Editor’s Note: This essay is part of an extended series, February 10-21, focused on the related subjects of the succession at Canterbury and the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals crafted by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO).
As one training to be a professional church historian, I want to ask not what the adoption or rejection of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals will mean for the Anglican Communion, but rather why conflicts within the communion have come to be both so serious and so intractable.
What I want to suggest is that our struggles as a communion are exacerbated and our ability to resolve them weakened by a new understanding of Anglican identity that emerged in the 20th century, a process that bishop and historian Stephen Sykes has called deconfessionalization. In short, we have moved from an account of what it means to be an Anglican rooted both in relationships and doctrinal and liturgical commitments to an account that is rooted largely, almost solely, in formal membership or participation in a small set of institutions (specifically, the Instruments of Communion).
If Anglican identity means nothing more than formal organizational belonging in the communion, and such belonging is not grounded in uniquely Anglican doctrine — no matter how capaciously circumscribed — but in the mere fact of shared history and present relationships, it is small surprise that conflicts about the limits of communion membership are both fierce and seemingly irresolvable.
The IASCUFO’s Nairobi-Cairo Proposals begin by discussing the definition of the Anglican Communion provided at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, which it then seeks to update for today’s communion. This is entirely reasonable. As the authors note, Lambeth 1930 has been a touchstone for Anglican ecclesiological reflection, and especially in the conflicts about the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate and now the place of LGBT people in the church, issues which, to varying degrees, have roiled the communion in more recent decades. I want to begin somewhere else, in 1867, at the very first Lambeth Conference.
At that conference, called most immediately in response to the activities of the controversial bishop of Natal, John Colenso, something like a definition of the Anglican Communion was offered. Its eighth resolution said this:
That, in order to the binding of the Churches of our colonial empire and the missionary Churches beyond them in the closest union with the Mother-Church, it is necessary that they receive and maintain without alteration the standards of faith and doctrine as now in use in that Church. That, nevertheless, each province should have the right to make such adaptations and additions to the services of the Church as its peculiar circumstances may require. Provided, that no change or addition be made inconsistent with the spirit and principles of the Book of Common Prayer, and that all such changes be liable to revision by any synod of the Anglican Communion in which the said province shall be represented.
This resolution shows us that from the very beginning of the Anglican Communion, a relationship to the Church of England was seen as central to communion membership, and even to “Anglican” identity. But membership and identity were not only grounded on this relationship. Rather, the bishops at the first Lambeth Conference believed that for this relationship to be maintained, it was important that the churches of the communion maintain “without alteration” the distinctly Anglican standards of faith and doctrine of the Church of England. The standards in question, of course, were the 1571 Articles of Religion, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (with some variations allowed), and the Ordinal, with the Two Books of Homilies as a sort of adjunct. To be a member of the Anglican Communion — to be Anglican — meant not just to be a catholic Christian in communion with the See of Canterbury, but also meant confessing a specific and distinctly Anglican theological position.
This understanding of Anglicanism still operated in the background of the 1930 Lambeth Conference definition of the Anglican Communion so important for the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals. It is true that, of the formularies, only the Book of Common Prayer was mentioned by name. Nonetheless, as the authors of the IASCUFO report note:
Anglican churches presumed from the start that a given faith and order was available and could be specified. The Church of England’s own ordered life stood as the measure for most Anglican churches in this regard at least until 1930. In terms of doctrine, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal were preeminent, while the 39 Articles served as a convenient touchstone of Anglican faith even when formal subscription to the Articles was not everywhere required.
One might question how exactly the report authors rank the articles in relationship to the prayer book, but the basic point is clear: even if not quite as explicitly in 1867, the 1930 statement still operated with a sense that the unique relationships that made up the Anglican Communion were undergirded by a unique and specific doctrinal and liturgical inheritance.
During the second half of the 20th century, this changed dramatically. At the same time as the Church of England loosened the subscription it required of its ordinands to the Articles of Religion, Lambeth Conference resolutions called for provinces across the Communion to abandon subscription requirements. Thus, for example, Resolution 43 at Lambeth 1968 suggested “that assent to the Thirty-nine Articles be no longer required of ordinands.” The 1662 Book of Common Prayer lasted a bit longer as a standard (or at least its “spirit” did), but the transformation of Anglican liturgical practice under the effects of the Liturgical Movement meant that it too came to be judged wanting.
The 1988 Lambeth Conference, for example, declared that Anglican liturgy ought to be marked by dominical sacraments, episcopal ordination, and the use of Scripture and the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds; a report to that conference declared that the 1662 Prayer Book’s era “is slipping irretrievably into the past.” Anglican liturgy came to be defined not in terms of a shared text but a shared shape — and this shape was not distinctly Anglican, but rather held in common with Rome and many Protestant bodies. The Liturgical Movement, after all, was the result of a late 19th and early 20th century boom in both ecumenism and patristic scholarship, movements that pushed beyond (or perhaps behind, so it would seem) the various doctrinal and liturgical standards, including those of Roman Catholicism, crafted in the 16th century.
As a result, being a member of the Anglican Communion — being an Anglican — no longer involved a specific doctrinal and liturgical heritage, a particular and unique proposal to the broader church catholic. Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher anticipated these developments when he declared:
The Anglican Communion has no peculiar thought, practice, creed or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ’s Church from the beginning.
If Anglicanism involves no peculiar beliefs or practices, then to be an Anglican one is a catholic Christian who happens to be in some connection with the Church of England. To be a member of the Anglican Communion then just means that one is a member of the Anglican Communion, participating in the shared network of organizations and relationships that constitute its life. Perhaps it is a small surprise that, particularly in the conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st century, the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral has increasingly come to stand as a description of Anglican identity — this although in its original formulation, it was designed as an ecumenical formula, one that would allow the Episcopal Church and later the Anglican Communion to entertain meaningful communion with non-Anglican churches and thus seek out the one church of Jesus Christ. Ecumenical work often begins by identifying what one tradition believes to be irreducible and essential to Christianity. Only as a byproduct has Chicago-Lambeth become a standard for internal coherence, which, again, was not its original purpose or intent.
Now, to be sure, this formulation of Anglicanism as “mere catholicity” and the concomitant definition of Anglicanism as a group of churches that commit to be “merely catholic” together have their advantages. They have enabled a great deal of ecumenical work. They have encouraged Anglican church bodies to adapt their worshiping life to the cultural and linguistic contexts in which they exist. They reflect honestly the increasing theological and liturgical diversity within as well as among various provinces.
But I submit that the experience of the last few decades shows that this understanding has some real drawbacks, even deficiencies. If we make membership in the communion the entire unique content of Anglican identity, then of course there will be conflicts about membership in the communion when disagreements arise — and of course these conflicts will be intensely difficult to adjudicate. These conflicts are the unintended but unsurprising result of late-20th-century deconfessionalization, again to borrow a term from Bishop Sykes. Indeed, it should not escape our notice that the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Reformed Churches, despite having similar sharp disagreements among member churches about marriage and sexuality, have not been so deeply embroiled by conflict. While those federations have, arguably, a lower expectation of unity across member churches, it seems to me at least plausible that the lower level of conflict within them is also explicable by their unembarrassed commitment to a particular doctrinal heritage, a commitment that allows institutional membership to function less centrally in determining Lutheran or Reformed identity.
But of course, we cannot simply turn back the clock to Lambeth 1988 or Lambeth 1958 and choose differently. The Anglican Communion is de-confessionalized. For several generations, Anglican identity has been largely reduced to institutional relationships with the Instruments of Communion. In light of this reality, the IASCUFO recommendations are sensitively and generously made. In a moment in which some provinces find themselves in impaired relationship with Canterbury, tying the communion less tightly to that particular see, however historic and symbolic, makes a great deal of sense. However, I must admit that I fear that as long as we remain committed to a unique relationship without a unique shared confession, even a fairly capacious one, our communion’s instability will continue.
Thus, I am hopeful that many conservative Anglicans across the world are taking another look at the historic Anglican formularies to ground an Anglican identity thicker than institutional belonging. I hope that those, like me, who fall on the progressive end on questions of LGBT inclusion will not write off the formularies as the sole property of conservatives but will be encouraged by these fellow Anglicans to a deeper engagement with them as well.
The revised definition of the communion offered by the IASCUFO report lists Anglicans’ “shared inheritance” as an important bond of unity. In my mind, this is perhaps the most exciting part of the proposal. I hope and pray that reengaging with this inheritance may produce a more durable Anglican Communion for a world in need of the preaching of the gospel — and, I believe, in need of that preaching in a distinctively Anglican key.
The Rev. Benjamin Crosby is a Guest Writer. He is a PhD student in ecclesiastical history at the McGill University School of Religious Studies.