The Basis of Anglican Fellowship: Some Challenges for Today

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines a central concern for the Anglican Communion, namely how a Communion without a strong central authority structure can maintain its unity in the face of potentially church-dividing issues. At present the major such issue relates to human sexuality, but the underlying problem itself is not new, and the article draws a parallel with the Kikuyu controversy of 1913 and subsequent years. The author questions the customary practice of beginning from a universal doctrine of the Church and seeing it as ‘translated’ or ‘inculturated’ into a diversity of contexts. He argues that the New Testament pattern is different. There, the experience of a variety of local churches is the starting point. Drawing on the terminology of the political philosopher Michael Walzer, he designates the local embodiment of the Church as ‘thick’ and its universal expression as ‘thin’. The concrete local embodiments of the Church should be our conceptual starting point, not an idealized picture of the Church universal.

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