The Approach to Unity through the Scriptures

Extract

In a television interview on the religious position of the Church of England recently given, the new Archbishop of York, Dr Coggan, said that he was an Evangelical, but with a high doctrine of the Church. This is as if his predecessor, Dr Ramsey, now Primate of all England at Canterbury, had said in a similar interview, as he might well have done, that he was an Anglo-Catholic but with a marked infusion of Evangelicalism.

The very real fact that two such statements, actual or hypothetical, represent is of profound ecumenical significance. The Church of England, and indeed world-wide Anglicanism as a whole, is a microcosm of the Ecumenical movement, for it contains in an organism which is highly cohesive in outlook and spirit most of the widely differing elements which exist within the World Council of Churches. It follows that the process of evolution going on within Anglicanism is likely to be reproduced, and is in fact now being reproduced, within the wider context of the main allegiances of World Protestantism.

One aspect of this process, and a fundamental one, is the increasing unity of outlook which marks the approach of many sections of divided Christendom to the Scriptures. In this we Catholics have both a share and a deep interest. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Liberalism in the non-Catholic world took a lead in the scientific criticism of the Scriptural documents.