Continuing Anglicanism? The History, Theology, and Contexts of “The Affirmation of St Louis” (1977)*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In September 1977, following a gathering of just under two thousand conservative North American Anglicans at St Louis, Missouri, emerged “The Affirmation of St Louis” (1977), an articulation of an Anglican vision born out of a conservative Anglo‐Catholic ecclesiology. Claiming to represent the “continuation” of orthodox Anglicanism, contrary to an alleged apostasy by the Anglican Church of Canada and the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, “Continuing Anglicanism” emerged as an ecclesiology of a number of Anglican jurisdictions who exist to this day outside the Anglican Communion. This paper discusses the ecclesiology and history of this movement — notably, its foundational doctrinal articulation: “The Affirmation of St Louis.” Viewed within the context of the history of Anglican theology, Continuing Anglicanism's conservative articulation is broadly but distinctly from the Anglo‐Catholic tradition. Continuing Anglicanism's claim to continuity is, therefore, accompanied with the problems of discontinuity. Viewed within the context of other Anglican bodies who have left the comprehensive boundaries of the modern Anglican Communion, the challenges of identity and unity have been persistent elements of the Continuing Anglican story since its formal inception in 1977.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".