Although there is a strong movement within Anglicanism to produce a Covenant, this article argues against such an approach. Postponing dealing with today's problems by leaving them for a vaguely worded future document, instead of trying to clarify and resolve them now, and live in peace with one another, is evasive action that solves nothing. Also, some covenant proposals represent a veiled attempt to limit the role of women and homosexuals in the church.

The article's core argument is that covenants were specifically rejected by Anglicans at a time when they swept the Continent in the sixteenth century. The Church of England had specifically rejected the powerful hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the legalism of the Puritans in favor of what was later to become the Anglican via media, with its emphasis on an informal, prayerful unity of diverse participants at home and abroad. It further argues the Church contains sufficient doctrinal statements in the Creeds, Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886, 1888, and the Baptismal Covenant in the American Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

Covenant proponents argue their proposed document follows in the tradition of classic Anglicanism, but Quinn demonstrates this is not the case. He presents Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor as major voices articulating a distinctly Anglican perspective on church governance, noting Hooker ‘tried to stake out parameters between positions without digging a ditch others could not cross. Hooker placed prudence ahead of doctrinal argument.’ Taylor cited the triadic scripture, tradition and reason so central to Anglicanism and added how religious reasoning differs from mathematical and philosophical reasoning. The author notes that the cherished Reformation gift of religious reasoning is totally unmentioned in the flurry of documents calling for a new Anglican Covenant.

The standpoint adopted here is that of a diocesan bishop serving in the Nippon SeiKoKai (NSKK, Anglican Church). The NSKK is a small church and has a long history in Japan. Its public stance has been relatively moderate and approaches Japanese society and other Christian churches in a modest way. Government agencies have tended to regard Christianity as peculiar and even dangerous. The moderate approach of the NSKK has meant that it has tended to yield its social work to the government. Liturgy and in particular the Eucharist has been the sustaining focus of the life of the NSKK. Monotheistic religions are regarded as not as suitable for peace as Buddhism and this creates special concerns for witness in a pseudo-religious and pseudo-communal society. The NSKK faces real challenges of enculturation and needs to find resources in the networks of the Anglican Communion for different experiences to be shared.

This article argues that Anglicans in North East Asia face a challenge to re-imagine their history in the light of the resources of the Anglican theological tradition. That history has been largely influenced by a narrative which has seen the Christian faith come from across the sea in the form of European missionaries in the Age of Discovery. But there is evidence of the presence of Christian faith long before this which came not through missionaries but through ordinary people who practised their faith. Anglicans can deploy a notion of via media which is not the assumption of a midpoint between contesting claims, but a method for sublating differing opinions by providing a new paradigm, integrating them into a new conceptual framework. Anglicans are thus called to aim for a church whose very mode of existence bears its message.

The contrast in social life between a messhi bōkō (sacrificing one's personal interest to the public good) and mekkō hōshi(sacrificing the public for the sake of the individual) cannot be settled in terms of a dualism. The Christian Church from its earliest times was without doubt a ‘public’ community. Setting up a hypothesis that the concept of ‘publicness’ presented by public philosophy is actually closely related to the ‘catholicity’ that has been a characteristic of Christianity since the time of the Early Church, the main object of this essay will be to demonstrate, by introducing concrete theological illustrations, that Anglicanism has the potential to be a ‘public philosophy’.

This article takes the opportunity of Gillis Harp's recent biography of nineteenth-century American Episcopalian Phillips Brooks to engage Harp's theological situation of the Episcopal Church. Harp's revisionist historiographical argument, rejecting the Broad Church ‘myth of synthesis’ for a more agonized tale of trenchant party battles, is welcome for its perceptiveness and depth of analysis, not least as these historical difficulties remain at the centre of contemporary intra-Anglican and ecumenical conversations. Harp's commitment to a ‘Reformed’ and ‘evangelical’ Anglicanism, however, raises a series of questions – concerning the nature of orthodoxy and Christian doctrine, as well as ‘Protestant’ identity – that deserve greater investigation, and that historians and theologians would do well to pursue together.

Historians of the Episcopal Church of the USA face the challenge of dealing with a tradition of in house ‘self-serving’ biographies and also of a Whiggish meta-narrative which privileged the Anglo Catholic reading of the history of ECUSA. This is similar to the challenge laid out by Diarmaid MacCulloch in relation to the English Reformation. This meta-narrative often read evangelicals out of the story. My book sought in part to correct this approach through a fresh analysis of Phillips Brooks' ministry and teaching. Within a broad tradition such as Anglicanism, argument about the past is part of the contemporary debate about identity in the tradition and of priorities in the present. That is very reasonable and a more candid engagement of the differences would serve everyone better than different perspectives passing each other like ships in the night.