What are the advantages and disadvantages of a formal liturgy as against extemporized worship? After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, it was clear that some form of national ‘Church of England’ would be reconstructed – but would it have a set liturgy, and if so what would it be like? This paper considers over a hundred books published in the following three years, debating whether the Book of Common Prayer should be imposed, reformed or abandoned, with arguments based on biblical precepts, the practice of the early Church and reformed Churches, the duties of ministers and the needs of congregations. The debate shows how the views of both conformists and nonconformists had developed in response to the religious free-for-all of the 1640s and 1650s, though it had little influence on political decisions.

This editorial piece considers the implications of Scriptural Reasoning, a method of inter-religious exchange that is the subject of the present number of the journal, for contemporary Anglicanism. It suggests that the character of Scriptural Reasoning as a conversation held across and despite religious difference offers a challenge to contemporary Anglicans to maintain their own conversation about Scripture.

Scriptural Reasoning is the study and discussion of Tanakh, Bible and Qur'an together, usually by Jews, Christians and Muslims. On its Christian side it has had strong Anglican participation since it began in the mid-1990s. This article recounts its origins and development (including its spread beyond the academy and to many countries, including China); offers guidelines for its practice; discusses four key publications that offer Anglican theological understandings of it; summarizes its significance; and proposes that it be practised more widely in the Anglican Communion. The article concludes with meditative and prophetic postscripts.

This paper considers how issues of conscience might be considered in seventeenth-century England. It looks at how some of the moral problems arising from the restoration of an episcopal Church of England in 1660 were debated, and focuses on the response of the clergy to the demands for conformity to the Book of Common Prayer, renunciation of the Solemn League and Covenant, and episcopal ordination. A large number of books were published on these subjects, and contemporary diaries show that ministers read these books and discussed the problems among themselves, in reaching difficult and often painful decisions.

This essay draws on the typological framework of Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder in Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), to analyse a case study church drawn from the Church of England. It investigates key elements of the theology and life of the church, in particular its implicit eschatology and understanding of salvation, and its approach to evangelism, to identify and establish which of Bevans and Schroeder's models it most closely expresses. This correlation is then used to draw out certain practical implications for the life of the church, most notably how it can more consistently and therefore with more integrity live out its inherent approach to mission. This shows the general practical usefulness of this methodology for other churches in different settings.

The process of scriptural reasoning promises to facilitate dialogue and understanding across religious divides. In this paper, the author reflects on the experience of scriptural reasoning with Anglicans and Muslims; describing the phenomenon of ‘fellowship, not consensus’ with reference to key points of doctrinal difference between the two religious traditions.

From childhood Elizabeth was trained in the ‘New Learning’ and brought up under Protestant influences. Her juvenilia attest to this immersion in Protestant and humanist education. The youthful Elizabeth often wrote formal Latin letters in the style of the mediaeval ars dictaminis replete with humanist and Protestant imagery. She continued this style of writing throughout her brother's reign. However, after Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity of 1549, Elizabeth stopped writing formal Latin letters to her brother and switched to formal English ones instead. This essay will argue that this switch was intentional on the part of Elizabeth; and set within the context of the time gives an early clue to Elizabeth's solidarity with her brother's Protestant efforts in England.

The emergence of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) as a movement and a society of scholars was made possible by the hospitality, influence and cohort of two Anglican theologians, the late Revd Daniel Hardy and Professor David Ford. In this essay, I offer a Jewish commentary on several Anglican theological dispositions that might contribute to this hospitality: among them are ‘found theology’ (as I label it), responsiveness to the powers of divine attraction, concern to repair obstructions to the healing work of the Spirit, and attentiveness to Scripture as host and source of reparative reasoning. While the primary subject of the essay is a species of Christian theology, the method of the essay emerges from a recent approach to Jewish philosophy we call ‘textual reasoning’ (TR), one of the antecedents of SR. In the style of TR, I encounter theology as a ‘disposition’, or mode of practice, displayed in particular in practices of reading and interpreting Scripture and of responding to the call of Scripture in societal action. The essay is structured as a series of brief accounts of Anglican theological dispositions, each one followed by a Jewish ‘commentary’, culminating in a sample of Anglican-Jewish dialogue as it might be overheard within a session of scriptural reasoning.

This article offers a distinctively Anglican evaluation of the practice of Scriptural Reasoning. It draws upon personal experience, and frames its discussion with two ‘case studies’ describing SR study in action. It engages closely with Peter Ochs's positive theorization of Anglican postliberalism from a Jewish perspective in his book Another Reformation. With Ochs, the article rejects the premise that a neutral ‘common ground’ of theoretical agreement is a prerequisite for fruitful encounter across religious traditions, and claims that the traditions in question have generated their own tradition-specific resources for dialogue. The central part of the argument looks for correlations between an Anglican trinitarianism that valorizes historical process and analogical reasoning (something that, with Ochs, might be described as a pneumatological emphasis on the ‘found’), and an Anglican legitimation of SR. The value of reading commentary from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions alongside scriptural texts is asserted.

This article is a response to the essays in this issue of the Journal of Anglican Studies on scriptural reasoning in the Anglican context, from the perspective of a Roman Catholic theologian, and one who is engaged in another kind of interreligious study, comparative theology. It sets out in general terms the distinctive character of comparative theology as an inquiry that crosses the borders between religious traditions. It draws attention to some of the common ground between comparative theology and scriptural reasoning and the character of each as theological disciplines, even while drawing out some of the distinctive marks of comparative theology. In this way it aims to shed light on how scriptural reasoning, even in its general form, is similar to other sustained efforts at interreligious learning, yet possessed of distinctive characteristics that make it interestingly different from the close reading that is comparative theology.

The Anglican Communion has developed ‘Instruments of Communion’ to aid communication and sharing of wisdom throughout the Communion. When the Archbishop of Canterbury invited bishops from the Communion to attend a meeting at Lambeth in 1867 to consult and seek common counsel for the good order and care of the churches of the emerging Anglican Communion the first of the Lambeth Conferences took place. In more recent decades the Anglican Consultative Council and Primates’ Meeting have developed to enable the bishops, clergy and lay people of the worldwide Anglican Communion to listen to one another, share their life and join in common mission. In recent years these four elements in international Anglicanism – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting – have become known as Instruments of Unity or Communion. Tensions and fractures in the Communion have raised questions about the value or use of the so-called Instruments of Unity.This article analyses the concept of ‘Instrument’ and assesses its value for understanding the nature of the Anglican Communion. It argues that the Instruments have a gift-like character and function in a quasi sacramental manner. As such they are indwelt rather than used in a tool like way. This approach to the Instruments of Communion gives high priority to the character and disposition of human agents participating in Communion structures and the importance of fostering a deeper communion among the Instruments for the sake of the Church and its witness to the gospel.