Reformation Anglicanism (The Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library, Volume 1) E-Book

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: The Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 346

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A Clear Vision for What It Means to Be Anglican TodayConceived under the conviction that the future of the global Anglican Communion hinges on a clear, welldefined, and theologically rich vision, the Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library was created to serve as a go-to resource aimed at helping clergy and educated laity grasp the coherence of the Reformation Anglican tradition.With contributions from Michael Jensen, Ben Kwashi, Michael Nazir-Ali, Ashley Null, and John W. Yates III, the first volume in the Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library examines the rich heritage of the Anglican Communion, introducing its foundational doctrines rooted in the solas of the Reformation and drawing out the implications of this tradition for life and ministry in the twenty-first century.

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“In light of the current crises of the Anglican Communion, this study of the origins of Reformation Anglicanism is particularly timely. The authors remind us why the Church of England adopted the confessional formularies that have characterized it since the sixteenth century and examine the relevance of these to the modern situation at home and abroad. Everyone with an interest in Anglicanism will benefit from looking afresh at its core principles, and the authors of this volume have done their best to demonstrate how those principles are still meaningful and relevant today.”

Gerald Bray, Research Professor of Divinity, History, and Doctrine, Beeson Divinity School; author, God Is Love and God Has Spoken

“This book sketches some of the complex history of the Church of England from early beginnings to the shape of the present worldwide denomination, now about eighty million strong. More importantly, it calls contemporary Anglicans, often awash in doctrinal and moral confusion, to return to the primary sources and evangelical and Reformed doctrines of the English Reformation, if that Reformation is to fulfill its promise.”

D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; Cofounder, The Gospel Coalition

“This wonderful book reminds me of what the former archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said: ‘To belittle the witness of the Reformers is to miss something of the meaning of the church of God.’ I am so grateful to the authors for producing this book, which will help us to know what it means to be a church of God.”

Mouneer Hanna Anis, Anglican Primate of Jerusalem and the Middle East; Chairman, The Anglican Global South

“This is a work that will serve contemporary Anglicanism permanently in helping readers understand that Reformation Anglicanism is simply biblical Christianity. In a time when many churches are doctrinally confused or morally compromised, readers will be encouraged to hold fast to the gospel and to fight against false teaching. I commend this book most highly and look forward to subsequent volumes in the library.”

Nicholas D. Okoh, Anglican Primate of All Nigeria; Chairman, The Global Anglican Future Conference

Reformation Anglicanism

The Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library

Volume 1

Reformation Anglicanism

A Vision for Today’s Global Communion

Edited by Ashley Null and John W. Yates III

Reformation Anglicanism: A Vision for Today’s Global Communion

Copyright © 2017 by John Ashley Null and John W. Yates III

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Samuel Miller

First printing 2017

Printed in the United States of America

The authors’ Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-5213-7ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5216-8PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5214-4Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5215-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Null, Ashley, author, editor. | Yates, John W., 1974– author, editor.

Title: Reformation Anglicanism : a vision for today’s global communion / edited by Ashley Null and John W. Yates III.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2017. | Series: The Reformation Anglicanism essential library ; volume 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016026235 (print) | LCCN 2016030303 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433552137 (hc) | ISBN 9781433552144 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433552151 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433552168 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Anglican Communion—Doctrines. | Anglican Communion—History. | Church of England—Doctrines. | Church of England—History.

Classification: LCC BX5005 .R44 2017 (print) | LCC BX5005 (ebook) | DDC 283—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026235

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-03-03 03:10:58 PM

With loving gratitude

for the living legacy of

John Stott and J. I. Packer

Contents

Preface

 1  How the Anglican Communion Began and Where It Is Going

Michael Nazir-Ali

 2  The Power of Unconditional Love in the Anglican Reformation

Ashley Null

 3  Sola Scriptura

John W. Yates III

 4  Sola Gratia

Ashley Null

 5  Sola Fide

Michael Jensen

 6  Soli Deo Gloria

Ben Kwashi

 7  A Manifesto for Reformation Anglicanism

Ashley Null and John W. Yates III

Bibliography

Contributors

General Index

Scripture Index

Preface

Around the world today more than 80 million people in 165 countries identify themselves as Anglican Christians. The nature of that shared identity, however, is a subject of earnest discussion and often vigorous debate. Recent fissures within the Anglican Communion have left those who are part of it asking questions of foundational import: What does it mean to be Anglican? What is the nature of our global communion? To what extent are we bound to one another by shared doctrine, history, and culture? These critical questions lead to even deeper questions: What is the gospel? What is the nature of God’s grace, our faith, and eternal life? What authority does Scripture possess, and how are we to apply it?

The future of the Anglican Communion hinges on our ability to answer these deeper questions. Thankfully, we have within our shared past a vast wealth of resources on which to draw in this necessary conversation. It has been some five hundred years since the dawn of the English Reformation, that fractured, fruitful season in the life of Western Christendom during which the Church in England carved out an identity for itself vis-à-vis the Church of Rome and other emerging reform movements in western Europe.

During that period one of the clarion calls of the Reformers was ad fontes, which can be loosely translated as “to the sources.” It was a cry that reflected the Reformers’ intent to delve deeply into the text of Scripture and the interpretive traditions of the early church fathers in an effort to answer many of the same basic questions that confront the church today. This volume, the first in a planned library of six, responds to the call ad fontes in a particularly twenty-first-century way, by returning to the founding documents of the English Reformation and considering the ways in which we answered these basic questions at the dawn of our now global communion. Within these founding formularies a well-refined and theologically rich vision emerges, one that is rooted in Scripture and aligned with the teachings of the early church. It is a vision we believe is capable of reinvigorating our global communion and providing clarity in the midst of mass confusion over our shared identity. Furthermore, we believe that the rich theological heritage of the Reformation is able to give us practical guidance on life and ministry in this twenty-first century.

Therefore, this volume can be divided into three parts. Chapter 1 opens with a sweeping historic narrative of the missionary birth of the church in England, the maturing of English Christianity during the Reformation, and the expansion of this renewed apostolic faith through overseas missions in the five centuries that have followed. From this high-altitude vantage point we descend in chapter 2 to a grassroots perspective to examine the age of the Reformation and the chief personality at the center of the English Reformation: Thomas Cranmer. Here we introduce the Anglican Formularies and the theological convictions that lie at their core. These core beliefs, captured in four Latin slogans of the Reformation, provide the structure for the second half of the book. Chapters 3 through 6 examine Anglicanism’s bedrock theological principles: sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli Deo gloria. Finally, the book concludes with a manifesto for Reformation Anglicanism as the way forward for the global communion.

This multiauthored volume is representative of the geographic and ethnic diversity of our Anglican Communion. The contributors hail from Pakistan, the United States, Australia, and Nigeria. Two of us serve as pastors in parishes in Australia and the United States, one is an archbishop in Nigeria, one a bishop who has served in both Pakistan and England, and one a research scholar in Germany. The chapters were written independently and retain the unique voices of their authors, but the content is based on extensive conversation and represents our attempt to speak with a single voice, one that makes Reformation Anglicanism accessible and relevant today.

Chapter 1

How the Anglican Communion Began and Where It Is Going

Michael Nazir-Ali

The Missionary Birth of the Church of England

Under Roman rule, the island of Britain was a provincial backwater on the very edge of civilization.1 No cultured Latin, Greek, Syrian, or Egyptian was terribly interested in what happened out on that rain-drenched, druid-filled frontier, let alone in writing down its history. Consequently, the origins of the church in England are now lost in the mists of time.

It seems only logical that Christians who came to Britain with the Roman occupiers first brought the faith to the island. Whether they arrived specifically as missionaries or came primarily for business and ended up sharing their faith with those around them, no one can say. Nor does any information survive as to how quickly their efforts produced local congregations. The story of the conversion and martyrdom of the native Briton Saint Alban, who perished perhaps as early as the beginning of the third century, indicates the presence of Christianity in the country at that time, albeit in a situation of severe persecution. Even after the withdrawal of Roman military protection and the subsequent Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, vestiges of the Christian church survived among the Britons, as is clear from the writings of the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede (673–735).2 However, having felt the sting of their rivals’ swords, the island Christians did not feel any obligation to share the faith with their new pagan Germanic neighbors.

That missionary impulse was to come from much farther away, all the way back to Rome, now no longer a ruling imperial city, but still the home of the leading bishop of the Western church. Pope Gregory the Great plucked Augustine from leadership of a comfortable monastery in Rome and sent him to the shores of England, now beyond the edge of civilization, in 597. A reluctant missionary, Augustine had to be encouraged by Gregory to persist in what he had been sent to do. However, his monastery at Canterbury eventually became the mother church for an emergent Anglo-Saxon Christianity throughout the island. Even as the Church of England felt forced to purge itself of medieval corruption and weakness during the sixteenth century, the English Reformers and monarchs continued to respect and honor their missionary debt to the Church of Rome.

At the same time, however, the Reformers pointed out that the church had existed in Britain before the arrival of Augustine and his fellow monks. Archbishop Matthew Parker is typical in claiming a mythic apostolic pedigree for this church.3 Of course, it is only pure legend that Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury as England’s first missionary bishop during the first century. Nevertheless, Augustine soon learned that the Celtic church, established long before his arrival, was still active among the British people who had been driven back to western and northern parts of the island by the Anglo-Saxon invaders.

The struggle between Roman and Celtic forms of Christianity, as well as between Britain and Ireland, is often described as if each was mutually exclusive of the other. The usual polarizations, however, are not accurate. After all, Patrick, the founder of Christianity in Ireland, was himself a British Christian. The son of a deacon and the grandson of a priest, he was kidnapped from the west coast of Britain and made a slave to serve across the sea among the pagan Irish. After escaping and returning home six years later, he felt God’s call to return to the land of his captors and, since he now spoke Gaelic, preach the gospel to them in their own language. Moreover, during his religious training in Gaul, he became familiar with Roman custom, and this seems to have been the form of the Christian faith that he preached in Ireland. He remained, nevertheless, sensitive to Irish spirituality, acknowledging the significance of woods, springs, and wells, as well as the importance of dreams and visions.

Patrick’s missionary zeal and method became part of the spiritual DNA of the Celtic church. As a result, at about the same time that Augustine was arriving in southeast England at Canterbury, the Irish monk Columba had not only settled on the Scottish island of Iona but also made it a center for missionary work in northern England. Paulinus of York and Rochester, a bishop who had been sent out from Canterbury, had converted King Edwin of Northumbria to Christianity. After Edwin had been killed in battle, Paulinus returned south, but left many Roman converts behind. A year later, Oswald, Edwin’s nephew, became king of Northumbria. In his youth, Oswald had taken refuge in Scotland, where he was converted to Irish Christianity. When he became king, he invited Aidan to come from Iona and found a monastery on Lindisfarne Island as a base for evangelizing his kingdom.

As a result, in Northumbria the Roman and Celtic churches directly collided. Their competing forms of mission had many aims in common: evangelization, baptism, and Christianization. However, significant differences still divided them. Most importantly, the Roman mission emphasized organizational stability for long-term growth. They fostered a strong institutional life for the church by establishing bishops with specific dioceses, holding synods, and insisting on a common liturgy marked by the same feasts and fasts. The Celts, on the other hand, saw themselves as pilgrims for Christ. Their primary motive was giving up everything, even their homeland, for the sake of following Christ. Their bishops lived in monasteries and made missionary trips out and about to pastor their flocks and increase them.

In short, the Roman missional strategy was to stress founding structures capable of shaping a message, whereas the Celtic way was to proclaim a message with the power to create a community. Yet, even these differences can be emphasized too much. Although the Roman mission placed its highest value on institutional rootedness, pilgrimage remained very important for the progress of the Roman mission in early medieval Northern Europe. Indeed, such Anglo-Saxons as Boniface, who left his homeland in England to become the apostle to Germany, emulated the Irish example.4

Because of their substantial differences, however, it should be no surprise that these two ways of living out the life of the church came into conflict. This tension came to a head at the Synod of Whitby (AD 664) and was, according to Bede, largely resolved in favor of Roman customs. Nevertheless, the tension between mission as enduring structure and mission as traveling message has recurred throughout the history of the church. For example, enclosed monasticism like the Benedictines (founded about 530) emphasized stability. During the Middle Ages, however, the new mendicant (i.e., begging) orders arose. As exemplified by the Franciscans and the Dominicans, these new groups emphasized traveling, teaching, and preaching among laypeople.

Of course, these were not the only tensions in the church. Another key issue was the proper relationship between the church and secular governments. Bishops were important figures in society, since they controlled the revenues from large amounts of land given to the church. Who, then, should appoint them: the king or the pope? After much struggle, Rome generally prevailed in this dispute, which became known as the investiture controversy (i.e., Who should “invest” a bishop with his office?). Even a section of the Magna Carta, the first great legal document limiting the powers of English kings, upheld the freedom of the Ecclesia Anglicana (the English church). Nevertheless, in practice kings managed increasingly to restrict the church’s freedom to act, especially, but not only, in the matter of episcopal appointments.5In England, Parliament passed the Praemunire law (1392), which prevented interference in the English church from Rome or any other foreign power.

If the church’s worldly wealth made kings want to control it, reform movements within the church wanted to remove that temptation by taking the church and its members back to an idealized notion of apostolic simplicity. Saint Francis (1182–1226) and the mendicant order he founded is just one example of these movements. The Franciscans inspired people by their preaching and their practice of evangelical virtues (poverty, chastity, and obedience), as well as by the different ways they lived together as a community. Later on, when their original vigor and rigor had been much weakened by worldliness and internal conflicts over how to be true followers of Francis, they themselves became the objects of attacks by newer reform movements. John Wycliffe (1320–1384), an Oxford doctor of divinity, renewed the call for the church to give up its worldly possessions and power. He emphasized the authority of Scripture and rejected Roman teachings he thought unbiblical, like transubstantiation and the clergy holding the keys to the forgiveness of sins. To give people a chance to decide for themselves whether Roman teaching was faithful to Scripture, he encouraged the translation of the Bible into English. But the Roman church condemned Wycliffe, his followers (called Lollards), and their translation of the Bible into English as heretical. Consequently, it was illegal to have an English Bible without a license from the bishop up until the reign of Henry VIII.6

The fifteenth century also witnessed a massive revival of ancient learning. Encouraged by the development of printing, which made possible the wide availability of books, the Renaissance brought into existence a Christian humanism. This varied from place to place, but it created a love of knowledge, especially about the Bible and the early centuries of Christianity, as well as revulsion at superstition and corruption. It is interesting that Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), whose translation of the New Testament triggered so much of the Reformation, was responsible also for a severe critique of popular cults, including that of the Virgin Mary. In his desire to give Mary a truly biblical place in the church, he was joined by others, such as Sir Thomas More.7

The early Reformers were quite as exercised about the abuses in the church, and it is instructive to compare the language used by More and Erasmus with that of Tyndale. It is a pity that the polemical climate of the time, and perhaps the temperament of the antagonists, did not allow them to see the common ground among them. This is also true of their desire for the availability of the Scriptures in the vernacular. Erasmus was an advocate not only of reading the Bible in its original languages but also of making it available to the humblest. Without Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament and its Latin translation, Tyndale would have been unable to do his work to make the Scriptures available even to “a boye that dryveth the plough.” It is to be regretted, though, that there was no generally available English Bible in the pre-Reformation Church of England, despite the endorsement by someone so esteemed by the Tudor establishment as Erasmus.8

Mission in the English Reformation

The Reformers were, of course, concerned that individuals should come to be right with God, but they were also keen that people should lead holy lives and that the church should be purified. While the radical Reformation may have looked more to a people called out from among the nations, the mainstream Reformers were thinking of discipling whole nations by bringing God’s Word to them. This sense of national mission was clearly manifested when the Church of England declared its independence from Rome in 1534. Seeing the visible church as essentially a human institution, albeit with a divine vocation, the English Reformers accepted that whomever God had appointed to rule a given society had authority not only in secular affairs but also in matters of its institutional church. Hence, in England the monarch should hold supremacy in the religious affairs of the kingdom, not the pope.

The Crown Legislation passed under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I often invoked pre-Reformation provisions like Praemunire as justification for rejecting interference in the English church from Rome or elsewhere. Henry took the title of “Supreme Head” of the church and certainly acted the part, closing all the monasteries and issuing his own theological primer known as the King’s Book. However, his daughter Elizabeth was much more cautious in her claims. She preferred the more modest title “Supreme Governor” and attached an Admonition to the Royal Injunctions of 1559 that explicitly repudiated any claim to interfere in the ministry of the church. This is reflected in Article 37 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which states that “we give not to our princes the ministering either of God’s Word or of the Sacraments.”9

For the English Reformers, the goal of such a state-sponsored Reformation was to use the authority of secular government to promote biblical faithfulness at every level of their society. They combined church and state so that the faithful could have the opportunity to evangelize the culture more effectively. They hoped that such Erastianism (i.e., having a state-directed church) would promote a thorough proclamation of the gospel throughout English life so that more people would practice lives of mature Christian discipleship, and the society as a whole would be better as a result. We shall take a closer look at their national program for “mission as proclamation of the message” in the next chapter. However, it must be said that a merging of church and state also holds out the opposite possibility, that secular culture might corrupt the faith, deforming the church and undermining the Christian way of life. Some have found Anglicanism’s Erastian origins to be its “Achilles’ heel.” Indeed, Episcopal theologians Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner have claimed that their province’s capitulation to American culture in matters like authority, revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, and human sexuality is a direct result of the sixteenth-century decision to wed church life to contemporary society.10 We shall need to examine this issue in more detail later on as well.

But what about Christian mission beyond the British Isles, indeed beyond Europe itself? Did the Church of England have any interest in promoting the gospel beyond the realm of its monarch? It has often been said that while the Counter-Reformation featured a great sense of world mission, the Reformation did not. Indeed, it was a common charge against the Reformers that they could make Christians “heretics,” but they could not convert the heathen. Of course, their Roman Catholic critics were not necessarily much more effective. Although the papal agreements with Spain and Portugal required every expedition of exploration or conquest to carry chaplains, these efforts were inevitably tainted with the cruelty and greed of the conquistadores.11 The religious orders were more independent, and while some certainly stood up for the indigenous population, others were implicated in their exploitation and subjugation.12 In further defense of the Reformers, it can also be legitimately said that the renewal of faith, the teaching of the Bible, worship in the vernacular, and developing a sense of vocation among the laity were the Reformation’s focus of mission. Moreover, it should be noted that as long as the sea routes were controlled by Catholic powers, the Protestant nations could not easily engage in world mission.

Such excuses are not enough, however, for as the historian of mission Warneck tells us, no sorrow was expressed in these churches about their inability to engage in mission, and their silence about the missionary task can only be accounted for by the fact that even the idea of world mission was absent.13Bishop Stephen Neill, similarly, tells us that the thrust of Protestant thought was not that foreign missions would come in God’s good time but that they were neither obligatory nor desirable. He further identifies this attitude with the Reformation’s emphasis on local or national churches. These not only were contained within specific boundaries but also were confined to particular ethnicities and to the limited vision of local rulers and populations. In addition, there was a kind of dispensationalism among some that held that the gospel had already been preached to all nations. After all, many of them believed they were living in the last days before Christ’s imminent return. There was no need to reach out in evangelism again to those who had refused it before.14

There were exceptions, of course, and Neill records some, among them Adrian Saravia (1532–1613), the Dutch Protestant who became an Anglican and eventually a canon of Westminster (some say dean). Saravia believed that the missionary mandate was for every age because it was accompanied by our Lord’s promise to be with his church to the very end. Such a promise has never been understood to mean he would be with the apostles only, and so the command to which the promise is attached could not be limited to the apostolic band either. The apostles, moreover, had chosen fellow workers and successors to continue their work. As a matter of fact, the church’s missionary work had continued through the years, and the gospel had challenged more and more people, who responded to it in different ways. Saravia expressly related his understanding of the continuing missionary mandate of the church to the doctrine of apostolic succession: bishops were successors of the apostles not only as chief pastors but also as leaders in mission. He was vigorously attacked on the continent both for his teaching on mission and for his view on episcopacy, but he remains, for Anglicans, an early champion of world mission.15

In spite of Saravia’s courageous upholding of mission, it has to be admitted that Anglicanism displayed the same lack of interest in world mission as other churches of the Reformation. Even though the 1662 Book of Common Prayer provided a rite for the baptism of “such as are of Riper Years” as useful for the baptizing of “Natives in our Plantations, and others converted to the Faith,” Neill can find records for only one Indian being baptized according to Anglican rites in the whole of the seventeenth century.16

The Emergence of Anglican Missionary Societies

So how did Anglicanism become global? How is it there is a worldwide Anglican Communion today which is one of the most widely spread Christian traditions, even if not the most numerous? In fact, there is no single answer to these questions. The Anglican tradition became global in a number of ways. There was, first of all, what we might call the coincidental spread of Anglican churches. Like the initial arrival of Christianity in Roman Britain, Anglicanism’s incipient global spread was coincidental in the strictest meaning of that term: the Church of England simply accompanied the colonization and settlement by the British of lands in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia, and so on. The colonists naturally took their church with them and generally made every effort to see that it resembled the church at home as much as possible. Thereby hangs a tale.

Nevertheless, at the same time, a second, more intentional method arose, the missionary society movement. The earliest two groups were the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK, 1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG, 1701). Their first aim was to provide for the pastoral care of British people overseas, but it was also their desire to bring other peoples, living within British dominions, to the Christian faith. Neill records some of the achievements of the German missionaries who worked with these societies of high church convictions. They ministered according to the Anglican rite and Anglican discipline but never received episcopal ordination. SPCK provided the press on which the first Tamil New Testament was printed, and it was a SPG-sponsored young man, Philip Quaque, who became, in 1765, the first African to receive holy orders according to the Anglican Ordinal.17

One hundred years later, the desire for cross-cultural mission, already implicit in the vision of SPCK and SPG, received a huge impetus with the emergence of the Church Missionary Society (CMS, 1799) as a result of the evangelical revival. The eighteenth century was a time of great change and even of turmoil in Britain, but it was also an exciting time. The preaching of George Whitefield (1714–1770) and John Wesley (1703–1791) had warmed the hearts of many. Bibles were being opened and read with the realization that God’s purposes were universal and that the gospel had, indeed, to be preached to “every creature.” Both the evangelicals’ Bible reading and Enlightenment thought about the dignity of the person led many to view the slave trade and the institution of slavery with increasing revulsion. But the Bible also inspired a fresh commitment to the worldwide mission of the church. It is no accident that the Clapham Sect, a group of Anglican evangelicals, had among their projects not only the abolition of the hated slave trade and slavery itself but also the establishing of a “model colony” of freed slaves in Sierra Leone. They were also, of course, engaged in improving the condition of the poor in Britain through education, laying the groundwork for industrial legislation by their successors, and in what they described as “the reformation of manners.” The formation of the CMS has to be seen against this background of a Christian mission, influenced by the Enlightenment, but drawing its basic inspiration from the Bible.18

From the very beginning the emphasis was on preaching the gospel, bringing people to personal faith in Jesus Christ, and on the emergence of Christian communities that would be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. Henry Venn, its secretary from 1841 to 1872, is usually credited—along with Rufus Anderson, the American mission strategist of the same period, and then later Roland Allen, from a more high church background—with the formulation and development of this “three-self” principle. As Peter Williams has shown, however, they were not unique in such thinking, as other Anglicans, Protestants, and Roman Catholics also thought in similar ways.19 Where the CMS had to work, by compulsion or by choice, either with the ancient churches, as in India with the Orthodox, or with establishment Anglicanism, it sought the renewal of the church in worship, theological education, and holiness of life.

In the Anglican context, however, CMS did insist on the priority of the community over the need for bishops. In a characteristic dispute with the Anglo-CatholicTractarians, it rejected the need for ecclesiastical authorities to send “missionary bishops” who would then establish a church with clergy, appropriate church government, discipline, and so on. The simple proclamation of the gospel was sufficient to create a Christian community whose life together would then be structured for best missional effectiveness in the local context. As Williams has shown, this ideal was compromised from time to time, but it remained a basic ecclesiological difference between CMS and the more high church societies, such as SPG and the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), as well as with colonial bishops like Bishop G. S. Selwyn of New Zealand and then of Lichfield. It cannot be claimed that CMS’s motives in promoting such an ecclesiology were entirely disinterested. CMS feared the appointment of high church bishops and the possible curtailment of its own role as a voluntary mission organization. How ironic, therefore, that the first appointment of missionary bishops in our own times should take place in Nigeria, one of the first areas of operation for the CMS.20

Venn and, therefore, CMS were firm advocates of the emergence of independent national churches that should enjoy the closest spiritual relations with the Church of England but should otherwise be responsible for their own worship, discipline, and order.21 In this sense, they sowed the idea of autonomy, which both characterizes contemporary Anglicanism and has become its leading problem.

Almost from the beginning, the evangelical movement had a vigorous debate about the nature of the Bible. All agreed that the Bible was, indeed, the inspired Word of God but differed in their understanding of such inspiration and its extent. Thus, some could, and did, refer to it as “the infallible Word of God.” Then there were those, like Philip Doddridge, who distinguished between different degrees of inspiration as, for him, some parts afforded a greater insight into the divine mind than others. And, yet again, there were those, such as Henry Martyn, the well-known missionary and translator, who explained to a Muslim interlocutor that, in contrast to what Muslims believed about the Qur’an, he believed that, for the Bible, the “sense was from God but the expression from the different writers of it.” The fault lines were thus laid for the bitter controversy that was to break out from time to time.22

There were several periods and aspects to this controversy, but, for our purposes, it was the division within CMS (sometimes called “the barometer” of Anglican evangelicalism) that is relevant. There was, first of all, the direct issue of the historical trustworthiness of the Scriptures. A significant number of the CMS membership felt that missionary candidates should be made to subscribe to some formula that expressed this clearly. Others, including CMS staff, held that candidates should not be asked to believe in anything beyond the formularies of the Church of England. Behind this lay the ubiquitous issue of “Anglican comprehensiveness.” Should CMS strive to be as comprehensive as the Anglican Church and, if not, what were the limits?

In the end, a formula could not be found to keep both sides together, and this led to the formation of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society (BCMS), consisting of those who wished to uphold the trustworthiness of Scripture in every respect and not just in matters of faith. This division in evangelical missionary ranks was a heavy blow at the time, but, in due course, the formation of the BCMS provided another opening for those wanting to engage in world mission. BCMS set out to be a pioneer in a number of areas and eventually some of its work became complementary to CMS. Much of the bitterness was forgotten, but the question about the nature and extent of biblical authority still lurked in the background.23

An important aspect of mission and the evangelical revival is its voluntary nature. The labors of the Clapham Sect, the rise of CMS, and other features of the revival can perhaps best be described as expressions of a voluntary movement of Christians concerned for justice and freedom—for instance, with regard to slavery and the working conditions of men, women, and children—but also for bringing the gospel to people both at home and abroad. The CMS was always keen to emphasize the “Church” aspect of its identity, and the wider church’s approval is shown by the fact that, throughout the nineteenth century, more and more bishops agreed to become vice-presidents of the society.24 At the same time, CMS and other organizations also wished to affirm the voluntary nature of their calling, which distinguished them from, for example, the high church SPG, which had been established by convocation and by royal charter. At a time when institutional provision seems to be failing the church, the idea of men and women being called by God for mission and ministry is becoming attractive once again. It is very instructive, in this context, to consider the history of voluntary movements in the Anglican Communion and the wider church.

The older missionary societies, SPCK and SPG, were founded on high church (rather than CMS “Church”) principles; but, as Bishop Neill points out, until 1861 they had no scruples over employing non-episcopally ordained German Lutherans to minister according to the Anglican rite in the areas of their mission activity.25 This would not be possible after the Tractarian movement began in the Church of England.

One of its more recent historians, Bishop John Davies, comments that mission was not, at first, a priority for the leaders and thinkers of the Oxford movement. They were more concerned with questions about the nature of the church and its relations with the state, and with the sacraments and the ministry that made them possible. Already in the early period, however, leaders like Hurrell Froude and John Henry Newman were becoming attracted to the idea of being missionary bishops abroad where they could develop their ideas about the church and its oversight free of what they regarded as the Erastian constraints of England.26

The real catalyst was David Livingstone’s speech at the Senate House in Cambridge in 1857. Among other things, it led to the formation of the Universities Mission to Central Africa. It is, indeed, remarkable that such an Anglo-Catholic mission should have begun under the inspiration of, and with the actual assistance of, a Scottish Congregationalist. The mission was, from the beginning, characterized by an emphasis on missionary bishops and on seeing the church as, first and foremost, a spiritual society. It was active against slavery and, as Neill reminds us in his book on Anglicanism, no one can fail to be moved when they see the cathedral in Zanzibar built on the very site of the old slave market with its sanctuary where the whipping post had been. It is interesting to note, in this context, that the first African to be ordained as a result of the mission’s work was a former slave of the Sultan of Zanzibar.27

The SPG was also gradually “catholicized” and became, in many ways, characteristic of Catholic Anglican mission values. The merger of the two societies in 1965 to form the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel can be seen as a kind of watershed in the story of Anglican Catholic mission. In 2015, to reflect its commitment to mission as partnership and evangelism as inclusion, the organization changed the meaning of its acronym to stand for United Society Partners in the Gospel.

In summary, then, Anglicanism became a worldwide communion in at least three quite distinct ways. First, it spread coincidentally (in the strict sense of that term) alongside the movements of English-speaking peoples across the world: into the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. As these people went to new lands, they took their church with them. Not only were buildings and architecture transplanted, but also ways of worship, styles of church government, the temper of pastoral care, and so on. In some parts of the world, the tendency to replicate what was at “home” was more pronounced than in others; but, on the whole, this kind of Anglicanism looked much like its mother, the Church of England, even when events like the American Revolution modified some of its features.

Second, another great force was evangelical revival and the birth of societies like the CMS and Church’s Ministry among the Jewish People, and the participation of Anglicans in interdenominational ventures, such as the British and Foreign Bible Society. The emphasis here was on personal conversion, the planting of Christian communities, and the centrality of the Word of God. Church order was deemed secondary and was to follow the establishing of churches through proclamation. The aim was that these should be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating.28 Evangelical Anglicans were willing to enter into “comity” arrangements with non-Episcopal churches, and these arrangements still determine the ecclesiastical map of many countries in Africa and elsewhere.29 They also became the occasion for discussions about greater Christian unity and led, in some places, to schemes for united churches.

Third, the Anglican Catholic missions like SPG and the Universities Mission to Central Africa sought to promote a more distinctly spiritual, high church understanding of Anglicanism. In contradistinction to the evangelicals, these societies were concerned to uphold the distinctiveness of Anglican church order and tended to see world mission as a way of establishing authentic “catholic” order in the unambiguous way that was not possible in the established church back in England. Their concern for the church’s freedom and their belief that it was primarily a spiritual society had led Anglo-Catholics from the very beginning to be suspicious of, even hostile to, the establishment of the Church of England as the official state religion.30

Traditions of Dissent from the State in Anglicanism

Thus, from its earliest days, the Ecclesia Anglicana has had two ecclesiological streams: the church as a community formed from the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ versus the church as a set of distinctly sacred institutional structures centered on its bishops who represent an unbroken chain of authority and empowerment traceable back to Christ’s apostles. The English Reformers favored the former understanding, choosing to merge the structures of the church with those of the secular government for the sake of the Christian message’s more thorough enculturation in English society, though this did not deny the apostolic foundation of the church. Later high church Anglicans felt increasingly uncomfortable with this understanding. They sought to reinterpret the Church of England as a divinely instituted sacred society, separate and distinct from the secular government and society it sought to serve.

Despite the Reformers’ intention of promoting revolutionary change through establishment, it cannot be denied that the Church of England’s relation to the state has often encouraged a theology and praxis that legitimizes the status quo. There are, undoubtedly, those in both