PART II
CHAPTER 48
AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
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I. Difference between "Auctoritas" and "Imperium"
The word "authority" is used in two entirely different senses.
Whenever we use the word,
we ought to ask ourselves first in which sense we are using it.
Many discussions about authority have been futile
because they have not made this necessary distinction.
One sense represents the Latin word "auctoritas";
the other, the Latin word "imperium".
AUCTORITAS is weight of evidence
e.g. a man who has lived for many years in a country speaks with greater "authority" about
it than a man who has never been there.
"Authority" in this case is always relative.
We weigh the authority of one expert against the authority of another.
The "auctoritas" of the Church in all spiritual matters
is great,
but its greatness depends on the Church's spiritual fitness.
IMPERIUM is the right to be obeyed.
When the policeman tells you to stop,
you have not got to weigh his authority against the authority of someone
else.
You have either to obey or to disobey.
[We may have to decide which of two "rights to be
obeyed" has the greater claim on us;
for instance, whether we are to
obey the Church or the State.]
Imperium takes the form of a command.
It is absolute authority.
But the right to be obeyed, though absolute, is not unlimited.
The policeman has the right to command us to stop in certain circumstances,
but he has no right to tell us how to vote.
Nobody has unlimited authority -
that is, the right to be obeyed in all circumstances -
except God.
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II. Difference between Right to be Obeyed and Power to Enforce Obedience
The right to be obeyed is not to be confused with the power to enforce obedience.
We are bound to obey the laws of both Church and State.
But if the Church is under persecution,
or if an invading army has expelled the government of our country,
they cannot enforce that right.
We are all the more bound to obey just authority when it cannot be enforced.
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III. Origin of the Right to be Obeyed
Every society has "imperium" the right to be obeyed over
its members.
If you join a club, you are morally bound to obey the rules because you are
receiving the privileges on condition of obeying the rules.
To do otherwise is dishonest because it is a breach of contract.
But an organic society has another right to be obeyed, a Divine right.
A boy is bound to obey his father in all things lawful (as long as he is
a child) because God has made him his son and commanded him to obey him.
We are bound to obey the laws of our country
not only because those laws protect our life, liberty, and property,
but also because God has made us members of our country,
which has a Divine right to command our services.
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IV. The Right of the Church to be Obeyed
The Church has both kinds of "imperium" over us.
We enjoy her privileges, and therefore we are bound to obey her rules.
But she also speaks to us with Divine authority derived from our Lord Jesus
Christ who gave her that authority.
Although her right to be obeyed is from God, it does not follow that every
command that she gives has the direct authority of God.
A housemaster
in a school gives the house prefects authority over the other boys.
He
tells them that they are to order certain things and leaves other things
to their discretion.
The boys are bound to obey both sorts of orders
from the prefects, but in the latter case they may appeal to the master if
they think that the prefects are misusing or exceeding their authority.
In the same way some of the rules of the Church are Divine, and some are
human.
We are bound to obey both, and the authority in both cases is Divine.
But the Church may misuse her authority by making rules which are clearly
contrary to God's will (for instance, by ordering religious persecution).
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V. The Right of the Church of England to be Obeyed
To us who are members of the Church of England,
the universal Church gives commands only through the Church of England.
For there is no means by which the universal Church can give a positive command
except a General Council, and even a General Council is not general unless
it is accepted by all the local churches.
Therefore when we English Churchmen speak of the "imperium" of
the Church,
Naturally the Church of England speaks with greater or less "auctoritas" according
as she proclaims the command of God, or of the universal Church, or of the
Anglican Communion, or of the two provinces of Canterbury and York.
But
whether she speaks with greater or less "auctoritas", she
has "imperium" over us, and we are bound to obey her directions
as the directions, for us, of the Catholic Church.
Of course her right to be obeyed is limited.
It is confined to matters of faith, morals, and discipline.
She has no right to command what is contrary to Scripture,
or contrary to what has been accepted as the faith of the universal Church.
She could not alter the Creed or the conditions universally held to be necessary
to the sacraments;
for if she did, other churches would not recognize her
sacraments.
But within these limits she is free to make her own rules.
The power of the Church to lay down rules for her members is limited by
the State, but this is an external limitation, which will be discussed below,
pp. 318-24.
It is not the English Church alone but all societies that
are limited to some extent by the State.
It is one of the conditions
under which the Church has to work in the world.
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VI. Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Authority in the Church
The authority (imperium) of a society is exercised in three ways:
legislative, executive, and judicial.
Thus in the United Kingdom
the legislative authority belongs to the King in Parliament;
the executive authority to the King's Council represented by the Cabinet;
the judicial authority to the King's Courts of Justice.
In the Church all three functions were from ancient times exercised by the
bishops.
In England the legislative authority in the Church is the Provincial Synod
(commonly called Convocation), and the representatives of the clergy have
an ancient right to share in the authority of the bishops so that no canon
(or church law) can be passed without their consent.
By Canons 139-141
the Sacred Synod of the Church of England that is, the two provincial synods
sitting together is the true Church of England by representation.
All
members of the Church of England are bound by its decisions, and whoever
denies this is, ipso facto, excommunicated.
The executive authority belongs to the bishops each in his own diocese.
The bishops through the consistory courts exercise the judicial authority
with an appeal to the provincial court.
But there is some doubt whether
these courts exercise real spiritual authority because they recognize the
decisions of a purely civil court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council, as binding,
[Recent research has shown that
this recognition of the judgments of the Judicial Committee as binding
the lower courts is contrary to the Acts of Parliament which gave the Judicial
Committee its powers.]
and also because it is not certain that the
law which they administer is canon law, the law of the Church, and not
merely statute law, State law dealing with the Church.
Most of the rules of the Church that we are bound to obey are found in the
Prayer Book which has received the authority of the Provincial Synods.
There are also canons both medieval and modern,
but many of them are obsolete.
In the other Anglican churches
the canons have been brought up to date and codified,
but not in the Church of England
because the control of the Church by Parliament makes such reforms difficult.
The opinions expressed by a bishop have only "auctoritas" (the
amount of which depends on his personal gifts), not "imperium".
His directions are to be obeyed if they are within his constitutional powers.
Otherwise they are only advice,
which is, however, always to be seriously considered.
Because the Church is the means of salvation appointed by God,
she ought to be very careful not to cause a stumbling block to any of her
members.
If you are dissatisfied with a club or with a religious society,
you can leave it and join another;
but there is no alternative to the Church.
If you leave her, you leave the ark of salvation.
The different parts of the Church are not alternatives.
You cannot, for instance, leave the Church of England without changing either
your residence (if you join another Anglican church) or your belief (if you
join another communion).
Therefore the Church ought not to require of her members
anything but what is really necessary.
Since men are often unreasonable and consciences often unenlightened, the
authorities of the Church, and the members also, ought to show endless patience.
It is partly for this reason that the English Church appears lax in her discipline.
She has to provide for a race that is not easily induced to obey,
and she must not cause any of her members to stumble,
not for her sake but for theirs.
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VII. Theory of Joint Authority Rejected
It has been suggested that since the Anglican churches are only part of
the universal Church, their members are not bound to obey their directions
unless those directions can be shown to be supported by the rest of the Church.
This theory is both false and unworkable.
The universal Church has no organ by which she can issue directions (except
an ecumenical Council which for practical purposes may be ignored as there
has not been one for many centuries).
The Church of England has authority,
that is, right to be obeyed,
but the Orthodox and Roman communions together have no authority in this
sense.
Each has authority over its own members, but the combination of them, though
it has great "auctoritas", has no
"imperium".
That Rome and Constantinople are agreed on a point (for instance, the number
of the sacraments) is a strong argument in its favour but is not a direction
to accept it; for neither of these communions recognizes the other, and neither
of them has any right to the obedience of members of the Anglican Communion.
But if neither has the right to be obeyed, they cannot have it in common;
for they are not linked together but opposed to one another.
The theory will not work in practice;
for Rome and Constantinople agree that the Anglican Communion is not part
of the true Church, though on different grounds.
If, then, their agreement binds us, it binds us to leave the Anglican Communion,
but it does not bind us to join either the Roman or the Orthodox Communion.
Those who put forward such a theory as this are either looking for explicit
directions which the Church of England does not give them, or else are refusing
to obey the directions which she does give them.
But the conditions
in which the Orthodox Communion works are so different that it is not likely
to give them directions either, and they are left to fall back on the directions
of Rome.
The theory is really nothing but an excuse for members of
the Church of England to disregard those of the rules of their own church
that they do not want to obey.
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VIII. Nature of Anglican Authority
We sometimes hear a complaint that there is no authority in the Church of
England.
It is quite untrue.
The Church of England has as much right to be obeyed as any church in Christendom.
She does not speak with the same "auctoritas", perhaps,
as those communions which claim to be the whole Church and to speak with
an infallible voice;
[On the other hand, the English Church, which allows her
members to criticize her freely, ought to have more "auctoritas" than
a church in which criticism is forbidden.]
nor has she got the power to enforce her commands which some churches have
got.
But she is not to be blamed for this.
She believes in freedom,
and her members are encouraged to use their reason and to judge for themselves.
It is the English method in civil as well as in religious matters.
We do not say that the British Government has no right to our obedience
because it is not a dictatorship.
The same is true of the English Church.
The abuses that we see are not due to her principles
but to the failure of so large a proportion of her members to recognize
that the Church to which they belong is a society to which they have duties,
a society which is Divine,
and therefore has a greater claim on them than any merely human society,
even their country.
The Church of England refers her members, in doctrine,
to the standard of Holy Scripture as interpreted by the whole Church in all
ages,
which interpretation is summed up in the creeds
and in the decrees of the genuine ecumenical Councils. (See p.
228)
That standard is further interpreted in the Prayer Book and the Ordinal
(which is, properly speaking, an appendix to the Prayer Book).
These documents are not merely liturgical texts,
though even as liturgical texts they carry great weight in questions of doctrine.
They are also standards of belief.
The Articles of Religion are accepted in general terms by the clergy,
[The clergy are no longer required to sign the Articles
but only to assent to them (1865). See p. 465.]
and are
a valuable witness to the teaching of the Church on certain points.
But some of them are obsolete, some are ambiguous,
and some deal with questions
which are no longer important or which have now taken a different form.
The Articles are not articles of faith.
We do not require other churches to accept them
as a condition of communion with us.
Some of them refer to purely English conditions.
But within their limitations they are of great value
and are by no means to be despised. (See pp. 464-6).
In matters of practice such as rites and ceremonies, the Prayer Book is
of obligation because it is authorized by the Provincial Synods.
The clergy have all promised "to use the said book
and none other".
Because the Provincial Synods declared in 1929 that they would not regard
the variations from the Prayer Book, within the limits of the Revised Prayer
Book of 1928, as contrary to the promise to obey the Prayer Book, many of
us think that such variations may be used.
In case of doubt the bishop is to decide with an appeal to the archbishop.
But neither the bishop nor the archbishop may allow what the Prayer Book
forbids,
or forbid what the Prayer Book allows
(subject, in the opinion of many of us,
to the condition mentioned in the last paragraph).
No one may use in church even a prayer or a hymn not found in the Prayer
Book or the Revised Prayer Book without the consent, expressed or tacit,
of the bishop.
Within these limits many parishes have their own traditions,
which should not be altered suddenly or without good reason.
But no parish has a right to traditional customs which are contrary to the
general rule of the province expressed in the Prayer Book, still less to
customs which are contrary to Scripture or to the rules of the Universal
Church.
[Such as the use of wine for the Eucharist in which fermentation
has been artificially stopped; see p. 352.]
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IX. Freedom of Local Churches
The ancient Catholic constitution of the Church,
universally observed in ancient times,
gives every local church freedom in matters unessential.
The lowest independent unit of church life is the diocese.
Dioceses are grouped in provinces.
In the Anglican Communion the province is the smallest group which can be
completely self-governing (that is, as completely as is consistent with membership
of the Catholic Church), and which can have its own Prayer Book, alter it
by its own authority, and consecrate its own bishops.
Provinces were in ancient times grouped in patriarchates.
These were connected with the system of the Roman Empire and are now only
survivals.
There has never been a patriarchate in the British Isles or in the Anglican
Communion.
[The see of Canterbury has never claimed patriarchal rights,
even though its occupant was called
"patriarch" by William of Malmesbury, and "Pope of a second
world" by Pope Urban II! (See F. W. Puller, Orders and Jurisdiction,
pp. 218-29).
No patriarchate ever had lawful jurisdiction in the British
Isles (see pp. 274, 304).]
In modern times provinces are grouped in self-governing national churches.
Each province or national church in modern as in ancient times may have
its own rite, provided that it does nothing contrary to Scripture or to the
conditions which are universally recognized as necessary to the sacraments.
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