JOHN STOTT ON ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS

Anglican church leaders like to talk about the 'glorious comprehensiveness of the Anglican communion.' Have your heard them talk about that? But, unfortunately, they are not always wise enough to distinguish between the two different kinds of comprehensiveness.

Principled on the one hand, and unprincipled on the other.

Dr. J.I. Packer, whom we honour very much in this community and throughout the world, wrote a contribution to a symposium about 25 years ago in which he spoke about these two kinds of comprehensiveness.

Let me quote from Dr. Packer. He distinguishes two ideals of comprehensiveness which have been held within Anglicanism.

One he calls the virtue; the other you will guess, is a vice. So the first is 'the virtue of tolerating different views on secondary issues on the basis of clear agreement on essentials.'

And this is what comprehensiveness meant in the time of the reformation. But then he distinguishes this from 'the vice of retreating from the light of scripture into an intellectual murk where no outlines are clear, all cats are gray and syncretism is the prescribed task. '

I was interested a few years ago to read a comment from Cardinal Basil Hume, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in the country from which I come; he was honest enough to say: "I am very uneasy concerning the comprehensiveness of the Anglican Church. Comprehensiveness has been seen by the Anglican church as a matter of pride. I wonder whether it is not its Achilles heel, leaving the rest of us asking, ' What does the Anglican Church, as a church, hold to be essential?'" Good question."

The Rev. Dr. John R.W. Stott "On Essentials"