texts. They allowed the word of God to speak to them through rigorous scholarly attention to the text in the original biblical languages. Part of the legacy of the Reformation is the vital role of hermeneutics, the science and art of interpretation, in the service of the Church. ‘Catholic’ and ‘reformed’ insights and concerns come together in the vision of the Bible studied, interpreted and applied within the community of the Church.

The royal priesthood of the baptized and the governance of the Church It can hardly be denied that the Reformers rediscovered the biblical doctrine of the royal, prophetic priesthood of the people of God. Martin Luther broke down the medieval barrier between the clerical and lay estates. ‘We are all priests’, he said; therefore all may speak gospel words of comfort and forgiveness to their neighbours. Each one may come before God in intercession for the needs of the other. That is essentially what it means to be a priest: to minister Christ, to be as Christ to another. It was John Calvin who developed, on the basis of Scripture and earlier theologians, the concept of the triple messianic office of Jesus Christ, who was anointed by the Holy Spirit as prophet, priest and king. Calvin showed how these offices are bestowed on and shared by those baptized into Christ and anointed with his Spirit. Calvin applied this concept to the individual Christian: each one may speak God’s word as a prophet, take an active part in worship in the exercise of their priesthood and share in the governance of the Church through the regal office. But it was John Henry Newman, who had absorbed Calvinist doctrine in his youth, who, three hundred years later, saw that the triple messianic



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office applied also to the Church corporately. The Church had a prophetic, priestly and regal authority: it taught the faith, celebrated the mysteries and governed the faithful. The Second Vatican Council recovered the doctrine of the royal, prophetic priesthood, the triple office of all the baptized. The Council encouraged Roman Catholics to study the Scriptures, to participate in worship – the community being the corporate celebrant – but remained reticent about the role of the laity in church governance; that is for the clergy alone in the Roman Catholic Church, though the clergy are encouraged to consult and discuss with their flock.24 Anglicanism upholds the threefold ministry of deacons, priests and bishops in historical continuity of ordinations and it recognizes and affirms many authorized lay ministries. The legacy of the Reformation suggests that the ministry of the Church needs to be reformed from time to time. Many churches of the Anglican Communion have women deacons and priests; some, including the Church of England, have women bishops. I would argue that the doctrine of the royal priesthood of the baptized underwrites this development. It would be intolerably paradoxical to affirm the theology of the royal priesthood and, at the same time, to insist that women could not be ordained (except perhaps to delay temporarily for ecumenical reasons, for the sake of Christian unity, which is arguable on its merits). At every level of the church’s life, bishops, other clergy, and lay people work together in the government of the church. The episcopate, individually and collectively, has a special but not exclusive responsibility, by virtue of episcopal ordination, in matters of doctrine, liturgy and ministry. Bishops exercise oversight in their dioceses, but they do so in collegiality and consultation with clergy and lay people. As an episcopal college, the bishops of the Anglican Communion have collective responsibility for leadership in the Church. The most visible expression of their communion and collegiality is the ten-yearly Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, convened and presided at by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Conference, while lacking juridical power to enforce its recommendations, nevertheless has significant moral and pastoral authority by virtue of the fact that it is made up of the chief pastors of the churches See further Paul Avis, Beyond the Reformation?, pp. 9–12. On the royal priesthood in the sixteenthcentury Church of England see Malcolm B. Yarnell III, Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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and they are called to lead and to guide the faithful. There is a communal dimension to authority in Anglicanism that is lacking in Roman Catholicism. It is expressed in the form of ‘the bishop in synod’ and can be traced to the legacy of the Reformation and beyond that to the Conciliar Movement of the pre-Reformation era. But what of the papacy? Where does that institution sit in terms of the ‘reformed’ dimension of Anglican identity? Although Anglicans are familiar with various expressions of primacy or presidency in their churches (particularly that of the Primates in each national or regional church), they do not accept the universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome. The repudiation of the Roman jurisdiction was a defining element in the English Reformation. The English Reformers tended to see the Church of Rome as one ‘particular’ or national church among others, moreover one that was singularly in need of radical reform. General or Ecumenical Councils were appealed to as the highest authority in the Church, not the pope. Like several of the Continental Reformers, however, many Anglicans have been open to the idea of a reformed universal primacy, by human not divine right, without immediate jurisdiction over particular churches and without potential infallibility, but nevertheless presiding among the churches in the cause of unity and charity. Anglicans stand, therefore, with all the Protestant churches in rejecting a papal primacy in its current absolute form, without any constitutional constraints, but Anglicans deviate from the Protestant churches in not espousing equality or parity of ministries. There is a certain ineradicable hierarchy in the Anglican understanding of holy order – a salutary hierarchy, I would say, because we are all ‘under authority’. In its understanding and practice of authority, Anglicanism has inherited several aspects of the pre-Reformation Conciliar Movement. Creative thinking about how the whole Church, gathered representatively in council, could tackle the problems of the Church was triggered by the fragmentation of the papacy in the late fourteenth century; and in the early fifteenth century the Conciliar Movement shaped several major western councils. It attempted (and ultimately failed) to reform and constrain the papacy. The Reformers generally positioned themselves in relation to councils. The English Reformers discuss the role of councils at length. Like Luther, Thomas Cranmer appealed to a free General Council. The key principles of the conciliar tradition



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that emerged in the late medieval period and continues as a strand within contemporary ecclesiology are representation (all have a right to participate and make their views known, indirectly through those whom they appoint or elect), constitutionality (the scope and limits of authority should be defined, agreed and set down; there is no unconstrained authority) and consent (laws cannot be imposed without the agreement of those they affect and this agreement must be sought through representative, constitutional means). These conciliar principles – representation, constitutionality and consent – are clearly embodied in modern Anglican synodical polity, without undermining the proper oversight of the episcopate.25 Unlike pre-Reformation conciliarism, however, the historic Anglican formularies do not ascribe infallibility to General Councils. They teach that General Councils can err and have in fact erred. What was decisive, with regard to the infallibility of General Councils, for Luther and the other Reformers, was that a hundred years before their day the Council of Constance had burned the proto-Reformer Jan Hus of Bohemia on false charges and after a travesty of a trial. In tune with the Reformers, Anglicans also deny that it is the sole prerogative of the pope to call, preside at and ratify the decisions of General Councils. Anglicans promote a conciliar way of working at various levels, from the very local to the provincial and beyond. They tend not to lose sleep over the hypothetical issue of a truly Ecumenical Council for today. Such a council is currently unattainable because an Ecumenical Council presupposes a state of communion between the churches taking part and – sad to say and as we all know – that relationship of communion does not pertain on the whole between the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist and Reformed churches. However, in my view, the Lambeth Conference is an estimable expression of conciliarity grounded in communion. When the bishops of the Anglican Communion come together in the Lambeth Conference they show themselves to be successors of the bishops of the early councils and of the pre-Reformation conciliarists. As they gather in Conference, gathering around the Scriptures and united in the Eucharist, they as it were activate and implement their continuity, collegiality and communion with their predecessor Anglican bishops in that ongoing See further Avis, Beyond the Reformation?.

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Conference and so make full proof of their episcopal ministry. The dimension of conciliarity is one aspect among many that sets the Anglican Communion squarely in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church. There is much of value to be learned today from the conciliar movement, part of the legacy of the pre-Reformation Church that has a continuing impact.26

Something more? Anglicans are familiar with the expression ‘catholic and reformed’ as a classical, albeit always polemical self-description of the Church of England through the centuries. Seventeenth-century apologists for the Church of England rang the changes on this phrase. Some spoke of being ‘reformed catholic’. Others became quite convoluted when they set out their claim to have the best of both worlds. John Cosin, Bishop of Durham and a significant liturgist, described the Church of England as ‘Protestant and Reformed according to the ancient Catholic Church’.27 But other churches claim the title ‘catholic and reformed’ too. For example, the United Reformed Church in Britain uses the phrase in its Basis of Union. The modern Roman Catholic Church has affirmed the imperative of reform in the Second Vatican Council and at the present time the papacy of Francis is attempting to reform the central structures of that church and aspects of its pastoral policies. To be catholic and reformed is not the sole prerogative of Anglicans. Rather, we may say, it is necessary but not sufficient to explain Anglican distinctiveness. What more needs to be added? Obviously the appeal to ‘reason’ and to ‘sound learning’ or ‘intellectual enquiry’ – and I will return to this. But even that is not enough to define what is peculiar to Anglican theological method, for other Christian traditions, as I have emphasized before, are richly endowed with scholarly resources and perhaps value them more than Anglicans do. Allow me to digress for a moment before returning to ‘reason’ and its cognates. I am not overlooking the significance of the liturgy for the ethos See Paul Valliere, Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Avis, Beyond the Reformation?. 27 H. R. McAdoo, ‘Richard Hooker’, in Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (Wantage: Ikon, 1992), p. 108. 26



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of Anglican life and theology. It is true to say that, in Anglican ecclesiology, the liturgy takes the place of the formal church confessions of other church families. I think it is indisputable that Anglicanism is not a ‘confessional’ tradition, much as some would prefer it to be so. Anglicanism has nothing in its repertoire comparable to the sixteenth-century Lutheran and Reformed confessions or to the doctrinal decrees of the Roman Catholic Church, gathered in ‘Denzinger’.28 The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion serve the same purpose only to a limited extent. The confessional role is served by the liturgy and in my view is served all the better by virtue of that fact. Anglicans confess their faith primarily in their prayers: lex orandi lex credendi.29 All that Karl Barth has to say in his major dissertation on the confessions of the churches in Church Dogmatics I/2 §20 applies only to a very limited extent to the Thirty-nine Articles, because they deal not with the faith of the Church as a whole, or even with the fundamentals of the faith, but with selected points of controversy. But what Barth says about the act of confessing the faith, which he rightly regards as an intrinsic function of the Church, applies more fully and properly to Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, to the Book of Common Prayer 1662 and to their successors, the modern Anglican liturgies. Barth states that a confession, consisting of a mutual hearing and sharing of the word of God within a particular community, though limited in place and time, expresses a special insight, given by the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures, and therefore borrowing (so to speak) its authority from the Scriptures – an insight that is intended to meet a new challenge or an emergency situation. A confession addresses pastoral, theological and political needs.30 All this can be referred to the legacy of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for the Anglican liturgical tradition. Cranmer taught Anglicans to confess their faith in prayer, worship and sacrament. It does not follow from the absence of confessions from Anglicanism that there is a doctrinal vacuum where the confessions should, on some accounts,

E.g. H. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer (eds), Enchiridion Symbolorum: Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, Editio XXXII (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1963). On confessionalism, etc., see P. Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology, Ch. 6. On the role of liturgy in Anglican identity see P. Avis, ‘The Book of Common Prayer and Anglicanism: Worship and Belief ’, in Stephen Platten and Christopher Woods (eds), Comfortable Words: Polity, Piety and the Book of Common Prayer (Norwich: SCM Press, 2012), Ch. 9. 30 Barth, CD, I/2, pp. 588–660. 28

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be. The ample doctrinal substance of Anglican faith is to be found in the authorized liturgy, which includes the creeds, supported by the decrees of the early ecumenical councils, the Thirty-nine Articles, as they have been received and adapted by the member churches of the Anglican Communion, and the bodies of canon law of those churches which have a good deal in common.31 Neither does its non-confessional character make Anglicanism unique in the oekumene. It puts us in the same boat as the Orthodox family of churches for whom, as for Anglicans, the Church’s confession of faith is given in the celebration of the liturgy and in the decrees of ecumenical councils, together with the creeds that derive from them. So having noted the distinctive, though not unique, non-confessional character of Anglicanism and the salient role of the liturgy in Anglican faith and theology, I return to the quest for the ‘something more’ and to the question of reason and enquiry. As I have suggested in the previous chapter, ‘The Critical Imperative’, there is something distinctive about the Anglican approach to authority in the Church. It concerns the way that the Anglican tradition has estimated and employed the resources of reason, scholarship and intellectual enquiry. Notwithstanding its catholic credentials and in particular its profound respect for Scripture and tradition (which – it is worth noting here – are brought together in a salient manner in the liturgy), Anglicanism has tended to recognize a degree of authority in the well-founded conclusions of scholarly enquiry to modify received positions. Critical study of biblical texts, with due attention to their original historical and social contexts, can lead us to revise our interpretation of the Bible. Historical research can enable us to have a more discriminating understanding of tradition. In other words, scholarly study makes a difference in belief and practice – it can prompt the call for change in the Church. This was true paradigmatically at the Reformation and remains valid today. Historically, sound learning in the Anglican tradition has often been found within the episcopate and therefore has been awarded a certain authority. Learning combined with power has a cutting edge. But in Anglicanism, after long struggles in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first

The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2008).

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decades of the twentieth, scholarship now carries its own credentials; it is not challenged by a church hierarchy, but is free to make its way within the moving stream of Christian culture and, at the end of the day, to be received into the mind of the Church, or not, as the case may be. Scholarly insight cannot be trumped by church authority. A magisterium is not invariably qualified to judge the conclusions of scholarly research. However, what I am describing is more than learning; it is the judicious, critical application of learning to questions and challenges that arise in the life of the Church. For Anglicans the exemplar of that combination of learning, insight and sound judgement remains ‘the judicious’ Richard Hooker.32 All areas of belief and practice are open to enquiry. The Bible and tradition are not exempt; they above all need to be understood and interpreted aright. The truth of God in Jesus Christ is the horizon of our unending quest.

P. Avis, In Search of Authority, Ch. 3. Accessible introductions include Charles Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God: Exploring the Origins of ‘Anglicanism’ (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013) and W. Bradford Littlejohn, Richard Hooker: A Guide to His Life and Work (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015). A more advanced account is Torrance Kirby (ed.), A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

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1 To bring our enquiry into the vocation of Anglicanism to a provisional conclusion, I want to go back a century and a half to one of my theological heroes and mentors, the Church of England theologian Frederick Denison Maurice. F. D. Maurice, who lived from 1805 to 1872, was what I would call a reconciling or mediating theologian: he looked for what was good and true in rival or opposing schools of thought and sought to weave them into a broader tapestry of Christian truth. Following Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who is usually regarded as the founder of the ‘Broad Church’ movement within the nineteenth-century Church of England, Maurice believed that people were generally right in what they positively affirmed, but suspected that they were generally wrong in what they denied or negated.2 He believed that the major Christian traditions each bore witness to a vital truth that was part of the wholeness of the Church. For example, he held that Protestants had made a necessary protest about the importance of the individual conscience, while Roman Catholics had maintained a steady witness to the corporate nature of the Church.3 A shorter form of this chapter was given at the Provincial Conference of the Nipon Sei Ko Kai (Anglican Church of Japan) in Tokyo in December 2008; at Christ Church, Bronxville, Episcopal Diocese of New York, in January 2009; and as the Richard Hooker Lecture in November 2009 at the (now) University of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, and Exeter Cathedral as part of the programme of the Centre for the Study of the Christian Church. An earlier version of the chapter was published in the USA in The Anglican and a German translation of the paper given at the University of Bern in October 2009 was published as ‘Die Berufung des Anglikanismus’ in Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 100.3 (2010): 209–22. 2 C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942). 3 F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ (2nd edn, 1842), 2 vols, ed. A. R. Vidler (London: SCM Press, 1

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Maurice also believed that when, as usually happens, a vital truth was elaborated into a theological system, it became seriously distorted. Thus in Protestantism the inviolability of conscience had become an overblown claim to the right of private judgement, discarding the authority of the Church and its tradition, while the Roman Catholic witness to the corporate nature of the Church had developed into a rigid self-serving institutionalism. The theological system that evolved, in any such case, then served, ironically, to conceal the truth that it was meant to embody. The hardening of a God-given insight into a kind of unchallengeable dogma, embodied in ecclesiastical structures, was counter-productive because the original truth that had provided the focus for a renewal of the tradition had become obscured. Like Archbishop Michael Ramsey (1904–88), I believe that Maurice and, behind him, Coleridge have much to teach us about a theological method that is non-polemical and that works for agreement, harmony and unity, in other words about the nature of ecumenical theology.4 Taking F. D. Maurice’s claim slightly further, we might say that when separate Christian traditions are being developed, by their exponents, into a systematic form, they tend to define themselves in a defensive way over against other Christian traditions. To have our own identity, we need to be different from others and the temptation is to elaborate our differences all along the line. These systems, defined and defended in relation to each other – over against the other – then serve to perpetuate the historic divisions within the Church of Christ, to cement them in place and to justify them. It is then extremely difficult for churches to see eye to eye when they talk to each other. Even more importantly – and this is sometimes a matter of life and death – it makes it virtually impossible for them to stand shoulder to shoulder in the face of hostile external threats either to themselves or to other vulnerable sections of the population.5 But the entrenched nature of separate Christian traditions, shaped by polemics and opposition, is precisely what calls for ecumenical dialogue and provides its motive power. As a matter of fact, great 1958). For a recent introduction to Maurice’s thought see J. Morris, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4 A. M. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). 5 Cf. Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012).



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gains have been achieved in mutual understanding and coming to a common mind on controversial topics in theology, though, in many cases, these have not yet been acted upon in a substantial way that affects the practice of the churches concerned.6 Without falling into that kind of defensive mindset, that self-justifying trap, we may properly and profitably ask whether there is a special vocation or calling for the Anglican tradition and the Anglican Churches in the providence and purposes of God, though it must be one that does not in any way demean or devalue other traditions of the Christian Church or claim moral superiority over them. Does Anglicanism bear witness, as F. D. Maurice would say, to certain vital truths of faith or order in the Christian Church? Does Anglicanism offer a worthwhile contribution to the common good of the Christian Church? I will try to suggest some answers to that question shortly, but before I do so, there are some rather tricky preliminary matters that I think we should consider. Maurice’s warning, that the development of God-given truths into an aggressive system undermines the very truths that the system is intended to enshrine, is well taken in the case of Anglicanism. Anglican theology is known for its unsystematic character. Some might regard that as a virtue, others as a weakness.7 Either way, I have no appetite whatever for merely singing the praises of Anglicanism and I have no desire to blow the Anglican trumpet. I share F. D. Maurice’s distaste for any complacent, triumphalist and uncritical approach to my own tradition.8 In England, if not elsewhere, members of other churches sometimes accuse Anglicans of smugness. The accusation of ‘effortless Anglican superiority’ is sometimes thrown at us. There has often been a suspicion of triumphalism, as though Anglicans believed that theirs See e.g. the work of ARCIC, especially Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission,The Final Report (London: CTS/SPCK, 1982) and Salvation and the Church (London: Church House Publishing/CTS, 1987); also in multilateral dialogue: Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982); The Nature and Mission of the Church (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2005); The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013). For a wider perspective on some dialogues that the Roman Catholic Church has been involved with, including ARCIC, see Walter Kasper, Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). For assessment and critique with regard to ecumenical dialogue and ecumenical theology, see Paul Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology: The Church Made Whole? (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010). 7 Cf. S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (Oxford: Mowbray, 1978). 8 Frederick Denison Maurice, The Prayer Book considered especially in relation to the Romish System and the Lord’s Prayer (London: Macmillan, 1880), p. 6. 6

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was ‘the best kind of Christianity’, somehow morally superior to any other brand. I have to search my conscience as to whether, in what I have written about the Anglican tradition and Anglican ecclesiology over the years, I have been guilty of smugness or complacency. A Methodist colleague, the late Angela Shier-Jones, used to say to me that what I tended to do was to describe the ideal form of Anglicanism, when the actual form is often rather different – the implication being that the ideal description is attractive, but the reality that other Christians experience is often off-putting. If that is the case – and I suspect that there is more than a grain of truth in it – Anglicans have some serious heart-searching to do. In my own case, I have certainly tried to expose the conflicts, contradictions and failures of Anglicanism, in history and today, without engaging in mystification about them.9 The pathology of Anglicanism weighs me down, just as much as its integrity buoys me up. I recall that when the proposed scheme of unity between the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain was narrowly defeated in the General Synod in 1972, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, with the tears rolling down his cheeks, dared anyone to tell him now that Anglicanism was ‘the more excellent way’. It was the Methodists, he said, who were now the leaders in Christian unity – and not for the first time.10 Recent developments in the Anglican Communion certainly make it impossible to be triumphalist about Anglicanism (not that one could ever have been that!). The worldwide family has shown itself to be a struggling Communion, wrestling with internal tensions and conflicts, especially over the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate, human sexuality, extreme liberal and extreme conservative theologies and the authority issues which underlie these struggles. So it may seem that this is not a good time to ask my operative question about the distinctive contribution of Anglicanism. On the face of it, this is not an auspicious moment to raise the question of the essential strengths and insights of Anglicanism, that is to say its special calling. On the other hand, perhaps this is not a bad time, possibly even the right time, to ask our question. Developments with regard to same-gender relations See especially P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, 2nd edn (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2002) and The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008). 10 Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 341. 9



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in the Episcopal Church, centring on the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003, and in the Diocese of New Westminster in the Anglican Church of Canada, exacerbated by episcopal interventions in North America from the global South, gave rise to the Lambeth Commission, the Windsor Report and the process that has flowed from it, especially the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant, and this process has been complemented by a project that has identified a core canon law, one that is broadly held in common by all the provinces or churches of the Communion.11 At the 2008 Lambeth Conference the majority of the bishops of the Communion (roughly three-quarters of them) were gathered by the Archbishop of Canterbury for prayer, Bible study, reflection and discussion. It seems that the Lambeth Conference had the effect of increasing mutual understanding and rapport among the bishops and of strengthening the determination of many bishops to hold together. It was, in my opinion, a valid expression of episcopal collegiality in an informal mode. However, since then the strongly conservative sector of Anglicanism has organized itself as the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GFCA) and has set out its manifesto for what looks suspiciously like an alternative Anglican Communion (as discussed in Chapter 5). The Communion faces an uphill struggle to resolve the divisive issues and to heal its damaged unity, its impaired communion, and it is not yet clear whether this will be possible. Perhaps then, after all, this is the right time to ask about the distinctive insights or strengths of the Anglican tradition and whether these might be activated in a helpful, healing way at the present juncture. It gives much food for thought to note that the first Lambeth Conference, in 1867, was convened in rather comparable circumstances to that of 2008. The presenting issues were identical in principle: biblical interpretation and sexual ethics. J. W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal in Southern Africa, was the main protagonist of progressive Anglicanism, with his metropolitan, Bishop Gray of Cape Town as the representative of conservative Anglicanism, struggling to assert his authority. Colenso’s biblical criticism (particularly with regard to the Pentateuch) appeared then to be radical and destructive (and it was indeed The Windsor Report (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2004). The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2008). See further Ch. 4 on the Anglican Covenant.

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gratuitously insensitive), and his tolerance of polygamy among converts was equally shocking at the time. The crisis created a formal schism in South Africa which has not been healed.12

2 So what is the vocation or special calling of Anglicanism, if there is one? At this point there must be another caveat. Before speaking of one particular expression of the Church, namely Anglicanism, we should speak of the Church as a whole. What is the vocation of the Church of Jesus Christ and to what is the Church as such called? First and foremost, we have to say in reply that the whole Church is called to conform itself (or, properly speaking, to allow God to conform it) to the four credal marks, notes or dimensions of the Church: unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity.13 The fact that these marks are given in the Creed (the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople, ad 381) has three vital implications. First, in the context of the Creed, the notes of the Church are affirmations of faith, not simply descriptions of what we see before us. To be committed to the Church is the fruit of the specific ‘theological virtue’ of faith (fides). The notes rightly belong in the Credo. ‘I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’ is the first article of the third paragraph of the Nicene Creed. It is extremely significant that it follows from, ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit’ – that is to say the Holy Spirit vivifying, renewing and reforming the Church. The notes are, therefore, fiduciary, not empirical statements. No one looking at the Church as we know it would say (for example): ‘Ah! I can perfectly well see for myself that the Church is united and I can see that it is holy.’ Much empirical For a brief, elegant introduction to the Colenso affair see A. O. J. Cockshut, Anglican Attitudes: A Study of Victorian Religious Controversies (London: Collins, 1959), Ch. 5. Also Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. 2 (London: A&C Black, 1970), pp. 90–5; P. Hinchliff, John William Colenso: Bishop of Natal (London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1964); J. A. Draper (ed.), The Eye of the Storm: Bishop John William Colenso and the Crisis of Biblical Inspiration (London and New York: T&T Clark [JSOT Supp.]/Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2003) – in-depth review in Journal of Anglican Studies 7.1 (2009): 116–24. On the first Lambeth Conference see A. M. G. Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference 1867 (London: SPCK, 1967) and Anglicanism and the Lambeth Conferences (London: SPCK, 1978), Chs 2 and 3; and for a brief account, W. M. Jacob, ‘The First Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Communion’, Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review 2008 (London: Lambeth Palace, 2009), pp. 55–68. 13 H. Küng, The Church (London: Search Press, 1968) calls them dimensions. 12



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evidence may fly in the face of what the Creed affirms about the Church. Nevertheless, the marks are true of the Church as it is held in the purposes and promises of God and will be fulfilled eschatologically, when God brings all things to completion in Christ. Indeed, Christ is the key to the Credo. ‘It is not possible to say the creed apart from uttering the word “Jesus Christ” alongside it as its translation. Indeed, the creed, including the discussion of the Church, is only a description of Jesus.’14 We can only have faith in the Church because we have faith in Christ. In fact faith in the Church is an aspect of faith in Christ. Christ and his Church are inseparable, both conceptually and in life. The Church is, therefore, the subject of the specific ‘theological virtue’ of Christian hope, alongside faith and love, for ‘faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’ (Heb. 11.1). It is the Church that hopes, loves and trusts. That is what we are affirming in the Creed with regard to Christ’s Church. But secondly, in the context of the Creed, the notes of the Church are also – and necessarily – statements of truth or fact. They tell what the Church is here and now and that is why they are often called ‘marks’ of the Church. There is a unity and a holiness (for example) that belong to the very essence of the Church and that can never be taken away. Its catholicity and apostolicity are equally inalienable and indestructible attributes of the Church. Without them, the Church would not be the Church. A real unity and holiness, a real catholicity and apostolicity, are manifested in the Church in the midst of the world and experienced in this life. But such unity and holiness, catholicity and apostolicity is always very incomplete, sometimes distorted and often obscured or contradicted.15 Sustained by the virtues of faith, hope and love, we can relate to the Church with a realism that does not descend into cynicism and with an optimism that is not blind to her faults, sins and crimes. Christ is

Radner, A Brutal Unity, p. 153. I am acutely aware of the moral and theological difficulties of claiming that a pure Church (‘the Church as such’) sails serenely on in history uncontaminated by the sins and crimes of its members and officers; see Radner, A Brutal Unity. That is not my argument. I am saying that, even at its lowest ebb, something of the true nature of the Church remains and shines through. This is consonant with what the Reformers held about the unreformed Roman Catholic Church; see P. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1981; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002); id., ‘The Church and Ministry’, in David Whitford (ed.), T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2012), Ch. 9.

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present in the midst of his faithful ones, gathered in his name, whatever else may be going on around them (Mt. 18.20). Thirdly, in the context of the Creed, the four notes or dimensions of the Church are imperatives for us to work for. We seek to live out our faith in practice, or rather in praxis, that is to say a practice informed by right knowledge and insight, and this praxis includes our faith with regard to the Church. As has so often been said in the ecumenical movement, the unity of the Church is both gift and task – God’s gift and our task. It is God’s work, but we must strive in God’s strength to bring it about. The holiness of the Church is God’s gift, not a human achievement, but we are called to be holy as God is holy, and to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2.12-13). Hence the ever-present need for the conformity or conversion of the Church to the touchstone of the Creed – which is to say, to the character of Christ.16 So, like all Christians and all churches, Anglicans are called to dedicate themselves to realizing more fully the four marks or notes of the Church. What that amounts to is to say: ‘Let the Church be the Church as God intends it to be.’ We need to pray, study and work for this in ways that are compatible with our own tradition and congenial to it, but also in ways that challenge our tradition and help to reform and renew it. I offer now a few topical reflections on how, as Anglicans, we might respond to these notes, marks or dimensions today.17 MM

First, the vocation of Anglicanism is to witness to and to serve the unity of the Church. The Church and its unity are a mystery hidden in God, but revealed through Jesus Christ. Because he is the incarnate one, ‘Jesus Christ come in the flesh’ (1 Jn 4.2), the Church’s unity must be an embodied, visible unity, expressed in time and space, in flesh and blood. Disunity clouds our understanding of the mystery of the Church. Disunity is a contradiction in terms, a denial of the cross, wherein all have died (2 Cor. 5.14), and a denial of what God did in raising Christ from the dead. ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up … He spoke of the temple of his body’ (Jn 2.19, 21). God will judge those

Cf. Groupe des Dombes, For the Conversion of the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1993). 17 A fuller exposition of these matters is found in P. Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology: The Church Made Whole? (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010). 16



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who destroy God’s temple (1 Cor. 3.17). To pray, study and work for the greater unity of the Church, for the healing of the wounds of division, is the fruit of Christlike love, the theological virtue of caritas or agape. The vocation of Anglicanism is to witness to and to serve the holiness of the Church. Today there is fierce debate about how we can do this and about what way of life, especially with regard to the expression of human sexuality, does appropriately reflect this holiness. Some argue that same-gender unions that are exclusive, faithful and lifelong are blessed by God as equally valid forms of life alongside heterosexual partnerships or marriages and equally reflect Christian holiness, and that the Church should sanctify them with prayer and blessing. For others, such relations are the very antithesis of holiness, exceedingly sinful and displeasing to God. In the middle ground are those, like myself, for whom marriage between a man and a woman is the norm, instituted by God, and for whom same-gender relations fall short of the ideal, yet who also believe that those who experience same-gender attraction as part of their nature should not be discriminated against, but rather welcomed and nurtured by the Church in order that the love, fidelity and mutual service that they aspire to and manifest may be given every support, strength and encouragement. As St Augustine enjoined, ‘Set love in order’. Always respect mutual love; always affirm it. Christians across the world and within our own churches are divided on this matter and there is much that remains uncertain. But there is one thing that is clear: holiness belongs to the Church; it is the Church’s holiness that we are talking about. It is not simply a matter of individuals making a choice or of one small part of the Church deciding how to interpret what must be true of the whole Church. So there is a need for patience, for consultation, for restraint and for avoiding actions that are unacceptable and provocative to other parts of the Church, so tearing apart the body of Christ (see Chapter 4). The vocation of Anglicanism is to witness to and to serve the catholicity of the Church. Its catholicity is its wholeness, its embrace of all sorts and conditions of God’s children when they come, through faith and baptism, to belong to mother Church. One form of this wholeness is the universality of the Church – it is a Church for the whole world – and

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this inevitably brings us back to the mark of unity, for these four marks or dimensions are interrelated. Catholicity and unity belong together. So do holiness and catholicity, for holiness is a mark of authenticity for the whole people of God. However, there may be a tension between catholicity and holiness in the way that we work these out in our particular circumstances. For catholicity involves a certain inclusiveness. Every believer should be enabled to feel that the Church is their home and to know that they are welcomed and accepted. There is no doubt that, in his own mission and ministry, Jesus Christ reached out to all without partiality. He welcomed all comers, condemning none, except those Pharisees who themselves condemned his welcoming approach. He went out of his way to associate with and to identify with those who were condemned by the religious authorities and who were treated as outcasts and as defiled and unworthy to belong to the community. That is where Jesus placed himself and that is where, I believe, the risen, ascended Christ places himself today.18 The vocation of Anglicanism is to witness to and to serve the apostolicity of the Church. Its apostolicity is the Church’s link with the mission and teaching of the apostles. This link is not simply made by aspiring to literally copy or emulate what they did in spreading the gospel of Christ: ‘We must try to be like them.’ In a literal sense, that is quite impossible; ‘restorationism’ is a delusion. But like the unity of the Church (and like holiness and catholicity, for that matter) apostolicity must be visible, tangible. The real, visible connection between the Church of today and the Church of the apostles is forged in several non-literal ways. As the sixteenth-century Reformers stressed, apostolicity is above all a matter of being faithful to the message and teaching of the apostles, true to the gospel. That means grounding our theology in the New Testament writings that were judged by the early Church to have apostolic credentials, and in the theology of the early Fathers, who were closest to the witness of the apostles. However, apostolicity refers not only to faith but also to order. We seek to be apostolic in terms of the order of the

See Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007); also P. Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology, Ch. 9: ‘Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism’.

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Church, its structures of ministry and of conciliarity. While recognizing much diversity in the beginnings of Christianity, we also acknowledge some linear development in the way the apostolic and post-apostolic Church ordered its life. We find this sense of primitive order in the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons and in the pattern of the bishop in council or synod, working collegiality with presbyters and communally with the lay faithful. In these and other ways, we must be able to trace our visible, historical continuity back through the centuries to the beginnings of the apostolic community that Jesus founded, a community or society that has spread to all nations and will remain forever (according to the doctrine of the indefectibility of Christ’s Church, affirmed by all the major Christian traditions). So apostolicity refers to the Church’s intended visible continuity with the Church of the apostles. Needless to say, what I have said about the vocation of Anglicanism is true of all churches. The vocation of the Church to realize the four credal marks is necessarily the vocation of all manifestations or traditions of the Church. I am not suggesting for a moment that this overriding calling is some kind of unique Anglican imperative or privilege. Anglicans do not think like that. As a result of serious ecumenical dialogue, Anglican churches have been able to recognize or acknowledge formally certain other churches as authentic expressions of the one Church of Jesus Christ and as belonging to the apostolic mission of the people of God. That means, I suggest, that Anglicans are able to see the presence of the one Church of Jesus Christ in those churches, and that must imply that they are able to discern the credal marks of the Church in them. When this is possible, it is right to confess this fact publicly to each other through synodical action and so take a step nearer to the unity of the Church.19 Now at last we are able to return to our specific question and challenge: What is the vocation, the special calling of Anglicanism, if there is one? If F. D. Maurice was right, each major tradition of the Christian Church, in See for example The Meissen Agreement between the Church of England and the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (1991); Called to Common Mission between The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (2001); and An Anglican-Methodist Covenant between the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain (2003).

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its concrete expression, bears witness to an enduring truth concerning the Church. So we would expect Anglicanism to bear witness to certain vital truths. I believe that it does, even though it may not always be very successful at putting them into practice. Along with some previous interpreters of Anglicanism, especially Michael Ramsey,20 I believe that the key to the Anglican tradition is that it attempts to hold together or bind together aspects of the Church that in some other traditions are allowed to drift apart, or become polarized or remain seriously unbalanced between strong and weak elements. Specifically, Anglicanism holds together in tension five aspects of the Church as a living organism. It reveals itself to be catholic and reformed, episcopal and synodical, universal and local, biblical and reasonable, traditional and open to fresh insight. In these ways Anglicanism holds together what we as Anglicans believe God, in the Christian revelation, intends to belong together. This holistic method is not confined to theology, specifically ecclesiology, and is not merely theoretical; it pertains essentially to Anglican life and practice in worship, service, evangelization and the community experience. Anglicanism seeks to hold truths together in theology and practice in order that it may hold people together. Let me now make some brief observations on each of these five pairs of ideas. 1. Anglicanism is both catholic and reformed. It seeks to hold these two identifiable elements together in synthesis. It is catholic because it stands in visible historical continuity with the Church catholic going back through the Christian centuries – through the Reformation and the medieval church to the Fathers and martyrs of the early Church and to the apostles themselves. While there are obvious and inevitable elements of discontinuity, of change and development, the point is sufficiently made if we say simply that the tradition that we now call Anglican was not invented in the sixteenth century. It embodies the catholic canon of Scripture, the catholic creeds, the catholic threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, the catholic sacraments (without being too prescriptive about how many there are) and it structures its life and A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936) and discussion of this phrase ‘binding together’ in P. Avis, The Anglican Understanding of the Church: An Introduction, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 2013), Ch. 5.

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worship by means of them. But Anglicanism also recognizes its debt to the Reformation. It has been significantly shaped by the late medieval movement for reform that came to a head in a particular way in the sixteenth century and by its abiding principles, namely the paramount place of Scripture in the Church and a return to the pattern of the Bible and the early Church, justification by grace through faith and the royal priesthood of all the baptized. The catholic and the reformed impulses interact within Anglicanism and moderate each other. For example, the creeds, received from the Councils of the early Church, are upheld in Anglican belief not only because Anglicans accept the authority of those Councils (which they do), but also because the creeds are recognized to be grounded in Scripture.21 There is a sacramentally ordained ministry, but it is a representative ministry (representing both Christ as Head and his Body) and a sign of what the whole Church is, not a cadre of set-apart hierophants who can do what no one else can do and keep the uninitiated at bay. The Eucharist always has a priest or bishop to preside, but it is the whole congregation that celebrates the sacraments corporately under the presidency of that bishop or a priest. Of course, Anglicanism is not the only church tradition that does this and it does not always get the balance right. 2. Anglicanism is both episcopal and synodical. It seeks to hold these two elements together in synthesis. Bishops are the chief pastors of the Church and the principal ministers of the sacraments. Their task is to teach, to sanctify and to govern the faithful. But they do not do this in an autocratic way. As the mantra ‘the bishop in synod’ suggests, the bishop exercises leadership in council or in synod, in consultation with the presbyters and with the laity, for they too play their part, appropriately expressed, in the tasks of teaching, sanctifying and governing. Anglicanism reveals itself as the heir (along with all the historic churches in the West) of the Conciliar Movement of the fifteenth century, with its key principles of constitutionality, representation and consent.22 So bishops lead the Church, but in order to do so they must consult the The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, article 8. See P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006).

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faithful and seek to carry the people with them. Anglicanism embodies the three modes of oversight identified by the benchmark ecumenical text Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry: personal oversight, collegial oversight and communal oversight.23 Of course, it is not the only church tradition that does this and it does not always get the balance right. 3. Anglicanism holds together the universal and the local. It exists as a global communion made up of a number of ‘provinces’ or, as I would prefer to say, member churches (see Chapter 2). The provinces or churches are themselves made up of dioceses, which are the ordered communities of Christians gathered by their bishop through the ministry of word and sacrament, supported by pastoral care. The combination of universality and locality is of the essence of the Church of Christ. While Anglicanism treasures its catholic credentials, it also privileges those ‘vernacular moments’ whereby the Christian faith is translated into local idiom and practice.24 The universal and the local are mutually constituting: the one cannot exist without the other. The local expression of the Church is ordered to the universal and the universal is ordered to the local; they co-inhere. A universal Church that has no local content would be meaningless and a local church, diocese or province that did not have a home in the greater whole would be cast adrift, cut off from the body. The collegiality of the episcopate within the various structures of conciliarity helps to hold the local and the universal together. Of course, Anglicanism is not the only church tradition that does this and it does not always get the balance right. In fact, at the present time the Anglican Communion is struggling to hold the local and the universal together, looking for models and structures (‘bonds of affection’ and ‘Instruments of Communion’) to help it to do this. 4. Anglicanism is both biblical and reasonable. Since the Renaissance and the Reformation it has held Scripture and all that is represented by ‘reason’ together. These twin movements of thought in Western Europe – the Renaissance and the Reformation – drove scholars back to the Bible Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), M26. Ian T. Douglas, ‘The Exigency of Times and Occasions: Power and Identity in the Anglican Communion Today’, in id. and Kwok Pui-Lan (eds), Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Church Publishing Inc., 2001), Ch. 1, esp. pp. 38–9. Douglas draws on the work of Lamin Sanneh for the notion of ‘vernacular moments’.

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and to the writings of the Fathers – ad fontes – but they used the most sophisticated hermeneutical tools of their day to establish what the Bible and the Fathers were saying. The Reformers were not fundamentalists, but avant-garde critical scholars, and Anglicanism has maintained their impetus to this day. However, we need to note that the classical Anglican understanding of reason is very different to the individualistic, secular, analytical concept of reason that we are familiar with in our post-Enlightenment, technological world. For Anglican theologians from Richard Hooker onwards, reason stands for a collective act of discernment that is formed by Scripture and acutely sensitive to tradition. It is a godly reason, ‘the candle of the Lord’, organic, holistic, dynamic. Of course, Anglicanism is not the only church tradition that seeks to be both biblical and reasonable and it does not always get the balance right. 5. Finally, Anglicanism attempts to be faithful to tradition and at the same time open to fresh insight. This is theological tightrope walking! Anglican theological method listens first to the Scriptures and does this from a position at the heart of the Christian tradition; but then it seeks knowledge and wisdom, information and insight, from sources outside the Bible and tradition. Scripture, embedded in tradition, provides the foundational truths of Christianity and an inexhaustible supply of images and insights. But there is also wisdom and knowledge to be found in literature and the arts generally, in philosophy and in scientific discovery, including the social and human sciences. The Church of England ‘professes the faith uniquely revealed in the holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation’. We cannot be open to fresh insight unless we are grounded in tradition. It is the community in which we are placed, undergirded by its traditions, that gives us our standing ground. However, tradition does not stand still. We stand within the living stream of tradition, but it carries us forward to new shores. Fresh insights should only be embraced when we have wrestled long and hard with Scripture and tradition, in an ecumenical community of interpretation.25 We need S. E. Fowl and L. G. Jones, Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (London: SPCK, 1991); A. K. M. Adam, Stephen E. Fowl, Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Francis Watson, Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI:

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a corporate dedication to the study of Scripture as the only valid basis for a corporate discernment of the way ahead. The Holy Spirit will guide the whole body of the Church into all truth, so we need to be in communion to receive the guidance of the Spirit.26 Above all, it might be true to say that the vocation of Anglicanism today is to work out what it means for Christians and churches to be in communion in a spirit not of grim determination, with gritted teeth, but of Christian cheerfulness, even when they differ on important issues in the interpretation of the faith. The Carmelite religious Ruth Burrows has written: ‘To live the Christian vocation in communion with one another is nothing less than to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity and that life is unadulterated joy.’27 I contend that our primary obligation to our fellow Christians is to seek to be – and to remain – in communion with them. Breaking the communion of the Church must be an absolutely last resort, one for which we will have to give an account one day.28 Anglicans are having to work out whether communion can be maintained in spite of differences about order (the ordination of women as priests and bishops) and particularly about morals (the appropriate expression of human sexuality). The communion of the Church was purchased with the precious blood of Christ. On the eve of the 1998 Lambeth Conference I said in an article published in Theology (and which the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey quoted to the bishops assembled in Canterbury): Though the member churches of the Anglican Communion are legally autonomous … the invoking of autonomy and the claiming of independence are hardly the language of Zion. More appropriate in the speech of Christians and churches is the rhetoric of communion, consultation, bearing one another’s burdens and interdependence. To practise the grace of walking together without coercive constraints is the special vocation of Anglicanism in our pluralistic world.29 Baker Academic, 2006); Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 26 Cf. P. Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church: Reception, Communion and the Ordination of Women (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004). 27 Ruth Burrows, ‘Smile though your heart is aching’, The Tablet, 19 April 2014, pp. 10–11, at p. 10. 28 See the discussion in P. Avis, Reshaping Ecumenical Theology, Ch. 8: ‘Building and Breaking Communion’. 29 Paul Avis, ‘Anglican Conciliarity and the Lambeth Conference’, Theology CI, 802 (July–August 1998): 245–52, at pp. 251–2.



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Developments since 1998 have compelled us to admit that what I then called ‘walking together’ as Anglicans is not as straightforward as it seemed a few years ago. Our paths have been diverging; we have been pulling away from each other. Walking together needs to be supported by a sense of shared responsibility, by mutual commitment and mutual accountability – which in my view is precisely what the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant aims to provide (see Chapter 4) – and these bonds of communion can only be entered into freely by each member Church of the Communion deciding to do so through its own canonical procedures. But I have not changed my mind on the essential point and I believe that it still stands. I find it reinforced by Jeffrey Driver’s description of the Anglican Communion’s constitution as ‘a polity of persuasion’.30 So I stand by what I said two decades ago: ‘To practise the grace of walking together without coercive constraints is the special vocation of Anglicanism.’

Jeffrey W. Driver, A Polity of Persuasion: Gift and Grief of Anglicanism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).

30

Index of Names à Kempis, Thomas 7 Anselm Saint, Archbishop 13, 15 Aquinas, see Thomas Saint Arnold, Matthew 132 Atherstone, Andrew 90, 92 Augustine of Canterbury Saint, Archbishop 117 Augustine of Hippo Saint, Bishop 7, 14–15, 179

Creighton, Mandell Bishop 20 Cromwell, Oliver 140

Barth, Karl ix, 7–8, 12, 15, 21, 34–5, 49, 53, 59, 81, 104, 127, 133, 135–7, 148, 151, 155–8, 165 Barton, John 73 Benedict Saint 87–8 Boff, Leonardo 36 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 42, 128, 151 Bradford, John 148 Bucer, Martin 91 Bultmann, Rudolf 106 Burke, Edmund 81–2, 87 Burrows, Ruth 186 Butler, Joseph Bishop 134–5

Edward VI King 128 Eichrodt, Walter 73 Eliot, T. S. 6 Elizabeth I Queen 116 Erasmus of Rotterdam 155

Calvin, John ix, 8, 64, 119–21, 123, 125–6, 154, 157, 160 Carey, George Archbishop 186 Chadwick, Henry 137 Chadwick, Owen 152 Charles I King 116 Charry, Ellen T. 89 Chesterton, G. K. 7 Churchill, Winston Spencer Sir, Prime Minister 23 Clemenceau, Georges President 23 Colenso, John William Bishop x, 175 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 6, 13–15, 135, 171–2 Cosin, John Bishop 164 Cranmer, Thomas Archbishop 36, 119, 154, 162, 165

Darwin, Charles 138 Davie, Martin 92 de Lubac, Henri S.J. Cardinal 127 Donne, John 29 Downham, George Bishop 156 Driver, Jeffrey Archbishop 66, 187

Fergusson, David 142 Field, Richard 123 Figgis, John Neville C.R. 18 Francis Pope 39, 120, 164 Frith, John 91 Gilbey, Thomas, O.P. 97 Gladstone, William Ewart Prime Minister 18, 134 Goddard, Andrew 90 Gore, Charles Bishop 8, 17, 20, 101, 130, 138–9, 151–2, 158–9 Gray, Robert Bishop 175 Gregory I (‘The Great’) Saint, Pope 117 Habgood, John Archbishop 9, 19 Hafemann, Scott J. 74, 95 Hanson, Richard (R. P. C.) Bishop 92 Hauerwas, Stanley 3, 9, 82, 96 Henry VIII King 117 Henson, Herbert Hensley Bishop 20 Hoadly, Benjamin Bishop 18 Hooker, Richard 8, 119, 121–3, 125, 130, 13–15, 159, 167

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Index of Names

Hugenberger, G. P. 74 Hus, Jan 163 James I (of England, VI of Scotland) King 116, 156 Jenkins, David Bishop 17 Jewel, John Bishop 155–6 John Paul II Pope 131 Joseph of Arimathea Saint 117 Jowett, Benjamin 138 Kaye, Bruce 67 Keble, John 134 Keynes, John Maynard 23 Kierkegaard, Søren 135 Küng, Hans 152 Lewis, C. S. 6 Lloyd George, David Prime Minister 23 Locke, John 134 Loisy, Alfred 106 Luther, Martin ix, 8, 64, 91, 119, 121, 123–4, 126–7, 135, 154, 155–7, 160, 162–3 MacDonald, George 7 McGrath, Alister E. 142 MacIntyre, Alasdair 89, 94, 96 McMichael, Ralph 13, 15–17 Macquarrie, John 137 Maurice, Frederick Denison 4, 16, 171–3, 181 Melanchthon, Philipp 123, 127 More, Paul Elmer 89 More, Thomas Sir 124 Morley, John Viscount 18 Morrison, Karl 97 Murray, John Courtney, S. J. 97 Némirovsky, Irène viii Newbiggin, Lesslie Bishop 142 Newman, John Henry x, 4, 14, 37, 128, 135, 160 Null, Ashley 91 Oliver, Simon 62 Origen 48 Orwell, George 29 Ovey, Mike 85

Pannenberg, Wolfhart 137 Paul, Ian 91 Percy, Martyn 88–9, 96 Pope, Alexander 131 Popper, Karl 14 Rahner, Karl, S. J. 8, 152 Ramsey, Michael (A. M.) Archbishop 8, 16, 20–1, 102, 130, 144, 172, 174, 182 Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (Pope Benedict XVI) 86 Raven, Charles 84 Rendtorff, Rolf 74 Rupp, Gordon (E. G.) 122 Ryrie, Alec 128 Schleiermacher, Friedrich (F. D. E.) 127 Scruton, Roger 142 Sedgwick, Timothy 65–6, 68–9 Shagan, Ethan H. 96 Sheldrake, Philip 88 Shier-Jones, Angela 174 Slocum, Robert Boak 87–8 Spong, John Selby Bishop 17 Sykes, Stephen (S. W.) Bishop 4, 8 Talbot, Edward Stuart Bishop 96 Taylor, Jeremy Bishop 13 Temple, Frederick Archbishop 138 Temple, William Archbishop 8, 20, 53, 137–9 Thomas, R. S. 82 Thomas, Saint (Aquinas) 8 Thompson, Michael B. 90 Tillich, Paul 12, 127, 141 Tolkien, J. R. R. 7 Torrance, Thomas F. ix, 15, 137 Tyndale, William 91 Vanier, Jean 38 Vidler Alec 18 Volf, Miroslav 104 Voltaire 18 Ward, Keith 141 Welby, Justin Archbishop 85, 90 Wesley, John 111, 119, 135 Whitefield, George 135 Whitehead, Alfred North 12



Index of Names

Williams, Rowan Archbishop 85, 87, 98 Wilson, Woodrow President 23 Woolf, Leonard 23

Woolf, Virginia 23 Wordsworth, William 128 Wright, Tom Bishop 91

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