An Address by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church

You have to guess the year before you click the link–KSH

I need not, I think, expound to you what I mean by the Anglican Tradition: for it is what you mean by it also. It has its strong Catholic element–which emphasizes the historic continuity and organized life of the Church as the appointed channel of the Divine grace through creed, ministry, and sacraments. It has its strong Evangelical element, which emphasizes Gospel before Church, personal conversion before corporate expression of it, spiritual immediacy, the direct response to the Holy Spirit wherever He may breathe. It has its third strong element, not easy to give a name to, which acts as a watchdog of both the other elements, and brings into our tradition a special element of intellectual integrity, of sobriety and moderation of judgment, of moral earnestness–an element which is as aware of what we do not know as of what we do, which does not wish to go beyond the evidence but to judge all things with a large and reasonable charity.

No Anglican should be without something of these elements. But difference of emphasis does often lead to widely different results in the presentation and practice of our common faith. Therein is an apparent weakness. I would say that it is the real strength and glory and special responsibility of the Anglican Churches that they hold together these three elements in one fellowship without resort either to schism or suppression. For all these elements are essential parts of the Christian Faith already visible in the New Testament; they need each other for their own correction. While the frailty of man makes them centrifugal, the truth of Christ should hold them together in Him as their center. An Anglican, as it seems to me, is one who above all does not desire or wish that any one element shall part company with the others; that any one shall prevail over or suppress the others. He cannot be a partisan, in the sense of thinking he is right and the others are wrong. Rather it is part of his special profession a part which requires of him humility, patience, and a real cost in spiritual effort and discipline, to think of, to value, and to learn from the others, and never to push his own emphasis or preferences to a point which could unchurch his partners. I do not know whether the term “Central Churchman” is here a term of praise or abuse. Sometimes in England it is used to mean a person who believes and who does nothing very much. I would say that he is a man who is to be highly regarded. There is a center, in the Anglican tradition, where the various tensions within the thought and life of the Church come nearest to being harmonized in a full energy of utterance and witness to the truth of Christ and His Church. Because it exists, it is possible for varying emphases to coexist without breaking the fellowship but rather enriching it.

It is because we are by the grace of God what we are in the Anglican Communion that we have so important a part to play, as I think, in the difficult field of reunion. I read in a book on religion in America that America thinks of the problem as one not so much of “reunion” as of “union.” In this country, it was said there never has been a Church visibly one; so the question is seen as one of creating what has never been rather than of recreating what has been lost. But in the Episcopal Church the historic sense is, I am sure, strong enough to make the term “reunion” right. For we have in our bones the memory of the Church which preceded all the divisions of it, the Church as it sprang from Christ on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets. It is that unity we desire, not to be made by us, but to be recovered from Christ Who made it first and wills it still.

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