An Evangelical Critique of Authority in the Anglican Communion (1987)

Quotations from the book are given in their original English. Page numbers in brackets refer to the printed edition.

While reading about Anglican identity I came across this book, and I would like to share with you what I discovered. What I found in its pages is at once deeply illuminating and deeply unsettling. Illuminating, because it explains, in its own authors’ words, how we arrived at the situation in which the Anglican Communion finds itself today. Unsettling, because it shows that, forty years ago, many of its leaders were already comfortable with a Church without authority.

I. The Book

In 1987 the English theologian Stephen Sykes, later Bishop of Ely, brought together fifteen theologians and bishops to answer, ahead of the 1988 Lambeth Conference, a question that Anglicanism could no longer avoid: who decides in the Anglican Communion?

The answer the book gives, almost unanimously, rests on a Lambeth report of 1948. According to that report, Anglican authority is ‘moral and spiritual’, resting on ‘a charity which is patient and willing to defer to the common mind’. It therefore rejects ‘centralized government’ and ‘a legal basis of union’ (p. 284). Authority is ‘dispersed’ among Scripture, Tradition, the Creeds, the ministry, the saints and the consensus of the faithful, elements which ‘combine, interact with, and check each other’ (p. 285).

The essays develop this idea in three directions:

• Authority is understood as service and ‘nurture’, never as coercion (Skinner, p. 35; Scott, p. 67).
• No common body may legislate: Lambeth, the Consultative Council and the Primates may only advise (p. 146). Canterbury has no juridical authority over anyone (p. 191).
• Looking ahead, the book turns towards dialogue with Rome and towards an authority that depends on ‘reception’ by the whole Church (p. 227).

II. Comfortable without Binding Authority

The first thing that strikes the reader, forty years on, is the complacency. The book does not lament that the Communion lacks authority; it celebrates it. The 1948 report concedes that this kind of authority is ‘much harder to understand and obey than authority of a more imperious character’, and adds: ‘This is true and we glory in the appeal which it makes to faith’ (p. 285). What ought to be seen as a problem is presented as a spiritual virtue.

The authors themselves acknowledge the consequences without alarm:

Gavin White concludes that, of the Communion’s bodies, ‘it cannot be said that any of them has authority or is likely to have authority’ (p. 213). He considers ‘the care of all the churches’ sufficient (p. 218).

McAdoo accepts that ‘going it alone’ is ‘the legislative prerogative of each General Synod’ (p. 75). He asks only that it go hand in hand with ‘love of the brethren’.

Sykes acknowledges that the Communion, or any one province of it, appears to be ‘simply too small a unit’ to decide controversial questions (p. 17).

In other words, the book describes a Church that cannot decide, does not wish to decide and does not believe itself capable of deciding. And this is presented as the distinctive mark of Anglicanism.

III. The Roman Option: a Door No One Intended to Walk Through

Faced with this vacuum, the only horizon the book dares to imagine is Rome. J. Robert Wright argues that a universal primacy of the Bishop of Rome ‘should be acceptable to most Anglicans’ (p. 245). Yet in the pages that follow he dismantles everything such a primacy might mean in practice:

Anglicans would not accept the Pope appointing their bishops (p. 249).

They would not accept his universal jurisdiction so long as he could issue demands ‘regardless of the sentiments of the church in a particular region of the world’ (p. 252). His example is the Pope’s opposition to the ordination of women.

If this is papal divine right, he writes, ‘I must reply that Anglicans cannot accept it’ (p. 247).

Nor do they accept that the Pope’s decisions can be assured before the faithful have received them (p. 256).

What remains is a primacy that does not bind: a Pope who would be obeyed only when he said what we already think. This is no solution to the problem of authority; it is the same problem relocated to Rome. The Anglicanism of this book rejects authority both from within and from without. Its one constant is that no one may bind the conscience of a province.

IV. They Speak of Anglicanism, but Hollow It Out

The book speaks of Anglicanism on every page, yet it abandons precisely what constituted it. Historic Anglicanism was not born without authority. It was born with a very clear one:

Scripture as the supreme rule. According to Article VI, whatever cannot be proved by it may not be required as an article of faith. Sykes himself recalls this (p. 15).

A Church subject to the Word. Article XX states that the Church may not ordain anything contrary to God’s Word written. Articles XIX and XXI teach that churches and councils can err.

Formularies that expressed that faith: the Thirty-nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal.

That is what united Anglicans. Not affection, nor succession, nor Canterbury, but a common biblical confession.

The book records that all of this had already been set aside. The Articles held ‘only a marginal place’ in provincial constitutions (Thomas, p. 133). The Prayer Book had ceased to be a common standard (White, p. 218). Scripture becomes one more item in a list of six that ‘check each other’, to be ‘continually interpreted in the context of the Church’s life’ (p. 285). Once Scripture can be corrected by Tradition, consensus or ‘reception’, it no longer governs: it is governed.

Sykes describes the result with remarkable candour. To hold together, Anglicans are ‘virtually compelled to celebrate the bare fact of orderly succession, even in the absence of any single (or coherent) theory about the apostolic office’ (p. 270). What remains is the episcopal form, emptied of shared doctrinal content. That is not a way of being Anglican. It is what is left when Anglicanism has dissolved.

Most telling of all is the distrust of doctrinal firmness. Skinner, in the essay that opens the theological section, declares that ‘Rigid fundamentalism is an ideological posture of the worst possible type’ (p. 29). The book is willing to talk with everyone, yet treats as suspect anyone who holds that the Bible says something clear and binding.

Paradoxically, the book does contain the right answer, though it leaves it at the margins. Craston expounds P. T. Forsyth, a Congregationalist: ‘If the Gospel of Christ’s grace is the one authority set up among men, the seat of that authority is the Bible, and the witness is the faithful Church’ (p. 59). That is the evangelical position. In this book it is one voice among many, not the foundation.

V. What the 1980s Sowed

The consequences were not long in coming:

Lambeth 1998 reaffirmed biblical teaching on sexuality in Resolution I.10, but had no means of enforcing it. The provinces that disagreed simply ignored it.

In 2003 the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated Gene Robinson as a bishop. It was precisely the ‘prerogative’ of going it alone that the book had accepted.

In 2023, after the Church of England approved blessings for same-sex couples, the provinces of the Global South ceased to recognise Canterbury as ‘first among equals’.

In October 2025, following the appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury, GAFCON declared that it would reorder the Communion with the Bible as its sole foundation.

In March 2026, in Abuja, Nigeria, GAFCON renamed itself the Global Anglican Communion and called for disengagement from Canterbury and from Lambeth.

The ‘moral’ authority of 1948 worked for as long as there was a moral consensus. Once that consensus disappeared, the charity ‘willing to defer to the common mind’ no longer had a common mind to defer to. And those who are now seeking to rebuild the Communion are doing so by returning to what the book relativised: Scripture and the Articles, as set out in the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008.

VI. Conclusion

Authority in the Anglican Communion is valuable because it is honest. It shows, in its own words, a generation of leaders at ease with a Church that never had to decide anything. That generation spoke of Rome with no intention of submitting, and spoke of Anglicanism while renouncing what made it Anglican.

To reject tyranny is biblical; to reject all authority is not. The Church of Christ is not held together by affection, diplomacy or empty succession, but by the Word of God, which judges bishops, synods and primates alike.

What this book could not name is what evangelical Anglicanism must recover: not a centre of power, but a rule of faith. Scripture, confessed in the Articles, prayed in the Book of Common Prayer and taught by a ministry subject to it. Without that there is no Communion, only an association of churches sharing a history and less and less of a faith.

Reference

Sykes, Stephen W., ed. Authority in the Anglican Communion: Essays Presented to Bishop John Howe. Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1987.