The governing documents of this pioneering study are the Reports of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. The results of the dialogues of ARCIC I appeared between 1971 and 1981 and were gathered into the ARCIC Final Report in 1982. This was presented to both Communions in the strong hope that it would find acceptance and help to resolve the differences of centuries on Eucharistic Doctrine, Ministry and Ordination and Authority in the Church. The Anglican Communion registered a fairly positive response in 1888 and the Roman Catholic Church a more reserved official response in 1991. Meanwhile, ARCIC II continued the dialogue, producing Reports in 1986, 1990, 1993, 1998, 2004. These covered Salvation and the Church; Church as Communion; Morals, Communion and the Church, the Gift of Authority and Mary, Grace and hope in Christ. Their impact, severally and collectively, was far less than that of the ARCIC I Reports.
Mark Langham has examined the thinking of the ‘Caroline Divines’ in a series of chapters concerned with each of the main ARCIC topics in turn. His Preface is a reminder that the theologians of the century after the divisions of the Reformation had become more or less fixed, and the Churches of Western Europe had fallen out of communion, have been neglected in ecumenical debate. This was partly a natural response to the decision of ARCIC I that it would produce short statements without references or footnotes; and partly perhaps a result of the choice of members of the Commission, whose expertise lay principally in Scripture and the Fathers.
With the Caroline Divines the modern enquirer is in an era analogous with that which followed the division of 1054, when a series of preliminary but unsuccessful attempts were made to mend the breach. They have acquired the label ‘Caroline’ because their work clustered in the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, but their endeavour was prompted by the need to justify positions arrived at in the Elizabethan settlement and some were at work in the reign of James I. The Bibliography provides a comprehensive list of individuals who may be included as Divines of the period in the first part, simply headed ‘Original Sources’. A preliminary chapter illuminatingly explores ‘features’ of their approach and their work and some of the issues with which they variously tried to grapple.
They would have faded into greater obscurity had it not been for the enthusiasm with which the Oxford Movement took them up in the nineteenth century, encouraging the publication of the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (1841–63). That brought many seventeenth-century works back into print and onto the shelves of a surprisingly wide range of readers. Hansard records numerous grapplings of Parliament with the reform of the ecclesiastical courts and rethinking of the relation of Church and State, with the perceived risk of Disestablishment of the Church of England, giving rise over decades to a variety of Bills on topics arguably in a grey area between the secular and the religious. Again and again an MP or a peer made a long and learned speech referring to the debates of the immediate post-Reformation period.
This book is a masterpiece of careful analysis of points raised by the Carolingian divines in relation to the issues as they looked to ARCIC and have arisen in the life of the Church in modern times. It is to be hoped that it will bring back into active study a body of theological analysis which has more recently fallen out of sight.
