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.

Africa played a prominent role in the formation of earliest Christianity not least in the persons of Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo. The Anglican heritage is considered through the experience of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria through whom christian faith came to the rest of Nigeria. The Anglicanism which came to the Yoruba was evangelical through the Church Missionary Society, though a key role was played by liberated slaves from Sierra Leone. Contexts in which the gospel is proclaimed and the way it is expressed may change, yet the contents of the gospel do not. A contextualized curriculum thus includes key courses such as biblical studies and systematic theology. It also includes contextual subjects such as African traditional religions and Islam and Christianity. The Church of Nigeria has thus undertaken a thorough review of the curriculum to adequately represent this kind of contextualized theology.

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.

Since 1998 there has been a revived interest in theology among Anglicans around the world. Rowan Williams has encouraged this with the promotion of a Theological Education for the Anglican Communion Commission. The Global South primates have called for a rejection of the Western paradigm of Anglican theology in the context of the current debates about sexuality. The key Lambeth resolution on sexuality at the 1998 conference carries with it significant assumptions and challenges about theological method. There has been a renewed focus on context in doing theology. These changes can be seen in the case of Kenya where there has been a determined effort to re-cast the theological curriculum. Theology has also become more popular among lay people and theological work is expanding and flourishing.

The inconsistency between theological education and parish life is a sign of the breakdown of a theological paradigm for doing and communicating theology in Africa today. The role of Scripture within the framework of an Anglican tradition is now a matter of examination. There are biblical foundations for ministerial formation but they need to relate to the current situation of ministry. The only theological seminary in Ghana is St Nicholas, where the staff are indigenous but the programme offered is Western and imported. The result is that ministerial formation has failed to meet the needs of the people of Ghana. The way forward demands a thorough revision of the present course content and a focus on the needs of the particular time and place that is modern Ghana.

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.

St John's College Auckland has served the New Zealand church for over 150 years. In 1992 the Anglican Church in New Zealand changed its constitution to give recognition to the Pakeha, Maori and Polynesian groups in the church. The Canon concerning St John's College was also changed to reflect the new Constitutional arrangements. From that time the college was committed to recognizing the two cultural traditions in its leadership and across all aspects of the college's activities and environment. This implied significant curriculum challenges. Some difficult choices have been faced as to the relationship with a secular university and its implications for the presence in the curriculum of Anglican studies. These have been resolved in a way which honours the contextual issues and the tradition of Anglican faith.

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’.

Theological education should take full account of the context in which it operates and authors share a commitment to a broadly defined liberation theology which takes the experience of the poor as its starting point. Focus is on the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown, a city with an unemployment rate of over 50 percent. The College supports not only theological education but also integrates ministerial and spiritual formation. The political context of South Africa has influenced the shape of theology even though students come from many other places. The contextualization thrust of the theology is shaped by a commitment to Outcomes Based Education. Anglican studies curriculum is shaped by this method and aims for a capacity to describe such things as Anglican identity, polity and beliefs. This is carried out in the absence of any sustained robust discourse on Anglican identity in the Anglican Communion.

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.

Malaysia became an independent nation in 1957 and has grown dramatically in prosperity since that time. The main groups in this ethnically diverse nation are Malays (65 per cent) Chinese (26 per cent) and Indians (7.7 per cent). Sixty per cent of the population are Muslim which is the official religion of the nation. Christians represent about 9 per cent of the population and there are 80,000 Anglican members. There has been political pressure against Christians in recent years and there is growing concern about the position of minority religious groups. Anglicans came with the British, though indigenous mission was the work of Indian and Chinese Christians. Theological education is mainly focused on the Seminari Theoloji Malaysia where a holistic curriculum has been developed. A sense of Anglican identity is developing in relation to the context in Malaysia but this has hindered clarity on the nature of the Anglican heritage. The challenges facing the Anglican Church in Malaysia are identified.

Building on Rowan Williams's claims about William Tyndale's importance for English Reformation theology, this paper outlines a theological matrix within which we can situate and interpret Tyndale's translation work. Focusing on Tyndale's translation of the fourth Gospel in his 1534 New Testament, the central claim is that in light of more recent developments in biblical interpretation, the very style of Tyndale's translation has evident theological implications with compelling resonances for contemporary Anglicanism. This analysis of the theology of Tyndale's literary style also attempts to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Tyndale's reputation. Tyndale's biographer, David Daniell, has lamented that ‘Tyndale as theologian… has been at best neglected and at worst twisted out of shape’, while ‘Tyndale as conscious [literary] craftsman has been… denied’. As a close reading of Tyndale's Gospel of John shows, Tyndale the theologian and Tyndale the craftsman can and should be approached as one and the same.