Un/Usual Suspects

Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones

Incompleteness is a merit of Anglicanism, at least according to some of its most lauded expositors and advocates (Ramsey 1936, p. 220). Incompleteness marks this collection, just as it does other texts about the same tradition, and perhaps needs must. In the first place, it is hard to get a complete view when even determining what might count as "Anglican" is contested, with different views of the sources, edges, and focus of the tradition.1 At the very least, though, Anglicanism by its name suggests a pertaining to the English, with a locus of its identity in the Angles/Atlantic/British Isles. Evidently, over time, and through both mission and the colonial expansion of empire - and not just one or the other - it has given the germs for related ecclesial forms in a variety of different cultures (see Sachs 1993; Ward 2007; Kaye 2008; Chapman et al. 2015).

The term "Anglican" itself only came into common use in the nineteenth century - with the "Anglican Communion" endorsed by the first Lambeth Conference of 1867, twenty?years after talk of a "Communion" emerged (Avis 2018). Identifying which churches belong to the Anglican Communion is presently the most obvious way to determine what is Anglican. Formal lists of course exist, and the website of the Anglican Communion keeps an up-to-date record.2 Yet aside from such lists, it can be difficult to see what might be Anglican: some Anglican churches are identified by their geography, for example, "The Anglican Church of Australia," "The Anglican Church of Kenya," while other Anglican churches are identified by geography but not by tradition, for example, "The Church of Melanesia," "The Church in the Province of the Indian Ocean." Some Anglican churches use the descriptor "Episcopal": "The Scottish Episcopal Church," while "The Episcopal Church" (TEC) is not just that for the United States but also provinces outside the United States (hence, its name was shortened from its former one, "The Episcopal Church in the USA" [ECUSA]). Brazil has "The Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil." One Anglican church uses the term "Anglican Communion" in its name, though this is seen to readers of English only in translation: Nippon Sei Ko Kai ("The Anglican Communion in Japan"). The Anglican Church in Hong Kong uses Cantonese in its title, while the church in New Zealand leads with Maori in its full title, "The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia." Some churches that are part of the Anglican Communion are united churches, The Church of South India being a case where Anglicans are joined with Methodists and Presbyterians, The Church of North India adding to those traditions Brethren and Pentecostals. In vibrant interfaith environments such as these, Christians have perhaps more readily united. Further complications are now present in that in some parts of the world, the descriptor "Anglican" is claimed by groups that are not part of the Anglican Communion while claiming Anglican heritage, "The Anglican Church in North America" (ACNA) a key case in point, where it is TEC that is part of the Anglican Communion, despite ACNA claiming to be more "authentically" Anglican. That leaders of ACNA have been ordained as bishops by those from "inside" the Communion means that lines are murky - and differences great. Note also divergence even in propositions, that is, whether churches deem themselves to be "of" or "in" a setting: New Zealand has "in," Australia, "of." Australia, mentioned first above, is an example of one of the most divided Anglican settings in the world, despite the singular "church." In fact, "Anglican churches in Australia" might be more apt to the ascendant very conservative evangelicalism akin to ACNA not only in Sydney but increasingly across the country, and brittle anglo-catholic ritualism in sharp decline, cheek by jowl. Australia's "inadequately incorporated pluralism" (Varcoe 1995, p. 192) is perhaps a vivid microcosm of the larger global Anglican picture.

Shared history does not then yield a simple map of the Anglican Communion. But whatever status churches claim within or without the "Anglican Communion," Anglicans have some shared relation to the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared Henry VIII - and not the Vicar of Rome - the "supreme head" of the Church of England. Hence, that 1534 Act looms in much Anglican thinking, with an absence of theses or confessions akin to Protestant precedents, placing Anglicanism somewhat outside a trajectory shared by several other churches of the Reformation. While documents do exist in which convictions of the nascent new English church are specified - notably the 39 Articles of Religion - their status in Anglican provinces around the world that inherited them has wavered, and certainly by today is quite diverse. This in part reflects the ongoing dispute about what period or epoch of history is or might be key for Anglicanism, with more or less weight being placed on, for example, the Reformations era, medieval continuities, and "the early church" with its ecumenical councils. It has often been noted that Anglicans have harbored an affection for "patristics," and also that Anglicans have rarely been recognized - or seen themselves - as "systematic" theologians like those spawned in other traditions, both Protestant and Catholic. Sometimes Anglicanism has been seen as involving a "pastoral" way of doing theology (e.g., Wright 1980, p. 3), or even a sophisticated take on "common practice" (Hardy 1989). In whatever mode, "untidiness," "baffling of neatness," and such like (Ramsey 1960, p. 220) often echoes in much theology by Anglicans. According to Robert McAfee Brown (not himself an Anglican), trying to describe Anglicanism in a simple way might lead one to "despair," yet the tradition's resistance to simple definition is at the same time a source of its "greatness" (as cited by Wolf 1979, p. v).

The question of whether or not Anglicanism carries any special doctrines of its own became a quite animated debate in the latter part of the twentieth century (about which discussion has circled around Sykes 1978; for more on the history of the tradition, see Avis 2002, with Avis becoming something of a flag carrier for ongoing attention to this question, e.g., Avis 2018). Whether special doctrines are or are not asserted as part of Anglican identity, "approach" rather than "content" as it were often tends to take precedence in defining the tradition, and in various ways: with Anglicans regarding themselves as those who are or at their best might be "always open" (Giles 1999), "know what they often don't know" (Hanson 1965, p. 132, citing Howard Johnson), value being "gentle" (Hanson 1965, p. 141), and perhaps even represent "the appearance of a type of human being the world doesn't otherwise see" (Hanson 1965, p. 132, again citing Howard Johnson)!

While documents such as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral suggest that Anglican theology is located in a balance of authorities drawn into theological reflection, how those authorities are to be weighted in the balance is by no means agreed. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888 proposes that Old and New Testaments, the Nicene Creed, "gospel sacraments" of baptism and eucharist, and "historic episcopate" - though "locally adapted" - define the Anglican inheritance. Yet it is not just the balance of identified aspects of the quadrilateral that invites questions, for as Hanson notes, "we have Scriptures, Creeds, Sacraments, and Ministry, but no people . The people who constitute the Church are ignored" (Hanson 1965, p. 57).

Sometimes, in lieu of confessional documents, "common prayer" has been said to be the locus of Anglican doctrine (see Hefling and Shattuck 2006; Platten and Knight 2011; yet especially Earey 2013 on how wide notions of common prayer may be). However, Books of Common Prayer emerging from different locations are marked by difference as well as similarity, and those to which variants might all trace their genealogy (those of 1549, 1552, 1559; less so maybe 1662, which settled into long practice) were themselves expressions of incremental development in liturgical practice and so invite some measure of conjecture about the reforms they projected. Whatever stands in the more distant past, through the twentieth century liturgical diversity accelerated to a point where current provisions' commonality is now sought less in texts (as more so in the past) but rather in elusive qualities that might suggest some "family resemblance" (see Buchanan 2012).3

The Chicago-Lambeth quadrilateral was itself the product of an early Lambeth Conference, with the Lambeth conference of bishops from around the so-called Communion identified as one of four structures in which Anglican connections and...