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‘The Consent of the Faithful’ from 1 Clement to the Anglican Covenant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2012

Benjamin J. King
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Abstract

The origins of the term consensus fidelium lie in the rhetorical tropes of pagans who exhorted unity between friends and within cities – tropes supporting the hierarchy of imperial elites. The earliest Christians adapted this language for the same purpose within churches: to speak of unity and lay involvement in support of Church hierarchy. After the Reformation, Church of England writers used this rhetoric to enforce conformity to church polity and morality. The Tractarians and their successors employed a rhetorical ‘voice of the laity’ as a bolster for episcopal power. While the early twentieth century saw some in the Church of England and Anglican Communion use this same rhetoric to bring the laity into actual decision-making processes, the rhetoric of recent statements by the Communion has left power firmly with bishops.

Keywords

consensus fideliumAnglican CommunionlaityChurch FathersReformationOxford Movement
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , May 2014 , pp. 7 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2012 

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Footnotes

1.

The School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee, TN 37375, USA. I wish to thank my colleagues James Dunkly, Paul Holloway and Brown Patterson, and my student Joycelyn Stabler, for their help with this article. I am also grateful for the insights of Edmund Newey, of those who heard me present a version at the University of Heidelberg, and of an anonymous reviewer for JAS.

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42. Hooker, Laws, VIII.6.8 [Folger edition 6.7]: ‘till it be proved that some special law of Christ hath for ever annexed unto the clergy alone the power to make ecclesiastical laws, we are to hold it a thing most consonant with equity and reason, that no ecclesiastical laws be made in a Christian commonwealth, without consent as well of the laity as of the clergy, but least of all without consent of the highest power’.Google Scholar

43. The OED refers to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596): ‘That all the cares and euill which they meet, May … Seeme gainst common sence to them most sweet’ (IV, canto 10, stanza 2).Google Scholar

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45. Epilogue, I.3.20 (Thorndike, Works, II.1, p. 46), I.1.5 (p. 17). I.4.15 argues for the reasonable probability of revelation at the Council of Jerusalem (p. 70). Charles Miller has argued from phrases such as these for Thorndike's ‘common sense’ ecclesiology in The Doctrine of the Church in the Thought of Herbert Thorndike (DPhil. dissertation, Oxford, 1990), ch. 1.Google Scholar

46. Analogy, Intro[2] (1736) in The Works of Bishop Butler (ed. David E. White; Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), p. 151; henceforth Butler, Works.Google Scholar

47. Analogy, ii.6[.16]: ‘Common men, were they as much in earnest about religion as about their temporal affairs, are capable of being convinced, upon real evidence, that there is a God who governs the world; and they feel themselves to be of a moral nature; and accountable creatures. And as Christianity entirely falls in with this their natural sense of things; so they are capable, not only of being persuaded, but of being made to see, that there is evidence of miracles wrought in attestation of it [i.e. Christianity], and many appearing completions of prophecy’ (Butler, Works, p. 270); my italics.Google Scholar

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49. Epilogue, Book I, Preface, 10 (Thorndike, Works, II.1, p. 7).Google Scholar

50. This is the title of ch. 6 in Quantin, The Church of England.Google Scholar

51. Epilogue, Book I, Preface, 9 (Thorndike, Works, II.1, p. 7); my italics. Thorndike published a condensed form of the argument of Epilogue in 1662 called Just Weights and Measures writing in ch. 7.4: ‘go no further, than the consent of the Church will bear us out. For if we make new and private conceits of the Scripture, and the sense of it, [or] law to the Church, which we reform; we found a new Church upon that Christianity, which the only Church of God never owned’ (Thorndike, Works, V, p. 125).Google Scholar

52. ‘For inasmuch as the consensus of the faithful hands on the certain testimony of the Apostles concerning Christ, on the basis of the faithful let the Church for its part stand firm. It is manifest that it is with the Church as [their] author, and on the Church's authority, that the Scriptures are accepted as the Word of God’; Thorndike, De ratione ac iure (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1670), p. 80 (I owe this translation to Christopher Bryan and Christopher McDonough).Google Scholar

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54. Epilogue, I.8.17 (Thorndike, Works, II.1, p. 150).Google Scholar

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59. Just Weights and Measures, ch. 6.8 (Thorndike, Works, V, p. 117).Google Scholar

60. Just Weights and Measures, ch. 6.7 found patristic evidence that the English Church owed Rome the ‘respect which was owed to their mother-Church; but that they either owed it or shewed it the respect of a subject to a sovereign … none at all’ (Thorndike, Works, V, p. 116).Google Scholar

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63. ‘The conscience must be confident, and it must also have reason enough so to be: or at least, so much as can secure the confidence from illusion; although possibly the confidence may be greater than the evidence, and the conclusion bigger than the premises. Thus the good simple man that about the time of the Nicene council confuted the stubborn and subtle philosopher by a confident saying over his creed: and the holy and innocent idiot, or plain easy people of the laity, that cannot prove christianity by any demonstrations, but by that of a holy life, and obedience unto death’, Ductor Dubitantium, I.2 Rule 2.5 (Taylor, Works, IX, p. 52); Taylor also used the legend of the ‘simple good man’ and the Nicene Creed (from Sozomen, Hist. Eccl. 1.18; Socrates, Hist. Eccl. 1.8; Rufinus, Hist. Eccl. 1.3) in the sermon ‘Via Intelligentiae’ (Taylor, Works, VIII, p. 385).Google Scholar

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70. One of the first references in the OED came in a church context: ‘Bishop Colenso is … decidedly against what seems to be the consensus of the Protestant missionaries’; Saturday Review (London) 637, 21 December 1861.Google Scholar

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81. Keble, Letters of Spiritual Council and Guidance (ed. R.F. Wilson; Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 3rd edn, 1875), p. 297; this undated letter to an unnamed recipient cited approvingly Gladstone's A Letter to the Right Rev. William Skinner, D.D. on the Functions of Laymen in the Church (London: John Murray, 1852), pp. 34–35.Google Scholar

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85. Rackham, R.B., ‘The Position of the Laity in the Early Church’, in Douglas Eyre (ed.), Reform in the Church of England (London: John Murray, 1915), pp. 28–72, at pp. 28–29. Rackham was a member with Gore of the Community of the Resurrection.Google Scholar

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89. The 1902 report, it seems, responded to Rackham: ‘It was by natural process that the phrase “meetings of the brethren” grew into the form “meetings of the bishops,” without any necessarily sweeping change in the facts, certainly without any abandonment – far less deliberate reversal – of the original idea. The efforts of Cyprian to secure the co-operation of the laity, however interpreted in detail, seem to us to have their real strength in their correspondence with the original idea. But the attempt to include the laity, without any machinery of representation, was not likely to be permanently successful … The more autocratic development of episcopacy may itself, no doubt, represent some very valuable aspects of truth’; The Position of the Laity in the Church: Being the Report of the Joint Committee of the Convocation of Canterbury (1902) (repr. with intro. by Norman Sykes; London: Church Information Board, 1952), p. 17.Google Scholar

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91. 31 March 1900 to Prebendary (Villiers?) in B.J. Kidd (ed.), Selected Letters of William Bright, D.D. (London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1903), p. 313. The recipient is anonymous except for his title, but it would make sense if the recipient were his fellow Committee member at n. 84 above.Google Scholar

92. 31 March 1900 to same, quoting Leo, Letter 102 (Kidd, Selected Letters, p. 316).Google Scholar

93. 26 April 1900 to same (Kidd, Selected Letters, pp. 325–26).Google Scholar

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96. See Benjamin J. King, ‘Seeking Consensus within the Anglican Tradition: The Example of Charles Gore’, in Charles M. Stang and Zachary Guiliano (eds.), The Open Body: Essays on Anglican Ecclesiology (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 79–100.Google Scholar

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98. ‘The Authority of the Church’, in Selwyn, E.G., (ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical: By Members of the Anglican Communion (London: SPCK, 3rd edn, 1929), p. 113.Google Scholar

99. ‘Authority as a Ground of Belief’, in Selwyn, E.G., (ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical: By Members of the Anglican Communion (London: SPCK, 3rd edn, 1929), p. 96.Google Scholar

100. The Virginia Report: The Report of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (1997), 3.9.Google Scholar

101. The Lambeth Conference 1948: The Encyclical Letter from the Bishops; together with Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK, 1948), Pt. 2, pp. 84–85.Google Scholar

102. Lambeth Conference, Pt 2, p. 85; quoting the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine (of which Rawlinson was a member), Doctrine in the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1938), p. 35.Google Scholar

103. Virginia Report, 1.2: ‘From the earliest time in the history of the Christian community, an admonishing voice has been heard exhorting believers to maintain agreement with one another and thereby to avert divisions.… Nevertheless the controversies themselves were stages on a road towards greater consensus.’Google Scholar

104. Virginia Report, 3.51, which continues: ‘The emergence of the Lambeth Conference and more recently, the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council, together with the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, have become effective means … of binding the Anglican Communion together.’ The Windsor Report (2004), 98, called these four the ‘Instruments of Unity’; the Anglican Covenant calls them ‘Instruments of Communion’.Google Scholar

105. Virginia Report, 6.18. See also the bold claim at 6.20: ‘The bishops at Lambeth are to represent those who have no voice.’Google Scholar

106. Communion, Conflict and Hope: The Kuala Lumpur Report of the Third Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (2008), 18. My thanks to Christopher Wells for bringing this report to my attention.Google Scholar

107. Communion, Conflict and Hope, 17, 61.Google Scholar

108. Communion, Conflict and Hope, 113; also 123 rightly recognizes that ‘Talk of broken communion has often been a form of exchange to gain rhetorical advantage.’Google Scholar