Early Christian writings

It was in the early era that a family of terms related to consensus fidelium began to be used: first ‘mind of the Church’ (from the Greek èκκλεσιαστικòν ϕρόνημα, rendered in Latin as sensus Ecclesiae), and secondly the ‘consent’ (συνευδοκησάσης in Greek, consensus in Latin) of the ‘whole Church’ or of ‘the faithful,’ which implies the voice of the laity – the fideles – assenting to church teaching. This section will argue that the earliest uses of these phrases show church leaders at work trying to impose unity on the laity. The leaders’ claims to have brought about consensus fidelium were less a case of hearing the faithful's collective voice than of putting words into their mouths.

One word of apology is needed before beginning explorations. In describing consensus fidelium as a rhetorical strategy, I could be accused of ignoring the reality of decision-making by the laity in the earliest councils mentioned in Scripture and in Eusebius – instances that could be described as consensus-building events. But who comprised the ‘whole assembly’ (πλñθος) at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15.12 (cf. 15.22) or the assemblies of Asian ‘believers’ opposing Montanism in an anonymous account from the second century is unclear.Footnote ³ By the time of Cyprian's councils in the third century, however, it is clear that consulting the laity at a council in order to seek their ‘consensus’ was a strategy designed to exclude those whom Cyprian deemed ‘wicked’. Nor will councils involving mainly bishops appear much in what follows, including the so-called Ecumenical Councils, at which the unity of the bishops’ decisions was said to be the work of the Spirit. Indeed the Spirit will receive little attention in what follows, largely because all sides of any debate claimed the Spirit's guidance.

New Testament Times. The New Testament does not contain the phrase ‘mind of the Church’ (èκκλεσιαστικòν ϕρόνημα) but Paul certainly wrote to encourage the church at Philippi to be ‘of one mind’. It has been suggested that in Philippians Paul deliberately deployed Greek friendship language to bring Christians to the same mind (3.15). Paul used the idea of coming to a common ‘mind’ or ‘feeling’ (ϕρόνημα) to exhort unity where there was division, for example between Euodia and Syntyche (4.2). Other tropes of friendship language were that friends should be of the ‘same mind’ (τò αúτò ϕρονñτε) and of ‘one mind’ (τò έ'ν ϕρονοũντες) (2.2). In the same vein, Paul exhorted the Philippians to stand together ‘in one spirit’ and to strive side by side with ‘one soul’ (1.27). Such ‘instances illustrate Plato's insistence that friendship is a matter of o'μόνοια, of being of the same mind and thus in harmony and concord’.Footnote ⁴

Scholars recall that these tropes were originally deployed among aristocrats, especially in Aristotle's theory of three kinds of friendship. Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics distinguishes friendships of utility, of pleasure and of perfection. Only the aristocratic males of the Greek polis could attain this last and highest form of friendship because, as equals, they grounded friendship in virtue not in pleasure and were not bound to each other in patronage. Aristocrats ran the polis and kept the lower orders in check, and by the time of the Roman Empire this friendship language sustained the Greek nobility and gentry who ran affairs in the provinces under Rome's minimal rule – men like Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–120), a magistrate in Prusa, a mid-sized town in the province of Bithynia-Pontus. Using the language of friendship and unity of mind, first Dio and then slightly later in Smyrna, Aelius Aristides, ‘extolled a narrative where the Romans brought unity and solved the problem of stasis [strife] for the Greeks … Underlying these unity rhetorics are claims to superiority, empire, and elite status, seeking an accompanying obedience, conformity, and subjugation.’Footnote ⁵

Paul's ‘unity of mind’ language is not used to subjugate the Philippians but to make them friends.Footnote ⁶ However, other early Christian writers, even Paul elsewhere,Footnote ⁷ did use unity language to establish authority within the community. For instance, the author of 1 Pet. 3.8-9, probably written around the same time and place as Dio, encouraged harmony or ‘unity of mind’ (o'μόϕρονες) within the household to bring wives into submission to their husbands.Footnote ⁸ Given that they were writing to churches whose members were a tiny minority in the cities of the Roman Empire, and who daily faced religious prejudice, it is unsurprising that the letter writers wanted to avoid their communities’ further fracturing. This it seems was the motivation for Christians in Rome to write to the church in Corinth at the end of the first century, using another expression for ‘unity of mind’. According to 1 Clement 44.2, the successors of the apostles should not be deposed from office because they were chosen by the ‘consent of the whole Church’ (συνευδοκησάσης τñς ε'κκλησίας πάσης). In deposing their leaders, the letter said, the Corinthians had brought disharmony to their community.Footnote ⁹

Pre Nicene Writers. By the late second century, Christian spokesmen (coming from higher social classes than the writer of 1 Clement) began deploying this letter's idea of apostolic succession to exclude opponents from church membership (which 1 Clement had opposed).Footnote ¹⁰ Henceforth the people's ‘consent’ would be sought in the deposition of church leaders. In the third century, new aristocratic church leaders could become powerful people in urban affairs. As men of status, bishops and their spokesmen would use unity language in the same manner as politicians like Dio – to end perceived strife and promote submission. Such is the earliest recorded use of the term ‘mind of the Church’ (èκκλεσιαστικòν ϕρόνημα), dating from Rome in c. 230, in an anonymous tract called the Little Labyrinth often ascribed to Hippolytus, which deployed the phrase to exclude someone named Artemon from the community. The tract defends the legitimacy of the apostolic teaching of Victor (bishop of Rome 189–199) from Artemon's criticism. Artemon, together with his followers, claimed to teach what ‘all earlier generations, and the apostles themselves, received and taught … [and] was preserved till the times of Victor’. But, the tract retorts, given that the theology pre-dating Victor also agreed with the bishop – ‘works by Justin, Miltiades, Tatian, Clement, and many more’ – ‘How then can it be true that when the mind of the Church [èκκλεσιαστικοũ ϕρονήματος] has been claimed for so many years, Christians up to the time of Victor preached as these people say they did?’Footnote ¹¹ If everyone submitted to the one mind, unified through time, then the community would be preserved from error. While Artemon claimed apostolic teaching was on his side, the tract argued that he disagreed with the ‘mind of the Church’. This explains why, by the fourth century, the ‘mind of the Church’ stood as shorthand for apostolic teaching that only the perverse contradicted.Footnote ¹²

Another third-century writer, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), provided a Latin version of 1 Clement's phrase, ‘consent of the whole Church’, and used it to exclude those who threatened his notion of unity. Cyprian, elected bishop by popular acclaim in opposition to the clergy's wishes, wrote to his priests and deacons: ‘I can make no reply on my own, for it has been a resolve of mine, right from the beginning of my episcopate, to do nothing on my own private judgment without your counsel and the consent of the people [sine consensu plebis].’Footnote ¹³ As an aristocrat and former rhetor, Cyprian here used the elite rhetoric of unity in the face of controversy.Footnote ¹⁴ The context for his seeking the consent of the laity was the dispute concerning the readmittance into the church of those who had lapsed during the imperial persecution. There were also practical reasons why Cyprian involved the laity as well as the ordained at the Council of Carthage in 251: lay people could act as witnesses against those who had sacrificed during the persecution, whom Cyprian only wanted readmitted at their deathbed after due penance.Footnote ¹⁵

The situation became more complex, however, when those who were indignant that the lapsed were readmitted at all founded a rigorist church in Rome, led by Novatian, which began to win converts in North Africa. When some Novatianists sought to join Cyprian's church, he insisted that new converts be rebaptized – against Stephen, the bishop of Rome, who was admitting them without rebaptism. The resulting bitterness of Cyprian's relations with Stephen was reflected in a letter the former wrote on behalf of the African bishops. The recipients in Spain were reminded that their one-time bishop, Basilides, had been deposed during the persecution ‘following the verdict of the whole congregation and in conformity with the judgement of the bishops who had convened with the congregation … [Basilides showed] his guilt simply by going off to Rome and there hoodwinking our colleague Stephen, who is far removed from the scene and unacquainted with what has in truth transpired’.Footnote ¹⁶ Inverting 1 Clement's attempt to secure church leaders in position based on apostolic succession, Cyprian claimed apostolic roots for his teaching that a bishop should not be chosen in the first place ‘without the cognizance and attendance of the people [populi adsistentis conscientia], so that in the presence of the people [plebe] the iniquities of the wicked can be revealed and the merits of the good proclaimed’.Footnote ¹⁷ During the crisis of the lapsed, therefore, Cyprian consulted the laity to testify against ‘wicked’ members of the church – even against bishops.

The Constantinian Church. With Constantine's conversion, and the general granting of toleration to Christians, debates between rigorists and laxists in North Africa became a matter for the Emperor to adjudicate. When the rigorists appealed to Constantine for vindication of Donatus's election as bishop of Carthage, the Emperor set up a commission of bishops in 313 who judged in favour of Donatus's laxist opponent Caecilian. Another commission rejected the Donatists’ appeal in 314, and in 317–21 Constantine conducted a campaign to suppress them. The so-called ‘Sermon on the Passion of Sts. Donatus and Advocatus’ dates from this period of imperial persecution. It gives an account of how ‘Catholic’ unity language appeared to these enemies of the empire: ‘ “Christ,” [Satan] said, “is the lover of unity.”… Those people who were already fawning on and were deserted by God came to be called “Catholics.” By prejudice in favor of the name, those who refused to communicate with them were called “heretics”.’Footnote ¹⁸ The Donatists’ counter-rhetoric, therefore, made the Deceiver the one claiming that unity was better than schism. God had deserted the Catholics, they said, and those whom the Catholics named heretics were the saved.

The imperial administration became increasingly Christian and, conversely, those who began as politicians (Ambrose), lawyers (Alypius), and teachers of rhetoric (Augustine) became church leaders, using their rhetorical skills to win and then maintain the laity's loyalty and obedience.Footnote ¹⁹ Three such elite ‘friends’, bound together in patronage, brought to the church the friendship/unity language of their secular careers,Footnote ²⁰ fulfilling within the church the implicit threat in Dio Chrysostom's language of harmony described above: ‘Underlying these unity rhetorics are claims to superiority, empire, and elite status, seeking an accompanying obedience, conformity, and subjugation.’Footnote ²¹

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was the inheritor of Dio Chrysostom's rhetoric of unity. In Augustine's doctrinal disputes we see the language of consensus fidelium used to exclude those unwilling to come into conformity. Augustine claimed that the Donatists were ‘setting forth a view which has neither been started in any regionary Council of the Catholic Church nor established in a plenary one’. Against them he claimed to assert only ‘what has been confirmed by the consent of the universal Church [universalis Ecclesiae consensione], under the direction of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ’.Footnote ²² Against the Manichees he asserted: ‘the testimony of the Catholic Church is conspicuous, as supported by a succession of bishops from the original seats of the apostles up to the present time, and by the consent of so many nations [et tot populorum consensione]’.Footnote ²³ According to Yves Congar, with these quotations from two doctrinal disputes, Augustine ‘enunciates a general principle’ of the reception of doctrine by the consensus fidelium.Footnote ²⁴ However, Augustine enunciated not so much a principle of doctrine strictly understood, as a general rhetoric that had been used first by pagan and then by Christian elites.

The Reformation and its Aftermath

The Reformation caused a rethinking of rhetoric among Protestant writers. The late-medieval rhetoric of disputation, in which a position was taken on controverted doctrinal questions, was in many ways more appropriate than unity rhetoric to churches breaking from Rome. Certainly Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and the Church of England's Forty-Two and then Thirty-Nine Articles were instances of such disputation.Footnote ²⁵ English Reformers still used unity rhetoric, however, to stifle the Roman practice of adoring the Eucharistic elements in the so-called Black Rubric of the 1552 Prayer Book, for instance, ‘for that were Idolatrye to be abhorred of all faythfull christians’. Again, in rhetoric but not in practice, ‘all [the] faithful’ gave their consent to the hierarchy's teaching, in this case to the hierarchy of the new Church of England. The consent of the faithful could also be used in polemics to legitimize the English Church against the Roman Church. John Jewel (1522–71), in his Apology of the Church of England (1562), wrote that while Rome only allows bishops and abbots to ‘give consent; yet in old time, when the church of God (if ye will compare it with their church) was very well governed, both elders and deacons, as saith Cyprian, and certain also of the common people, were called thereunto and made acquainted with ecclesiastical matters’.Footnote ²⁶ Laying claim to continuity with Cyprian's views on church unity and involvement of the laity, Jewel argued that the English Church was old and the Roman Church new. Cyprian proved a crucial authority for post-Reformation polemicists because of his opposition to the bishop of Rome.

The late-Reformation churchmen who used an English version of consensus fidelium were, like their late-antique predecessors, elite males schooled in rhetoric and tied to one another in friendships of patronage (Aristotle's ‘utility’) or equal social rank (‘perfection’).Footnote ²⁷ Friendship continued to motivate the use of consensus language in this period. Most famously, Richard Hooker (1553/4–1600), a family friend of Bishop Jewel, wrote Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity using the unity rhetoric of consent to support conformity to such bishops.Footnote ²⁸ While Laws was written in the last decade of the sixteenth century, under the patronage of Archbishop Whitgift, conformists who wrote after the British civil wars of the 1630s–40s had seen their patronage ended and their friends killed. Unity rhetoric needed to be repurposed. With Church and Crown abolished, Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672), ejected from his living and his Cambridge fellowship, invoked consensus fidelium as an aid to settling disputes about Scripture. In contrast, Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), whose patron Archbishop Laud was beheaded by Parliament, expressed suspicion concerning popular consent in moral matters.Footnote ²⁹ At the restoration of Charles II, however, both churchmen received preferment for their loyalty. At the end of the tumultuous seventeenth century the puritan Richard Baxter (1615–91) gave testimony to the changeable nature of consent – and consensus rhetoric.Footnote ³⁰ As a youth Baxter was under the patronage of the Master of the Rolls but in the interregnum became leader of the English Presbyterians; at the restoration, he turned down the offer of a bishopric, was deprived of his living, and between 1662 and 1687 was persecuted as a Nonconformist. No wonder he bemoaned: ‘it is no rare thing for the common prejudices, self-conceitedness, or corruption of the weaker and greater number of good people, which needeth great repentance and a cure, to be mistaken, for the “communis sensus fidelium,” the inclination and experience of the godly.’Footnote ³¹ Baxter's counter-rhetoric claimed that while the ‘godly’ puritans remained the true fideles, his opponents’ ‘common sense of the faithful’ signified merely the opinions of the majority – opinions as changeable on matters of church governance as on hairstyles!

Richard Hooker. Seeking unity in the English Church-State, Hooker used ‘public approbation’ as an alternative to consensus fidelium – a rhetorical term to criticize both puritans for ignoring customs long received and Roman Catholics for not seeking lay consent.Footnote ³² Writing as a Reformed theologian,Footnote ³³ Hooker was clear that the revealed laws of Scripture could be interpreted without the Roman lens of tradition.Footnote ³⁴ But on matters where Scripture gave no positive law, and much to puritan dismay, Hooker drew upon the natural law theology of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74) to express confidence in the ability of humans – with God's ‘perpetual aid and concurrence’Footnote ³⁵ – to discern by reason, among other things, laws for the Church–State. It was reasonable to follow custom in lawmaking. ‘For in all right and equity’, he wrote, ‘that which the Church hath received and held so long for good, that which public approbation hath ratified, must carry the benefit of presumption with it to be accounted meet and convenient.’Footnote ³⁶ Following one's forebears was supported by Aristotle: ‘It is therefore the voice both of God and nature, not of learning only, that especially in matters of action and policy, “The sentences and judgments of men experienced, aged and wise, yea though they speak without any proof or demonstration, are no less to be hearkened unto”.’Footnote ³⁷ Hooker also quoted Augustine: ‘For in these things, whereof Scripture appointeth no certainty, the use of the people of God or the ordinances of our fathers must serve for a law.’Footnote ³⁸ Therefore, quoting two of the authorities discussed in the section ‘Early Christian Writings’ above, Hooker defended the right of the Church of England to follow the customs to which the faithful consented – unless that custom was unreasonable or incompatible with Scripture.

On the basis of such consent, Laws sought to oppose the Presbyterian polity favoured by puritans. As the preface put it: ‘the [episcopal] government against which ye bend yourselves be observed every where throughout all generations and ages of the Christian world, no church ever perceiving the word of God to be against it.’Footnote ³⁹ Although Hooker conceded that the office of bishop was no part of the positive law of Scripture, the consent of the historic Church showed episcopacy to be compatible with reason.Footnote ⁴⁰ The puritans were wrong to object to some customs that the Church of England shared with Rome. But so were Roman bishops wrong to govern without the laity's consent. Hooker states that although ‘the pastors and bishops’ devised ‘laws in the Church’ – mentioning the Prayer Book and Thirty-Nine Articles – yet those laws required ‘consent of the whole Church’ or else ‘well might they seem as wholesome admonitions and instructions, but laws could they never be’.Footnote ⁴¹ Here the role for the laity is a passive one, though without their consent the laws remain like the unheeded ‘counsels of physicians’. Such rhetoric was specifically in service of the Elizabethan Settlement, for church laws in England could not be made without the ‘consent as well of the laity as of the clergy’, given respectively in Parliament and Convocation, ‘but least of all without consent of the highest power’, the Crown.Footnote ⁴²

Herbert Thorndike and Joseph Butler. While Hooker was writing Laws a new phrase appeared, ‘common sense’, a notion that not only brought a paradigm shift in intellectual inquiry but also provided churchmen with a new rhetoric of unity.Footnote ⁴³ ‘By the end of the seventeenth century, most English thinkers, no matter what their field of inquiry, had ceased to believe that their labors would produce the certitude or “science” that had for centuries been the goal of the philosopher.’Footnote ⁴⁴ The Cambridge scholar Herbert Thorndike was true to his age when reasoning from the data of ‘experience and common sense’, or when speaking in terms of likelihood, rather than certainty: ‘Matter of faith is evidently credible, but cannot be evidently true.’Footnote ⁴⁵ But in their redeployment over the seventeenth century from rhetoric to empirical reasoning, the words ‘credible’ or ‘probable’ did not lose their rhetorical usage – what was credible or probable continued to depend upon persuasion – and ‘common sense’ was also used rhetorically. For instance, Joseph Butler (1692–1752) would argue from the rhetorical tropes of analogy and probability for the truth of revelation: ‘That which chiefly constitutes probability is expressed in the word likely, i.e., like some truth, or true event’, citing the classical term verisimile.Footnote ⁴⁶ On this basis, Butler held that ‘common sense’ could recognize the evidences of revealed religion.Footnote ⁴⁷ Butler's rhetoric was still that of an elite male, loyal to his patron-friends, seeking in a stratified and divided society the conformity of ‘common men’.Footnote ⁴⁸

An important difference between Hooker and churchmen who came later, then, lay not just in their experience of civil war and its memory, but also in using new words to express old unity language. In English debates among the ‘three parties, papists, prelatical and puritans’Footnote ⁴⁹ that intensified during the interregnum – when there was neither Church of England nor Prayer Book – Thorndike used ‘common sense’ as a conservative term. An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England (1659), as has recently been shown, was among the first Anglican works to make ‘the case for tradition’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Here Thorndike argued that any ecclesiastical reform claiming the words of Scripture as its foundation must be judged by the same standard as the fathers used: ‘Owning, therefore, my obligation to the whole Church – notwithstanding my obligation to the Church of England – I have prescribed the consent thereof, for a boundary to all interpretation of Scripture, all reformation in the Church.’Footnote ⁵¹ To accept the sense of Scripture to which the whole Church consents was, for Thorndike, literally to adopt the ‘common sense’, the one mind of the Church. (When writing in Latin he used the term consensus fidelium.)Footnote ⁵² The common-sense interpretation was, he claimed, what the fathers called apostolic tradition or the rule of faith,Footnote ⁵³ in which ‘the succession of pastors’ through ‘daily intercourse and correspondence between Churches’ brought into unity ‘particular Churches by consent of the whole’ to the exclusion of error.Footnote ⁵⁴ Through communion with such a pastor, therefore, the individual Christian was ‘neither putting trust in man, which God curseth, nor in his own understanding, for the sense of the Scriptures, but trusting his own common sense, as well for the means of conveying to him the matter, as the motives of Christianity’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Notice how the rhetoric works here: the individual should take the ‘common sense’, not his personal understanding, to be his own. Moreover, his appeal to the succession of ‘pastors’ (not ‘bishops’ whose office had ceased in the interregnum) may have been an attempt to divide puritans, separating Presbyterians from Thorndike's greater enemies, the Independents, who rejected a visible Church and promoted private interpretation of Scripture.Footnote ⁵⁶ Calvin had, after all, regarded the office of ‘pastor’, ‘presbyter’ or ‘bishop’ as all the same in the New Testament.Footnote ⁵⁷

On matters of polity, Thorndike's ‘common sense’ approach reiterated Hooker's resort to custom in the two-pronged attack on puritans and Romans. Thorndike used the canon of Vincent of Lérins (d. c. 450) against Independents, saying their congregational polity added more to the rule of faith than Rome did at the Council of Trent: ‘matter of faith is to the world's end the same, that the whole Church hath always from the beginning professed. If you impose more, the Church of Rome will have a better pretence than you can have; namely, a better claim to the authority of the Church.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Labeling the Independents as ‘fanatics’ he presented them with a double argument – one from the law of Scripture as interpreted by tradition and one from consensus. On the one hand, those who read Scripture by the ‘tradition of the faith’ recognized episcopacy to be God's law. On the other hand, if fanatics considered ‘episcopacy no part of God's law, but introduced by consent of the whole Church’, then to reject bishops in the face of such consensus made one schismatic.Footnote ⁵⁹ With respect to Rome, Thorndike argued that the pope had rightful headship over the Western Church, including the Church of England, but that he needed to govern by council and consent.Footnote ⁶⁰

Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter. Rather than employing consensus fidelium to defend doctrine and existing church polity, the Caroline divine Jeremy Taylor and the puritan Richard Baxter used the concept on questions of morality. Both writers held that the plethora of opinions extant in the aftermath of the civil war made moral decision-making hard for lay people. In their respective books on decisions of conscience, they tried to prioritize the various authorities that guided decision-making; both included popular consent, although recognizing that it had to be evaluated carefully. Taylor quoted the same letter of Augustine as Hooker to argue that ‘custom is to be allowed … [as] the best argument we have when we have no better’.Footnote ⁶¹ On the basis of consent, moreover, Taylor argued against treating the fathers as moral authorities: ‘no company of men will consent that in all cases the fathers are rather to be followed than their successors’.Footnote ⁶² But, for Taylor, each individual's conscience had to judge which authority to follow, and ultimate knowledge was to be found not in scholarly learning but in holy living.Footnote ⁶³

Baxter was more open to following the ‘common sense … of the faithful’ than Taylor. Regarding worship, he wrote: ‘prefer not the judgment of a sect or party, or some few godly people, against the common sense of the generality of the faithful; for the Spirit of God is more likely to have forsaken a small part of godly people, than the generality, in such particular opinions, which even good men may be forsaken in.’Footnote ⁶⁴ But, he warned, ‘use the advice of men in a due subordination to the will of God, and the teaching of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Baxter saw the importance of the laity's submission to the pastors, whose office is ‘to bear and exercise the keys of Christ's church’.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, ‘in the case of extremity [the people] may cast off heretical, and impious, and intolerable pastors, and commit their souls to the conduct of fitter men; as the churches did against the Arian bishops and as Cyprian declareth it his people's duty to do’,Footnote ⁶⁷ referring to the action described by Cyprian above, Basilide's deposition ‘following the verdict of the whole congregation’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both Taylor and Baxter represent an English tradition of moral reasoning that included consensus fidelium among the ways of discerning moral action, which flourished in the work of Joseph Butler mentioned above.Footnote ⁶⁹ But Hooker and Thorndike represent an English tradition of unity rhetoric in matters of doctrine and discipline that would re-emerge in the nineteenth century.

The Tractarians and their Successors

Although phrases derived from the Latin consensus fidelium were used in the English Church after the Reformation, the word ‘consensus’ entered the English language only in the 1850s.Footnote ⁷⁰ John Henry Newman used the Latin in his article ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ (1859), which sought to make the hierarchy of his adopted Roman Church aware that ‘the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine … their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible Church’.Footnote ⁷¹ Newman's rhetoric of ‘consulting’ the faithful was also pertinent in an English Church that had, around this time, started to admit a few active laymen into new church bodies, the first diocesan synods and (with the revival in 1852 of Convocation prorogued since 1717), a new House of Laymen for Canterbury (1886) and York (1892). Charles Gore (1853–1932) and W.J. Sparrow Simpson (1859–1952), two Anglo-Catholics steeped in patristic learning, used evidence from Newman's article for a fourth-century consensus fidelium to argue on different sides in debates concerning the House of Laymen's role in church governance.Footnote ⁷² All Anglo-Catholics agreed that doctrine was the Church's truth, upheld by bishops and their clergy, to which the people consented. But what was the laity's role in matters of discipline (or church governance)?

These Anglo-Catholics, bound together as friends by family and university ties, debated what consensus fidelium in the early church meant for the English Church. The original Tractarians had coalesced in opposition to a series of parliamentary reforms (1828–32) that increased the freedom of Nonconformists to participate in government, which they saw as ending the claim of Parliament to be the lay synod of the Church of England. In the opinion of the Tractarians, lay involvement by means of Parliament in Church affairs should come to an end. Conversely, when the parliamentary franchise widened through the Reform Acts of 1867, 1884 and 1918, the question of representation for lay churchmen in Church affairs pressed upon the Tractarians’ successors. The shifts in rhetoric that resulted will be traced across roughly four generations: those of the Tracts for the Times authors, of William Bright (1824–1901), of Charles Gore and of Jack Rawlinson (1884–1960). As in the previous sections, these were debates among elite friends – although now some were laymen.Footnote ⁷³ Many from the first three generations discussed here were friends with, or received patronage from, the Tractarian layman and later Liberal prime minister, W.E. Gladstone (1809–98); even those who did not share his politics – as in the case of Bright – were on friendly terms.Footnote ⁷⁴ Gladstone voiced the Tractarians’ call to increase the faithful's active participation in the Church, through synods, in support of their bishops.Footnote ⁷⁵ Some in the younger generations would push beyond Gladstone, considering consensus fidelium in the early church to provide warrant for a more ‘democratic’ Church. Yet, what has been said of Rawlinson applies to many of these so-called Liberal Catholics, that ‘although he taught a liberal theology of authority he exercised episcopal authoritarianism’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Tractarians. The Tractarians’ nostalgia for early Christianity set the bar by which they could measure the downfall of contemporary England. In the face of the Whig government's reforms, Newman wrote in 1833: ‘Hitherto the English Church has depended on the State, i.e. on the ruling powers in the country – the king and the aristocracy; and this is so natural and religious a position of things when viewed in the abstract.’ But the ruling powers had let the Church down in admitting Nonconformists to Parliament, so instead ‘we must look to the people’, seeing in the example of Ambrose (c. 339–97) ‘how a Church may be in “favour with all the people” [Acts 2.47] without any subserviency to them.Footnote ⁷⁷ Newman recognized in Ambrose's rhetoric the power to leverage the laity in support of the clergy against the secular power. Newman and his friends tried to emulate Ambrose with rhetoric suited to the laity of their own day in Tracts for the Times. Of the first ten Tracts in the autumn of 1833, although the first and third (by Newman) were specifically ‘addressed to the clergy’, the fourth (by Keble), fifth (by John Bowden), sixth (by Newman) and ninth (by Froude) were specifically addressed to the laity (‘ad populum’). The laity were there to uphold the doctrine and discipline of ‘apostolic tradition’ as a bolster against heresy and Nonconformity – indeed Newman invoked the orthodoxy of the early church's laity against the heresy, as he saw it, of Oxford clergy in 1836.Footnote ⁷⁸

For precedent on matters of discipline (or church governance), the Oxford Movement often focused on Cyprian's councils. These were lionized because, unlike bishops in Parliament, Cyprian and his fellow bishops governed authoritatively and, unlike the House of Commons, the lay faithful in attendance were orthodox and did not include Nonconformists. Based on their contemporary concerns, the Tractarians raised the historical question of how involved were the laity in early councils of local churches? Edward Pusey (1800–82) claimed:

According to Pusey, Cyprian sought ‘concurrence’ (his translation of ‘consensus’) with the people when by right bishops could have decided alone – a rhetoric that left church government in the hands of bishops.Footnote ⁸⁰ John Keble (1792–1866) agreed, writing to suggest that Gladstone's 1852 proposals for lay involvement in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, which ‘so carefully guarded the Episcopal Prerogative, that I really think St. Cyprian (e.g.) would have allowed it as consistent with his principles’, should become the standard for English diocesan synods.Footnote ⁸¹ Keble used consensus fidelium rhetoric to accept lay representation in diocesan synods as long as the governing power rested with bishops: ‘the voice of the laity, in one form or another, has always been a most essential part of the voice of the whole Church’, even in doctrine, in which, based on the evidence of other early councils, the faithful's acceptance of a council's teaching was required for it to ‘become Oecumenical’.Footnote ⁸² The ‘voice of the laity’ was, for Newman, Pusey and Keble, a bolster to episcopal power against the power of Parliament. Evangelicals recognized this in their counter-rhetoric, the Record describing ‘the ever-lengthening chain which is fast binding on the neck of the Church of England the autocratic government of the Bishops under the name of Diocesan Synod’ and J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) wanting synods ‘confine[d] … to their proper work’ of ‘consultation, deliberation, expression of opinion, discussion, comparison of views, – and not action’.Footnote ⁸³

The Generations of Bright and Gore. Later in the nineteenth century, some Anglo-Catholics used consensus fidelium as rhetoric to proclaim conformity to historic Christianity when faced with opposition from Church and State, including from bishops. For instance, in 1899, 220 Ritualist priests in London supported resolutions to defy their bishop in cases where the ‘whole Catholic Church’ has spoken, specifically ‘the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in parish churches and for the bona-fide purpose of communicating the sick and dying, and the ceremonial use of incense’. Notice that the Ritualists justified reserving the Eucharistic elements using consensus rhetoric, one of the practices the Prayer Book's Black Rubric had used consensus rhetoric to forbid (see ‘The Reformation and its Aftermath’ above). The resolutions aimed consensus fidelium rhetoric at bishops who, in prosecuting Ritualists, failed to conform to the ‘laws, usages, customs and rights of the Church’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Non-ritualist Anglo-Catholics also challenged bishops’ authority. Political progressives such as Richard Belward Rackham (1863–1912) and Gore argued: ‘From St. Cyprian's letters we gather that the presence of the laity was an accepted feature of the councils of the third century.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Rackham charted the change in meaning of ‘brethren’ from Cyprian's ‘the whole body of his fellow-Christians’ to ‘fellow-bishops’; in Rackham's rhetoric, the golden age of consensus fidelium was replaced by episcopal autocracy.Footnote ⁸⁶ George Bayfield Roberts (1847–1937), a Ritualist from the English Church Union, challenged this claim, concerned about Rackham's attempt to downsize the role of bishops (which the Oxford Movement had done so much to magnify) in order to upgrade the laity. Roberts replied, regarding the councils on rebaptism, ‘in the six epistles which deal with the subject, there is absolutely no mention at all of the laity from beginning to end … when [Cyprian] describes the composition of these later Councils, it is … “that you may know what several of us, fellow-Bishops, with the brother presbyters who were present, lately determined in council”.’Footnote ⁸⁷ An allied concern was any downsizing of the role of priests (who, according to the Oxford Movement, participated in their bishop's apostolic authority); hence Roberts saw a difference between Cyprian's seeking ‘council’ from clergy and ‘consent’ from the laity.Footnote ⁸⁸Consensus fidelium was less important to Cyprian than the consilium of priests, Roberts claimed, for then as now, the laity's views were not as important as the priests’ views.

The debate between Rackham and Roberts reflected divisions in later generations over the legacy of the Tractarians. The same dispute can be seen in the writings of Charles Gore and William Bright. The radical Gore assumed consensus fidelium to have been a fact in the early church, and thus to fulfill the Tractarians’ exhortation to follow primitive times led him to use consensus fidelium as rhetoric to propose lay participation in a more ‘democratic’ Church of England. A conservative opponent such as Bright, the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, who was appointed to a Joint Committee of the Convocation of Canterbury examining church reform, would argue – like Roberts – that evidence was lacking of lay participation in early councils.Footnote ⁸⁹ Although Bright died before the Committee concluded, its 1902 report testified that he upheld his Tractarian mentors’ position.Footnote ⁹⁰ From Bright's perspective, the Tractarians defended the rights of laity, so it was wrong (for Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics alike) to claim that Pusey ‘contended for the autocracy of bishops’.Footnote ⁹¹ The Tractarians were nevertheless right to assert that no laity were involved in legislating at early church councils, Bright argued, for Pope Leo I was only using rhetoric when he claimed that the Chalcedonian Definition received ‘general acceptance … in the Catholic world’ (universo iam mundo consentiente).Footnote ⁹² While Bright correctly identified consensus fidelium as rhetoric, of course, this served his own rhetorical purpose by showing that ‘the average laic is not by right on the same footing with the ordained pastors’.Footnote ⁹³

Gore, on the other hand, considered lay participation in the early church to be real, pushing for more lay representation in the Church of England by interpreting the consensus fidelium with his own rhetoric of representative democracy. Writing in 1898 on behalf of the Church Reform League, Gore said that the early church's ‘popular election or approbation of clergy’ showed that the ‘Church was in fact the very nursery and home of the principle of representative government’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Gore viewed the Tractarians’ true legacy as ‘the revival of this corporate consciousness on the part of the Church’, and rather than invoking Pusey's exhortation that it was enough for bishops and priests to ‘pay regard … to the feelings of their parishioners and communicants’, Gore argued that the New Testament and early church witnessed to a ‘hierarchy largely tempered by spiritual democracy’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Like his Tractarian forebears, Gore claimed that representative government in the Church required freedom from the State, but unlike the Tractarians he demanded therefore a House of Laity, elected by lay women and men, to supplement the Houses of Convocation.Footnote ⁹⁶

The Liberal Catholics. Many influenced by Gore's ‘Liberal Catholicism’ also upheld his contrast between a real consensus fidelium in the early church and the more authoritarian rule of later bishops. In 1884, Gore had opposed the early church's ‘consentient witness’ to the Roman Catholic view that the Church was ‘an open organ of continuous revelation’: ‘the strength of [the latter's] promulgative authority is centrality; the strength of witness is the consent of independent and distinct voices’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Putting aside the obvious polemic (in a book called Roman Catholic Claims!), Gore's own claim that ‘consentient witness’ is the basis for church authority represented a shift in consensus rhetoric that others would adopt. For the Liberal Catholics who contributed to Essays Catholic and Critical: By Members of the Anglican Communion (1926), Gore's ‘consentient witness’ was said to determine what the church's doctrine and discipline should continue to be, embracing the notion (that Gore himself rejected) of development in the church's teaching. Thus Wilfred Knox (1886–1950) wrote of ‘the general Christian consciousness’, which upholds pronouncements that ‘have come to be regarded as expressing the voice of the whole Church. Those which have been found in practice inadequate, or have been shown to be untenable by the advance of human knowledge, have been relegated to the rank of temporary and disciplinary pronouncements, or else … held not to have been spoken in the name of the whole Church.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Equally open to development, Jack Rawlinson's essay on ecclesial authority argued that consensus is the opposite of forced conformity. Invoking an authority based upon ‘free consensus of competent and adequately Christian minds’, Rawlinson rejected ‘unanimity … secured only by methods of discipline’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Gore's and Rawlinson's emphasis on the freedom of ‘consentient witness’ opposed both the post-Reformation Church of England's requirement of conformity and the Tractarians’ promotion of episcopacy.

Ultimately, Knox's ‘general Christian consciousness’ and Rawlinson's meeting of ‘adequately Christian minds’ seem as unitary (and as rhetorical) as the post-Reformation language of ‘common sense’. The Liberal Catholic ‘mind’ was an eminently reasonable one that opened tradition up to scientific discovery and historical criticism – yet it was a rhetorical construction that presented as unified and stable what was neither of these things. These Liberal Catholics remind us that, since the seventeenth century, Anglicans have claimed for themselves the rhetoric of ‘common sense’ or ‘reason’. This rhetoric continues today, for instance in The Virginia Report (1998), which holds ‘common’ sense to be ‘the mind of a particular culture’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ – as if such a ‘mind’ were either unitary or stable. This article has shown the dangers of such unity language in suppressing disagreement. Of those examined above, only the Liberal Catholics, by involving the laity in pursuit of ‘free consensus’, represent some way out of the dangers of ‘mind of the Church’ rhetoric, including their own. In conclusion, it will be seen that the Liberal Catholics’ view of authority has contributed to the best Anglican Communion discussions of authority and consent.

Conclusion: Anglican Communion Documents

The first section, ‘Early Christian Writings’, showed that the fathers employed unity language to persuade others to conform to their teaching. The next section showed that this patristic unity language emerged in the Church of England after the Reformation, not least in the rhetoric of ‘common sense’. The third section compared the trajectory of Anglo-Catholics in the nineteenth century who used the patristic consensus fidelium to bolster the position of bishops in the Church of England, with those in the twentieth century who used it to increase lay involvement. In concluding with an examination of four Anglican Communion documents, it will be seen that of the two trajectories – the Tractarian and the Liberal Catholic – The Virginia Report (1997) and the Anglican Covenant follow one, the 1948 Lambeth Conference and The Kuala Lumpur Report (2008) follow the other. The first trajectory emphasizes the role of bishops and works to suppress discord; the second emphasizes the voice of the laity and the positive contribution of conflict alongside communion.

The Liberal Catholic use of consensus language to encourage lay involvement in church governance entered the documents of the Anglican Communion at the 1948 Lambeth Conference. The report of the Committee on the Anglican Communion declared: ‘Authority … is single in that it is derived from a single Divine source … [but] distributed among Scripture, Tradition, Creeds, the Ministry of Word and Sacraments, the witness of saints, and the consensus fidelium, which is the continuing experience of the Holy Spirit through His faithful people in the Church.’ In a key phrase, the report continued: ‘It is thus a dispersed rather than a centralized authority having many elements which combine, interact with, and check each other.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Here ‘dispersed authority’ expressed the same idea as Gore's ‘consentient witness’ but now explicitly included the consensus fidelium as part of that authority. Such a view of authority could be called ‘consensual’ in the modern sense of emerging from both discord and accord among voices – lay and ordained. The recognition of the positive role of discord in debate (when one position ‘checks’ another) is a vital corrective to the consensus language seen so far, which, with the exception of Rawlinson's, operated to bring about conformity. The report also reiterated Rawlinson's stress on liberty: ‘ “the weight of this consensus [depends on] … the extent to which the consensus is genuinely free” ‘.Footnote ¹⁰²

Instead of the trajectory of consensus rhetoric used in 1948, more recent Anglican Communion documents resemble the Tractarians’ rhetoric. Following the lead of the Virginia Report,Footnote ¹⁰³ the Covenant Design Group ended up with a document that promotes consensus in the face of Communion-wide division. Section 3.1.4 of the proposed Anglican Covenant holds that while apostolic authority is diverse – synodal, episcopal, local – it ‘interprets and articulates the common faith of the Church's members (consensus fidelium)’. Here the fideles, even when involved at the national and local level, let the apostolic authority do their interpreting and speaking for them, much as we saw in Cyprian's councils. This is not the Liberal Catholic vision of Cyprian's councils, found at the end of the section ‘The Tractarians and their Successors’, in which the voice of the laity existed alongside other authoritative voices. Instead the Covenant's model of episcopally promoted consensus comes from The Virginia Report. That report stated: ‘The episcopate is the primary instrument of Anglican unity, but episcope is exercised personally, collegially and communally.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ An instance of the episcopal orientation of the report's unity rhetoric can be seen in its interpretation of the Archbishop of Canterbury's words to the Lambeth Conference in 1988: ‘ “to bring their dioceses with them” … [Thus a] resolution did not just express the mind of the bishops acting entirely alone, but as spokespersons who reflected the mind of their Provinces and were together expressing the mind of the Communion.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This is unity rhetoric in the patristic mode that the Tractarians reclaimed: when bishops (elite friends) speak for their dioceses and provinces, the entire Communion is of one mind. Just as with the pagan friendship language that preceded the Christian rhetoric, the people are given little opportunity to speak for themselves.

By contrast, The Kuala Lumpur Report prepared for Lambeth 2008 represents a return to the language of sixty years before, acknowledging lay involvement as well as the necessity of discord in Anglican decision-making. Lambeth 1948's ‘dispersed authority’ is cited as a counterthrust to proposals for greater ‘centralisation’ of Anglican authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Seeking a ‘fresh understanding’ of dispersed authority, the Commission produced a discursive report of many voices: ‘Each [statement in the report] includes an initial comment from the Commission and responses from the people of the church.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the report, ‘the people’ (fideles) express discord as well as accord in their own voices. Bishops are reminded that the ‘purpose of “dispersed authority” is to draw to itself the consensus fidelium’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thus bishops speak to the faithful, rather than for them. If this report were followed, then ‘consensus’ might be less rhetorical today than ever before.