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A Note on the Role of North America in the Evolution of Anglicanism

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Marshall, Paul V

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The slow and reluctant10 establishment of each colonial episcopate required an act of Parliament, and by 1823 only the sees of Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Calcutta had been populated with bishops. It was not until 1847 that a bishop for foreign parts was consecrated outside a very private ceremony in the chapel at Lambeth Palace. A great deal had to change in the meantime.

The English had been backed into consecrating bishops for America by the Scottish bishops' consecration of Samuel Seabury. In the next century, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London decided not to seek permission to consecrate a bishop for the numerous Church of England congregations in Europe because the effort "might lead to great inconvenience."11 Bosher's recounting of events is memorable:

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Once again, recourse was had to the Scottish bishops, who after consideration judged the case "infinitely more delicate than that of Dr. Seabury." But in the end despite "the very chilling effect" of a letter from Mr. secretary Peel, and the "very cold" letters of the English prelates, Primus Gleig and his fellow bishops on March 20, 1825, consecrated the candidate in question. . . . Thus, for the second time, the tiny Scottish Church accepted a responsibility for the welfare of Anglicans outside her borders, while the Established Church of England found herself powerless to act.12

The English began to notice church life in the United States at about the same time that the Scots were sharing the episcopate. The bishop of South Carolina's collected sermons, not much noticed in the United States, got a great deal of attention in England.13 Bishops Hobart and Chase brought their controversy over missionary theology and the claims of The General Seminary to England in 1823. Hobart brought with him the American ecclesiology he knew, and was not entirely tactful in expounding the virtues of a purely spiritual episcopate and of democracy in church affairs; the ideas and testimony he shared were thoroughly noticed. Shortly thereafter books began to appear in England about the American church and its leadership. As tensions grew in England between the church and the civil government, interest in non-established church experience grew.

The Tractarians looked westward with an appreciative eye. Newman found relationship with the American church encouraging in his own struggles for ecclesial integrity in England. Its very existence enabled him to contemplate disestablishment.

We have proof that the Church, of which we are, is not the mere creation of the State, but has an independent life, with a kind of her own, and fruit after her own kind. Men do not gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles; the stream does not rise higher than the spring. If her daughter can be, though the State does not protect, the mother too could bear to be deserted by it ... The American Church is our pride as well as our consolation.14

Other Tractarians were less appreciative of American liturgy and doctrine. Walter Farquhar Hook enlisted Newmans circle in providing The General Seminary with a complete library of patristic texts on the grounds that "the divinity of our Transatlantic brethren (and fathers even) is somewhat crude."15 (How much this rhetoric is a fund-raising pitch is open to question.) Nonetheless, the Tractarians ultimately cherished the freedom enjoyed by the church in the United States-and Pusey encouraged Bishop Doane of New Jersey to use that freedom to establish contacts with Anglicans around the world precisely because the mother church was not acting.

A Note on the Role of North America in the Evolution of Anglicanism

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Marshall, Paul V

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