ABSTRACT
Is there still, in the last years of the twentieth century, a sustainable, as distinct from a recognizable, Christian identity? The major churches, in answering this question affirmatively, appeal to the authority of their sacred Scriptures, historic creeds and confessions; as churches, they present themselves as authoritative, and even as supernaturally guided, interpreters of what has been handed down from the primitive Church in text and tradition. They base their ecumenical policies on the assumption that despite existing differences in doctrine, worship, and ethics they share a common identity which could be expressed in a common theology and structure. This does not mean that their attitude to doctrine is entirely static; they accept, in theory at any rate, the possibility of theological change, but the theories of development which they prefer do not justify either radical rejection of traditional doctrine or more than minor doctrinal adjustment to changing historical conditions. Nor do these churches officially admit that within their ranks—in what might be called the existential, as distinct from the institutional, Church— reinterpretation of some traditional doctrines, for example that of eternal punishment, has gone so far as to be tantamount to a repudiation of what earlier Christians generally believed. For the churches as institutions the identity of Christianity, supernaturally revealed and guaranteed, has not changed, whatever the appearances. The final authority of Scripture and tradition remains unimpaired, however diverse interpretation may become: although there are many cases in which Scripture and tradition settle nothing, nothing can be settled apart from them. The strength of this position explains the anxiety of innovating Christian individuals or groups to claim religious and theological continuity with the past: in the sixteenth century Protestants argued that they, and not Roman Catholics, were faithful to the traditions of the primitive church, while in the nineteenth century what was decisive for John Henry Newman in his shift from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism was his belief in the closer identity of Roman Catholicism with the patristic Church. In the 1990s, Anglican opponents of the ordination of women attacked the proposal as a departure from Scripture and tradition so radical as to make it impossible to guarantee the future identity of Christianity.
