The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion

Ian S. Markham, J. Barney Hawkins, IV, Justyn Terry, Leslie Nuñez Steffensen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118320860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

This uniquely comprehensive reference work provides a global account of the history, expansion, diversity, and contemporary issues facing the Anglican Communion, the worldwide body that includes all followers of the Anglican faith.

• An insightful and wide-ranging treatment of this dynamic global faith, offering unrivalled coverage of its historical development, and the religious and ethical questions affecting the church today
• Explores every aspect of this vibrant religious community – from analyzing its instruments of Unity, to its central role in interfaith communication
• Spans the Anglican Communion's long history through to 21st century debates within the church on such issues as sexual-orientation of clergy, and the pastoral role of women
• Features a substantial articles on the Church's 44 provinces, including a brief history of each
• Brings together a distinguished and international team of contributors, including some of the world's leading Anglican commentators

PART I

History

CHAPTER 1

Locating the Anglican Communion in the History of Anglicanism

Gregory K. Cameron

1867 and All That

On September 24, 1867, at 11 o’clock in the morning, 76 bishops representing Anglican and Episcopal Churches across the globe gathered without great ceremony for a quiet said Service of Holy Communion in Lambeth Palace Chapel. They were keenly observed – from outside the Palace – by press and commentators alike, because this was the opening service of the first Lambeth Conference. This gathering of bishops marks the self-conscious birth of the Anglican Communion. Bringing together a college of bishops from around the world, the Conference was a step unprecedented outside the Roman Catholic Church in the second millennium of Christianity, as bishops of three traditions within Anglicanism were consciously gathered together in what we can now recognize as a “Christian World Communion.”¹ The 76 constituted only just over half of the bishops who had been invited, but they had deliberately been invited as being in communion with the See of Canterbury, and they now began to understand themselves as belonging to one family.

Groundbreaking as it was, the calling of the first Lambeth Conference by Charles Longley, the 92nd Archbishop of Canterbury, represented the culmination of a process of self-understanding which had been developing rapidly over the previous 100 years. In the previous decades, many had articulated a vision intended to draw the growing diversity of Anglican Churches and dioceses into one fellowship and communion. In a seminal moment some 16 years before, for example, 17 bishops had processed together at the invitation of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, John Sumner, at a Jubilee Service to mark 150 years of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. It was an event which had been enthusiastically greeted at the time as the dawn of a new age and a harbinger of things to come. Henry Caswell, one of the first American clerics to take up a ministry in England, had taken inspiration from the Jubilee Service, seeing the presence of the bishops there as a trailblazer for “the 108 bishops of the Anglican Communion whom they may be considered to represent” (see Stephenson 1967, 43).

However, the opening of the first Lambeth Conference may be reliably taken as the first occasion when the Churches of the Anglican Communion – in the persons of their bishops at least – acted deliberately and consciously as a worldwide communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided, the Archbishops of Dublin and Armagh read the lessons, and the Bishop of Illinois preached the sermon. The first Lambeth Conference formalized a profound change in the consciousness of Anglicanism, acknowledging its evolution from an essentially British Protestantism into something which could identify itself as a global expression of the Church Catholic. Now, an episcopally ordered communion could claim to reach out as an equal partner to the Orthodox Churches and the episcopal Lutheran Churches of Scandinavia with a vision of an episcopally ordered global family to rival that of the Roman Catholic Church. As a result of the first Lambeth Conference, Anglicanism gained the confidence to become a global communion in which diversity of church life, adapted to local cultures and increasingly pluralistic in its expression, could flourish; an international movement in which the voices and expressions of church life far removed from the established Church of England could contribute to and shape a distinctive form of Christianity.

Early Diversity: A Prehistory of the Anglican Communion, 1530–1776

While the Anglican Communion as a self-conscious entity belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century, its origins lie alongside the very roots and foundations of Anglicanism. It is possible to talk of two distinct periods in the history of Anglicanism prior to the emergence of the Anglican Communion, with each contributing philosophical and theological understandings to shape the later reality.

Between 1530 and 1776, Anglicans defended their faith as a national expression of Christian discipleship lived out in the realms of a monarch who ruled “by the grace of God,” and who was therefore correctly acknowledged as the supreme head or governor of the church as well as the state in the territories subject to him.² The early architects of Anglicanism did not see themselves as establishing a new branch of Christianity, but as discharging their responsibility, under God and the monarch, to order church life in their nations in a way which conformed to the will of God expressed in Holy Scripture. It was essentially a political vision of Christian faith, justifiable to the rest of Christendom on the grounds that it was right for the British and Irish peoples, under a Christian monarch, to determine and establish for themselves the form of their church and worship.

Such an explicit nationalism, however, also meant that, from its very beginning, Anglicanism carried the seed of the idea that there should be autonomy for each church in each nation, governing itself in a way which was authentic for that people. This principle was from the first acknowledged quite naturally beyond the English realm. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Churches of the European continent were natural partners in faith and life. In the seventeenth century, political necessity allowed established religion to take very different paths north and south of the English–Scottish border. Anglicanism has always understood itself as belonging to a wider family of churches rather than as constituting a self-sufficient church, and this was particularly true as it developed distinct and separate expressions of Christian life in the different nations of the British Isles. The theological principle that each people was competent to decide its own religion and liturgy formed part of the foundations of Anglicanism, and this bore fruit centuries later as national and regional churches were formed to sustain Anglicanism in very different environments.

Even in the earliest period, this diversity was apparent in the distinct Anglican Churches of the Atlantic Isles. The four dioceses of Wales were part of the Province of Canterbury, and the nation of Wales had been united to the Crown of England by the will of the Westminster Parliament in 1536. There was nevertheless a real sense that religious provision for the people of Wales should be adapted to their own language and culture. This contrasted with the way in which the institutions of civil government imposed English methods of state control. While the officers of the state were required to govern Wales through the medium of English, Welsh remained the language of faith. The Bible was rapidly translated by a series of Welsh scholars in the late sixteenth century, and a Welsh Prayer Book followed a decade later.³ Care was taken to promote Welsh speakers to the episcopate in Wales,⁴ and Anglicanism was adapted to an indigenous form.

Across the Irish Sea, the Church of Ireland was established by the Irish Parliament as a separate and independent church in 1536, and survived as such until Ireland was itself united politically with Great Britain in 1801, and a United Church of England and Ireland created. In 1615, the Church of Ireland created its own body of doctrine with the publication of the 104 Articles of Religion, which were more explicit in their Calvinism, even if the Thirty-Nine Articles were also adopted alongside them in 1634. The translation of the Scriptures into Irish was promoted by the Irish episcopate between 1580 and 1680, although the episcopate came to be dominated increasingly by English or Scottish clergy. This independent life was extinguished with the political union of England and Ireland, but it remained as a clear precedent that Anglicanism was a faith capable of expression in more than one church.

The early chapters of the life of the Scottish Episcopal Church were much stormier, being bound up with the battle between the king and “covenanters” in the early seventeenth century. When the bishops refused to accept the legitimacy of King William III in the Revolution of 1688 and were ejected from the Church of Scotland, forming their own Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church of England was unsure whether its true partner in Scotland was the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland or the tiny remaining Episcopal Church – a tension exacerbated by the severe legal penalties imposed on the nonjuring church. While there could be said to be at least two Anglican Churches in Great Britain, they were not regarded as being in communion. Nevertheless, it was the independent existence of a form of Anglicanism north of the English border which was ultimately to be a vital catalyst in the development of the Anglican Communion, since a distinct and separate hierarchy survived, not bound by the structures or doctrine of the larger church to the south. From its very beginnings, Anglicanism existed as a family of churches.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the exploration of the globe by British soldiers, merchants, and adventurers, and the expansion of British rule across vast swathes of North America, Southern Africa, and India. However, there was no attempt at this stage to plant anything like autonomous churches in these lands. Rather, while the practice of Anglicanism was propagated, it was seen as an extension of the Church of England. Indeed, the Bishop of London was nominally the Bishop of all these territories and responsible for the deployment of clergy across the burgeoning Empire, sending out Commissaries as necessary to order the life of scattered congregations. It was often the mission societies that provided the links between the churches, and at the turn of the eighteenth century, societies such as the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK, founded in 1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG, founded in 1701) set the tone for links within Anglicanism in different parts of the globe. There were occasional attempts to provide bishops in North America – but politics on one side of the Atlantic or the other tended to frustrate all schemes (see Neill 1958, 222f).

The Church of England had become a global institution. Nonetheless, the pattern of the four home nations set the tone for an underlying acknowledgement of the importance of diversity, and seeds were sown which would sustain a more federated polity in the future. All this was to be radically realized when part of His Majesty’s dominions asserted their independent status in the American Revolution.

Parallel Tracks 1776–1867

Anglicanism arrived in North America with the first English settlers. Although the majority of settlers tended to be those seeking an escape from Anglican conformity, the pattern was far from uniform, and many settlers remained part of structures that understood themselves as part of the Church of England. Indeed, the second Charter of the London and Plymouth Virginia Company, granted by King James in 1606, specifically provided that the established religion of the new colony should be that of the same church established in England.

Even so, Anglican Churches in North America tended to be left to their own devices, apart from the occasional ordination of a cleric for service in North America, and the occasional Commissary acting in North America on behalf of the Bishop of London. Thomas Bray, a founding figure in both the SPCK and the SPG, was one such Commissary. He operated in Maryland by license of the Bishop of London, but spent little more than a year at the task before returning to London. More effective was James Blair, a Scotsman, who was appointed as Commissary in Virginia, and stuck to the task between 1689 and 1743. Anglican Churches in North America were, however, without the direct ministrations of bishops, and aspiring clergy would have to seek ordination from any bishop they could find back in the “old country.” Thus, Samuel Seabury, who would become a pivotal player in forthcoming events, was deaconed by the Bishop of Lincoln and priested by the Bishop of Carlisle.

Following the American Revolution and the establishment of an independent United States of America, one of the chief challenges for Anglicans in North America was to determine their future and polity and to define their relationship with the Church of England. The decisions to be “Episcopal” and to seek a catholicity which maintained links with the Church of England was to have profound consequences for the future.

Early leaders of Anglicanism in the newly independent United States, such as William White, were keen to ensure that “as far as possible [the liturgy of the Episcopal Church] should conform to that of the Church of England” (see Stephenson 1967, 37). White advanced his views in books such as The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered, published in 1782, and through meetings of the churches in New York and Pennsylvania congregational conventions. In October 1784, a particularly significant meeting was held prior to the first General Convention. In setting out their hopes for the church whose shape was to be decided at the General Convention, the meeting resolved thus: “4th. That the said Church shall maintain the doctrines of the gospel, now held by the Church of England, and shall adhere to the liturgy of the said Church, as far as shall be consistent with the American Revolution, and the constitutions of the respective states” (Resolution for an Episcopal Church in the United States of America, New York, 1784, recorded in William White, Memoirs, quoted in Evans and Wright 1991, 289).

Such arguments proved to be persuasive at the General Conventions of 1785 and 1786. By 1801, the General Convention had already met nine times (the second and third General Conventions both met in two separate sessions), and had shown itself ready to adopt the historic formularies of the Church of England, the Thirty-Nine Articles, as the basis of its own faith, although with appropriate revisions for a republic. In doctrine, therefore, the North American Episcopalians set out their faith in continuity with the Church of England. In discipline, as well, North American Anglicans chose to be episcopal in governance, and the first General Convention had made it clear that it was “requesting due episcopal succession” (see Perry 1874, 25) in its life, even if it took until 1789 to secure the establishment of a House of Bishops as a separate entity within the polity of the church.

The story leading to the ordination of Samuel Seabury as Bishop of Connecticut in 1784 is well known, but it is important to note that the refusal of the bishops of the Church of England to consecrate Seabury did not arise out of any inherent hostility to the idea, but because the English bishops were all too stuffily conscious that, as part of a church by law established, they were limited by that law and could only consecrate bishops by the sovereign’s mandate and only then for service in his realms. The law was in fact quickly changed (the Consecration of Bishops Abroad Act, 1786, 26 George III, c.84), and the next two bishops for the United States (William White, Bishop of Pennsylvania, and Samuel Provoost, Bishop of New York) were ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury acting with the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Bath and Wells in Lambeth Palace Chapel in 1787. To these was added James Madison, consecrated at Lambeth Palace in 1790 as Bishop of Virginia. From this point on, the new Episcopal Church had its own line of bishops in historic succession.

By 1808, the House of Bishops could write a pastoral letter to the members of the new Protestant Episcopal Church that rehearsed a history referring to the “connections speedily created of our churches until then detached from one another, in terms which contemplated the perpetuating of the communion [a use of the term which was to become highly significant, vide infra], with all the distinguishing properties of the Church of England” (The Pastoral Letter of the House of Bishops [Baltimore, 1808] quoted in Evans and Wright 1991, 298).

Even so, from the first there was uncertainty in the English episcopate as to the implications of their participation in the consecration of bishops for the American Church. Although the authority to consecrate had been conferred by Act of Parliament, the act of consecration was not seen as constitutive of interchangeability of ministries. Consecration was seen as an exceptional action, and the legislation passed specifically excluded the possibility of bishops and clergy ordained for and in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States serving in His Majesty’s domains.⁵ When Bishop Hobart of New York was present at a consecration in Lambeth Palace Chapel in 1824, he was not permitted to participate in the actual laying on of hands (see Bosher 1962, 28, note 65). It took until 1840 and another Act of Parliament to introduce interchangeability of ministers (see Podmore 2005, 29). This uncertainty did not, however, focus solely on the American Church; even those ordained for work in the colonial church had been placed in a separate category from those ordained for ministry in England.⁶

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: History
• PART II: Structures of the Communion
• PART III: Provinces
• PART IV: Themes
• Index