the Anglican church has always been divided on the role of Apostolic Succession and role for true and valid sacraments.
Has it?
on a personal note I don't care if a church has it or not. Apostolic Succession is not in the bible nor is it in the 39 Articles. I believe we Anglicans have it, but to me it's a unimportant factor in creating a 'Valid Sacrament'
How would you argue, then, that sacraments ever become valid?
I do believe in the orders of Bishop, Priest and Deacon but just no the Apostolic Succession as taught by the Roman Catholic Church and some Anglo-Catholic Churches
It's unfortunate that apostolic succession has been relegated to people with a romanizing perspective. Traditionally, classical Anglicans have had a very high view of the church and the bishop, and concomitantly, the Apostolic Succession.
I view it as very important. The Romans pride themselves on being able to trace themselves to the apostles, but the curious fact is that Anglicans too can have a direct lineage,
unbroken, all the way to the Apostles. I would further argue that Anglicanism, sequestered far to the north from Rome, has preserved a line of Christianity that most closely resembled the Early Church.
Of course I know that everybody and their brother try to liken themselve to the early church, but none other than the Catholics and Orthodox have any connection with it. And both Catholics and Orthodox are nothing like the life and faith the Church Fathers describe in their writings. During the medieval period England was obviously under a theological shadow of Rome in many ways, and yet important critics of the Papacy in the whole Western
world inevitably were from
England -- Bede, Anselm, and others.
Then, during the Reformation, the Anglicans were given the temporal and theological liberty to return to the Church Fathers, something both the Catholics and and the radical Protestants did their utmost to refute.
The radical Protestants argued that the visible Church, properly speaking, died with the last Apostle in the 1st century AD (only to be resurrected in the 1600s). On the other hand, Catholics make a
show for reverencing the Fathers, until they behold the countless patristic quotes where Peter's supremacy was denied, and sola scriptura was professed; at which point they turn away (and have always turned away) from the Church Fathers, and embrace the Pope as their one true bulwark.
All of the above was a long way of saying that there is an
interesting, and
special, historical line that runs through the English church, sequestered and far away, like I said, from most of the tumults of Rome, Byzantium, and wars that convulsed the Mediterranean. This line shows that the Anglican church was not something that 'began' in the 1500s. Rather, that it has connection to the original Church, that was given freedom to restore itself in the 1500s.
If we think of the Anglican church as in some
physical way tethered, to the
original Church!, the notion of apostolic succession takes on a
vastly new meaning, and its importance or absence becomes much more significant.
