My apologies for a late response to this post which does n excellent job of correcting some (but not all) of the Anglocentric mythology of Anglicanism. It should be read in conjunction with the Scottish Episcopal Church’s response to the Nairobi-Cairo proposals (scotland.anglican.org/w…)

I myself wrote to the ACO in October lamenting the airbrushing of Celtic and Scottish Christianity :

“If one of the issues which besets the Anglican Communion is the perception that it is a fundamentally colonial institution whose history is problematic and  demands a decolonisation, and, equally, that it needs to be shorn of a very much Anglo- mentality, the historical descriptions  within the Proposals are both  self-defeating and inaccurate.

There is  painful start on page 3:

A crucial part of this story is the place of the See of Canterbury and the rich inheritance that it

represents. All Anglicans share the gospel of Jesus Christ as it was borne both to and from the

British Isles, and flourished, by the grace of God, throughout the world. 

The phrasing conflates Canterbury and British. Not a good start.....One may ask historically when "Britain" exists as an historical entity for a start. With Scotland gifting England a monarch in 1603....? Before or after the Act of Union of 1707? 

Page 8 is also problematic....

The history of the Anglican Communion is the story of the emergence of a family of

churches, broadly born of common parentage in England, marked by a shared inheritance

both from the Protestant Reformation and an earlier Western and Catholic patrimony. The

Elizabethan Settlement established for the Church of England a breadth of spirituality and

theology within a normative pattern of prayer and an assumed unity of faith and order, which

set the terms for subsequent Anglican identity. The era of the Anglican Communion, dating

from the first Lambeth Conference of 1867, emerged alongside a providential, unplanned

pattern of explosive missionary growth, for which the Communion has continually sought to

develop supportive structures, while protecting the autonomy of its member churches.

No mention of the Episcopalian party in Scotland, the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637, the consecration of Samuel Seabury in Aberdeen by Episcopalian, not Church of England, bishops... 

Noting of course, that the conditions of Seabury's consecration meant that non-Book of Common Prayer worship would be settled on the American Church through the adoption of the Episcopal liturgical forms. SO the BCP was not the colossus that bestrode the Anglican world entirely....

Nor of the   important role of the Chicago Quadrilateral (1886), two years before Lambeth... Noting the role of Bishop John Hopkins of Vermont (1851) and Canadian bishops in its inception. It is entertaining to note that not all English bishops thought it merited attendance..... "Selective" is one way of describing this....

But, wait, it gets better,   The real clunker comes on p. 26

The churches of the Anglican Communion share a history of common prayer and common

mission, nourished by a rich theological inheritance. Incorporating the earliest arrival of

Christianity in Britain, Pope Gregory the Great’s sending of St. Augustine to the Angles in

the 6th century, and the reformation of the Church of England in the 16th century, what we

now call the Anglican Communion emerged gradually from the fruit of 18th, 19th, and 20th

century missions. 

Would it have hurt to articulate the fact that the earliest arrivals were not just in Roman Britain, but also  came from Celtic  pathways via, in mainland Britain,  Candida Casa (Whithorn circa 397 CE) and Iona (563 CE- I will allow you to quibble that it is not strictly "mainland", as one of the Inner Hebrides)? You will no doubt recall that the Celts coming South and the Angles going North would meet at Whitby 648 CE, under the hospitality of Hilda.

Small points, you may argue, but guaranteed to pique the ire of those who resist a predominantly English or Anglo- identity for the Anglican Communion when they see their tradition and history airbrushed out. And, make us chuckle  wrily at the suggestion that the problem of colonialism is being  negotiated....” ( must note that in this original I got the wrong date for Whitby…..it should read 663/664 CE)

I would suggest however that there is room for a gentle corrective here…

The first is “some support” for Episcopalianism in the 17th century. It must be noted that Episcopalianism was always strong in the North East of Scotland- and in fact in the early 17th century, it was possible, by dint of relocating the General Assembly or Synod to Perth to usher in a period of episcopal polity. (It must always be remembered that Scotland is not, and was not a homogeneous entity: the Gaelic Highlands are not the Doric North-East are not the Lalllands, not the Orkneys, or nor the Shetland Islands) . But this period of episcopal ascendancy meant the production of the 1637 prayer book and what might be called the Bishops Wars, an alternative to the completely erroneous “English Civil War” (neither English, nor civil, but another less than subtle Anglo whitewash name) given this Scottish dimension.

Second, the description of the Scottish rite, as exemplified by that 1637 book) as “Scottish Laudian theology” reveals, sadly, a return to the default Anglocentric view that Scots theology must depend on England. Here I must confess an unfair advantage- the privilege of seeing drafts of Brian Douglas’s forthcoming ”The Eucharist in Scottish Episcopalianism: An Alternative History and Theology” scheduled for publication later this year by Edinburgh University Press.

Douglas (An Australian liturgist without a dog in the usual Anglo-Scots fight and turf war) points out two important points: first the inadequacy of viewing the Kirk as essentially and only presbyterian ( a myth which is regrettably persistent, and has also been noted and resisted by Stephen M. Holmes) and, for our immediate purpose, that Scottish realist eucharist tradition may share commonalities with Laudianism, but the two are not the same, and the Scots tradition is most certainly not spawned from the English material alone.

Full recognition of this robust Scottish tradition will then further help to dismantle the global communion as English.

Seabury’s mitre merits further examination. For the symbolism described here is very much in synch with that Scots realist tradition. This should come as no suprise….given that the non-juring Scots bishops insisted that the new American church draw on their liturgical tradition to formulate their prayer book. And they did.

Again, this is important because it shatters the long, dearly and falsely held myth that the BCP is omnipresent: a sine qua non. Simply not so…. To borrow a phrase used by the former archbishop of Tanzania , Donald Mtetemela about the role of European theology as non-negotiable: “It should be consigned to the dustbin”.

Lastly, and both the SEC and Douglas note this in their respective reflections on the Nairobi-Cairo proposal, the Scots tradition makes communion the focal point of unity within a church, not simply a “baptismal ecclesiology”. It is all very well to have a common (literally) fons et origo as the baptismal ecclesiology suggests, but, to invoke a Johannine pattern, there needs to be more than a common first step: “abiding” is not satisfied simply by a common baptism (come and see, born from above) , but by a shared life which follows.

There is a wisdom in the themes from the 1985 Eucharistic Conference which was held in Nairobi and tapped into African theology: if you do not eat together, you have a problem. We cannot hope to paper over the cracks of non-communion, so profoundly recognised by generations of Scots Episcopalian theologians, by invoking a “baptismal ecclesiology”. Maybe this can be done by invoking English tradition, but not Scots….

Respectfully,

Fergus King