In the first week of July I was in the University of Southern Queensland for a conference on the history of the British World. Many of the papers were concerned with historiographical issues and addressing the different ways in which events and conflicts in the history of the British world have been handled. Quite a few were designed to challenge a received interpretation by deploying a re-reading of the relevant sources and setting them in a different interpretative context. A number were concerned with Anglican issues such as the Restoration, Archbishop Sheldon and witchcraft, and re-casting the role of clergy in colonial New South Wales. Of course this is very much the bread and butter work of historians as they try to make sense of the past for succeeding generations.

During the conference I had a conversation with a scientist in the university who referred to the difference as he saw it between the humanities and what he called the ‘hard sciences’. By coincidence that was the day that CERN announced the identification of the Higgs boson. The New York Times headlined ‘Signalling a likely end to one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science, physicists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe.’ However, it noted that some physicists were referring to a ‘Higgs like particle’.

The hard scientists seemed to be struggling with similar issues of certainty as the historians in the humanities. The scientists were actively canvassing the question as to whether the discovery of this ‘Higgs like particle’ would confirm or question the standard theory of the sub-atomic world that had prevailed in scientific work for the last thirty years. The historians were debating how far the material sources being brought forward, sometimes for the first time, would challenge a prevailing theory.

In the hard sciences the absence of absolute certainty did not stop them, or us, doing things as if we were frozen in the face of a sea of uncertainty. I recall a researcher reminding a group of engineering professors at a university seminar that we did not fully understand aspects of the fundamental science in heavier than air flight. He also pointed out that that did not stop him flying on a jumbo jet across the very wide Pacific Ocean. The historians went home from their conference and continued to get on with their lives. If anything, in both cases, the uncertainty prompted action and engagement rather than resignation and passivity.

My Queensland conversations prompted me to reflect on how far these issues of uncertainty and action have worked in Anglican faith and practice. There are practical everyday markers of Anglican identity whose significance we can easily forget because of their familiarity. Two institutional continuities come to mind very easily in this regard; the ordained ministry and the canon of Scripture. Both relate to the Anglican claim that the tradition preserves an apostolic faith. In each case there is confidence that these institutions of canon and ministerial order contribute to and secure the apostolicity of Anglican beliefs and practices. They provide a secure connection between the faith of the apostles and succeeding generations down to the present time. At least that is what the hard scientist might call the received theory.

A form of the received theory on apostolicity is to be found in both Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. The two traditions have been at odds over the theory for many centuries, more especially over the last century. There is a rich tradition of literature on this century of conflict – a great deal of it prompted by currents flowing from the revival led by Newman and others in Oxford in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1989 Paul AvisFootnote ¹ provided a systematic review of Anglican ecclesiology for the modern period from the sixteenth century to the present and Stephen PickardFootnote ² returned to the debate in 2009 with a more thematic focus on the nature of ministry in the church. Stephen Pickard in particular draws attention to the influence of ecumenical conversations on the understanding of apostolicity as encompassing ‘the whole life of the church and is “exemplified” and “embodied” in “marks” or “elements”: canon of Scriptures, creeds, confessional writings, liturgies, activities of preaching, celebrating sacraments, exercising pastoral care and oversight, common life of the church, engagement in mission. Apostolicity thus encompasses faith, sacrament, ministry and service.’Footnote ³ These are interesting developments and show how interaction with other Christian traditions can influence Anglican self-understanding.Footnote ⁴ However, here I wish to focus on several incidents in the debate between Anglicans and Roman Catholics on the particular issue of apostolicity. These incidents offer a glimpse into an interesting aspect of Anglican institutional identity.

In 1974 I had the privilege of a German Academic Exchange Fellowship in the Catholic Faculty of Theology in the University of Feiburg im Breisgau to work on the history of the interpretation of the New Testament. I came across reports of the meetings of Roman Catholic New Testament scholars. Regular biennial conferences of these scholars began in 1957 and during the 1960s the conference spread beyond Germany both in terms of its location and its membership. It came to be called Tagung der deutschsprachigen katholischen Neutestamentler. Each conference considered a particular theme. Reports of the meetings were usually given in the journal Biblische Zeitschrift. These meetings reflected the liberation of Roman Catholic biblical scholars from the constraints against the free investigation of the biblical texts perceived to have been implied in the Encyclical Letter of 1895 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII. This letter established the Pontifical Biblical Institute and placed it in the hands of the Jesuits. In 1943 Pope Pius XII in his Encyclical Letter Divino Afflante Spiritu re-visited this question. Taking account of the major developments in scientific critical biblical studies he encouraged the adoption of these developments.Footnote ⁵

A large number gathered for the 1963 meeting to discuss the form-critical method. In 1969 the theme was Church office in the New Testament. There was vigorous debate among the forty people present and a wide range of views was expressed. Because the debate was inconclusive the subject was set down for the next meeting in 1971. Again the debate was very lively but this time there was some kind of resolution. In his report Werner Bracht formulated four theses as the result of the conference.

1. 1. The New Testament does not yet speak of church office in the later sense of permanent and legal. The office appears more as a ‘service function’ of the church.

2. 2. This office is christological and based on the sending of Jesus, but it is also ecclesiastical and to be seen in combination with and in the service of the church.

3. 3. The recognition of Paul's apostolic office is from the church, and also from his own self-understanding, which is eschatologically orientated.

4. 4. From a purely historical point of view the New Testament shows a gap in the succession of the office of apostle, which does not allow the view of a direct succession. However, it is not possible to exclude an actual context between the later office and the original apostolic office.

These conclusions were highly controversial within the Roman Catholic Church because they clearly stood in sharp contrast to the claims made Pope Leo XIII in 1896.

Following some moves towards unity between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century the aforementioned Pope Leo XIII initiated a consultative investigation to clarify the matter of Roman recognition of Anglican orders for priests and bishops. The conclusions were set out in a letter (Apostolicae Curae) from the Pope on 15 September 1896 which concluded, ‘We pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void.’Footnote ⁶

The Letter argues this on two grounds. First, that historically, with the ordinal of Edward VI, ‘the true Sacrament of Order as instituted by Christ lapsed, and with it the hierarchical succession’. The ordinal of Edward VI was defective both in terms of form and content. It did not purport to ordain priests to celebrate the Eucharist in its proper and full sense. Even the slightly amended 1662 ordinal with the addition of the words ‘for the office and work of a priest’ did not adequately remedy the situation. Furthermore the use of this ordinal for a long period of time meant that the apostolic succession of order had irretrievably been lost in the Church of England.

It is this latter argument to which I draw attention here. The argument arises out of a claim that the line of actual historical succession of ministry goes back from the present Pope to Christ himself. It is the certainty of that connection that makes the Pope's office effective sacramentally. Not only his office but all those whose sacramental standing relate to his in the ordered hierarchy of what is regarded in this argument as the one true Church.

The following year the two English archbishops, Frederick Temple and William MacLagan published a reply entitled Saepius Officio. Footnote ⁷ The appeal made by the archbishops to the apostolic tradition in Sections 18 and 19 makes two things quite clear.

The fundamental appeal is to ‘the Lord and his apostles’. ‘Our Fathers’ fundamental principle was to refer everything to the authority of the Lord, revealed in the Holy Scriptures’ (Section 18). They claim the English ordinal ‘expresses more clearly and faithfully those things which by Christ's institution belong to the nature of the priesthood and the effect of the Catholic rites used in the Universal Church’ (Section 19). They conclude with a revealing and trenchant comment: ‘We also gladly declare that there is much in his [Pope Leo XIII] own person that is worthy of love and reverence. But that error, which is inveterate in the Roman communion, of substituting the visible head for the invisible Christ, will rob his good words of any fruit of peace’ (Section 20).

There was of course a lot going on in the background and the exchange grew out of conversations about the possibility of some rapprochement between the two traditions.

Almost exactly one hundred years later Pope John Paul II issued in 1998 a personal letter changing certain elements of canon law. Canon 750 paragraph 1 stated that the faithful are to believe those truths set out in the Word of God and ‘at the same time proposed as divinely revealed’ by the solemn or ordinary magisterium, that is to say the Pope.Footnote ⁸ At the same time the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a commentary written by then Cardinal Ratzinger in which he identified some of the doctrines that were to be regarded as divinely revealed under this heading. He included in his list the letter of Pope Leo XIII Apostolicae Curae, which had declared Anglican orders null and void.Footnote ⁹

The publication of this commentary without any prior notice caused some ruffling of feathers in the ecumenical nest, but in fact it simply re-stated what had clearly been the case since 1895. It showed with the utmost clarity that the certainty of the church's apostolicity relied on the historical continuity from Peter to the Pope, and that the order of bishops went back to the apostles in continuous succession.

Throughout the last century the Roman Catholic Church has remained consistent in its conception of the nature and basis of the apostolicity of its ministry and gospel. It is not as if this was a matter that concerned only theologians and ecclesiastical bureaucrats in Rome or Canterbury. It was an issue felt in the far reaches of each of the traditions.

For example, these self-same conflicts were felt in the distant colony of New South Wales in 1838. William Grant Broughton, the high church bishop of Australia, found himself fending off criticism of the status of his episcopal orders from local Roman Catholics. He was accused of being simply a tool of the government and that his authority arose from his relationship to the crown and the force of his Letters Patent. Broughton determined to demonstrate the error of these criticisms. To do that he needed a territory not under British sovereignty where the jurisdiction of his Letters patent did not apply. A window of opportunity appeared for him in relation to New Zealand.

In 1837 William Hobson had been sent from Sydney to protect settlers in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. He returned and recommended New Zealand be brought under the jurisdiction of the British crown. This was a matter of considerable interest and discussion in Sydney. On 13 December 1838 Broughton sailed for New Zealand to visit Church Missionary Society missionaries in the Bay of Islands. In doing so he pre-empted William Hobson's return visit in 1840 as the government representative to negotiate with the Maoris an acceptance of British sovereignty.

In response to a welcome address from the missionaries Broughton declared,

Within the year Broughton found he had to respond to Tract 90 from the Oxford revivalists, which had become available in the colony. In his charge to the clergy of New South Wales in October 1841 he dwelt at considerable length on the apostolic foundations of the ministerial order of the Church of England. On the one hand he declared that this ministerial order should not be deprecated, but on the other hand it should not be made the subject of too inordinate claims. The strongest affirmation of the apostolic character of the ministerial order should not lead to the conclusion that there is ‘no validity in any divine ordinance administered by mere laymen, or by such as do not partake of that successional appointment to the ministry’.Footnote ¹²

Both Broughton in colonial New South Wales and the Pope and the Archbishops in England were all struggling with the same underlying question. On what basis can there be certainty about the apostolic character of the contemporary ministerial order of the church, or more generally the identity of a particular church? How and in what way can Anglicans be said to have an apostolic faith?

Somewhat in the same spirit as Bishop Broughton, J.B. Lightfoot in his famous essay on the ministry published in 1868 as a separate essay in his commentary on Paul's letter to the Philippians, drives to the same conclusion, though in somewhat more pointed terms.Footnote ¹³ Like Broughton Lightfoot was responding to what he referred to as the sacerdotal interpretation of the ministry. Of the 88 pages of the essay, he devotes 25 pages to what he describes as ‘one of the most striking and important phenomenon in the history of the Church’.Footnote ¹⁴

He opens the essay with a powerful statement of what he calls an ideal that needs constantly to be kept in mind.

Nonetheless he says all human societies cannot exist over time without officers, rules or institutions. In the case of the church such rules and institutions are simply means to an end. The apostles he said waged war against ‘the principle which exalted the means into an end, and gave intrinsic value to subordinate aids and expedients’.Footnote ¹⁶ Nonetheless the principle of a ‘universal priesthood, of the religious equality of all men’ has ‘hitherto been very imperfectly apprehended; that throughout the history of the Church it has been struggling for recognition’.Footnote ¹⁷

Lightfoot then goes on to set out the origins of the threefold order of ministry. Deacons were a new order of service which spread from the Jerusalem church to Gentile churches where the early Christian churches would have been regarded by contemporaries as a confraternity. Presbyters were not a new office but adopted from the synagogue, and these were also called bishops in Gentile churches. These presbyters were ‘rulers and instructors of the congregation’.Footnote ¹⁸ These two orders were ‘firmly and widely established’ at the close of the apostolic age. He rejects the idea that bishops replaced apostles. Rather ‘the episcopate was formed not out of the apostolic order by localisation but out of the presbyteral by elevation: and the title, which was originally common to all, came at length to be appropriated to the chief among them’.Footnote ¹⁹

Lightfoot goes out of his way to reject the view of Richard RotheFootnote ²⁰ that the order of bishops arose in response to the destruction of Jerusalem and thus the centre of reference for the church was removed and ‘out of this need the Catholic Church arose’. He then goes on to survey evidence from the various centres around the Mediterranean and the East to show how bishops grew out of the order of presbyters. The bishop was one presbyter set over the rest in a locality, though he remained still a presbyter.

His general conclusion about apostolic succession is very instructive in terms of how we imagine our connection to the apostolic beliefs and practices.

The chief causes of the emergence of bishops were the struggles with a hostile society and of conflict within the church about the gospel. He examined three key representatives of the development from the end of the first century, Ignatius, Irenaeus and Cyprian. In regard to Ignatius he declares that the language used by him if taken literally would be ‘subversive to the true spirit of Christianity’.Footnote ²² With Irenaeus, ‘the episcopate is regarded now not so much as the centre of ecclesiastical unity but rather as the depository of apostolic tradition’.Footnote ²³

With Cyprian we come to something quite new. ‘If with Ignatius the bishop is the centre of Christian unity, if with Irenaeus he is the depository of the apostolic tradition, with Cyprian he is the absolute vice-regent of Christ in things spiritual.’Footnote ²⁴

In trying to understand the character of the relationship between the contemporary and the apostolic age, that is to say, the apostolicity of the Church of England, Lightfoot puts the whole matter under a wholly contingent heading. The ministerial arrangements are part of the pragmatically required arrangements for the life of the church. Those arrangements never take any precedence over the ideal he set out at the beginning. The historical origins of the threefold order lead to a very early and approximate historical connection with Jesus.Footnote ²⁵ The threefold ministerial order in his understanding is apostolic in the sense that it serves the apostolic ideal of the church and also that it can be traced historically back very close to the apostolic age. The first reason means that the second, historical continuity, cannot have any determinative force on the main question. On this reading the apostolicity of the ministerial order of Anglicans based on a continuous historical connection, is thus not absolutely certain, though it is of very ancient pedigree.

Lightfoot is making a clear distinction between those things which stand secure and certain, such as the ideal of the church he sets out at the beginning of his essay. On the other hand, there are those arrangements in church life such as the ministerial order he describes, which exist for practical reasons to serve the fundamental ideal of the Church as a community of people who belong to Christ's kingdom, which is not of this world.

Both these episodes, Lightfoot and Broughton, occurred in the nineteenth century in the context of the influence of the Oxford revival led by Newman and others, and in particular their appeal to the bishops of the Church of England to exercise their apostolically grounded authority. Broughton had been a keen supporter of the Oxford revival. Through the late 1930s he began to doubt the extreme claims for apostolicity through episcopal orders. Tract 90 finally forced him to depart the ranks of Oxford supporters. Like the Oxford reformers Broughton found himself engrossed in the tensions of Church–State relations which in both cases acted as a catalyst to seeking a strengthened sense of Church integrity and authority. For some, this meant separation of the Church from the State, and for some, separation from the Church of England, usually to join the Roman Catholic Church. In colonial New South Wales Broughton saw the point of the first of these moves but could not bring himself to act systematically on it. In relation to Rome he remained a confirmed critic till his death.

Lightfoot also was responding to the Oxford revival, but a later and different aspect of it. Similarly, Leo XIII and the Archbishops were responding to the long-running currents of the Oxford movement. All three examples reveal a struggle to formulate an apostolic pedigree for Anglican ministerial orders. In a time of immense social change in England and Europe and when many of these changes directly affected the institutional credibility of the church, especially the Church of England, their task was not an easy one. Both Broughton and the Archbishops were also confronted by a Roman Catholic Church that expressed itself with increasing confidence about its institution of ministry.

The doctrinal position of the 1998 revision of canon law and the authoritative commentary of then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, provide a clear assertion of the universal authority of the Pope as the successor of Peter. The apostolicity of this Christian tradition is set in terms of absolute certainty by the presence of a magisterium and the confident claim of historical institutional continuity. Of course the Roman Catholic community is too large and diverse for there not to be dissent and divergent views on this point, though this dissent is set within a very clear official confidence. Indeed the conclusions of the German New Testament Scholars in 1967 very closely follow those of Lightfoot one hundred years before. More than that they place a question mark against the historical claims implicit in the Ratzinger commentary on the recent papal revision of Canon Law.

On the other hand, the apostolicity of the Anglican tradition of Christianity is set in much more contingent terms and in a different key. The approach to continuity is made through the early Church up to the New Testament so that Scripture is the ultimate authority for such matters.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, in the absence of a magisterium, the diversity of view within Anglicanism is set within a much more open playing field.

Given such a frame of reference there is bound to be more freedom for diversity of view amongst Anglicans and thus the need for more sustained and open argument. If Anglicans do not have an apostolic identity by means of institutional confidence that yields absolute certainty, then the ongoing ecclesial dynamics become much more significant. Shaping an ongoing consensus fidelium relies on a church holding together in argument for the sake of the gospel. This makes catholicity a more strategically important reality in the life of the church.Footnote ²⁷ It also makes it that much more important for Anglicans to have the kind of serious and continuing scholarly conversation that the Journal of Anglican Studies exists to facilitate. Perhaps it is something like the kind of conferencing that scientists, even in the so-called hard sciences, have to engage in to discover the truth about something, even something like the Higgs boson.