ABSTRACT
The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) has spent more time on questions of authority than on any other area. This is because questions of authority underlie the continuing breach in communion between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, just as they underlay the initial breach in the sixteenth century. There are two aspects to such questions: questions of authority proper, which are to do with the identity of the Church, and questions of governance, which are to do with the running of the Church. These two are linked because the way in which the Church is run is an expression of what is perceived to be its identity, and its perceived identity is to some extent determined by how it is run. In this chapter I shall follow ARCIC in spending much more time on the identity of the Church than on the specifics of how the Church is run, since ARCIC makes few suggestions for the reform of Church governance. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that what keeps Churches apart on a day-to-day basis is a host of practical details about the way in which they are run as separated institutions. The ARCIC texts on authority have significant implications for the reform of Church governance – and not only for Anglicans and Roman Catholics. Some of these I hope to bring out.
