Huntington's Four Points

William Reed Huntington was rector of Grace Church in New York when he published The Church-Idea in 1870, and his question was practical: on what terms could the divided American churches actually reunite? His answer was to state the minimum an Anglican would have to insist upon, and to be equally clear that it was a minimum and that everything else, including a great deal that Anglicans valued, was negotiable. He named four things: the holy scriptures as the revealed word of God; the primitive creeds as the rule of faith, meaning the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds; the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself, baptism and the Lord's Supper; and the historic episcopate.

The Episcopal Church's General Convention, meeting at Chicago in 1886, adopted a version of the four as a declaration of the terms on which it would enter into reunion conversations. The Lambeth Conference of 1888, gathering bishops from across the Anglican Communion, adopted the form that carries both cities in its name, with the fourth article qualified in the words that have mattered most since: the historic episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of his church. The document is not a confession of faith, and neither Huntington nor Lambeth offered it as one.