Kenneth E. Kirk (1886–1954)

This book has two problems which have to be taken into account when reading it.

The first is that it was written as a response to a very specific issue (the formation of the Church of South India which allowed for the continuation without reordination of non-episcopally ordained ministers) which has since passed into history (with the passage of time, all priests in the Church are now episcopally ordained). Similar issues affect other intercommunion discussions, but not to the same degree, as institutional fusion is not in issue.

The second is that the current assessment of the first and second-century sources has changed. In particular, "Hippolytus" Apostolic Tradition would now be dated later and would not be considered as reliable evidence of second-century uses. This means that one has to read Dom Gregory Dix's contribution with some care. Modern views would probably downplay the degree of continuity with Jewish practice which Dix argued for.

However, the book remains both readable and valuable, especially for the contributions by Farrer and Dix, although they have to be read with awareness of more recent contributions to the discussion. In particular, Dix's separation of the issue of apostolicity from that of a fixed structure of church government and his emphasis on the very early period's theology of addition, rather than succession to the apostolate, which ran contrary to the style of "root and branch" theories beloved of earlier Anglo-Catholics.… (altro)