Authority in liberal catholic Anglicanism

Abstract

The Anglican view of authority, set out in her more recent official documents, owes much to the influence of liberal Catholicism; more especially to that of the generation younger than Gore who had themselves been influenced by the concept of authority espoused by certain Roman Catholic modernists. Radical movements in philosophy, literature, and science during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created a climate of suspicion and doubt. By the mid-nineteenth century the accepted view of authority within Anglicanism could no longer sustain the weight placed upon it by the effects of these movements. Liberal Catholicism emerged in the l880's with a view of authority which allowed a certain liberality for the exploration of new ideas without compromise to the historic and catholic basis of Anglicanism. Within Roman Catholicism the modernist Tyrrell was opposing the official concept of authority which imposed upon the faithful dogmas defined by the hierarchy. Tyrrell maintained that the faithful themselves, in their collective spiritual experience, guaranteed the authority of dogma. The importance of spiritual experience, and hence of the consensus fidelium, was siezed upon by the younger generation of liberal catholic Anglicans, Incorporating the modernist view of authority they produced a neo-liberal Catholicism as catholic as Gore's, but with a greater degree of liberality. The emergence of neo-liberal Catholicism was catalysed by a ' period of crisis within Anglicanism immediately prior to the Great War. The Doctrine Commission, appointed in 1922, included a number of neo-liberal Catholics. Amongst them was A.E.J.Rawlinson and Will Spens, Rawlinson, as Bishop of Derby, also participated in the 1948 Lambeth Conference. In so far as they deal with authority both the report of the Doctrine Commission and the report of Lambeth 1948 show a marked dependence upon the neo-liberal catholic view of authority.