Robert Crouse: “The Essence of Anglicanism”
The Essence of Anglicanism
A Transcription of a Lecture delivered October 3. 2002 at Regent College, Vancouver, by Dr. Robert Crouse (For a pdf version of this lecture, click here.)
It is a great honour to be the first lecturer in this proposed lecture series, and I thank the sponsors for the opportunity. And I cannot resist complimenting Regent College on the production of ordinands. It holds promise for a speedy reformation of the Anglican Church of Canada.
The Anglican Communion, the fellowship of Anglican Churches throughout the world, exists by virtue of a voluntary allegiance to a common tradition of Christian faith and worship. Faithfulness to that tradition, and that alone, constitutes the definition of Anglicanism, and that tradition is its principle of cohesion. It has, after all, no racial unity. People of Anglo Saxon origin who once dominated its membership are now a small proportion of it. It is not a linguistic unity. Its liturgies have been translated into many languages and most of the world’s Anglicans nowadays are not English speakers. It is not even really an organizational unity, not really. The Archbishop of Canterbury has a primacy of honour and the Lambeth Conferences bring together Bishops for consultation from all over the world. But no Primate, no Conference, no Council has any legislative authority over the Anglican Communion. So the Communion adheres only by faithfulness to a common tradition, and if that faithfulness falters it moves toward disintegration. No one can legislate for the Anglican Communion. Insofar as its member churches fail in their allegiance to the common tradition the communion disintegrates. And that, I think, is the nature of the current crisis in global Anglicanism.
Signs of disintegration are, as you well know, manifold. The Primates at their meeting in ler Portugal several years ago deplored the fact that repudiations of the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference have come, as they said, to threaten the unity of the Communion in a profound way. And they strongly urged those repudiating Lambeth “to weigh the effects of their actions and to listen to the expressions of pain, anger, and perplexity from other parts of the Communion.” Another sign of the times was, of course, the consecration of bishops to be missionaries to the Episcopal Church in the United States. And, of course, we have all become familiar with the phenomenon of separated or Continuing Anglican Churches in our own country and elsewhere and we have learned to live, somehow, with the condition of what is somewhat euphemistically called “impaired communion,” a condition brought about by unilateral decisions on the part of some Provinces of our Communion.
But these and other disquieting phenomena are merely symptoms of a malaise which threatens the continued existence of the Anglican way. The fundamental issue, I would insist, is faithfulness to a tradition of Christian faith and worship. But just what is that common tradition, and what precisely are its elements? What is the essence of Anglicanism?