He has done this by consistently avoiding questions of doctrine, speaking largely through gesture and example.
He also declared that interpretation of "questions of doctrine" were not to be discussed in future Lambeth Conferences.
Characteristic of the church in the 6th century were frequent councils to settle questions of doctrine and discipline.
In recent years its most active contributors have become obsessed with obscure questions of doctrine and have developed their own curious jargon to describe the editing process.
Their disagreement did not involve whether to rely on Scripture as the fundamental source of truth on questions of doctrine and practice, but their differing methods of interpreting the meaning of a passage (that is, their different hermeneutic principles) became a central issue in their debate.
And here, perhaps, is an irony as cruel as it is intriguing: eleven centuries later, when the Church to which Augustine had devoted the last four and a half decades of his life was to split in a manner that still shows no signs of reconciliation, both sides would appeal to Augustine as an authority on questions of doctrine [Muller 1999; Grossi 1999].
Constantine established the principle that emperors could not settle questions of doctrine on their own, but should summon instead general ecclesiastical councils for that purpose.
When I met with Chancellor Klein earlier this summer in the Tweed Courthouse, the splendidly refurbished marble building that serves as the headquarters of the newly fashioned Department of Education, he scoffed at the whole question of classroom doctrine.
Thus there are many aspects to the question of Christian doctrine, and in what follows they will be treated in the sequence just outlined: the permanent basis, the perennial functions, the levels of authority, the stable pattern, and the institutional vicissitudes.
It outed Leigh as a G&S aficionado: today, he is president of both the Gilbert Society and the Sullivan Society, though not the Gilbert and Sullivan Society from which (at least let's hope) the first two seeded over some hair-splitting question of G&S doctrine in the manner of the schism that sundered the People's Front of Judea from the Judean People's Front.
