SCM Research

Authority and Polity in the Anglican Communion

Alexander Ross

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780334059325
• eBook ISBN: 9780334059349
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

"A Still More Excellent Way" presents a comprehensive account of the development and nature of metropolitical authority and the place of the 'province' within Anglican polity, with an emphasis on the contemporary question of how international Anglicanism is to be imagined and take shape. The first comprehensive historical examination of the development of metropolitical authority and provincial polity within international Anglicanism, the book offers hope to those wearied by the deadlock and frustration around questions of authority which have dogged Anglicanism.

Part One
The Pedigree of a Polity

The use of the term province for the member bodies of the Communion seems to have crept into Anglican discourse partly by accident. In Anglican ecclesiology the so-called provinces are more properly understood as churches. There are exceptions and anomalies: there are provinces that are made up of more than one particular or national church; some churches consist of more than one province; and some member churches of the Communion are legally styled the Province, etc. Nevertheless, the important point is that they are churches, with all the privileges and responsibilities of churches.1

The province has crept, like a kind of ecclesiological critter, behind the Communion cupboard to nest in our Anglican polity. That, at least, seems to be the understanding of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO)’s summative report, Towards a Symphony of Instruments, as it attempts to account for the confusing and conflicting use of the term within Anglicanism, particularly since the rapid establishment and growth of provinces in the second half of the twentieth century. At the very least, this somewhat dismissive assessment of the province within Anglican polity highlights not only the confusion around which the term is used and understood, but also the contested nature of Anglican ecclesiology itself as it struggles to convincingly articulate and locate the relationship between its own structures with the correlating theological reality of the Christian ecclesia.

Through an exploration of the development of the province within ecclesiology, beginning with its relationship to the geographical demarcation of the Roman Empire and its gradual consolidation alongside the codification of metropolitical authority and culminating in a study of the development of a distinctly Anglican provincial polity through the long eighteenth century and colonial era, the following three chapters will demonstrate that the province has a greater pedigree within Anglican polity than IASCUFO imagines and that, while the use of the term has become confused, a rediscovery of our provincial polity would not only be beneficial for the future of Anglicanism but also faithful to its history and development.

Note

1. Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order 2012, para. 1.18.

1
‘A Glorious and Salutiferous Œconomy’: Provincial Polity Established

The origin of provincial boundaries and the locus of metropolitical authority developed in the Early Church largely alongside the pre-­existing political units of the late Roman Empire. During the Roman Tetrarchy, civil administrative provinces were subdivided into smaller units and organized under thirteen dioceses which themselves formed an intermediate level of governance below the Praetorian prefecture.1 These provincial boundaries were taken over into the ecclesiastical polity by the end of the fourth century, and the major dioceses were largely reflected in the development of patriarchates and exarchates.2

An interest in chronicling the development of this provincial polity within the Church, and its relationship to provincial boundaries in the late Roman Empire, was sparked in continental Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In particular this is illustrated in Charles Vialart’s 1641 Notitia Ecclesiae3 and Guido Pancirolus’ commentary on the fifth-century Roman manuscript, Notitia Dignitatum, which set out in detail the organizational units of the Roman Empire in both the East and West.4

This scholarship was taken up within England in the early eighteenth century. Roger Altham, Archdeacon of Middlesex, employs these sources in a vigorous defence of the harmony between civil and ecclesial polity in a published address to clergy attempting to establish that ‘Provincial Authority was the first Settled, External Authority in the Church of Christ.’5 The context for the Archdeacon’s addresses was the heated conflict at the time concerning the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority, following the deprivation of the nonjuring bishops after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the tumultuous controversy between the High Church and Erastian parties which was brought to a head in the Bangorian Controversy of 1716 to 1721.6

In his pamphlet Altham claims to be arguing for a mediating position between what he characterizes as, on the one side, the Erastian and Whig position, ‘that there are no Powers in the Church, but what are deriv’d to it by the Civil Authority,’ and on the other side the High Church Tory position espoused by the dismissed Convocations of Canterbury and York, which would not meet again until the mid-nineteenth century, that, as Altham asserts, ‘affirm such an independent Power to the Church as does necessarily interfere with the Divine Commission granted to the secular Magistrate.’7

As it turns out, Altham’s position is not a mediating one at all but comes down strictly in favour of the Erastian party. In support of this he makes the extraordinary claim that the purpose of the ‘glorious and salutiferous œconomy,’ a phrase he uses to refer to the Incarnation of Christ, was the reformation ‘of the Sacred Polity only,’ presumably meaning the prevailing structures of first-century Jewish authority and administration, so that it may be totally conformed to the civil administration of the Roman Empire by the establishment of a provincial polity.8 In pushing forward his argument, Altham draws heavily on both Pancirolus and Vialart, as well as the works of Italian Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and Archbishop of Paris Pierre de Marca.9

Joseph Bingham and the Origines Ecclesiasticae

However, the most comprehensive and significant account written in English of the development of provincial polity within the Ea...

Table of contents

• A Still More Excellent Way
• Contents
• Foreword
• Methodological Introduction
• Part One The Pedigree of a Polity
• 1 ‘A Glorious and Salutiferous Œconomy’: Provincial Polity Established
• 2 The Mean Between the Streams: Provincial Polity Adapted and Abolished
• 3 Colonial Communion: Provincial Polity Exported
• Part Two The National Church
• 4 ‘Contained’ or Compromised Catholicity: a Critique of the ‘National Church’
• 5 Independence or Interdependence: A Close Reading of Communion Constitutions
• Part Three The Rise of the Primates
• 6 Primus Inter Pares: All Bishops are Equal, but Some are More Equal than Others
• 7 ‘Leisurely thought, prayer and deep consultation’: The Primates’ Meetings
• Part Four Paradigm for Provincial Revival
• 8 The Anglican Church of Australia: ‘Microcosm’ or ‘Ecclesiastical Monstrosity’?
• 9 Provincial Possibilities: a Theological Reflection on the Potential of Provincial Polity
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index