When we speak about identity in any area—whether it is Anglican identity, sexual identity, national identity, et cetera—we struggle with a subtle equivocation. Do we mean “the sum of existing expressions of Anglicanism” or do we mean “the essence of Anglicanism?” Two recent articles in Earth & Altar show us these two directions. While neither is quite at the extremes of what I’ve suggested, both Tony Hunt and Ben Crosby are talking around this critical slippage of terms. There is imprecision about the meaning of “identity” in a discourse about the meaning of “Anglican.” “What does it mean to be Anglican?” is the basic question here, but only “Anglican” is receiving attention and not “meaning” or “being.” 

Hunt identifies two ways in which identity operates semantically. The first “distills an Anglican ‘spirit’ that remains constant throughout history. If we could just live up to this true core (so the thinking goes), then we could discover the real unity that brings all church parties together.” Hunt’s second form of identity is “Anglican identity is to attempt to locate a fixed center of practice or belief, deviation from which is generally thought to be the reason for modern Anglicanism’s ecclesial woes.” These two do not differ very much. They only differ in what they prefer as authoritative on Anglicanism. In the former, the historical practice of the Church and its discerned destiny are authoritative, whereas in the latter, doctrines and documents are preferred to be authoritative. Thence arises the old “debate” over orthodoxy versus orthopraxy, to which Crosby alludes.  

But Hunt names a third route, exemplified by Rowan Williams, which is to pluralize Anglican identity in order to recognize the diversity of expressions found under the moniker “Anglican.” This is less an attempt to name every form of Anglicanism than it is a preference, as Hunt writes, to “not solve [the ‘crisis’ of Anglican identity] at all.” He continues, on Williams:  

“any attempt at final closure was bound to be at odds with the central reformed convictions that Anglicans actually share. When Anglicans try to secure institutional well-being by willfully refusing to recognize the Church in its concrete form, they are trying to do without their siblings, whom Jesus himself calls his own.”  

Recognizing our diversity of practice/belief does not establish what unites them. The insinuation here is that to attempt to unify diverse expressions threatens to do away with difference altogether. However, if there is nothing distinctive which unites them, then we should stop calling these expressions “Anglican.”  

On this point, I agree with Crosby who writes that “I’m troubled by the attempt to simply rule the discussion of Anglican identity out of bounds, arguing that it is in se a frivolous and possibly unfaithful one.” However, Crosby’s article seeks to set out a prolegomenon for a prescriptive Anglican identity based on historical precedent and the development of doctrine and practice. His marriage of doctrine and practice is welcome, but there remains an unspoken metaphysical discourse at play. 

When claiming a broad Anglican identity, there is an impression, that this claim is final. After all, on what other grounds can we base prescriptive and governing senses of Anglican identity? Williams’ impulse to recognize diversity under the Anglican moniker is right, but this need not mean we deny a singular unifying identity. This plurality, on the contrary, suggests that there is something uniting these diverse expressions which cuts beneath and is manifest through those expressions. We must seek to understand, then, the essence of Anglicanism. 

However, this does not mean for me what it means in Hunt’s criticisms. The language of “essence” nowadays has been quite abused; many are wearied by the term. However, I maintain that if we can speak of no unity, we should speak neither of being “Christian” nor “human” nor members of any genera whatsoever. To be a member of any genera means that the essence of that genera is intelligible. 

By “essence” I mean something similar to Edith Stein. “Being,” Stein writes, “as the unfolding of a quid, denotes not only the effluence and confluence of the contents of this quid, but simultaneously the quid’s being manifest.” (1) In other words, as Thomas Gricoski prefers to translate, “being is the unfolding of meaning.” (2) But there is no unfolding without something to be unfolded. Here, in history, we see the meaning of Anglicanism unfold. Meaning, here, is not our ability to create interpretations of an otherwise meaningless reality. On the contrary, meaning here is an ontological quality which renders existing things intelligible, in whatever limited way. 

 Anglican identity is not only doctrine, orders, or polity. It unfolds in these, alongside the life of the Church, driven by a holy communion of saints with the great help of the Holy Spirit. To search for the essence of Anglicanism is neither an attempt to “fix it” in place or reduce it to a particular set of unifying historical themes, as Hunt might allege. The essence of Anglicanism needs no breaking out of—it is constantly unfolding before and through us.  

We need not finalize Anglican identity in order to live in it. Our inability to exhaustively name conditions for unity is less evidence against the existence of such unity than it is evidence for our finitude. There is no escaping our finitude. As Gillian Rose writes, we must start in the middle, along with every anxiety, fear, and risk. The discourse on Anglican identity is a discourse on a lover who “comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty.” (3) There is no illusion that we can establish Anglican identity a priori, before experiencing it as it unfolds, nor is folding it back up a viable task. Anglican identity consists in an historical union of diverse expressions, promising to be revealed further as time trudges on. 

What I insinuate hitherto is that being Anglican is what it sounds like: a certain manner of existing. Take, for instance, St. Julian of Norwich who, though confessionally a pre-reformation Catholic, prays from heaven as the unofficial patron saint of converts to Anglicanism, for her way of being, as manifest through her Shewings and hagiological memory, excites in us a zeal to exist similarly. We are limited, therefore, by diversity of expression, surely. But we are limited more by the depth of our faith, for as a divine gift it easily surpasses our understanding. Anglicanism is not only this history, this prayer book, this theology, et cetera; it encompasses the fullness of a faith lived and given.  

But this, it may seem, only gives us a descriptive account of Anglican identity and not a prescriptive one. For a prescriptive identity, Anglican identity must mean something more than the “concrete” instantiations of Anglicanism, and something more than a nominalist view of identity (i.e. that anything is Anglican which is called Anglican, without reference to an abstract or general concept). 

Catherine Pickstock’s notion of “non-identical repetition” is helpful here. Non-identical repetition, for Pickstock, names the continuous repetitions of an abstract concept (like Anglicanism) in concrete form that differ from one another (much like Stein’s sense of unfolding). As these things manifest in history, they have, Pickstock writes, “obscurely to anticipate the possible bounds and extent of the process of variation.” (4) For this reason we can turn to the past to guide our prescriptive discernment of Anglican identity, without a necessitas (by necessity) “fixing” identity in any delusion of stasis.  

We might be edified, at this juncture, by a retrieval of John Henry Newman’s notion of the “development of doctrine,” with a mind to expanding it for the development of Anglican identity. Newman writes that:  

we know little of the thoughts, and the prayers, and the meditations, and the discourses of the early disciples of Christ, at a time when these professed developments were not recognized and duly located in the theological system; yet it appears, even from what remains, that the atmosphere of the Church was, as it were, charged with them from the first, and delivered itself of them from time to time, in this way or that, in various places and persons, as occasion elicited them, testifying the presence of a vast body of thought within it, which one day would take shape and position. (5) 

Newman shows us, in a sense, that faith—as developed in and through the Body of Christ—is a gift. So I conclude with the suggestion that Anglican identity—insofar as it is an expression of faith in the Triune God—is a gift, much like existence itself. We do not have full command nor full comprehension of it, and this overflowing nature of Anglican identity is part of what makes it attractive, authoritative, singular, good, and true. In the end, Anglican identity is an ongoing inquiry into the possibilities of our faith, seeking both for confirmation of our faith and strengthened of it, as iron sharpens iron.  

1. Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, 332. 

2. Thomas Gricoski, Being Unfolded, xviii. 

3. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, 60. 

4. Catherine Pickstock, Repetition and Identity, 23. 

5. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Ch. 10. (p. 400 of Longmans, Green, and Co. 1909 edition).