THE QUESTION OF WHAT, if anything, holds together the Anglican Communion has recently become a painfully immediate one. The answer will take a fair amount of time to work out; and these essays are meant to suggest that any answer that is more than just a temporary political adjustment will need to reflect the lives and the ideas (and the prayers) of some of those who, for various reasons, are recognised as in some way credible representatives of Anglicanism over the centuries.

Anglicans have always been cautious about laying too much stress on formulae over and above the classical creeds; and that has proved both a strength and a weakness. A strength because it has at best focused attention on the fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy in a way that allows people to “inhabit” this tradition without too much defensive anxiety about contemporary battles; a weakness because this makes rather a lot depend on the capacity of individual theologians and teachers to orchestrate the central themes of the tradition in a satisfactory way at times when the lack of external norms and boundaries has become a serious worry.

It is not true that there is no distinctive Anglican doctrine. But the discovery of it may require some patience in reading and attending to a number of historical strands, in order to watch the way in which distinctiveness shows itself.

There is in the Anglican identity a strong element of awareness of the tragic, of the dark night and the frustration of theory and order by the strangeness of God’s work.

God does not belong in a limited area of human life; but one implication of this is that we do not find or identify God with ease. He may be encountered in any area of psychological experience or of political challenge. To recognise Him in these unexpected places we need, most certainly, a discipline of scriptural thinking, informed by all the resources that can be summoned in the intellectual sphere, and an inhabiting of the doctrinal tradition that reminds us again and again of what we are for as creators and as adopted children.

There is little here that can be quickly summarised as utterly and uniquely Anglican — these themes can be easily paralleled in Lutheran, continental Calvinist and Catholic sources. But perhaps there is a distinctive constellation in Anglican history: the Reformed Church of England emerges in revolt against a medieval map of the world in which the Church was in danger of becoming a political entity alongside others; it develops in tandem with a fantastically inventive period in the use of the English language, producing both a profusion of metaphor and a quick, critical sense of the possibilities and dangers of rhetoric; it discovers both a language for Scripture and a Scripture that shapes secular language, so that its biblical fidelity is deeply bound up with a feel for the riches and the traps of speech. The result is a mixture of poetry, reticence, humility before mystery, local loyalties and painful self-scrutinies. It is not a formula for being Anglican; simply a description of how and where some kind of recognisable historical identity came to exist.

Its future is of course unknown, and I have already foresworn any aim to provide a fresh rallying-point for Anglican identity. But perhaps there is one thing worth drawing out. The writers discussed here in their different ways are apologists for a theologically informed and spiritually sustained patience.

They do not expect human words to solve their problems rapidly, they do not expect the Bible to yield up its treasures overnight, they do not look for the triumphant march of an ecclesiastical institution.

This is an age dramatically impatient and intolerant of many sorts of learning; and the modern church is not exempt. Perhaps these “identities” may allow and encourage some readers a pause for mind and feeling to be reintroduced to “passionate patience”. Perhaps the Anglican vocation still has this to give to the world, Christian and otherwise.

CONTEMPLATIVE PRAGMATISM

Richard Hooker (1554-1600) was an Anglican divine who in his Treatise on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity justified episcopacy, opposed a literalist interpretation of Scripture and developed a theory of law that influences secular and ecclesiastical law to this day

HOOKER believed (injudiciously, in terms of his reputation and career) that Roman Catholics could go to Heaven; he believed this, so his notorious 1586 sermon explains, for what are in fact sound Protestant reasons.

In effect, he is perhaps the first major European theologian to assume that history, corporate and individual, matters for theology; and he is one of the inventors of that distinctive Anglican mood which I have elsewhere called “contemplative pragmatism” — a mood that embraces a fair degree of clarity about the final goal of human beings and the theological conditions for getting there, but allows room for a good deal of reticence as to how this ought to work itself out and scepticism as to claims that we have found comprehensive formulations.