The Basis of Anglican Fellowship: Some Challenges for Today*

Stephen Sykes

doi:10.1177/174035530300100202

The Basis of Anglican Fellowship: Some Challenges for Today*

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009

Stephen Sykes

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Stephen Sykes: Affiliation:
s.w.sykes@durham.ac.uk

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Abstract

This article examines a central concern for the Anglican Communion, namely how a Communion without a strong central authority structure can maintain its unity in the face of potentially church-dividing issues. At present the major such issue relates to human sexuality, but the underlying problem itself is not new, and the article draws a parallel with the Kikuyu controversy of 1913 and subsequent years. The author questions the customary practice of beginning from a universal doctrine of the Church and seeing it as ‘translated’ or ‘inculturated’ into a diversity of contexts. He argues that the New Testament pattern is different. There, the experience of a variety of local churches is the starting point. Drawing on the terminology of the political philosopher Michael Walzer, he designates the local embodiment of the Church as ‘thick’ and its universal expression as ‘thin’. The concrete local embodiments of the Church should be our conceptual starting point, not an idealized picture of the Church universal.

Type: Research Article
Information: Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , December 2003 , pp. 10 - 23

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/174035530300100202 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) and The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2003

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References

1. Gore, Charles, The Basis of Anglican Fellowship in Faith and Organization (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co., 1914), p. 3.Google Scholar

2. The One Christ: An Enquiry into the Manner of the Incarnation (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907).Google Scholar

3. For example, he wrote in 1898, ‘We have always to remember that they, and not we, are the permanent leaders of the African Church’ (from Smith, H. Maynard, Frank: Bishop of Zanzibar [London: SPCK, 1926], p. 30).Google Scholar

4. Bell, G.K.A., Randall Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 692.Google Scholar

5. Bell, , Randall Davidson, p. 694.Google Scholar

6. Bell, , Randall Davidson, p. 692.Google Scholar See Clarke, Henry Lowther, Constitutional Church Government in the Dominions Beyond the Seas and in other Parts of the Anglican Communion (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1924)Google Scholar, especially p. 392, for a discussion of the composition of Church government in Africa during the period in question.

7. Bell, , Randall Davidson, p. 708.Google Scholar

8. Bell, , Randall Davidson, p. 708.Google Scholar

9. As recorded in Bell, , Randall Davidson, p. 694.Google Scholar

10. Gomez, Drexel W. and Sinclair, Maurice W. (eds.), To Mend the Net (Carrollton, TX: The Ekklesia Society, c. 2002).Google Scholar

11. Prestige, G.L., The Life of Charles Gore (London: Heinemann, 1935), p. 364.Google Scholar

12. This sentiment is credited to Fairbaim, A.M. (1838–1912)Google Scholar, a nineteenth-century British Nonconformist and Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford University (1886–1909). He authored Catholicism: Roman and Anglican (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903).Google Scholar For an overview of the debate within the Church of England of the nineteenth century in regard to ‘Catholicity’, see Longenecker, Richard N. (ed.), Community Formation in the Early Church and in the Church Today (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002).Google Scholar

13. I want permission to use the word ‘body’ here without falling prey to the criticism aimed at Working as One Body (the Turnbull Report of 1995 [London: Church House]) for adopting one image–and that the most conservative–for the Church. I am fully aware of the varieties of models of the Church in Scripture. In this case ‘body’ simply refers to what the Church is in its corporate existence.

14. Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).Google Scholar

15. Walzer, , Thick and Thin, p. xi.Google Scholar

16. Walzer, , Thick and Thin, esp. pp. 11–19.Google Scholar

17. This study can be found in Minear, Paul, Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).Google Scholar

18. As characterized by Lumen Gentium I, which can be found in Flannery, Austin (general ed.), Vatican Council II (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1987).Google Scholar

19. See Walzer, , Thick and Thin, p. 48.Google Scholar

20. Refer to Nocent, Adrien, ‘The Local Church as Realization of the Church of Christ and Subject of the Eucharist’, in Alberigo, G., Jossua, J.-P. and Komonchak, J.A. (eds.), The Reception of Vatican II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), pp. 215–29.Google Scholar

21. Encyclical of Pius, Pope XI issued on 15 05 1931Google Scholar, which can be found at www.osjspm.org/cst/qa.htm.

22. Handy, Charles, The Empty Raincoat (London: Hutchinson, 1994), p. 115.Google Scholar

23. This report can be found in The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998 (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1999), pp. 15–68.Google Scholar

24. The term ‘lower’ is put in inverted commas to indicate the absence of any judgment of inferiority–on the contrary, the ‘lower’ level is closer to where the Church is real.

25. The role of the papacy in occasional interventions at crises is an example of competency over competencies. How such exercises of authority may expand is the point of the warning in Buckley, Michael J., Papal Primacy and the Episcopate (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), p. 64.Google Scholar