The Lambeth Quadrilateral

In 1870 William Reed Huntington, rector of All Saints, Worcester, published The Church-Idea: An Essay towards Unity (Huntington, The Church-Idea title page). He did not wish to impose the whole Anglican system on America, but he held that the Anglican principle was the country’s best hope (Huntington, The Church-Idea pp. 155–156). That principle, he wrote, lies “foursquare”: the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God, the primitive creeds as the rule of faith, the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself, and the episcopate as the keystone of governmental unity (Huntington, The Church-Idea pp. 156–157). He called the four “the Quadrilateral” of pure Anglicanism (Huntington, The Church-Idea pp. 156–157).

In 1886 the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, meeting at Chicago, issued a declaration to Christians of other communions (House of Bishops, Chicago Declaration (1886) Prayer Book, pp. 876–877). The bishops said that all who have been duly baptized with water in the name of the Trinity are members of the Holy Catholic Church, that their church was ready to forgo its own preferences in things of human ordering, and that it did not seek to absorb other communions (House of Bishops, Chicago Declaration (1886) Prayer Book, pp. 876–877). They then named four things as “essential to the restoration of unity”: the Holy Scriptures “as the revealed Word of God”, the Nicene Creed “as the sufficient statement of the Christian Faith”, the two sacraments of Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, and “the Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration” to the needs of different peoples (House of Bishops, Chicago Declaration (1886) Prayer Book, pp. 876–877). The church’s House of Deputies did not enact the declaration; a note printed with it says that it was referred, as part of a general plan, to a new joint commission on reunion (House of Bishops, Chicago Declaration (1886) Prayer Book, pp. 876–877).

In July 1888 one hundred and forty-five Anglican bishops met at Lambeth Palace in London under the archbishop of Canterbury (Lambeth Conference 1888 encyclical letter, p. 264). Their committee on home reunion took the American articles as its basis and submitted them with some changes (Lambeth Conference 1888 report of the committee on home reunion, pp. 333–336). Resolution 11 of the conference declares that four articles “supply a basis on which approach may be by God’s blessing made towards home reunion” (Lambeth Conference 1888 Resolution 11). The first now describes the Scriptures as “containing all things necessary to salvation” and as “the rule and ultimate standard of faith”; the second adds the Apostles’ Creed, “as the baptismal symbol”, to the Nicene; the third speaks of the two sacraments “ordained by Christ himself”; and the fourth, on the historic episcopate, keeps the American wording (Lambeth Conference 1888 Resolution 11).

The Lambeth Conference of 1920 restated the four points in an appeal to all Christian people (Lambeth Conference 1920, Resolution 9 sect. 6–7). It claimed the episcopate as the means of providing a ministry that every part of the church could acknowledge, and it acknowledged at the same time the spiritual reality of the ministries of churches that have no bishops (Lambeth Conference 1920, Resolution 9 sect. 6–7).