Unashamed integrity: Stephen Sykes and the ‘crisis’ of Anglican ecclesiology and identity Jeremy Morris Stephen Sykes’s Integrity of Anglicanism was published in 1978, and had a convulsive effect on discussions of Anglican identity and ecclesiology. In prose that was spare and sometimes biting, it laid into a common Anglican apologetic style that had trumpeted the virtue of Anglican ‘comprehensiveness’ and had claimed a unique ecumenical advantage for the Anglican churches as a ‘bridge’ between Protestantism and Catholicism. Much of this traditional Anglican apologetic Sykes found muddled and complacent, and he appealed to Anglicans to take systematic theology seriously, and to attempt to articulate exactly what was distinctive about Anglican doctrine, and especially the Anglican doctrine of the Church. Appearing as it did in good time for the Lambeth Conference of 1978, the Integrity of Anglicanism sharply divided opinion, both then and since.1 This article is an attempt to re-read the book, and through it to re-evaluate Sykes’s view of Anglican identity. To do that it is necessary to broaden the analysis to encompass the whole context of Sykes’s life and work, including both his earlier work on Schleiermacher, and his later years writing as a bishop and as chairman of the Doctrine Commission. What emerges from this re-reading is an assessment of Anglicanism, I would argue, marked by four main emphases: first, an attempt to clarify the method and content of the ‘essence of Christianity’, with its 1 Sykes’s own diary of the 1978 Lambeth Conference at several points attests to the controversy the book caused; for example, of his first meeting with the other theological consultants, on the first day, he wrote: ‘Various remarks were made to me about my book. Hugh Melinsky says that he’s very angry – which he should be since it is unquestionably his kind of [‘theory’ crossed out] position which I find so infuriating’; S.W. Sykes, mss. diary of the Lambeth Conference 1978, currently in the possession of Dr M. Guite; I am hoping to publish this diary with annotations in the future. 1 implications for Anglicanism; second, a profound reflection on doctrine as ecclesial practice; third, a related preoccupation with conflict and power in Christian history; and fourth, a great affection for, and deep learning in, the riches of the Anglican theological tradition. These are, of course, not the only themes that could emerge from a review of Sykes’s theological writing: others that can only be alluded to here include his anatomy of theological liberalism, his ecumenical commitments, and his reflections on the nature ecclesiastical authority. The article falls into three main parts. First, it attempts to outline where I think ‘Anglican identity’, or rather Anglicanism as theologically conceived, had got to by the third quarter of the twentieth century, in order, second, to explore Sykes’s critique in a little more detail and assess the damage it inflicted on that well-established view. And then, third, I shall in turn develop a critique of Sykes’s articulation of Anglicanism, pointing out briefly where a fault-line opens up on closer inspection. In an all-too-brief conclusion I shall try to repair that fault-line, and suggest that Sykes himself later in life seems to have been moving towards a more historically-contingent view that implicitly stepped back somewhat from the bracing position of The Integrity of Anglicanism. 1: Anglicanism and Anglican identity in the mid-twentieth century2 In that book Sykes refers several times to a ‘crisis’ in Anglicanism, seeing it principally as a theological problem, bearing on a specific tradition of Anglican self- 2 This section draws at several points on my discussion of the historiography of Anglicanism in chapter 1, ‘The Historiography of Anglicanism’ in J. Morris (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, IV: Global Western Anglicanism, c.1910 – present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1-21. 2 understanding which, broadly, he labels as ‘comprehensiveness’. The first substantial chapter was actually titled ‘The crisis of Anglican comprehensiveness’. But rather than expound Sykes’s view first, and examine what he thought the nature of this ‘crisis’ might be, it is helpful to remind ourselves of just what passed for Anglican apologetic in the middle of the twentieth century. Three books appeared in the early 1960s that can stand as a convenient point of reference, William Wand’s Anglicanism in History and Today (1961), Charles Stranks’s Anglican Devotion (1961), and perhaps also Martin Thornton’s English Spirituality (1963). Wand’s book is a historical survey of the Anglican Communion, and of its contemporary features and functions. It is heavily Anglocentric, moderately Anglo-Catholic in sympathy, and completely in thrall to the perspective on Anglicanism Sykes was to dissect so effectively in The Integrity of Anglicanism. An anonymous reviewer in the Church Times captured its spirit: ‘The approach is typically Anglican in the constant appeal to history: the temper and outlook of the writer are no less recognisably Anglican, being always calm, moderate, eirenic and magisterially judicious.’3 For Wand, there were four main emphases in the Anglican way of faith: comprehensiveness (‘an essential trait of Anglicanism…[which] prevents dogmatic precision…[and] is a field for the amateur rather than a bastion for the professional theologian’), continuity with the early Church, Biblicism (or the Reformation influence), and – perhaps surprisingly, to contemporary eyes – nationalism.4 Stranks’s view was of a piece with this. Anglican devotion was typified by a ‘catholicity of spirit’, by a ‘temper of mind’, by a ‘balance between the claims of emotion and reason’, by a refusal to let one side of religion be stressed to the neglect of another, by restraint, by dignity, by ‘the fusion of fact and feeling which characterises the Book of Common Prayer’, and so on and so 3 Church Times, 17 November 1961. 4 J.W. C. Wand, Anglicanism in History and Today (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), pp. 47-8. 3 forth.5 Thornton’s historical survey of English ascetical theology, though broader in scope and rooted in Patristic and medieval sources, nonetheless ended with a discussion of contemporary spiritual needs which exactly fitted this same broad perspective, hinging on an ‘English temperament’ of moderation and restraint, adapted to an ascetical theology that could supply a suitable framework for Anglican spiritual guidance (and note that the contemporary application, in the final chapter, is expressed almost exclusively as ‘Anglican’, implying once again an uncritical conflation of Englishness and Anglicanism).6 In these writers, and in others, Anglicanism was essentially non-dogmatic, moderate in temper, Patristic in content but Reformed in its view of Biblical authority, balanced and reasonable. Without always saying it explicitly, their broad understanding was that Anglicanism was distinguished not only by its retention of Catholic order with Protestant faith, but by its refusal to assert any Christian doctrines as authoritative other than those professed by the early Church. These were essentially popular presentations of Anglicanism. There were others of greater scholarly weight and influence. Stephen Neill’s Penguin Anglicanism (1958, but reprinted many times), for example, was a more nuanced reading of the growth and complexity of the Anglican Communion, as you would expect from someone who had spent over twenty years as a missionary in India and then worked for the World Council of Churches.7 You could not think that Neill would make the fatally easy conflation of the spirit of worldwide Anglicanism and English restraint and moderation that some of his peers did. Nonetheless it is Neill who, I suspect, trying to answer the question ‘What is 5 C.J. Stranks, Anglican Devotion (London: SCM, 1961), pp. 270-5. 6 M. Thornton, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology according to the English Pastoral Tradition (London: SPCK, 1963), pp. 55-7 & 291-302. 7 W.O. Chadwick, ‘Stephen Neill (1900-1984)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 4 Anglicanism?’, provided Stephen Sykes with his launch pad for The Integrity of Anglicanism, for Neill says ‘there are no special Anglican theological doctrines, there is no particular Anglican theology’, asserts that the Church of England is only the Church in England, for it teaches ‘all the doctrines of the Catholic Faith’, and again emphasizes the comprehensiveness of the Anglican way of faith.8 Or again, Paul More and Frank Cross, in their compendium of passages from Anglican writers of the seventeenth century, published a decade earlier, at least to judge from More’s introductory essay, highlighted the same essential themes of balance, of restraint, of moderation, of refusal to pass beyond certain core doctrines, as typical of the Anglicanism not only of the seventeenth century but of the present: More emphasized the via media, a ‘just balance between fundamentals and accessories’, a characteristic pragmatism, and so on.9 Henry McAdoo was another such authority, whose Spirit of Anglicanism (1965) trod much the same ground as More and Cross in discerning in the middle way of seventeenth-century Anglicanism a template for the present.10 Wand, Stranks, Thornton, More and Cross, McAdoo, and even Neill in a more muted way, were writing out of a perspective in which the Church of England, its history, its order, its liturgy and its theology, absolutely dominated the account Anglican church leaders commonly gave of their denominational tradition. Most of them were written during, or shortly after, the post-war ‘Indian Summer’ of British Christianity, when the British churches, and especially Anglicanism, experienced what some historians have even called a 8 S.C. Neill, Anglicanism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), pp. 417 & 426. 9 P.E. More & F.L. Cross, Anglicanism. The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: SPCK, 1951), pp.