Anglican-Methodist Ecumenism: The Search for Church Unity, 1920–2020

Abstract

critique of writers and historians who have tried to interpret Anglican responses to the outbreak of war in 1914 through the lens of later attitudes to war. The breadth of the canvas and the emphasis on war means that there are aspects of the story being told that do not receive the attention that might have helped the argument. The absence of a mention of the 1867 Army Chaplains Act passed by the British parliament, together with other subsequent attempts to define the place of British military chaplaincy within the organizational structure of the Church of England, overlooks a theme that might have been a fruitful source of enquiry. As late as 1989, an “uncontroversial” attempt to repeal the 1867 Act resulted in a row in the General Synod of the Church of England that laid bare the ambiguities of military chaplaincy when provided within the United Kingdom—an ambiguity that remains unresolved. The earlier abolition, by archbishop Ramsey, of the Bishops’ Board overseeing military chaplaincy was another twist in the story of the governance of Anglican chaplains by their Communion. Given the discussion of the criticism of Anglican chaplains in Robert Graves’s polemical memoir, Goodbye to All That (Jonathan Cape, 1929), it is a pity that reference was not made to Robert Keable’s Simon Called Peter (U.S. ed. E.P. Dutton, 1922), not least because of its mention in The Great Gatsby (Scribner’s, 1925) and thus its resonance in the United States as a description of Anglican World War One chaplaincy in France. Another of Keable’s books, Standing By (Nisbet, 1919), with its argument that Anglican chaplains would have been better to have become either Catholic chaplains or workers for the YMCA, is similarly overlooked. The debate about the efficacy of chaplaincy, particularly during the wars described in this book, remains live. The difficulty for Snape is that the debate is not merely about Anglican chaplains. This is an Anglican book. Other churches receive only occasional mentions. The ecumenical aspect of the development of military chaplaincy is thus lacking. The importance to British army chaplaincy of the 1999 Spiritual Needs Study (unpublished Ministry of Defence paper, 1999) and the consequent adoption of an “all souls” ministry that allows the army to view all chaplains as interchangeable might follow a traditional Anglican model of chaplaincy but results in a theology of chaplaincy that is more “Church of Army” than “Church in the Army” that would merit more discussion. As Snape has shown, this is a vast subject with important questions for the contemporary world in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As he would be the first to accept, there is still more research to be done in this field.