ABSTRACT
Gathered at the Lambeth Conference of 1920 the diocesan bishops of the Anglican Communion issued An Appeal to All Christian People. The encyclical’s prophetic tone embodied a profound hope, not uncommon amongst modern ecumenism’s earliest advocates, that the Churches of Christ then stood at the cusp of a new era in Christian history. The twentieth century like none other before was to be an ecumenical century: one in which the bitter disputes of the past would finally give way to the reunion of all believers into one common flock united within a single fold. ‘The times’, proclaimed the bishops,
History would suggest that, despite the bishops’ belief in the novelty of their appeal, the Lambeth proposal did not so much herald a unique development as a modern expression of Christianity’s age-old struggle for unity. ‘Is Christ divided?’, demands the Apostle Paul himself to his feuding flock in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:13, AV).2 ‘Was Paul crucified for you?’, he laments, this self-same Paul whose quarrels with the Judaisers of Antioch had required for resolution a full apostolic council (Acts 15, Gal. 2:1-14) – convened by the same disciples who once had bickered over seats in the coming Kingdom before Christ ended the matter on his own cryptic terms (Matt. 20:20-8, Luke 22:24-30). The contradictory realities of fractious humanity and the Gospel’s communion-imperative have plagued Christian society from its inception.
