The Anglican Communion: Idea, Name and Identity

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, the idea that the United Church of England and Ireland (with the ‘Colonial Church’), the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA belonged to each other was (in England at least) a belief advocated by high-churchmen, not an established fact. Their ministries were not interchangeable. The article first traces the growth of the view that they were or should be branches of one communion. The second part surveys the variety of names used for this communion in the earlier nineteenth century. It records use of the name ‘Anglican Communion’ in the modern sense in 1847—more than three years earlier than previously known. Finally, reasons are suggested why the terms ‘Anglican’ and ‘Anglican Communion’ are not found in the Church of England's formal expressions of identity. One is the Church of England's reluctance to view itself as a denomination with a particular (‘Anglican’) identity. Mid-twentieth-century statements to this effect are recorded and defended against more recent criticism; indeed, the author agrees with Michael Ramsey in placing a question mark against the very concept of ‘Anglicanism’. References to the provisionality of the Anglican Communion—most recently by Archbishop Runcie—are cited with approval.