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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
The present situation of global Anglicanism sharply highlights issues of plurality which have been created in part by the nature of the tradition and also by the history of its expansion. Plurality and difference inevitably call for some account of this in relation to the tradition. Recent work has often focused on koinonia as a way of dealing with the relationships involved in the church community. But many of our problems arise from an absence of a capacity to require actions of others. A better way into this precisely institutional question is through Richard Hooker's discussion of power and order. Such a consideration leads to the need to develop more effective adjacent connections, and thus to a regionalizing of the communion.
1. In Sydney the Archbishop is chair of the Synod and of the Standing Committee. The Standing Committee has the powers of the synod in between meetings of the Synod. The Standing Committee has the power here. In Melbourne the archbishop presides at the Synod. He chairs an Archbishop in Council which has little power and is fundamentally a consultative body to advise the archbishop on any matter on which he cares to consult them. The archbishop is the authority here and is a complete institutional entity in himself.
2. I have explored some reasons for the value of Anglicanism within the broader spectrum of Christianity in Reinventing Anglicanism: A Vision of Confidence, Community and Engagement in Anglican Christianity (Adelaide: Openbook, 2003).Google Scholar
3. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Opening Address, The Truth Shall Make You Free (London: Church House Publishing), p. 15.Google Scholar
4. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Opening Address, p. 16.
5. See the essays in Sykes, S., Unashamed Anglicanism (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1995).Google Scholar
6. Sachs, W.L., The Transformation of Anglicanism: From State Church to Global Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7. Tillard, J.-M., Church of the Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Markey, J.L., Creating Communion: The Theology of the Constitutions of the Church (New York: New City Press, 2003).Google Scholar
8. See Went, J., ‘Koinonia: A Significant Milestone on the Road to Unity’, One in Christ 32 (1996), pp. 22–39Google Scholar; WCC, ‘“Towards Koinonia in Faith, Life and Witness”: Faith and Order’s Dublin Text, April 1992’, One in Christ 28 (1992), pp. 357–86Google Scholar; and Sagovsky, N., Ecumenism, Christian Origins and the Practice of Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. See Kaye, B., ‘Unity in the Anglican Communion: A Critique of the “Virginia Report”’, St Mark’s Review 184 (2001), pp. 24–31.Google Scholar
10. In thinking about this topic I have been especially helped by the work of Conal Condren, Alistair MacIntyre and Nillkas Luhmann. See Condren, C., The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and on the History of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; George Lawson's Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and ‘The Creation of Richard Hooker’s Public Authority: Rhetoric, Reputation and Reassessment’, JRH 21.1 (1997), pp. 35–59Google Scholar; MacIntyre, A.C., Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Luhmann, N., Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
11. See Gascoigne, J., ‘The Unity of Church and State Challenged: Responses to Hooker from the Restoration to the Nineteenth-Century Age of Reform’, JRH 21.1 (1997), pp. 60–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gascoigne, J., ‘Church and State Unified: Hooker's Rationale for the English Post-Reformation Order’, JRH 21.1 (1997), pp. 23–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12. McGrade, A., ‘Introduction to Book VIII’, in Hill, W.E. Speed (ed.), The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (7 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; and Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993), VI, p. 359.Google Scholar
13. Hill, Speed (ed.), The Folger Library Edition, III, p. 331 (Book 8.2.1).Google Scholar
14. For example in Fortescue, J. and Lockwood, S., Sir John Fortescue: On the Laws and Governance of England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1460]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15. See Grislis, E., ‘The Role of Consensus in Richard Hooker’s Theological Enquiry’, in Cushman, E. RE and Grislis, E. (eds.), The Heritage of Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of Robert Lowry Calhoun (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).Google Scholar
16. See Hooker, , Works.Google Scholar The text is famously quoted in the Bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII, though there it is used to justify papal superiority over the secular [Philip the Fair of France] ‘For, according to the Blessed Dionysius, it is a law of the divinity that the lowest things reach the highest place by intermediaries. Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back to order equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary, and the inferior by the superior. Hence we must recognize the more clearly that spiritual power surpasses in dignity and in nobility any temporal power whatever, as spiritual things surpass the temporal’. See David Luscombe, ‘The “Lex Divinitatis” in the Bull “Unam Sanctam” of Pope Boniface VIII’, in Brooke, C.N.L., Luscombe, D.H., Martin, G.H. and Owen, D. (eds.), Church and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to C.R. Cheney on his 70th Birthday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 205–21Google Scholar. Hooker, on the other hand, uses the text, whose authenticity he seems not to question, to argue for the coherence of the whole.
17. Lawes 8.3.3–4 (Folger edn, III, pp. 353–54).Google Scholar
18. Lawes 8.3.5 (Folger edn, III, p. 355).Google Scholar
19. See Runcie, , The Archbishop of Canterbury's Opening Address, pp. 13–14.Google Scholar
20. See Kaye, B., ‘Classical Anglicanism: A Necessary and Valuable Point of Reference’, Reformed Theological Review 56 (1997), pp. 28–39.Google Scholar
