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The Anglican Experience of Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Stephen Sykes
Stephen Sykes*
Affiliation:
St John’s College, Durham University
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Extract

Several years ago, I had a conversation with an American Roman Catholic Archbishop with a substantial theological background, in the course of which I asked him to be frank about his impression of the American Episcopal Church. His reply was memorable: They appear not to want to say no to anything.’ This encapsulates the inherent difficulty in the idea of ‘inclusiveness’, or in the much-claimed virtue of ‘comprehensiveness’ which Anglicans and Episcopalians are wont to make. Two problems immediately present themselves. The first is that, without difficulty one can suggest views or actions of which it would be impossible for a church to be inclusive, at least with any semblance of loyalty to the New Testament. Then, secondly, the inclusion of disputed actions, such as the ordination of gay persons, presents a different order of difficulty from inclusiveness in relation to disputed beliefs. Churches characteristically have rules about who may, or may not be ordained into a representative ministry. Ordinands are ‘tried and examined’. But tolerance of diversity of belief is one thing: tolerance of diversity of practice another, as the churches of the Anglican Communion discovered when they simultaneously ordained women to the priesthood, but extended tolerance to the beliefs of those who asserted that the priesthood was reserved to males. The illogicality of that position is exposed by the discovery that those being received into the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church were publicly required to state that they accepted the ministry of the Church of England – a higher requirement than was imposed on newly ordained Anglican clergy. On the other hand, it was argued at the time, and the argument has force, that an acknowledged state of incoherence was preferable to overt schism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 43: Discipline and Diversity , 2007 , pp. 419 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2007

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References

1 In 1998, this was emended to a general acceptance of ‘teaching, discipline and authority of the Church of England’. See Initiation Services (London, 1998), 110.

2 It was Weber’s view that after the death or departure of an exceptional (or charis matic) teacher a movement would experience a reversion to a different form or forms of authority, better adapted to conditions of everyday existence. See ‘The Nature of Charis matic Domination’, in W. G. Runciman, ed., Weber Selections in Translation (Cambridge, 1978), 226–50 from Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2 vols (4th edn, Tübingen, 1956), 2: 662–79.Google Scholar

3 Martin, David, The Breaking of the Image (Oxford, 1980), 171.Google Scholar

4 See ‘The Document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Sherbrooke, Que., 1994), 188–9, with a cautious preface by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

5 The Most Revd Davidson, Randall T., ed., The Five Lambeth Conferences (London, 1920), 188–9 Google Scholar.

6 See Knight, Frances, ‘A Church without discipline is no Church at all’: Discipline and Diversity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Anglicanism’, 399–418 Google Scholar, in this volume.

7 Text in Gibson, E. C. S., The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (London, 1896), 511.Google Scholar

8 Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 573.

9 Text in The Two Liturgies, A.D. 154c, and A.D. 1552: with other documents set forth by Authorities in the reign of King Edward VI, ed. Joseph Ketley, Parker Society 29 (Cambridge, 1844), 352.

10 Ibid., 331.

11 O’Donovan, O., On the Thirty-Nine Articles: a Conversation with Tudor Christianity (Exeter, 1986), 109.Google Scholar

12 Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 7.18.10 (ed. Stanwood, P. G., 3 vols [Cambridge, MA, 1981], 3: 261)Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 7.20.2 (Stanwood, 3: 267).

14 Resolutions formally adopted by the Lambeth Conference of 1888 in Davidson, ed., Five Lambeth Conferences, 122.

15 See Wright, J. Robert, ‘Heritage and Vision: the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’, in idem, ed., Quadrilateral at One Hundred (London, 1988), 8–46 Google Scholar, at 10.