Anglicans and Reunion
Christian Unity : the Anglican Position. By G. K. A. Bell, Bishop of Chichester. (Hodder and Stoughton. 6s.) IT is instructive, as it is inevitable, to compare the lectures delivered in Upsala on the Olaus Petri foundation by the Bishop of Chichester in October, 1946, with those delivered on the same foundation by Bishop Hensley Henson in September, 192o. Dr. Bell's style may be described as workmanlike ; it admits of such a phrase as "Anglican practice varied about receiving Holy Communion in foreign churches " ; it makes no effort to compete with Dr. Henson's fastidious and lapidary prose. Both lectures display a refreshing erudition. But it is significant that whereas Dr. Henson's object was to assist Swedish students to understand " the highly perplexing phenomenon which is called Anglicanism," and to note and weigh the influences by which modern Anglicanism has been shaped and coloured (for " apart from the history the subject is wholly un- intelligible, and yet it is precisely this history which is commonly ignored, or concealed, or misrepresented "), the purpose of Dr. Bell is to provide within the compass of a single volume a conspectus of " some of the fundamental facts in the relationship of the Church of England to other Christian Churches, from the Reformation to the present day." It is true indeed that Christian Unity begins with a chapter on The Wisdom of the Church of England, and also that Anglicanism touched more than once upon the problems of Reunion. But the essential difference, which cannot fail to be observed, is that Christian Unity has been written in the context of the Oecumenical Movement, as Anglicanism was not.
There had been the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh (1910), closely followed by the inauguration of the Faith and Order Movement ; and, as Dr. Bell points out, the report of the Lambeth Conference of 1908 contains " the germ of the South India proposal." But, beyond dealing, as he was bound to deal, with the appeal to all Christian people issued by the Lambeth Conference of 1920, Dr. Henson failed to discern the signs of the times. For this he is hardly to be blamed ; events have moved very rapidly since he wrote, and the changed perspective was perhaps for the first time authorita- tively disclosed to the Church of England in 1937, when Archbishop Lang described the Oecumenical movement as "a wholly new fact in Christian history." Since the sixteenth century, the Anglican communion has taken " a rather specially active part in movements for reunion." Being in a peculiar sense at once Catholic and evan- gelical, the Church of England is favourably situated for appreciating both the Catholic and the Protestant Churches, and even speaking to them both at the same time. Moreover, it has never suffered, even under persecution, from that inferiority complex under which the Roman Catholic body in this country so evidently labours ; and therefore the genius of the Church of England has always been in- hospitable to the sectarian temper. If we have ever produced a Margaret Clitheroe we save been careful not to advertise the fact. But it would be rash to deduce from this that the Anglican piety is indifferent to church order.
As the editor of Documents on Christian Unity : 1920-1948, of which the third series has just been published, the Bishop of
Chichester speaks with a knowledge of the field which is incompar- able, at least in the Anglican communion. His pages are a repository of information covering every aspect of the subject and presented with a judicial objectivity. It may be objected that his treatment of some not unimportant topics, such as the Jerusalem Bishopric (1841) and the Kikuyu Incident (1918), is unduly compressed.' But it would be ungrateful to press such criticisms against a manual of less than two hundred pages. Moreover, the value of his work is greatly enhanced by the fact that, while achieving a marvellous degree of objectivity in the selection and presentation of its material, at the same time it avoids that frigid and deliberate impersonality which chills the reader's marrow. On more than one occasion the author takes his public into his confidence, indicating where he believes tactical mistakes to have been made, or running up a danger-signal, or drawing on his personal recollections of the wary statesmanship of Archbishop Davidson.
The Bishop endorses the statement of Archbishop William Temple that "we shall impoverish our service of the wider fellow- ship if we let our membership of our own communion become hesitant or indefinite " ; and he agrees with Mr. T. S. Eliot that " it would be very poor statesmanship indeed to envisage any reunion which should not fall ultimately within a scheme for complete, re- union." His book proves that it is possible to take long views with- out necessarily selling any passes. What Burke described as a " degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts and little fallacious facilities " is as much the bane of ecclesiastical as of political states- manship, however presumptuously disguised as " the unfettered guidance of the Holy Spirit." It is however permissible to regret that in the section dealing with the conferences between representa- tives of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland (1932-34), Dr. Bell omits to mention the existence of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. Some Anglicans seem to regard the Church in Scotland in no other light than as a tiresome obstacle to reunion with the Presbyterians. The Bishop of Chichester is not, indeed, of this number, but the position should always be made quite clear beyond the possibility of any misunderstanding on that subject. Nor, in the chapter on relations with the Roman Catholic Church, is there any.mention of the Church of Ireland, although the whole Anglican Communion in its Catholic aspect may have reason to thank God for the presence of the Irish bishops at the Lambeth Conference of 1948. It is a characteristic defect of much modern Anglican eccle- siastical statesmanship of the liberal and forward-thinking kind that its charity begins either at home or at a considerable distance.
With these reservations, Dr. Bell's survey of the Anglican position in regard to other Churches, episcopal and non-episcopal, abroad and at home, is as masterly as it is comprehensive, and as fair-minded as it is judicious. It will be found indispensable by all who are in- terested in the subject. Briefly and in conclusion, the Bishop points to the possibility and to the necessity, outside the dogmatic field, of practical co-operation between the Churches in face of the
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