The Church of England and the Anglican Communion: a timely engagement with the national church tradition?

Abstract

The following is a critical appreciation of the Reformation theological foundations of English church establishment which seeks to demonstrate their importance not only for the Church of England in the current political and legal climate, but also for non-established Anglican churches and for the Anglican Communion. It identifies as their central structure the dialectic of church and nation, theologically articulated as the dialectic of proclamation and jurisdiction. The enduring achievement of this dialectic, the paper argues, is to hold in fruitful tension the two unifying authorities of sinful and redeemed human society: the authority of God's word of judgement and grace and the authority of the community of human judgement under God's word. The historical analysis traces the evolving ecclesiastical and civil poles of the dialectic through their Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan formulations, from William Tyndale and the early Cranmer to John Whitgift and Richard Hooker, clarifying the decisive late medieval and contemporary continental influences, and the key schematic contribution made by the humanist Thomas Starkey. A continuous concern of the exposition is with the paradigmatic place occupied by interpretations of monarchical Israel in the shifting constructions of both civil and ecclesiastical polity, with the attendant dangers from a relatively undialectical relation between the ‘old Israel’ and the ‘new Israel’. The concluding evaluation and application focuses on the contemporary need for a theological construction of the nation and the church that grasps the complexities of the dialectic of proclamation and jurisdiction, especially as they bear on the unity and discontinuity of ecclesiastical and secular law at the national and international levels.