Professor Stephen Sykes is Bishop of Ely in England. He delivered the annual Felix Arnott Lecture at St Francis’ Theological College in Brisbane on June 8. His lecture, entitled ‘The Future of Anglican Christianity’ has been edited here for print.
Futurology was a term which in England had a brief flowering around the turn of the Millennium. Contemporary Christians – a number of them familiar to a wider public from starring roles on television – might be heard meditating on the difficulties of portraying a future with any degree of assurance. Modesty became them, since none of them predicted the impact that an event such as 9/11 was to have on the early years of the 21st Century.
My concern is to convey a sense of what should matter to Anglicans – not to guess at what may happen to the Anglican Communion in the next twenty years. I am very clear that events can overtake institutions and constrain them.
Leadership has the exceptionally difficult task of maintaining the Church in the truth of the Gospel, whatever may happen. And, in my view, one of the quite demanding tasks our contemporary church leaders face is the prevalence of anxiety in the developed world.
When Jesus said to his disciples, “Do not be anxious”, he was addressing a fact about human beings, greatly magnified by particular social conditions.
I have on my shelves the first edition of Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be (1952), with its threefold analysis of the history of Western civilisation as characterised successively by ontic, moral and spiritual anxiety.
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something more ‘balanced’ than the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone.But given that general terms such as Anglicanism do have a proper and justifiable use, there has to be a dynamic process of argument about the term if Anglicans are to be exposed to the truth about their church.
In 194 the philosophical historian W B Gallie introduced the notion of an “essentially contested concept”, giving as instances art, religion, justice and democracy, the correct use of which necessitated awareness of the history of the terms.
These are not meaningless or vacuous concepts – we cannot do without them. Knowledge of their history exposes us to the contests about their meaning, which are endemic to them.
I have argued elsewhere that ‘Christianity’ is itself an “essentia1ly contested concept”.
So also must be Anglicanism, as a version of Christianity. The term should designate what characterises Anglicans without any implication that such characteristics are in any way distinctive of them. It is perfectly possible for example that Anglicanism is composed of a group of characteristics none of which distinguishes it.
To illustrate what I mean, consider the well-known tune by Haydn called in many hymn books ‘Austria’. Musicologists tell me that every phrase of this tune has been borrowed from somewhere else, but we have no difficulty at all in recognising the melody when we hear it.
It is a mistake to object when a charactaristic of Anglicanism is mentioned that it is not distinctive of Anglicanism. Because what is being spoken of is the Christian faith, it ought to be expected that Anglicans will share characteristics with other Christian churches, and the significance of the modern ecumenical movement is precisely that it has identified some of these shared characteristics.
I propose to abandon all pretence that I am offering a description of an abstract entity called Anglicanism, the Anglican Way, or Anglican Christianity, and give you frankly what I hold to be valuable in the Anglican tradition, in the hope that it will have a future as well as a past.
What I think we shall notice is the historical contingency of these characteristics.
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Although the authority of these creeds was challenged in my lifetime, it was a challenge which has not been sustained, and these two doctrines are apparently securely rooted in the practice of the church, its life and its worship.
o Secondly, belief in the doctrine of justification by grace alone, to be received by faith alone. This is not as widely spoken of by Anglicans, partly because it has come to be the common possession of Christians of many traditions.
It was, of course, very controversial at the Reformation, but the recent agreement between the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church on a matter which had torn Christians apart for five centuries hardly caused remark in Anglican circles.Why should this be?
It is partly because the 1th Century expression of this doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles
was in a very moderate form, and partly because Anglicans have internalised this doctrine through the prayers they have been using.
o This brings me to the third of my chosen characteristics – the place of the Scriptures as the sole source of saving knowledge.Again, it has been characteristic of Anglicanism from the first that the Bible should be publicly read to the people of God in their own language. It is furthermore assumed that, on the most important matters, what the Bible has to teach us is perfectly intelligible. It is plain enough so that ordinary people should hear for themselves, and even if illiterate should be able to judge that what they were being taught was, in fact, the substance of saving truth.
o This characteristic is intimately connected to my fourth characteristic; which is respect for due authority, cultivated within a climate of consent by the whole church. For Anglicans in the 1th Century this meant an ordered ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, who were to teach ‘with authority’.
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In this connection I enjoy citing the view of Symon Patrice, later to be Bishop of Ely from 191 to 170. He had a background as a Presbyterian, and was preaching at the baptism of an infant son of a Presbyterian minister.This is what he said:
“We are not baptised into this or that particular Opinion, or received into a particular Church, but into Belief in the Gospel, and into the Church of God in general, and therefore should love all the Followers and Disciples of our Lord, and embrace all of every persuasion that live godly in Christ Jesus”.
In a century of severe conflict with Presbyterians this was a notable and inspiring view of the uniting character of Christian baptism. There were at least some Anglicans who had grasped its ecumenical potential.
o My sixth characteristic really belongs more to modem Anglicanism than to its traditions, but nonetheless I hold that it is exceptionally valuable. It is the openness of our way of believing to a plurality of spiritual traditions within historic Christianity.
It is a striking fact about the calendars of both the Anglican Church of Australia and the Church of England that they contain the commemoration of a number of non-Anglicans.
This includes some persons who set themselves against the Anglican Church of their times, such as George Fox (d. 191), John and Charles Wesley (d. 1791 and 1788), John Henry Newman (d. 1890), Thomas More and John Fisher (described as Reformation Martyrs, d. 155) and John Bunyan (d. 188).
In addition to people such as these, there are named in our calendar people of quite widely different spiritual traditions, heritage and theology, including some from the pre-Reformation Church, both eastern and western, with no obvious preference for one tradition over another.
There is an English spiritual tradition to be appreciated in such 17th Century figures as George Herbert and Jeremy Taylor.And Australia has produced its local men and women whose lives are also commemorated.
It would not be difficult to show that some of these figures are strictly incompatible with each other – and doubtless their presence in a common Calendar is the result of some modem ecclesiastical compromise.
On the other hand, they are an enrichment of the life of the church, and it is an advantage that no Anglican is obliged to hold that a saint is
As a young student in the ‘fifties I was taught by a man who had seen service as a naval chaplain in the Second World War, who was wont to mock the idea that ‘deep down’ humans are consumed by existential despair.
But I have to report, fifty years later, that I have frequently encountered church men and women in a serious and debilitating state of anxiety about their church.
To them I have simply wanted to address Jesus’ words – lest they should come to think that the future of God’s Church is in any other hands than His own (where it is, in the long run, perfectly safe) and to assure them that what is demanded of contemporary members of the Church is not success but faithfulness.
I will reflect briefly on the significance of the -ism at the end of Anglicanism.
As William Cantwell Smith, the Harvard historian of religion, pointed out, there was a moment in Western intellectual history when general terms for the religions came into fashion and when christianitas ceased to mean the practice of living as a Christian and took on the overtones of our modem term ‘Christianity’ – meaning a particular belief system. It was a process of objectification, intellectualisation and abbreviation. ‘Anglicanism’ is a term invented as part of this broader intellectual movement.
The first uses in English, given by The Oxford English Dictionary, are by John Henry Newman in 188 and Charles Kingsley in 184. It is presumed that Anglicanism is describable as a set of beliefs, and constitutes at least an attempt at a system.
The problem is that almost imperceptibly -isms become reified self-contained systems which function independently of any particular thinker.
Part of the ‘invention’ of Anglicanism was the myth imparted to generations of Anglican theological students, that this church taught
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There is no law which says that the Anglican way is something immutable. I was brought up as a schoolboy, as a student, and in most of my ministry upon the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, together with Coverdale’s Psalter, as presented in the 12 Book of Common Prayer. The assumption that this experience is still true of the whole of the Anglican Communion now cannot be made.
There are many places where revisions of these services, or what are thought to be the needs of modern worshippers, or where what is said to be liturgical creativity, have displaced what once was true for most parts of the Anglican world.
There are consequences,of course,in this variety. Uniformity, in its own way, was a testimony to the unity of the church in its offering of worship. And there was something extraordinary in finding the same words in many different parts of the world. But there were undoubtedly negative features too, and modern liturgical developments have changed this feature of historical Anglicanism, perhaps forever.
This is an example of the fact that none of these characteristics should be thought of as immune from the possibility of change in the light of historic circumstances.
Anglicanism, is a particular way of believing or practising the Christian faith. It has sustained my own journey in the faith for more than sixty years, and I have every reason to be grateful for it.
But the crisis which has overtaken the Anglican Communion in the last few years looks as if it has the potential for causing a serious division between so-called liberal and so-called conservative versions of it. It is only a very bold (or very foolish) writer who will make predictions about it.
If I am asked what characteristics of Anglican Christianity should have a future as well as a past, these would be among my replies:
o First and foremost would be belief in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation,held along with respect for the context in which they were formulated in the Early Church.
The importance of these to Anglicanism is obvious enough from the Thirty-nine Articles, and from the use of the Nicene and Apostles Creeds in the worship of the church.
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But this authority could not be mistaken for any kind of personal whim. It was rather contained in the Gospel; it was available to the whole church; and to make it even more plain a Bible was presented at ordination with the words:“Take thou authority to preach the Word of God and to minister the holy sacraments”.
Episcopal authority has waxed and waned over the centuries, and the manner of church government has varied in different geographical, political, economic, social and educational contexts. From the first however, Anglicans have assumed that lay people can and should be consulted.
Normally this has meant the lay people within the bishop’s immediate locality.
The globalised village in which we all now live gives surprising measure of responsibility to a bishop if reports of what has seemed a purely local matter are carried by modem media into unimagined contexts.
Suddenly the idea of the consent of ‘the whole church’ may take on an altogether new and unexpected meaning.
At the same time bishops are ordained within the ‘Church of God’, not the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Australia, or the American Episcopal Church. They have, therefore, an inherent responsibility for the unity of the ‘Whole Church of God’ – this is part of the ecumenical mandate of Anglicanism.
o My fifth characteristic is a developing understanding of the church rooted in baptism.
This is an aspect of Anglicanism which has only come to the fore in recent years. Of course, it is based on the practice of baptism, which has been an integral part of the Anglican Way from the first.
But the strong affirmation that in baptism with water in the name of the Trinity, God confers membership of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, is characteristic of many 20th Century ecumenical statements.
Furthermore, the Anglican practice of extending Eucharistic hospitality to all who are baptised and in good standing with their own churches is a comparatively recent gesture, consistent with the same understanding of baptism.
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incapable of error. So it is possible to read their works, or consider their deeds, in a teachable frame of mind, but it is unnecessary to defend them on every point, or to abandon one’s critical faculties.The presenting issue of the current crisis is, as is well known, a new view of the possibility of a life-long, non-celibate partnership between people of the same sex. But the way this has impacted on the life of the whole Church deeply involves the view which is taken of the unity of the Church.
In ecumenical discussions Anglicans have generally taken the view that the Church should aim at organic unity.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in this dispute there are those who hold that the teaching, and also the practice, of the church cannot change on this matter without the consent of the majority of the churches of the Anglican Communion.
There is another disturbing aspect to the dispute.
In North America generally there is a polarisation in all the mainline denominations between liberal and conservative forces.
The dispute is being fought with all the sophistication that modern media can supply.
There are many signs that this conflict is now being globalised – that a polarity established in an American religious market is being exported to the rest of the world. In my view this would be a tragedy.
The first casualty in such a situation is the time and patience which is necessary before the requisite wisdom can emerge.
Many African cultures are confronting homosexuality in its modern, urbanised western form for the first time.
There is also a highly significant shift taking place in western attitudes towards intimacy of any kind.
In the context of these movements the Church needs time to discern the implications of its historic teaching about holiness. But time is what the campaigners will deny us if they see an opportunity.