A note about authority

Some comments to last week's post about a shattered (?) Communion raised questions about how Anglicans understand "authority" (i.e. authority in relation to what we believe and to what we should not be believing, if we wish to continue to claim to be truly, genuinely Anglican).

This post is not any kind of attempt at a definitive answer to such questions but I offer a few thoughts or three.

1. I am not hugely interested in whether we have a notion of authority which deals to outliers among the bishops and eccentrics among the theologians. Embarrassing and difficult though these Anglican brothers and sisters have been and are, they have never represented some kind of highway to the future and trying to impose an authority-and-discipline structure on them sometimes was, or would have been debilitating. I would rather put my energies into teaching and training and forming spiritual and theological leaders among us who joyfully adhere to the creeds and the proclamation of Scripture.

2. I am hugely interested in what Christians believe "en masse" and what shifts in those beliefs we can discern as time marches on. Put in slightly different words, what use is an authority structure for belief if God's people do not subscribe to it? The "consensus fidelium" matters - what is it that we commonly sense matters or does not matter, should believe and act on or quietly refuse to believe and thus not act on? (I am also less than convinced that if only we in positions to teach the faith did a better job we would arrest all shifts in the consensus fidelium.)

3. I suggest one outstanding modern example of a belief with an authority structure behind it but not much influence on the actual lives of the people of God (i.e. the people of God who identify as Catholic) is Humanae Vitae in respect of use of artificial contraception.

4. I suggest the outstanding, all-time example for Christians of a shift in belief, without the authority of the church driving that shift forward is our attitude to slavery. Once accepted. Then debated. Then abolished. And not to be restored.

5. Anglicans may or may not have enough authority (and, sure, definitely do not, compared with the Roman Catholic church) but we are managing some changes in belief (best example, I think, is ordination of women) which have been and are a lead to other churches (as, indeed, other churches got there first before the first Anglicans did).

6. Where we go with the common sense of the people of God does need to match in some way or another with Scripture (which is a continuing authority in the life of God's people, on any account of authority). Abolishing slavery may not have been driven forward by reading the Bible on slavery, but it is not against the Bible to have done so - it is "with" the Bible on questions of human dignity, justice and mercy.* The ordination of women to be deacons, priests/presbyters and bishops may not square with one particular text, 1 Timothy 2:11-15, but it does square with Jesus' attitude to women, especially in John's Gospel.

7. On the question of women in the church, might we all, across all denominations, acknowledge that the tradition of the church includes the most appalling things the Church Fathers said about women, and if we are not ever again going to subscribe to those deprecations of women, might it be fair to ask whether we need to continue to subscribe to the traditions they fostered about male-only ordination?

Tertullian offers a mild example: "“Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil’s gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die.”"

That is enough for now. Somehow Tertullian escaped censure and so, I hope, will I!

*In the end, if there is change across the church on a wider scale than at present about same sex partnerships, it will involve squaring with Scripture that such change squares with what Scripture says about human dignity, justice and mercy.

Shattered Communion? Repaired with new ecclesial superglue?

On the one hand [this week's news] ... the shattered Anglican Communion is once again shattered, this time by news that the new Archbishop of Wales is a woman in a partnership with a woman. Thinking Anglicans report here. The Other Cheek has comment here, including these thoughts:

"The Christians who believe that partnered gay and lesbian people should be treated equally with all others in the church will see a glass archiepiscopal ceiling being shattered – Vann is the first openly gay woman to head a province (national church) in the Anglican communion. They will sympathise with Vann’s three decades of secret keeping.

Evangelicals and others will also have seen a shattering – a further shattering of the Anglican Communion itself. For example, Sydney’s Archbishop Kanishka Raffel describes Vann’s election as “a grievous departure from the teaching of the Bible, inconsistent with the understanding of marriage as expressed in the formularies of the Anglican Church, and a tragic rejection of the words of Jesus.” Some theological conservatives will see the secret relationship as concealment."

On the other hand [not this week's news, but I did notice a mention of it] ... a new way to be the Communion - via a new leadership model for the Communion ... if the Communion is again "shattered", might we ask, "Is this the ecclesial superglue to hold us together albeit as a patched up, fracture lines showing where the glue re-joins us Communion?"

The key proposal here has been made by IASCUFO (Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order), see, e.g. report here, and the most recent guide to a recitation of its strengths/weaknesses that I can find on the internet is this round up of articles, published 2 June 2025, by The Living Church (i.e. listing articles published by this journal earlier in the year). From the IASCUFO report itself, when all the fine and necessary words are said about the theology of our life together as global Anglicans, we get this proposal:

"The second proposal suggests broadening how the meetings of the Instruments of Communion are called, convened, chaired, and presided over, in order to diversify the face of the Instruments of Communion. We propose (a) a rotating presidency of the Anglican Consultative Council between the five regions of the Communion, elected from the membership of the Primates’ Meeting by the same; and (b) an enhanced role for the Primates’ Standing Committee in the calling and convening of both Primates’ Meetings and the Lambeth Conference. Ceding the expectation that the Archbishop of Canterbury convenes and presides at all meetings of the Communion will enable the personal and pastoral aspects of the archbishop’s ministry to be given and received, and fits with the identity and ideals of the Anglican Communion in a post-colonial era. The leadership of the Communion should look like the Communion." 

This paragraph boils down to six words about possible change to Communion leadership: diminished role for Archbishop of Canterbury.

Is this a way forward to "mend the nets", to superglue shattered pieces of previously united pottery together? This is a genuine question since the intent is to find a new way forward for the life of the Communion but I have seen (e.g. GAFCON) criticism of the proposal; and - speaking for myself - I am not keen on a diminishment of the ABC's role in the Communion.

Back to the first part of the post, and this week's Welsh news. 

One thought has struck me: if such an appointment is "unconstitutional" for the Communion (against Scripture etc), is it time to look more creatively-theologically (than, e.g., ++Sydney has done) at how we treat those who (so to speak) are not constituted in their humanity to enter into heterosexual marriage?

Another thought is this: the issue of being shattered or repaired continues to be our capacity to accept there might be two reasonable, plausible, Christ-based-compassionate views on the matters homosexuality as a human phenomenon raises for Christians, held within a Communion which previously has demonstrated extraordinary capacity to hold two differing views in the one fellowship.

Addendum: As it happens, not long after composing the above paragraph, The Other Cheek reports on and discusses a couple of non-Anglican situations in Australia where some kind of "two integrities" challenge is being worked on - I post the link here without further comment on whether or not any other church Down Under is going about things in a helpful way.

John Henry Newman - Doctor of the Church

John Newman (1801-1890) - St. John Newman - is an interesting figure for Anglicans to reflect on, and this week he prompts a bit of reflection because a few days ago Pope Leo XIV has announced that John Newman - made a Cardinal by Leo XIII - is to be deemed a "doctor of the church" - a teacher of the highest rank, in other words.

Naturally it is not for an Anglican to comment on whether John Newman should or should not have received this accolade, but from afar there are a few observations to be made.

First, there is an Anglican kind of question which - with tongue slightly but not completely in cheek - asks whether John Newman was a doctor of the church when he was an Anglican priest, leading the then charge within the CofE to develop the catholic nature of the CofE, with vigorous writing of Tracts which sought to challenge some of the prevailing thinking of the CofE which, in summary, the Tractarians (Newman was not alone) saw as too much "Reformed" and not nearly enough "and Catholic."

Secondly, once Newman became a Catholic and then Catholic priest (1845), he undoubtedly contributed to Roman Catholic theology, and in doing so became one of a relatively small group of English Catholic theologians of note through the past 2000 years. His canonization and now naming as a doctor of the church will be of great encouragement to English Catholics.

Thirdly, we who lean to the evangelical side of being Anglican might take note of this paragraph in John Newman's Wikipedia entry:

"Although to the end of his life, Newman looked back on his conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 1816 as the saving of his soul, he began to shift away from his early Calvinism. As Eamon Duffy puts it, "He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church's role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism."^[37]"

Fourthly, if you can make head or tale of these paragraphs about Newman, from First Things, then let us know in the comments:

"Rather than single out any particular contribution, I would point out that key ideas such as conscience, development, education, and the rival claims of faith and reason weave in and out of all Newman’s writings. It is as if he views reality in myriad ways in seeking to piece together the jigsaw of creation (and its Creator). He views reality in a highly intuitive manner and excels at holding disparate truths together in creative tension. It could be said that his approach to discerning truth is both East and West, and that it draws on both the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition as well as the continental. 

This amounts to a new way of viewing the world. It brings in the religious imagination, sacramental vision, the personal, subjective, relational, and existential, in contradistinction to approaches that privilege the objective, systematic, and the scholastic—and which thereby complement the thinking of, inter alia, the Angelic Doctor."

There is nothing distinctively Catholic about Newman - if this is indeed his mode of thinking and arguing - and it seems like some kind of confusing approach to theology!

Fifthly, and finally, Newman is a most intriguing Catholic theologian because of a notion associated with him and often commented on, "the development of doctrine," defined in the Wikipedia article at that link in this way:

"Development of doctrine is a term used by John Henry Newman and other theologians influenced by him to describe the way Catholic teaching has become more detailed and explicit over the centuries, while later statements of doctrine remain consistent with earlier statements."

Now, there is a lot going on in this conception of (shall we say) progress and change (which may not be actual change) of doctrine. Clearly some mischief could be made from it ("No, we haven't changed the doctrine, we have just developed it") and that mischief could be at the hands of Catholic and Protestant theologians. Clearly also, there is not time in my life to (er) develop a detailed response to this concept. Suffice to say, here, that making John Newman a doctor of the church, is fascinating and may be especially so some 200 years hence - should the Lord tarry, and I pray that He will not - when we find there is something going on in development [change???] of doctrine and Newman is invoked ...