The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral

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.

Three of the four articles are common ground with most historic churches, so every union conversation of the last century has turned on the fourth, and on the qualifying clause attached to it. The clause concedes the form of episcopal government while insisting on the fact of it: a church entering communion need not adopt the English pattern of dioceses and cathedrals, but it must have bishops standing in the historic succession. That distinction made the Porvoo Communion possible in the 1990s, bringing the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland into full communion with Lutheran churches in Scandinavia and the Baltic, several of which had kept the historic episcopate through the Reformation while others recovered it, and it underwrote earlier full communion arrangements with the Old Catholic churches of Europe. It is also precisely the point on which conversations with Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational and Baptist bodies have repeatedly stalled, since those churches hold their own ministries fully valid and read the Anglican insistence as a requirement that they accept a defect they do not believe they have.

The Quadrilateral has therefore functioned less as a basis for union than as an honest statement of where the obstacle lies, which is a genuine service; and because it is a statement of terms rather than a creed, Anglicans have been able to hold it while continuing to disagree among themselves about almost everything else.