The Gospel and the Anglican Tradition, by Martin Davie
Paul Avis considers an Anglican vision wider than the Communion, Church Times:
THIS is an unusual, possibly unique, book. I know only one person who could have written it: my faithful former colleague at the Council for Christian Unity of the Archbishops’ Council, the lay theologian Dr Martin Davie. Even if it did not have his name on the cover, I would have known it for his work.
He has chosen a most interesting topic. Few projects could be more edifying than to examine the relationship of the Anglican tradition to the gospel of Christ. Davie has an excellent knowledge of the Anglican tradition, both of its founding documents in their historical context and of the current state of the Anglican Communion.
Davie gives great weight to the “historic formularies” of the Church of England (the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, 1571; the Book of Common Prayer, 1662; and the Ordinal in its 1662 form), though I sense that he does not pay enough attention to nuanced statement of the formularies’ authority today in the Preface to the Declaration of Assent (Canon C 15).
He also quotes extensively from the two 16th-century books of Homilies, which, while they contain much that is edifying, are not among the “historic formularies” and have no canonical authority today, except that of being mentioned in the Articles.
It is significant for Davie’s approach that he includes within the Anglican tradition the main “continuing” (actually separated) Churches, while explaining that they are not member Churches of the Anglican Communion. He quotes extensively from two key documents that are not owned by the Anglican Communion: the Jerusalem Declaration, produced by GAFCON in 2008, and the catechism of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) in 2014, To Be a Christian. He holds them up as examples of how to state the historic faith of Anglicans in accessible contemporary language.
See also this review from earlier in the year by Alan Purser
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