Should the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) vote to approve the revised Concordat of Agreement and our next General Convention concur, this will put the Episcopal Church in the interesting, albeit ambiguous, position of being in communion with a church which is in turn in communion with the Presbyterian-Reformed family of churches with whom we are not in communion.

American Episcopalians and Presbyterians have rubbed shoulders at country clubs and boardrooms since anyone can remember. Although they get along swimmingly in social situations, they never seem to be able to get very far in serious ecumenical commitments. Efforts at some sort of coming together go way back to the Reformation era. In this century, there was an ill-fated plan for merger defeated in the '40s and, of course, the COCU proposal of the late Presbyterian ecumenist, Eugene Carson Blake, which has been the subject of ongoing but relatively sterile dialogue for many years. Although our immediate ecumenical focus has been elsewhere, sooner or later we must address once again our relations with the Reformed churches.

This issue has bedeviled Anglicans since the Reformation. The "Reformed churches" are those stemming from the Swiss Reformation and looking to the theology of John Calvin as formative to their self-understanding. Although they honor Calvin, they prefer the designation "Reformed" to "Calvinist." The theology of the Swiss Reformation soon spread to other lands and became a strong presence in the neighboring countries of France and Germany as well as Hungary and the Netherlands. Early on it gained adherents in Scotland, where it became the dominant religious group under the redoubtable John Knox. As a result of missionary outreach from the European Reformed churches and their North American daughters, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches now has more than 50 million members and is represented on every continent.

The Lutheran and Anglican reformations were supported by the established secular rulers and therefore were relatively conservative. Calvinism, on the other hand, had a special appeal to the emerging mercantile class of the 16th century. It challenged the existing feudal rulers, though not so radically as the Anabaptists, who formed the left wing of the Reformation. It proclaimed that all human labor had dignity and worth - even the most menial - when done to the glory of God. It stressed thrift, diligence and moral probity. It provided the theological underpinning for the "protestant work ethic" which was instrumental in shaping our modern society. From the time of the Massachusetts Bay Pilgrims and Puritans on, Calvinist influence has had an enormous impact on the American way of life, even for those not members of churches which stemmed from it.

The mainline representatives of this branch of Christianity in our own country are the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (originally formed by early Scots and Scotch-Irish pioneers), the United Church of Christ (representing an amalgam of the Congregationalist and German Reformed traditions) and the Reformed Church of America (which stems from the churches planted by Dutch settlers in the new world). There are other smaller groups of this family present in the U.S., but they tend to be of a decidedly non-ecumenical bent.

The Reformed family is not by any means monolithic in outlook. It contains many and varied currents. Two of them - the one tending toward narrow puritan fundamentalism and its ultra-liberal counterpart tending toward unitarianism - most Anglicans would not find congenial. But these currents, while interesting historically, do not involve the mainstream of Presbyterian-Reformed theory and practice. The mainstream is reflected in the work of Karl Barth, arguably the greatest theologian of our century.

The Reformed tradition was decidedly more radical in its revision of worship than the Anglicans or Lutherans in the 16th century. Thus an Episcopalian visiting a Presbyterian worship service does not generally feel quite as "at home" as when attending a Lutheran Eucharist. Nevertheless, our own prayer book was strongly influenced by a Reformed theologian and liturgist, Martin Bucer of Strasbourg, whom Cranmer brought to England to assist in the English Reformation. Many Anglicans took refuge in Geneva, the center of the Reformed world, during the reign of Bloody Mary and returned home much influenced by Calvinism, as is clear from reading the Thirty-nine Articles.

The Presbyterian-Reformed churches all have beautiful official liturgies. The trouble from our perspective is that they are optional and not widely used. Calvin firmly believed that the Lord's Supper should be celebrated every Lord's day. However, this is not the case today in most of the churches which look back to him as their spiritual mentor. Bucer and Calvin rejected the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran idea of consubstantiation; they also rejected the mere memorialist description of the Eucharist put forth by Zwingli and favored a eucharistic understanding involving a real presence of Christ, albeit a mystical and spiritual presence rather than one described in crudely physical terms. This view appears to be Cranmer's final understanding of Holy Communion as well and is held by many Anglicans today.

Ecumenical discussions with the Reformed family of churches seem inevitably to founder on the thorny question of ecclesiastical polity. We are, after all, episcopalian and they are presbyterian. Can ever the twain meet? The answer is yes, as long as one is not insisting on a monarchial episcopate but rather understands the bishop as primes inter pares with respect to the whole Christian presbyterate of a given area. The Hungarian Reformed Church, for example, is and has been very comfortable with bishops presiding over their synods.

The Presbyterian-Reformed Churches and the Episcopal Church have a very similar stance vis-a-vis society and culture. As Richard Niebuhr, who along with his brother, Rheinhold, was a distinguished theologian in the Reformed tradition, points out in his seminal work, Christ and Culture, Anglicans generally share with the Presbyterian-Reformed churches a Christ, Transformer of Culture approach to moral theology over and against the historic alternatives within Christendom. We share with them the Reformation vision of a church renewed, purified and faithful to scripture. We share with them a great respect for scholarship and the desirability of a "learned ministry." We share with them a concern for the reformation of society in accordance with the gospel principles of justice and righteousness.

There are real issues we need to address in Anglican-Reformed dialogue, but much of the acrimony of former times has been influenced by such things as Scottish-English cultural rivalry rather than honest theological reflection. We have so much in common with our sisters and brothers of this Christian tradition that it is unconscionable not to pursue the possibility of spiritual rapprochement and inter-communion. o

The Rev. Kenneth Aldrich is rector of Trinity Church, Red Bank, N.J.