1. De Trinitate IV.12, in The Trinity (trans. OP, Edmund Hill; Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), p. 161.Google Scholar I am grateful to many with whom I have been in conversation about the subject of this article, generating dialogues which have been indensable to me in clarifying my own thinking. I must mention here Willis J. Jenkins, the editors and readers of the Journal of Anglican Studies, and my colleagues and students at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, especially Alan Gregory, Philip Turner and Theresa Daily, who kindly gave a scrutinizing eye to more than one draft of the text.

2. De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate 4, in Wallis, Revd Ernest (trans.), On the Unity of the Church in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951), V, p. 422.Google Scholar

3. Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.1.2 (LCC edn; trans. Battles, Ford Lewis; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), p. 1014.Google Scholar

4. Epistle LXXV. 11, in Ante-Nicene Fathers V.

5. De Trinitate IV.12, in The Trinity, p. 161.Google Scholar

6. ‘“Challenge and Hope” for the Anglican Communion’ (27 June 2006) and the Archbishop's Address to the General Synod of the Church of England (7 July 2006). Available online at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org&releases.

7. Radner, E. and Turner, P., The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).Google Scholar

8. Radner, E., The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).Google Scholar

9. Radner, E., Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and Its Engagement of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004).Google Scholar

10. Radner, , The End of the Church, p. 26.Google Scholar

11. See Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, pp. 39–54.Google Scholar

12. Radner, , The End of the Church, p. 338.Google Scholar

13. Radner, , The End of the Church, p. 352.Google Scholar Lacking a body, however, penitence is not repentance: cf. p. 332: ‘The Church cannot repent; yet it can die… For lack of repentance, one can still assert the figure of our Lord, history can be disestablished in favor of God, simply by dying where one is and asking for no more than that God bless this dislodged place of standing.’

14. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, pp. 79–90Google Scholar; The End of the Church, pp. 26–35.Google Scholar

15. Radner, , The End of the Church, pp. 335–54.Google Scholar

16. I refer to the pairing of her story, in ECUSA's Year C Proper 23, with that of the Samaritan leper in Luke 17 who prostrates himself at Jesus' feet.

17. The unavoidability of typology in the Christian tradition and even within the New Testament itself indicates that there remains an equally unavoidable supersessionism in the Christian faith: not, to be sure, in the sense of a replacement of Israel with the Gentile church, but in the etymological sense according to which the church must ‘sit in the place of’ Israel to discover itself as the New Jerusalem. Attempts to define the church in such a way as to give a final integrity to Israel beyond the revisions of the Christian church can only result in a shutting off or distancing of the Old Testament from the church, in a kind of revised Marcionite posture.

18. Sermones in Cantica Canticorum 9.2, in The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators (trans. Norris, Richard A.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 23.Google Scholar

19. Origen, , Comm. Jn. Book I, 1–46, in Commentary, 31–43.Google Scholar

20. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 17.Google Scholar

21. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 13.Google Scholar

22. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 16.Google Scholar

23. Hymns on Virginity 25, in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (trans. McVey, Kathleen; New York: Paulist Press, 1989), pp. 369–75.Google Scholar

24. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 134.Google Scholar Cf. Augustine who, in defending the idea that proper disciplines for reading Scripture can be taught, says, ‘For charity itself, which holds men together in a knot of unity, would not have a means of infusing souls and almost mixing them together if men could teach nothing to men.’ de doctrina christiana, Prologue 6, in On Christian Doctrine, p. 6. It is precisely the mediating ‘tampering’ of human hands that allows our souls to be knotted together.

25. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 152.Google Scholar

26. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 128.Google Scholar There is historically no longer any questioning the fact that Medieval Eucharistic Rite took over much of the symbols and even the phrases from Neoplatonic theurgy. See Rorem, Paul, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984).Google Scholar

27. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 134.Google Scholar

28. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 50.Google Scholar

29. Radner, , Hope among the Fragments, p. 51.Google Scholar

30. The End of the Church, p. 342.Google Scholar

31. See especially Athanasius, Contra Arianos III, in The Orations of S. Athanasius against the Arians, no named translator (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, no date given), pp. 180–261.Google Scholar

32. See, for example, von Balthasar, Hans Urs, The Glory of the Lord. V. The Realm of Metaphyscis in the Modern Age (trans. Davies, Oliver et al. ; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 9–47Google Scholar, Courtine, J.-F., Suarez et la Systeme de la Metaphysique (Paris: PUF, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Boulnois, Olivier, Etre et Representation (Paris: PUF, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am referring especially to Scotus, Ockham and Suarez here. In this vein, however, it is interesting to note the harmonies between Radner's own theology and the late medieval voluntarism of the Jansenists, who are his chosen heroes in The End of the Church. See especially the conclusion, pp. 335–54. In fact, this harmony cuts rather deep, and one could almost create a new shelving category for this book alone, called ‘Contemporary Anglican Jansenism’.

33. Here the Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology of Catherine Pickstock offers a critique of the modern church that is at once more devastating than Radner's, because she refuses the ontological foundation of a rupture in God, but also more hopeful, because she insists that ecclesial unity was in fact figured in the Roman Rite as a repetition of divine unity. The church can repeat the unity of God within its language and performance of worship, and it is this acknowledgment which names our present disunity so clearly as sin. But in order to maintain this claim, Pickstock insists that liturgical forms are in fact important, not just hollow spaces for us to wait for the imputation of the Sovereign God. After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).Google Scholar

34. Williams, , On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 209 and 215Google Scholar, citing Irenaeus.

35. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 207.Google Scholar

36. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 12.Google Scholar

37. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 206.Google Scholar

38. Cf. Augustine, , De Trinitate VI.4, in The Trinity, pp. 207–208.Google Scholar

39. Williams, , On Christian Theology, pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

40. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 20.Google Scholar

41. Williams, , On Christian Theology, pp. 272–75.Google Scholar

42. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 82.Google Scholar See also p. 58, where ‘the basic Christological duality behind the classical formula of Chalcedon’ is expressible as the continuity with the conflicted history of Israel alongside ‘a gratuitous and unpredictable moment in the whole process’. While this gratuity of history certainly resonates with and approaches the Chalcedon duality, the latter tradition would never have stopped at conceiving of the divine nature as a ‘moment in the process’ of any sort—even ‘gratuitous and unpredictable’.

43. Williams, Rowan, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984), pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

44. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses V.19–23, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), I, pp. 547–52Google Scholar and Augustine, Civitas Dei XIV.10–XV.8, in The City of God (trans. Dods, Marcus; New York: The Modern Library, 1950), pp. 456–89.Google Scholar

45. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 120.Google Scholar

46. This is perhaps evidence of the influence of Barth's early theology on Williams's thinking.

47. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 121.Google Scholar

48. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 20.Google Scholar

49. Williams, , On Christian Theology, p. 82.Google Scholar

50. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I.iii.1, in Hooker's Works (Keble edn; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), I, pp. 204–205.Google Scholar This also allows for a sharp critique of voluntarism in Hooker: ‘They err therefore who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides his will. Many times no reason known to us; but that there is no reason thereof I judge it most unreasonable to imagine, inasmuch as he worketh all things… not only according to his own will, but “the Counsel of his own will”’ (Laws, I.ii.5, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, I, p. 203Google Scholar, quoting Eph. 1.2).

51. Laws, I.ii.3, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, I, p. 202.Google Scholar

52. Laws, V.xvi.1, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 57.Google Scholar

53. Laws, V.iv.1, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 29.Google Scholar

54. Williams, Rowan, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2003), p. 26.Google Scholar

55. Laws, V.viii.2, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 33.Google Scholar Cf. Laws, III.x.7, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, I, pp. 388–89.Google Scholar

56. To be sure, the modernist understandings of the mutable and immutable, to which Hooker was certainly subject, are already several steps removed from the more complex Aristotelian causality, which saw matter to be the final aspect of an event that also included the deeper levels of formality, teleology and efficiency. For Thomas, for instance, the ‘form’ of the liturgy was actually the divine causality active within it, shaping it towards the ultimate goal of unifying creatures with God, while the material cause is the mutable and contextually specific way that this form will be enacted. Naming what does not change is, for Thomas, a complicated undertaking, since even doctrine comes into the liturgy through material cause. It would perhaps be fair to say that Hooker has, consciously or not, abbreviated Thomas's theology of cause in his ecclesiology. I leave aside any discussion of the important if obvious observation that Anglicans do in fact tinker with statements of doctrine. Though generally brushed aside as insignificant, slight changes to articulations of the Creed itself, such as in the Rite II formulations, change the meaning of the phrases, and as a result the significance of their performance within worship. See Pickstock, Catherine, ‘Asyndeton: Syntax and Insanity: A Study of the Revision of the Nicene Creed’, in Ward, Graham (ed.), The Postmodern God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 297–317.Google Scholar

57. Laws, V.li. 2–3, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, pp. 220–22.Google Scholar

58. Laws, V.lii.3, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 225.Google Scholar

59. Laws, V.li.2, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 221.Google Scholar

60. Laws, V.li.3, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 222.Google Scholar

61. Rite I, Prayer 2, in the ECUSA 1979 Book of Common Prayer. See de Lubac, Henri, Corpus Mysticum (Paris: Aubier, 1949), pp. 279–94.Google Scholar

62. Rite II, Prayer A, in the ECUSA Book of Common Prayer.

63. Laws, V.l.1, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 219.Google Scholar

64. Laws, V.1.3, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 220.Google Scholar

65. As Hooker shows in Laws, III.viii.14, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, I, pp. 376–77Google Scholar, there is a profound and essential kinship between Scripture, tradition and reason, that makes any separating of the ‘three legs’ impossible: ‘For when we know the whole Church of God hath that opinion of the Scripture, we judge it an impudent thing for any man bred and brought up in the Church to be of a contrary mind without cause. Afterwards the more we bestow our labour in reading or hearing the mysteries thereof, the more we find that the thing itself doth answer our received opinion concerning it. So that the former inducement prevailing somewhat with us before, doth now much more prevail, when the very thing hath ministered farther reason. If infidels or atheists chance at any time to call it in question, this giveth us occasion to sift what reason there is, whereby the testimony of the Church concerning Scripture, and our own persuasion which Scripture itself hath confirmed, may be proved a truth infallible.’

66. Specifically, the ‘Unity of God, the Trinity of Persons, salvation by Christ, the resurrection of the body, life everlasting, the judgment to come.’ Laws, III.x.7, in Keble, , Hooker's Works, I, pp. 388–89.Google Scholar

67. Cf. the ‘Chalcedonian’ accounts of the church as both human and divine in Lossky, , Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (no named translator; Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), pp. 174–95Google Scholar, and especially Bulgakov, Sergei, Bride of the Lamb (trans. Jakim, Boris; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 268–90.Google Scholar

68. I am referring in particular to Thomas's arguments with the Byzantine church in Opusculum contra errors Graecorum, where he relies on the idea that orthodox belief is translatable from one language and culture to another to insist that, in his case, a Latin theologian has the ability to judge the Greeks' theology. This is the case because there is always a linguistic excess that never enters irreducibly into particular material voicings of doctrine. I owe this point to comments offered by Mark Jordan at Baylor University on 3 December 2005.

69. See Augustine, , De Trinitate III and IV, in The Trinity, pp. 97–146Google Scholar, where he argues brilliantly that unless we allow exegetically for such proto-assumptions of the flesh as occur through angelic media in the Old Testament, the greater catching up of the Incarnation in the New is in danger of losing all meaning.

70. ‘Cradle and Altar’, in Rowell, Geoffrey, Stevenson, Kenneth and Williams, Rowan (comp.), Love's Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest of Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 115.Google Scholar

71. Cf. here Radner's rather short-sighted critique of John Milbank's thesis that the historical narrative of the gospels opens out onto a communally constructed metanarrative that in turn shapes and guides the construction of meaning that church gives to the narratives themselves (The End of the Church, n. 38, pp. 218–20)Google Scholar. Milbank's reading of the life of Christ sees the ongoing interpretation of the life by the community as a real extension of the Body through history—and is thus one of the clearest statements of the linkage of gospel interpretation and Eucharistic theology in recent theology. Radner, on the other hand, continues here his insistence that human interpretation is only ever human, never taken up and transformed by the hypostatic union, and thus all there is to see in the gospel is what the narrative itself reveals, prior to and separate from the sort of doctrinal reconfigurations so essential to the liturgical readings of Scripture.

72. Pickstock, , After Writing, pp. 178–219.Google Scholar

73. Laws, I.iii.1, Keble, , Hooker's Works, I, p. 205.Google Scholar

74. Laws, V.lvi.8, Keble, , Hooker's Works, II, p. 251.Google Scholar

75. ‘The Spirit of Peace’, in Rowell, et al. , Love's Redeeming Work, p. 118.Google Scholar

76. See Andrewes, , ‘Sermon 4 of the Holy Ghost: Whit-Sunday 1611’, in Lancelot Andrewes: Sermons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 249–50.Google Scholar