The Fourth Article Does the Work

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.