The Archbishop is Not the Pope

He’s not a pope, the archbishop of Canterbury says, because “we [the Church of England] have a reformed tradition which says that decisions about the Church are made by the whole people of God, by the laity, that we have to be rather cautious about people laying down the law from on high.”

Justin Welby’s description would have been news to the Anglican reformers, who had no such idea of lay authority. They knew what God wanted (or so they thought) and were going to make it happen on their own, especially as the vast bulk of laypeople were attached to the old ways they thought so corrupt. (See the often-invoked The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, among other works.) They did believe in the authority of the king, who was a layman, but was a layman who could give them their way.

Welby continues:

And I quite like that. It’s slower, it’s less tidy, it’s sometimes really frustrating, but the reality is, I think it’s the right way to do things. Read the New Testament: Paul really struggled with some of the decision-making processes, but he accepted that was the right thing to do.

Yes, read the New Testament. There you’ll find that the Apostles spoke and acted on their own authority and don’t actually seem to have consulted the laity of the day at all. The earliest Church wasn’t a form of early Anglicanism. One might argue about the authority of Peter in the New Testament and since, but what is clear is that the Apostles did not believe that “decisions about the Church are made by the whole people of God.”

I wonder if Welby actually believes this fanciful  history he tells. Heading up the Church of England is a very difficult job, but the archbishop shouldn’t try to rationalize its problems by inventing a history that makes its current debacle into an example of True and Ancient Christianity.